Good question. I was mentioning in another thread (trips that will change you, or something like that) about how I never really thought about evil as anything more than a convenient device that writers and filmmakers use to explain the actions of someone when they want the audience to hate the character without really having to explore their motivations. (ouch, brutal sentence...) And then I went to Aushwitz/Birkenau, and that completely changed my mind, convinced me that there was such a thing as evil in the real world. Personally, I reserve the use of 'evil' for really, really heavy things like genocide, and generally when it is pervasive through a society or culture, as opposed to being the actions of a single individual. For me, it has to be an immoral perversion prevelent in a society or group--in my mind a single murder, for example, does not constitute evil, no matter how immoral and poorly-justified that killing might be. I'm close to thinking it's 'not real', as Rouge suggests, but for me there are a few things that just can't be explained through any amount of psychology or anthropology.
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