Sick, sick, sick-or evil

...it is hardly a choice...

...The power of evil can work its way up from the heart's emptiness to murder...

...It is a way of telling your mate something, telling yourself something, a response to deprivation, whatever--but it isn't wrong...

...A sense of life which is too constantly critical can lead to neurotic misery...

...It may not be possible to pin that one down scientifically, but it is an absolutely essential question...

...There was no false piety, there was nothing at all false, in his words...

...They must be-- right...

...Without that impulse the left itself is bankrupt...

...There is no other feeling quite like going armed into the woods after game...

...I wonder about that...

...Our real complaint against the plaintiffs in McRae, then, is essentially our complaint against the bishops and so many right-to-lifers...

...And of course they couldn't...

...Ah, but this is mental illness, a very mysterious thing . . . . I want to suggest this heresy: Jim Jones, Charles Manson, and all their company are creatures like us...

...I didn't like buckshot, which consists of six or eight lead balls...

...We could do what they did...

...Adultery, for example, isn't evil anymore...

...At what point does choice enter these things...

...We are repelled, fascinated and numbed as we read about events like these...

...But while destroying astronomical geocentrism, it has assumed what might be called a psychological geocentrism...

...Having found a few clear patterns we think we have all the answer we need...

...But it is not a lack which had the power to murder millions under Hitler...

...Never mind the fact that answering it is quite literally a matter of life and death...

...No, he answered, he isn't...

...L IKE MOST readers of Commonweal I have never killed a fellow human, but I did kill a Whitetail deer once, and it was an interesting experience...

...It is not exactly exhilarating, but it is certainly not flavorless or dull either...

...We know better now...

...9H ubert Selby's novel The Demon is a compelling fictional portrait of a real process: a sexual obsession which seems light and innocent enough at the start leads, finally, to murder and suicide...

...The religious tradition most readers of this magazine are familiar with speaks not only of a good GOd, but also of the "prince of this world," the world's tormentor...

...It was added to their case only after the Supreme Court appeared to reject their other grounds for the Hyde Amendment's unconstitutionality...

...The deer would still be out feeding, or heading back up into the woods along their accustomed trails...

...The point is not to speak of it simply, only to speak of it at all...

...what is an unkind flare-up, immediately regretted, next to murder...

...It is there at the center of what we want, or think we want...

...I did it in the morning, not long after the sun came up, and I used an old double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun which had belonged to my grandfather...

...the implications of the McRae challenge are vast...

...There is no denying that an extreme consciousness of the choice between good and evil can be taken too far...

...My grandfather was a meticulous man...

...In their single-mindedness about one concern, they are running rough-shod over numerous other values to which they owe responsibility...

...They caught some special virus, some weird bug that makes them not like us--and that's what counts...

...Maybe because it defies our current demand for objectivity, for the appearance of hard scientific data (a superstition as silly as any), the question of choice will continue to be ignored...

...It is noteworthy that the First Amendment argument which these letters treat as so obvious did not figure in their original legal action...

...One of the roots of the moral impulse, if not the tap root, is religion...

...Manson, Hitler, Idi Amin, mass murderers, cooperators in mass murder, Calley, the Shah's torturers-- all are either ' 'products of the system" (so choice isn't involved), or they are "sick," part of a class which includes people who get migraines, flu, colds and measles...

...There is a bad, if classical, idea that evil is merely an absence of good, a lack...

...American newsmen asked if he thought Idi Amin was insane...

...The most impressive Christian I have met said to me once, "If God can save me, he can save anyone...

...What are the limitations of knowledge that man's ordinary state of consciousness places upon him...

...We don't think they have pursued this unfortunate course because of any conscious wish to infringe the rights of believers and put up obstacles to the exercise of Americans' deepest values in the political arena, but because their zeal for the immediate cause has blinded their larger vision...

...it was an acquiescence to evil, which is real...

...The left has every reason to be solicitous about the roots of the moral impulse in politics...

...He is evil...

...Murderers must be worse, of course...

...Apartheid . . . is the calculated oppression and exploitation of innocent, inconvenient human beings...

...But the belief that as we are, we are more or less all right--this is crazy...

...11 Of several minds: John Garvey I SICK, SICK, SICK--OR EVIL 'BUT DELIVER US FROM A POOR SELF-IMAGE, AMEN' " I ~ ODERN SCIENCE has painted a iq picture of the universe which is humbling to the human ego...

...Perhaps it is the fact mentioned recently by a friend of mine, a psychologist: we have psychoiogized all our experience, as if a description were the same thing as an explanation...

...When Saint Anthony went into the desert to face himself and God, he did not find in himself a poor selfimage...

