Our capacity for evil: 7-23-12

If it's true -- and I think it is -- that to a boy with a hammer everything looks like a nail, it's also true that to a person with a gun everything looks like a corpse.

Surely a movie theater full of people in Aurora, Colo., early last Friday morning looked like a room full of corpses to James Holmes, arrested for trying to make it exactly that.

In response to that horrific massacre I do not want in this space to enter the re-ignited gun control controversy per se. Nor do I want to engage in the endless speculation about motive.

Rather, I want to remind us what the great religions try to teach us, which is that each of us is capable of evil. Knowing that, and knowing that religion also teaches us to consider each human being to be of inestimable value, we should do whatever possible, legal and constitutional to put the tools of evil and destruction out of reach or at least restrict our access to them. And I'm not talking only about guns. I mean anything that can be used to kill or injure other people, whether it's arms, drugs, alcohol or tiny toys on which babies might choke.

In the Reformed Tradition of Protestantism, where I find my spiritual home, we have something called the Doctrine of the Total Depravity of Humankind. It's really not quite as bad as it sounds, but it does tell us that each of us is capable of sin and that we cannot save ourselves from this condition.

The doctrine, by implication, reminds us to be vigilant. It urges us not to put ourselves in situations that tempt us to do the very evil we're prone to do.

How prone are we to such sinful behavior? Holy writ's answer is: very.

For instance, in the third chapter of the New Testament book of Romans, the Apostle Paul writes that ". . .Jews and Gentiles alike (Tammeus note: In that context, that meant everyone) are all under sin. As it is written: (Tammeus note: Paul now quotes various passages of the Hebrew Scriptures) 'There is no one righteous, not even one. . .[T]here is no one who does good, not even one."

Well, Paul had a tendency to overstate things in ways that are easy to misinterpret. He would, I'm sure, acknowledge that humans, though capable of evil, also have been known to do good deeds from time to time. But his point is that by comparison to the perfection of God, all of us are imperfect and cannot always be counted on to choose good over evil.

If we know that about ourselves, one of our tasks is to limit our exposure to temptations to evil. A recovering alcoholic, for instance, knows it's nuts to keep a full liquor cabinet in her house. And someone with a gambling addiction understands the risks of eating dinner every evening at a casino.

I am not arguing against liquor or gambling in their legal forms, though there are cases to be made against both. Rather, in the context of the Aurora shootings, I'm arguing that when we allow almost anyone to buy almost any amount of weapons and ammunition, we fail to place a high value on life and we fail to live by the widespread religious teaching that the capacity for evil can be found in all of us.

Traditional teachings of faith condemn the conditions that allowed those murders to happen.

Why did someone shoot up a theater full of people in Aurora the other evening? Given the current status of state and federal laws regarding ownership and use of weapons (and I'm not arguing against the constitutional right to bear arms, which I reluctantly support), the answer seems to be: Because he could.

We can do better than that. And the great religions urges us to do exactly that.

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OLYMPIC ATHLETES AND RAMADAN

The intersection now of Ramadan with the impending London Olympics has some Muslim athletes having to make choices about following the requirements of Islam versus doing their best as athletes. As this piece notes, that's not always an easy choice. All of this reminds me of the no-play choice Sandy Koufax made on Yom Kippur in 1965. But each case is different and each person must find ways to make a choice that makes sense for him or her.