The question isn’t new,“If God is good, why do bad things happen?” We ask it when a child gets cancer.When a drunk driver takes a life.When the headlines bleed with violence, corruption, and disaster. But here’s the truth that wrecks our excuses, “Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned…”— Romans 5:12 The problem isn’t…

Jamie Bulger was the victim in that case, his killers were Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. As for them, I don’t think that even they could have honestly told you why they did it. People blamed their parents (there was some abuse for one of them), their school, psychopathy, even violent media.

I don’t think anyone can know for sure what motivates these kinds of horrific acts, and in the face of that kind of atrocity it is all too tempting to reach for one, single, simple explanation. That they were ‘born evil’ is one such explanation, and it helps us to separate ourselves from violent offenders, as if there is just something fundamentally different about them from birth. That helps us feel more comfortable, I think.

The truth is probably a lot more complex than that, and much harder to stomach. There will have likely been an interplay of lots of social and psychological factors, that probably came together in a sort of terrible ‘perfect storm’ to result in that poor boy’s murder. That is harder to reckon with than just writing someone off as ‘evil,’ as if there is nothing anyone could have done to predict or prevent it.

Evil can be defined in two forms: Moral evil and natural evil. Moral evil is the evil humans do, by choice, knowing that what they do is wrong, but they do it anyway. Moral evil is a broad subject, because there are a lot of factors in display (for instance, personality disorders). Those who commit morally evil crimes have freely chosen to do so. Then there is natural evil, the bad things that happen naturally, storm, flood, volcanic eruption, fatal disease. But we ask a vital question, to those who commit moral evil - are they really evil? Neuroscience begins to tell us that while the cognitive part of the brain works normally, other parts of the brain do not. For instance, this makes sense since psychopaths feel no remorse when doing horrible acts, or when hurting other human beings. We can conclude that we must not lose sight of the evil act itself. Nonetheless, what this man did is wrong, but he is still a man.

Natural evil refers to parts of existence which cause suffering, but not from human wrongdoings, such as earthquakes, suffering that animals inflict on one another and illness. Moral evil refers to evil and suffering which stem from humanity’s choice to do bad rather than good, such as suffering caused by bullying, greed and selfishness, and violence. It also refers to suffering caused by humanity’s failure to do good when the opportunity arises, such as the loneliness felt by elderly people or absence of clean drinking water in poorer countries.

Over in Jersey City the scabrous head of sin has raised itself in what ought to have been the Eden of human brotherhood, the “block party.” Persons with a misplaced confidence in fallen humanity used to think that in the crowded city community feeling should be encouraged, and the natural craving of the young for innocent pleasure could be harmlessly gratified, by social meetings in which the whole neighborhood assembled to watch the young folks dancing in the street. Whatever modern evils might flourish int he dance halls, nothing untoward could occur under the watchful eye of grandmother, baby sister and the talkative woman across the airshaft.

But Jersey City moralists have already discovered that the block party is usually distinguished by dancing as objectionable as any that could be seen in the gilded tango parlor. Conditions are so bad that the city officials are talking of having any block party suppressed by the police the moment a single couple begins to dance in a manner disagreeable to the official sensibilities. This is very much like the German method of shooting the Mayor, the curé and all the village notables if a German officer happened to bark his shins on the village fireplug, but perhaps it is hoped that collective responsibility will make each block keep itself pure.

We doubt it. If hardened young people transgress the rules of polite dancing under the eyes of the whole neighborhood, the neighborhood itself is largely at fault. The awful revelations from Jersey City prove only that there is no innocent pleasure, and that the human race can’t be trusted alone with itself. When a proper understanding on this truth has reached the public, politics will become a mere branch of penology [or, the study of crime and prison management].