"I'm not satisfied with the term 'evil'," says Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge University psychology and psychiatry professor. “I've been looking for an alternative – we need a new theory of human cruelty." He calls for a kind of rebranding of evil to offer a more scientific explanation for why people kill and torture, or have such great difficulty understanding the feelings of others. His proposal is that evil be understood as a lack of empathy – a condition he argues can be measured and monitored and is susceptible to education and treatment.
Meet the new Savior of the world, Simon Baron-Cohen. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could eliminate evil just by rebranding it as a “lack of empathy” and then educate people to be completely understanding of the feelings of others? Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen. Evil is a real as the news we read every day. And evil is the result of another very real human condition – sin. We’ve also tried rebranding sin (human frailty, mistakes, poor choices) and it hasn’t worked either.
The reality is that sin is such an intransigent problem that the only solution was the love of God manifested in His Son Jesus Christ. In order to overcome sin Jesus, who was God come in the flesh, had to live a sinless life as a real human being and then take upon Himself the sin of the whole world. He had to suffer terrible cruelty at the hands of sinfule men and die on a cross in order to absorb the wrath of God and pay the penalty in full for sin. That’s a horrible solution but sin is a horrible problem. Look at the evil that results from it day after day all over the world.
We will not redefine our way out of evil. We will not educate our way out of evil. We cannot talk ourselves out of evil. And we cannot reform ourselves to overcome evil. We need a Savior, a real Savior, whose loving sacrifice becomes the compelling reason for us to live not for ourselves but for Him who died for us and was raised again. Once we have trusted ourselves to Him, then – and only then, by the power of the Holy Spirit – and only by the power of God – can we begin to live a new live in which we say “No” to sin and “Yes” to self-controlled, upright and godly living.
