Right And Wrong

vs Good And Evil

It is the right way of doing all things Italian for you to order a lusty tomato Marinara sauce with your pasta - and completely wrong for you to ask the waiter in Rome to serve it up with ketchup!

Similarly, it may be wrong to address your grandfather by his first name (it would be unthinkable in a traditional Italian home!) - and the respectful, traditional and right way would be to call him, “grandpa” (“nono” in Italian). It could even be said to be terribly wrong to refer to your grandpa as “dude” - and under these unfortunate circumstances, very quickly, your family might (should!) disown you and insist that you use the correct and right way of addressing grandpa.

In this sense, the wrong way of doing things may be looked upon with distress, dismay, a sense of upset to the order of things, even with humour. But when the perpetrator of the wrong deed/word reverses course and reverts to the right word and deed, it is easy to forgive the perpetrator and to pronounce him or her innocent as a lamb (the younger the perpetrator, the closer to a lamb - the older, perhaps, closer to a goat or donkey!).

And then, there is good - and there is evil. It is the good and righteous thing to do, to stop and help an old woman who has slipped on the ice and is stranded on a busy street; and quite evil to ignore her and “pass by on the other side.” And if a passerby should stop and start beating the poor woman, we would probably say such things as, “what a devilish thing to do” - for “devilish” and “demonic” are intimately linked with evil. 

The good is often seen in terms of that which sets itself up in battle against evil. We speak of the forces of good warring with the forces of evil - but not in this sense, of Marina sauce battling against tomato ketchup, for example.  A cosmic elevation of seriousness occurs, a threshold is crossed - and the latter cannot in any serious way be compared with the former. 

It is good to treat a child with kindness, with love and with a cherished sense of being with someone of whom it was said by Jesus, “unto such as these does the Kingdom of Heaven belong.”

In my essay, “Why The Rights of The Child?” I describe some of the unconscionable indignities and sufferings inflicted upon children by adults.  Taking away a child’s right to life, whether in the womb or by war is evil. So is the failure to protect the child from physical, mental and spiritual harm. The perpetrators of harm on the child are undoubtedly evil - but so are those who stand idly by, letting the abuse continue.

In the covid era, there are certain actions by public health and government officials that are no longer in dispute as being wrong, pig-headed, stupid and unscientific - the “six feet distancing” rule for example that was conjured out of thin air; or the plexiglass barriers in our shops and offices which were a comic demonstration of incompetence. Most of us would not use the word “evil” to describe these failures of policy and common sense.

But I challenge any decent human being who has actually examined the scientific evidence, to characterize the administration of the covid injection to healthy young adults or babies as young as six months old as anything other than evil. A cosmic threshold has indeed been crossed. We are in a spiritual battle.

The covid, criminal enterprise is undoubtedly driven by power and greed. But the latter alone, without the spiritual context of the driving force of evil, cannot explain the utter horror of administering an experimental and dangerous gene injection (“the covid vaccine”) to healthy children - in whom the risk of death from covid is less than that of the flu and whose robust immune systems shake off the virus with ease. 

In like fashion, the covid injection mandates were undoubtedly wrong, unscientific and ridiculous. But mandates that forced healthy young adults and healthy children to be injected, mandates that compelled healthy young adults to choose between the injection or losing one’s job or home, mandates that prevented people from being with a dying member of the family, mandates that insisted on the injection after recovery from covid - all these go far beyond being wrong. They must be called out as being evil.

For an adult to wear a useless and unnecessary mask in order to access essential groceries or essential medical care is a nuisance, an annoyance and after a few weeks, a bloody outrage. But for children as young at 3 years old to be forced to wear a mask is the very definition of evil. And children being made to weep behind these masks is frankly demonic.

The very clever and very consequential British cartoonist and illustrator, Bob Moran is in no doubt in his artwork about the diabolical evil of masks for children in the covid era.

Mr. Moran’s artwork of a Moloch-like demon threatening a child with the covid injection and the child pluckily hiding behind his courageous mother, likewise leaves no doubt that we battle the forces of darkness.

As a surgeon, who knows only too well the history of medicine’s battle with superstition, I cannot stress too strongly the need to cling fast to the evidence and to reject false and spurious claims. The act of following the evidence in fact is strongly on the side of the righteous and the good. It is the failure to adhere to evidence and the determination to inflict terrible suffering even on children, that is evil.

It is essential I believe to understand the covid era as an unprecedented assault on science, freedom and humanity. But without an acknowledgement of the essential evil and spiritual nature of this assault, it is impossible to understand the depth and breath of the evil that has been perpetrated in the name of science.

The great Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn could have characterized all the atrocities of communism as simply being “wrong,” “misguided” or even “destructive.” But he did not hesitate to call out the atrocities as evil and as demonstrations of an evil ideology. To those in the trenches, the realization dawns sooner or later, that there is much more to the narrative than right and wrong. They realize that they are in an existential battle between good and evil.

If we recognize the obvious and admit that we are in a spiritual battle against evil, we must rely on overwhelmingly powerful spiritual resources, since “we battle not against flesh and blood.” 

The ancient Israelites were urged to be courageous and instructed to rely only upon God for victory: : “let not your hearts faint, fear not, and do not tremble, neither be ye terrified because of them; For the Lord your God is he that goeth with you, to fight for you against your enemies, to save you.”

In this season of Lent, The Cross and the Resurrection reminds us that evil has no future and that even death cannot defeat us. For “where sin abounded, Grace did much more abound.”

With God, we cannot lose. God always wins this fight - always.