Our planet - Just Evil Terrorists? or do we live on a planet populated by Evil People?

Once again, the world has been shocked by another evil terrorist attack, committed by a radical, religiously and politically brainwashed human being, killing many innocent people. .

This act deserves nothing but condemnation - but when you really start thinking about evil, isn't there evil all around us, and unfortunately also in all of us.

Isn't it evil, when governments invest more in their military, than in universal healthcare, or in taking care of the environment? 

Isn't it evil, to carpet bomb and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in proxy wars, and calling  the casualties "collateral damage ? "

Isn't it evil, when corporations consider profits more important than the health of human beings? re:industrial pollution; the genetic manipulation of foods;  the production and sale of pesticides, all of these having caused a number of health effects, which today are linked to a range of serious illnesses and diseases in humans, from respiratory problems to cancer ?

Of course many people reading this will say: "that is all good and well, but I am certainly not an evil person".

Really?  what about : jealousy, lies. cheating, gluttony,intimidation, lust, fornication, pride, - all evil acts .Can anyone honestly say they never had anything to do with any of those evils listed ?

Evil is evil, lesser, greater, middling - makes no difference. The degree is arbitrary, the definition blurred. If one would have to choose between one evil and another, It is better not to choose at all.

Christians, in contrast to all other beliefs, know, they are not alone in their sufferings and struggles against evil. They know they are all in this battle together, and that everyone will experience trials. 

"Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time” (Revelation 12:12).

If we consider the whole picture, specially now we get bombarded daily by all kinds of alarming news, there should be no doubt in our minds, that this is Satan’s world and planet, rather than God’s. Paul even refers to these times as “this present evil age” (Galatians 1:4).

However, Satan will not always dominate planet earth. Biblical prophecy reveals that an astounding series of events will shake our world, as never before and usher in a new age—a 1,000-year era under the reign of Jesus Christ in the Kingdom of God (Matthew 6:10; Luke 21:31).

God never promised that believers wouldn’t have suffering, but He did promise to be with us through it.    Jesus said, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20)

EU-Digest  

Christianity: Coming to Terms with a Post-Christian World - by Rod Dreher

Political and legal revolutions always follow cultural revolutions. The gay rights revolution is just the latest example of the West’s long process of emancipating the individual from all authority outside the sovereign Self.

Gerson and Wehner are surely correct that Christians must learn to live in a world—I would call it a post-Christian world—that accepts same-sex marriage. And they are right to say that as a general rule, Christians should work with LGBT citizens and their allies on causes both sides support.

But I see two big problems with their essay. First, it is naïve to believe that if only Christians stop making a big deal about homosexuality, LGBT groups and their allies will partner with us in other areas. Many people on the other side see orthodox Christians as the equivalent of straight-up white supremacists.

It’s outrageously unfair, but that’s the world we live in. As long as we hold to traditional biblical teaching on sexuality, all the winsomeness in the world won’t make them like us.

Second, I sense in Gerson and Wehner’s essay a veiled willingness to compromise on Christian sexual orthodoxy. They blame “some Christian leaders” for “associating Christianity primarily with sexual morality.” That’s true, to an extent, but the secular world, especially the media, has played a far more consequential role in this distortion.

Our news-entertainment media have for the past two decades obsessively promoted the LGBT cause. It has been the sole standard on which many outside the church judge us. Why should those who stand on the issue where all Christians stood for nearly two millennia surrender to the radical

If the Bible doesn’t say much about homosexuality, what it does say is uncompromising. The Bible is equally uncompromising about sexual purity, and more broadly, on sexual complementarity as intrinsic to Judeo-Christianity’s theological anthropology.

To affirm homosexuality would mean refusing the clear teaching of Scripture not only on same-sex relations, but also on sexuality itself, and even what it means to be fully human.

The sociologist Philip Rieff, in his prophetic 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic, said that subordinating sexual desire to God’s purposes was at the center of Christian culture from the beginning. Renouncing sexual freedom, and controlling sexual desire and spiritualizing it, was part of the “positive asceticism” of Christian

Today, Rieff said, we live in a “post-ascetic culture” in which we have ceased to be religious, and have instead become psychological. Therefore, individual fulfillment is our goal. “Religious man was born to be saved,” Rieff wrote. “Psychological man is born to be pleased.

Christians who think standing firm on traditional sexual teaching is ancillary to the gospel, and even harmful to its spread, may mean well. But in accommodating the zeitgeist, they surrender something more essential than they realize.

I agree with Gerson and Wehner that traditional Christians have lost the culture war. I agree that we need a “dose of realism” about that. And I agree that offering healing is more important than offering judgment.

Read more: Coming to Terms with a Post-Christian World | Christianity Today