Wickedness

When was the last time you washed your coffee mug at the office, or water bottle, or your filtered water pitcher? Kris Frieswick writes in the Wall Street Journal, “I was bred to believe that product expiration or “best by” dates are just marketing—and marketing is for rubes. When the light on top of my water pitcher insists I change the carbon filter, I use the same approach I have used for expiration dates on prescription drugs, eggs and canned soup: I ignore it. I only swap it out when the water starts to taste funky, or when it filters too slowly, which is annoying and wastes my precious waning time on Earth.

The mold and bacteria growing in my pitcher, however, were the least of my concerns, according to Caitlin Proctor, an assistant professor of engineering at Purdue University, who studies “the entire microbial ecology of what’s growing” in drinking water systems. “There’s a whole ecosystem in there,” she says.

Most of the residents of this ecosystem don’t hurt you if ingested, she says. But carbon filters don’t kill or filter some types of opportunistic pathogens, such as Legionella pneumophila (which causes Legionnaire’s Disease) and Naegleria fowleri (better known as braining-eating amoebas). And the slimy biofilm that clings to the inside of your pitcher when you don’t wash it enough will give them a nice place to grow.

The good news, says Proctor, is that these scary bad guys don’t generally hurt you by drinking them. They can ruin your day if they are aspirated, come into contact with your eyes or get near your brain.”

What is contaminating our soul that is flying under your radar? We are not to let the contaminants of the world conform us into their “mold.”

In what might be Ohio's most bizarre drug bust this year, law enforcement officials doing a traffic stop were surprised to discover a raccoon named Chewy sitting in the driver's seat, casually holding a meth pipe to its mouth.

Police detained motorist Victoria Vidal after a records search showed her license was suspended, and she had an active warrant for arrest. Their traffic stop uncovered a veritable drug buffet - crack cocaine, meth, and three used meth pipes - but the real star was the furry suspect. “Thankfully, Chewy the raccoon was unharmed,” police confirmed, adding they even checked if the owner had “the proper paperwork and documentation to own the raccoon.”

“While our officers are trained to expect the unexpected, finding a raccoon holding a meth pipe is a first,” a department rep quipped. Vidal faces multiple drug charges and a citation for driving with a suspended license, but Chewy walked away without so much as a warning, proving that in Ohio's criminal justice system, raccoons remain Ohio's most wanted—and least prosecuted—outlaws.

In the meantime, let’s hope that Chewy gets the help it needs – or failing that, that it finds a better human role model to emulate.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Creation; Responsibility; Stewardship - The Bible teaches that humans are given dominion over animals, but this comes with a responsibility for their well-being. This story reminds us that our actions can influence those around us, even animals who are keen observers, and they often replicate both positive and negative actions they observe in their environment.

In an almost unbelievable turn of events, a man already facing legal proceedings for fare evasion was caught trying to avoid paying for a train ticket yet again—this time while on his way to court for the original offense. The individual, who owes more than £30,000 in unpaid fines (about $37,500 in USD), attempted to board a train without a valid ticket, only to be stopped by vigilant railway staff during a routine ticket inspection.

Despite facing mounting legal consequences, this man continued a pattern of behavior that authorities described as “prolific fare evasion.” His repeated attempts to dodge payment laid bare the ongoing struggles faced by transportation services to enforce fare collection and deter habitual offenders.

The incident took place in London, where public transportation relies heavily on trust and compliance with fare policies to maintain its operation and funding. Transport officials have expressed frustration but also underscore the importance of fairness for all passengers who pay their way. Authorities must balance enforcement with opportunities for rehabilitation, hoping offenders will recognize the value of integrity and lawfulness.

This man’s actions serve as a sobering reminder of the consequences of unrepentant behavior. Instead of facing his charges and seeking to make amends, he chose to continue evading responsibility, compounding the legal challenges he already faced.

Possible Preaching Angle:

There comes a time when we must stop and ask ourselves—How long can I keep repeating the same sin, expecting to escape the consequences?

London's metropolitan police force has seen just about everything in terms of crime, and they've saved much of the evidence. A forward-thinking officer in 1874 began saving items from historic cases to show new recruits. The museum includes items like: Letters from the Jack the Ripper case, an oil drum used to dissolve murder victims in acid; Cannibal Dennis Nilsen's cooking pots; The umbrella-fired ricin bullet that the KGB used to kill a Bulgarian dissident in London during the Cold War; Items that once belonged to Charles Black, the most prolific counterfeiter in the Western Hemisphere, including a set of printing plates, forged banknotes, and a cunningly hollowed-out kitchen door once used to conceal them.

The museum houses evidence from some of the most twisted, barbaric criminal cases of recent history. It is not open to the public, as some people think it's just too gruesome for public viewing, but it is used as a teaching collection for police recruits. It also may show the monstrous side of humanity, what we have been and still are capable of doing to each other.

