#evildoers

Really funny experience opening my email and being like 'oh new comment! .... Wait. I don't think that's my line. Isn't that from yesterday's r&s chapter?' Laughed my ass off. Someone got their ao3 tabs mixed up apparently

pfffhaha oh no! I'm sorry you got randomly pounced on!

Though since you're here I adored? Evildoers? You are fantastic at characterization anyway, but the way you wrote Helsknight's cynicism, and Evil X's manic, just a little off energy was fantastic.

Also, adore a pair of villains working together, for better or worse.

"It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for children, so as to keep the picture simple. But when the great world literature of the past -- Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens -- inflates and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems somewhat farcical and clumsy to our contemporary perception. The trouble lies in the way these classic evildoers are pictured. They recognized themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black. And they reason: 'I cannot live unless I do evil. So I'll set my father against my brother! I'll drink the victim's sufferings until I'm drunk with them!' Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black and born of hate. But no, that's not the way it is! To do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions. Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble -- and his conscience devoured him.Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology -- that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and deterination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. ... Thanks to ideology, the 20th century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago."

Christians must seek to balance something vital: The desire to see evil punished while at the same time desiring to see all evildoers come to salvation. 

Think of it this way: When I sin, do I want to meet a God of justice or a God of mercy? Since we are to treat others the way that we would want to be treated, if I want to receive God’s mercy, I have to desire that for others too. Even those evildoers who have hurt me. 

This was the mission Jesus was on, and the one to which He commissioned all His followers—“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him” (John 3:16-17). 

Devotional for March 15

I love them, but they try to destroy me with accusations even as I am praying for them! - Psalm 109:4

Insight

David was angry at being attacked by evil people who slandered him and lied. Yet David remained a friend and a man of prayer.

Challenge

While we must hate evil and work to overcome it, we must love everyone, including those who do evil, because God loves them. We are called to hate the sin, but love the person. Only through God's strength will we be able to follow David's example.