...There are plenty of "managers" and "experts" from everywhere, and from nowhere, on the political spectrum willing and able to oil the wheels of the status quo more efficiently than the left can...

...Before we left I put four or five shells into my pocket, rifle slugs about as big as the end of your thumb, weighing perhaps an ounce each...

...It is well-known that some hunters go into the woods in a reckless frame of mind and occasionally shoot dogs, cows, or even other hunters...

...The first time you encounter the writing of a saint who claims to be the most evil of men, you are likely to think of this as a sort of bragging...

...How could he be, really...

...This seems never to be a question for the modern temper...

...I remember an interview with a refugee from Uganda, a man who had been prominent in the government there...

...You are consciously alert, you are inclined to pay attention and not daydream, you are cautious and serious because you are out to kill something but do not want to kill the wrong thing...

...He knows precisely what he is Commonweal: 38 doing...

...If they were brought to the dreadful places in which they made their fame by anything involving choice, we're all in trouble...

...He found demons...

...It means that we are willing to settle for being less than we must be...

...it can enter our lives through our need to be loved, our desire to be regarded as important and interesting, our fear of inner emptiness...

...It was dark outside...

...The newsmen persisted: of course he must be sick . . . how else could he do those things...

...It is less unsettling to think that a man like Idi .Amin is ill than to think that he might have chosen to be what he is...

...When in our ordinary experience moral choice is so reduced, we are really at a loss when we bump into something spectacu-larly hideous...

...In the twentieth century (the time of Auschwitz, the Gulag, China's rape of Tibet, Hiroshima) we find it difficult to accept the fact that there is something which does not love humanity, but delights in negation and destruction...

...the season opened at daybreak and it wouldn't do to miss first light...

...Jacob Needleman, in The New Religions (Doubleday, 1970...

...First there was Jonestown, the pathetic story of people who called Jim Jones "daddy," and then a couple of weeks later police in a Chicago suburb were digging up bodies under the home of a man who dressed up as a clown to enterlain children...

...As disturbing as it may be to think that there is a real connection between our own casual insensitivity and the crime of the most vicious murderer, if thousands of years of testimony about the human heart have anything to tell us, there is a link...

...you were more likely to hit what you were aiming at, but you were also more likely to wound than to kill...

...The point, of course, is that the person whose life is lived at the edge of religious awareness is conscious, moment to moment, of choices which are only apparent to the rest of us (and to the murderer, for that matter) once in awhile...

...It makes them other...

...There are experts in something called "values clarification" whose role is to help us "find out what our values are," as if values lay deep in our psyches, to be uncovered like buried treasure...

...The word "sick" is being stretched very thin these days...

...Paul is taken seriously (what if the congressman had said, "The essential question is the equal humanity of blacks...

...It is not enough to look at the economic conditions of post-World War I Germany to explain the holocaust, nor can the bloodshed in Uganda be explained by searching for clues in Idi Amin's childhood...

...JOHN GARVEY Of several minds: Thomas Powers I ON KILLING A DEER IS THERE MORE SUPPORT FOR BOMBS THAN BUCKSHOT...

...If the example of a supposedly improper "religious reference" made by Congressman Hyde and cited in the letter from Ms...

...I wonder about our inability to use the word "evil...

...Our usual response is to say that such people must be sick...

...In our original editorial, we asked why the First Amendment argument against McRae would not equally apply to various other struggles, honored or supported by the left, in which religion and organized religious groups have taken leading roles...

...But given Charles Manson's sad foster home rambling, Jim Jones's lonely childhood, and later his being the object (or victim) of an adulation which could turn almost anyone so alone from the start into a false messiah--given things like this, who can speak simply of evil...

...It is not at all obvious in most of its workings...

...The left has not attended much to this fact, partly due to the'historical conflict between the Enlightenment and the churches, partly due to the left's concentration on problems of physical deprivation, often and unfortunately to the neglect of questions of meaning, identity and integrity...

...Our correspondents have not answered this question...

...To say that they are "sick" allows us to avoid this possibility...

...When I snapped his shotgun together, sitting in the kitchen with my brother, the barrels were as free of pits and rust inside as they'd been the day the gun was bought...

...The Ugandan answered that as long as the newsmen thought Amin was sick, they couldn't understand what was going on in Uganda...

...every great religious tradition is clear about that much...

...Later, when the season was well underway, they'd be spooked, running outside their usual territories, and finding a deer would become a matter of accident...

...we would even be likely to, under conditions which brought us to the moments at which they made their worst choices...

...In school I had a good friend who had been badly wounded on a deer hunt with his father 2 February 1979:39...

...he would no more have put a gun away uncleaned, than he would have appeared in his office without a tie...