Aquinas was right. There is no such thing as evil

Aquinas says that evil does not exist, there is only absence of good.  He was right.  What about the Devil with his horns and tail who has terrified religious believers for so long then, roaming the earth seeking whom he might devour?  You could hardly find a pious and irrational belief so much mocked by rationalists.  Biology tells us that we and our chimpanzee cousins evolved from a proto-chimpanzee ancestor in an astonishingly short time, six million years, perhaps only four million, a few seconds on the clock in evolutionary terms.  We and the chimpanzees share over 99% of our genes.  What we call wickedness, in fact, is usually better described as inappropriate behaviour over which we have only fitful control, falling back into acting like the chimpanzees that we so very nearly are.  Genocide, sexual promiscuity, struggling for dominance, cruelty, flaunting superiority, devious deceptions, making alliances and cynically breaking them, desire for someone else’s territory, envy, sulking, anger, you can find all of these among chimpanzees.  Civility is the thinnest of veneers.   Indeed, those credulous religious believers had it right too.  For what else are the Devil’s horns and tail but the insignia of the very beast that is inside us, the horned and tailed brutes from which we evolved?  How we ignore him at our peril.  It is only in mythical images that these deeply buried strata within us break surface into consciousness.

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