Religious people and institutions are not exempt from being corrupted by the power of evil. It does not matters what their belief system is, whether it is Christianity, Islam, Judaism, New Age or whatever the brand and flavour.
A quick survey of your daily newsfeed or a search through Google will quickly reveal to you how evil has been perpetrated by good people throughout history.
The problem of evil
The problem of evil has plagued humanity since the beginning of time. But by dividing everything into neat categories of good and evil, we oversimplifies a complex problem and bury it.
We end up dealing with the symptoms on the surface rather than digging deeper into our psyche to uncover the root cause.
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
How can a good person do evil?
In the quest for moral purity and perfection demanded by our religion, we repress and bury our undesirable feelings, desires and habits.
There it lies dormant in our shadow waiting for the right time to rise up and devour us.
“I don’t really understand myself, for I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate.”
The Apostle Paul in Romans 7:15 NLT
The Lucifer Effect
Philip Zimbardo’s TED Talk may shed some light on this matter.
There are no two ways about this. If we really want to see lasting change and transformation in our world then we need to begin the difficult task of removing the log from our own eye, by bringing our shadow into consciousness and integrating it.
Exodus 