There was a time when I never fully comprehended evil; it never touched my world. That’s not to say I grew up sheltered from horror, far from it. I was frightened out of my footie-jammies as a five-year-old hiding behind my cousin’s sofa watching Salem’s Lot. I dressed up like Freddy Krueger for a sixth grade Halloween party. We rented so many B-grade slasher films by the time I was sixteen that The Silence of the Lambs seemed lite fare. But none of this was real evil.
This Hollywood version of depravity is a mere mockery of genuine evil, something so awful that it haunts those touched by it. Real evil embeds images in our memory that disrupt our sleep, makes us cynical, and effects relationships. It breeds fear. There are simply things you cannot “un”see. They’re hard to shelve. True evil tints our lenses, and we perceive the world differently. It changes us.
This was the kind if evil I’d never been exposed to, didn’t know how to cope with, and hardly even knew existed. So it was with wonder and intrigue that I pored through the book Helter Skelter, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s 698 page account of Charles Manson and the killing spree perpetrated by his cohorts — later known as The Manson Family — throughout the final years of the 1960’s.
As twisted and disturbing as the Manson Family was, it seemed easy to write them off as a crazed hippy death cult that was unlikely to be seen again in history. My curiosity piqued, I started to delve into the world of criminology, and to my horror, discovered another face of evil, personified in two men: Bittaker and Norris.
Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris, while serving separate sentences for attempted murder and rape respectively at California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo in 1977, devised a ghastly goal of raping, torturing, and murdering a girl of every age from thirteen through eighteen. That they only managed to murder five young women we will reluctantly call “the good part” of the story. The rest is pure horror, or rather pure evil as I now understood the meaning of the word.
From that day forward I knew in my core that evil is real: lurking, patient, pouncing indiscriminately, unconscionable, devoid of reason…merely devouring.
This was a problem for me.
I also understood that the reality of evil’s existence threw my atheistic worldview into a tailspin. After all, how could I absolutely categorize something as evil without defining its opposite – the most basic exercise in logic. If evil was darkness, then there must be light? There must be. What then could we call ultimate good? Was there anything pure and perfect? Understanding this concept was something I examined and pursued for the next several years.
It is written, In this world you will have trouble. But take heart, I have overcome the world. – John 16:33
If you’ve ever wondered about the source of ultimate good, there are a few things you should know. For one, it’s real, and will make you uncomfortable when you discover it. Like evil, it will leave you changed; it’s something you cannot “un”see. There are times when it will lead you down scary paths no rational person should tread. Your perception of the world will be transformed, and sometimes it will invade your solitude in the middle of the night. But like most great adventures, and unlike evil, it’s not a journey for cowards.
For though evil exists in degrees unimaginable, so does it’s antithesis. The question then is this: which do you fear more? The darkness, or the light?