http://www.lucifereffect.com Understanding how good people turn evil. http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=48 I can’t think about “goodness” without recalling the 1932 Mae West film, “Night after Night.” Mae West plays the role of gangster’s moll Maudie Tippett. As Maudie enters a nightclub draped in diamonds, the hat-check girl exclaims, “Goodness, what lovely diamonds!” Mae answers, famously, “Goodness had nothing to do with it.” The “goodness” flowing from the scriptwriter’s pen is cultural shorthand for God. The phrase “for goodness sake” is, more correctly, “for goodness’s sake,” or... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=47 “I’m ashamed of my school,” the seventh-grader said quietly. Since 12 year-olds are prone to finding fault with anything and everything having to do with school, you might under normal circumstances dismiss this statement as normal griping. But, these were not normal circumstances. The school in question was A.E. Wright Middle School in Calabasas, California. A.E. Wright is regarded as one of the top middle schools in the area. Some families live within the boundaries of... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=46 We’re told that the story of Stone Soup is a medieval folk tale about soldiers on their long way home from war. But it’s really a story that is both older and more contemporary; it is a fable for our times, a lesson in the Lucifer Effect and how to reverse it. One day three comrades walked down a road in medieval France, weary and hungry. They came upon a village of frightened people. These people hide their limited supply of food and bar their doors against hungry soldiers who arrive... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=45 Why is there evil? In William Blake's famous poem "The Tyger," the poet describes the tiger's ferocity and wonders about its Creator: "Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" A telling question. A heart-felt, serious question. The conventional understanding of God as all-powerful makes God responsible for both good and evil ("weal and woe"). People wrestle emotionally with the idea that good and evil could have their source in a single all-powerful being:... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=44 "I accept the regret, the sorrow and the suffering of the million Cambodian people who lost their husbands and wives. I would like the Cambodian people to condemn me to the harshest punishment." ?Kaing Guek Eav (?uch?, addressing the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Phnom Penh, August 12, 2009 ?At times, I have imagined you shackled, starved, whipped and clubbed, viciously. I have imagined your scrotum electrified, being forced to eat your own feces, being nearly drowned and having your throat... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=43 First off, I want to be perfectly clear on something . . . Bernie Madoff got exactly what he deserved. We haven? yet printed a book too big to throw at him. The point of this post is not to argue that Madoff is somehow not to be blamed for the wanton destruction he caused on other peoples?finances. The point of this post is to underscore, once again, a massive breakdown in systemic safeguards and a massive retreat from reality by a whole bunch of people who should have known a whole... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=42 Today we remember those who died in the service of ideals we cherish. We remember the fallen. We mourn what is lost. And on this day I wonder what lessons we might draw from our new understanding of the Lucifer Effect. I will never forget my first walk through the Vietnam war memorial. The walkway slanted gently downward, inviting entry. As I descended, the wall rose around me, each step taking me deeper and deeper into the hall of the dead. Here and there people had... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=41 April 20, 1999. On that date, two teenage boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Harris and Klebold were members of a group/gang called the Trench Coat Mafia. Embittered over years of bullying, the two went on a shooting rampage in which they targeted athletes, Christians, and African-Americans. They killed 12 students and a teacher, and injured 23 others before they turned their guns on themselves and committed... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=40 “I admit that I am responsible for the crimes, torture and execution at S-21.” – From a prepared statement by Kang Kek Ieu, a.k.a. “Duch,” March 31, 2009. Kang Kek Ieu, the born-again Christian who once ran the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious torture facility in Phnom Penh, came tantalizingly close to making one of the most dramatic gestures in the history of international war crimes tribunals last Tuesday as his trial at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal opened. Duch, as he was called... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=39 Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” -- John 2:15-16 (NRSV) On Sunday, March 15, 2009, the Third Sunday of Lent, the Reverend Janelle Tibbetts-Vaughan, the incredibly talented and creative Associate Pastor of First... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=38 In Adam on Mars, I imagined humans living in a domed city that protected them from the harsh wilderness of a partially terraformed alien planet. Cut off from the civilization that produced their domed city, the inhabitants gradually lose the ability to do the right thing. One of them—Adam—makes a decision that cracks the dome and dooms the city. The doctrine of “original sin” explains the suffering of humanity as the result of a taint that spreads from one man’s wrongful action. God... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=37 It’s almost too perfect. On the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the U.S., Barack Obama takes the oath of office as America’s first black President. The temptation to declare victory in the ages-old struggle against prejudice is strong. Inauguration Day 2009 is indeed a milestone, an event that few of us who are old enough to remember the civil rights struggles of the sixties and seventies ever expected to witness. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to think that the Obama presidency ushers... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=36 Imagine a place like Mars: barren, dry, lifeless. But in the far future humans have learned to terraform planets—to make them like Earth. As the planet changes, its thin atmosphere gradually increasing, the first tentative plants taking root, humans live in a domed city safe from the harsh external world. Inside the dome they have everything they need: air, beautiful gardens, food, wildlife, lakes and streams. But some catastrophe happens back on Earth, and the humans living in the domed... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=35 First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians. – Martin Luther “On the Jews and Their Lies” (1543) Seventy years ago, on... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=34 The behavior of too many on Wall Street is a violation of biblical ethics. The teachings of Christianity, Judaism, and other faiths condemn the greed, selfishness, and cheating that have been revealed in corporate behavior over decades now, and denounce their callous mistreatment of employees. Read your Bible. – Jim Wallis, www.sojo.net/blog/godspolitics September 18, 2008 Jim Wallis, the evangelical founder of Sojourners, has thusly summed up the theological... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=33 These misdeeds, which constitute so grave a betrayal of trust, deserve unequivocal condemnation. They have caused great pains and have damaged the church’s witness. Victims should receive compassion and care and those responsible for these evils must be brought to justice. -- Pope Benedict XVI, speaking in Sydney, Australia, on sexual abuse by priests. “Where is forgiveness in all of this?” I hesitated, not being quite sure at all how to answer that question. The woman... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=32 It was almost exactly a year ago that I sat in the living room of the man Vann Nath has described as “The Butcher of Tuol Sleng.” My interview with the former chief of guards at the Khmer Rouge interrogation and detention (read “torture”) center in Phnom Penh was an experience I’ll not soon forget. As I have written in earlier blogs, the hour I spent with the seemingly amiable Him Huy put me face-to-face with Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” and has haunted me ever since. My interview... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=31 Nobody, it seems, can make documentaries quite like Ken Burns. His recent series, “The War,” tells the story of America’s involvement in World War Two through the eyes of four American cities and towns, among them Mobile, Alabama. When war broke out, Glenn Frazier, a 17 year-old infantryman from Mobile, was serving in the Philippines under General Douglas MacArthur. In “The War,” Mr. Frazier admits that he had enlisted several months earlier with no thought of ever seeing combat, and... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=30 Sometimes heroes are people who stand between. In 1859 a young Swiss entrepreneur named Henri Dunant witnessed the battle of Solfertino, where the French and Italians were fighting to drive Austrians out of Italy. Three years later he published a book about the experience, A Memory of Solfertino. Dunant's book tells about the bloody battle, but its focus is on the aftermath—the fruitless attempt to help the wounded and dying. The book concludes with a proposal that all... http://www.lucifereffect.com/theologyblog.htm?articleID=29 The acts of genocide, which have no statute of limitations, mean any acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such: * killing members of the group; * causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; * deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; * imposing measures intended to prevent births within the...