In today's collection of inane and fallacial ramblings he calls his
column, William Kristol, aka Billy Blood, decides that he has achieved
the goal that philosophers and theologians have been struggling with
for centuries. He has solved the problem of evil in the world. If true,
he would have accomplished the philosophical equivalent of Michael
Phelp's winning eight gold medals at the Olympics. And based upon his
previous ramblings and opinings, we know that can't possibly be true.

Way
back when I was studying for the priesthood, the "problem of evil" in
the world was one of the most perplexing topics we covered in theology.
If you posit that by definition "God is Good" and further that all
things that exist come from God then, by logical extension, all things
are good how then can there be evil which is the opposite of good? And
after batting that around for a few hundred years, the best that
theological scholars could come up with is that evil is man's
distortion of the good. I know, I know, too much for Monday morning.
But not for fearless Billy. He calls it as he sees it. And wouldn't you
know it, he thinks John McCain has had the same divine revelation.

In
yet another tedious neocon diatribe, Billy goes on and on how McCain
gets it and Obama with his New Age gobbledygook doesn't. Oh yes, McCain
really got the better of his hope-filled opponent. And wasn't the way
McCain used "colorful anecdotes" to beguile and impress his listeners
just the antidote to Obama's thoughtful observations? Yes indeed,
nothing like a colorful anecdote to distract your listeners from the
fact that you really have nothing to say of any consequence or import.
Just like when you were a kid and you'd sit for hours by the side of
the stream while Gramps reminisced about what the world was like when
he was a lad. How the NY Times pays this guy for his weekly steaming
pile of bullshit amazes me. But I digress.

After studying for
the priesthood for some 11 1/2 years, and hundreds of hours discussing
philosophy and theology, I eventually left the Church entirely and
would say that at best I'm an agnostic now. Confronting evil in the
real world is a far cry from scholarly debates and metaphysical
musings. I do not believe in an anthropromorphised God, the Divine
Creator, just as I don't believe in his opposite, Satan, the Evil One.
Those simplistic concepts are the basis for all the three major
religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. And we all know how well
historically these faiths have done in bringing together people in
peace and harmony.

The mistake shallow thinkers like Kristol and
his neocon fellow travelers make is seeing an individual or a group of
individuals as evil. Evil is not a person. There is no "axis of evil"
as proposed by the simple-minded George Bush. The triumph of evil is
that it manifests itself as good either individually, in the guise of a
Hitler, or, more broadly, by a whole group of people like the Germans
who followed him. Evil exists in the world because it presents itself
as the truth.

Kristol argues that McCain is right when he says
that we must do battle with evil. That's comic book stuff. You can't do
battle with a concept. McCain picks up on Bush's old West theme. It's
not a shoot'em up between the guys in the white hats and those in the
black. Kristol and his fellow neocon promoters of death and destruction
think you can bomb evil out of the world (innocent victims
notwithstanding. War is hell, ya know).

Obama gets it right when
he says we must confront evil. Confronting evil means exposing it for
what it really is, namely, the opposite of what most people posit to be
the good. However, the reality is that neither McCain's nor Obama's
approach will succeed. Obama's is less deadly but in the end the
problem of evil will exist for as long as humankind does.