Some years ago, I undertook extensive research into the vexing phenomenon of evil.
After reading many books on serial killers and books in psychology, philosophy, and theology on evil, I settled on a definition of evil as “doing harm to an innocent other (i.e., a person undeserving of the harm), for self-interested reason(s).”
I also noted that there are gradations or degrees of evil, of which the greatest evil is when the person “doing harm to an innocent other” derives pleasure from the act.
By that yardstick, the organizers and participants in the Hunky Jesus contest are evil.
Last Easter Sunday, April 20, 2014, as Christians remember Jesus the Christ’s resurrection after being tortured and crucified to death, a group of transvestites — homosexual men wearing heavy makeup and nuns’ habits — who call themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, held a Hunky Jesus contest at the 35th annual “Easter Celebration” in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
Here are some pictures from the blasphemous event, from the San Francisco Chronicle and Huffington Post:
Jeffrey Burton Russell, “The Evil One,” in Paul Woodruff and Harry A. Wilmer, Facing Evil: Light at the Core of Darkness (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1988), p. 53:
“[T]here are people who, like Satan, allow the forces of hatred and malice to become a black hole that drains away all light and life. These people not only do evil things; by allowing themselves to be identified and taken over by the focus of evil, they become evil people…. What I suggest that is different from what most psychologists believe is that underneath these individual destructive proclivities is a focus of malice and destructiveness that unites and energizes the variety of destructive, hateful forces within us. This focus of destruction creates its own hidden agenda, its own policy, which is destruction for its own sake.… This focus of evil, having an agenda of its own, a purpose and a will, may we not call it a person?”
See: “Remembering His Passion,” April 18, 2014.
H/t FOTM’s swampygirl
~Eowyn