Ponderings on Universal Evil

I've been thinking a lot lately about universal evil, you know, as a concept.

I spent a lot of my life believing that there was a universal evil. I remember very clearly sitting in my honors seminar with the wonderful and amazing Bill Van Antwerpen at Indiana and talking in great detail about my believe in universal evil. The idea that there is something in the universe that is pure evil, and that it does impact us, and that it is imperative on us to actively ward it off from our daily lives. Call it the devil if you must. I don't, and I think it's a lot more complicated than that. But it's the closest western equivalent we have to what I'm talking about.

But in the past year, I've been doing a lot of reading on religion and religions (two separate things), and so much study claims that the idea of a universal evil doesn't exist at all until after religion became politicized or corportized (pick your poison). That if you really truely look at the first evidences of religion, they involved gods that were both good and evil simultaneously. The gods could bring fertility and abundance, but they could also take them away. There was not one god who was good and gave good things and another separate force that destroyed them. Creation and destruction were part of the same whole, necessary elements of the same cycle. And one was not evil. It just was part of the whole.

Except that, in the absence of a universal evil, there's so much I can't explain. I can't explain Jeffrey Dahmer. I can't explain Idi Amin. I can explain Hitler, because he was more evil in theory than in practice, but I can't explain the people who actually walked herds of humans into gas chambers. I cannot explain any of that, and so much more, without a universal evil.

On the other hand, it's quite true that the more traditional views of good and evil, of cycle and regeneration, of giving and taking, fit more in line with my own practices of spirituality.

And so I came to a conclusion. And I hate it.

We done went and manifested a universal evil. It's the only thing that makes sense, you know. We've gotten more and more evil over time. And as more and more people were preached to and convinced that there was a universal evil, there it was. Way to go, humans. Way to introduce that concept and then run with it. Awesome work. But I've never doubted the power of the mass subconscious to create from nothing, something. And I've really come around to believing that we created a force of evil.

Which then begs the question - if I believe that a universal evil does exist, but I believe that it is not a natural thing, in what way do I proceed with my own development?

Discuss.