As a prisoner in Nazi death camps during World War II, Lily Engelman vowed that—if she survived—she would one day bear witness to the systematic slaughter of Jewish people. After the war, she emigrated from Hungary to Israel, where she found sewing work in a mattress factory. She married another Hungarian-speaking Jew, Shmuel Ebert, who had fled Europe before the war.

Despite her vow, however, she found herself rarely even mentioning the Holocaust after the war. People noticed the number tattooed on her left forearm but didn’t ask questions. They could never fathom the horrors she had endured, she thought. As for her own children, she preferred not to terrify them.

Only in the late 1980s, spurred partly by questions from one of her daughters, did she begin to open up. Resettled in London, she told her story in schools, in gatherings of other survivors and even in the British Parliament. Once she sat in a London train station and talked about the Holocaust with anyone who stopped to listen. In one video recounting her experiences, she says the Holocaust was the first time factories were built to kill people.

Lily Ebert, who died October 9, 2024 at the age of 100, once summed up her mission as trying “to explain the unexplainable.” But one of her obituaries noted that according to Ebert, words really matter. As she explained, “The Holocaust didn’t start with actions. It started with words.”

In the popular, BBC murder mystery series Broadchurch, the mystery is who in this lovely little seaside town could have murdered a child. The local detective, Eli Miller, is dubious that anyone from the town could’ve done it. This is a tight knit community of good people. She says, “We don’t have these problems.” In response, Detective Inspector, Alec Hardy argues with her.

Hardy: Anybody’s capable of murder, given the right circumstances.

Miller: Most people have moral compasses.

Hardy: Compasses break.

Tim Keller adds: “The fictional detective inspector is telling us exactly what the Bible says. You must not be in denial about your capacity for evil. You will do some really bad things in your life that will utterly shock you, unless you get ahold of this particular truth from the Bible. Blame shifting is therefore one of the most dangerous things that you can do.”

Legend has it that G. K. Chesterton, the famous philosopher/theologian, was asked by a newspaper reporter what was wrong with the world. He skipped over all the expected answers. He said nothing about corrupt politicians or ancient rivalries between warring nations, or the greed of the rich and the covetousness of the poor. He left aside street crime and unjust laws and inadequate education. Environmental degradation and population growth overwhelming the earth’s carrying capacity were not on his radar. Neither were the structural evils that burgeoned as wickedness became engrained in society and its institutions in ever more complex ways.

What’s wrong with the world? As the story goes, Chesterton responded with just two words: “I am.”

His answer is unlikely to be popular with a generation schooled to cultivate self-esteem, to pursue its passions and chase self-fulfillment first and foremost. ... (But) maybe there is something to Chesterton’s answer after all. In fact, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was fond of saying that original sin—the idea that every one of us is born a sinner and will manifest that sinfulness in his or her life—is the only Christian doctrine that can be empirically verified. Everyone, whether a criminal or a saint, sins. Insofar as that dismal verdict is true, it’s hardly surprising that there is a great deal wrong with the world.

Tens of millions of people devour true-crime shows on TV, cable, streaming services, radio, podcasts, and in books. This is deeply personal for author Lisa Nikolidakis and her 2022 book No One Crosses the Wolf. She was 27 in 2003, when her father murdered his girlfriend, her teenage daughter, and committed suicide. She experienced the inevitable trauma and "inherited his crime scene of a house." For 17 years she plodded along writing the book about her shock, confusion, and her emotional wounds.

In recent years she "escaped" from her "darkness" by watching endless streaming TV shows that depicted "bizarre murders, cults, kidnappings, rapes, conspiracies. Bodies dismembered and disappeared and defiled, eccentric townsfolk and investigators each with their own secrets.

The upside for this strange choice was that good usually wins, and there are heroes who pay a price. She writes:

I found comfort in following detectives and prosecutors who care. That’s it, really. Someone cared. In real life, we know this often isn’t the case. But fictional characters pursuing The Big Bad are so invested, they pay for it in their personal lives: failed marriages, mental breakdowns, angry children, demotion. They care at their own peril.

She admits: "I can’t stop asking why? When our world news is often so dark, why on earth do we seek out more?" Some of the common reasons:

Voyeurism is a cheap ticket to a thrill-ride – the allure of our own dark sides. There is also the “could I get away with it” curiosity. Would we make better criminals than the ones who are caught? The criminals fascinate us, and we get to peak in their doors from the safety of our triple bolted ones. The world may be dangerous, but there is comfort in our streaming safety. We remain safe.

Evil as entertainment remains deeply problematic, and it raises for me images of families attending public hangings. We look back at that as macabre spectacle, but I am not so sure that what we are doing now is all that different.

Possible Preaching Angles:

The popularity of true crime shows indicates the needs of human nature: 1) Vicarious sin - People delight in imagining themselves breaking the law and getting away with it. 2) Justice; Penalty for sin – People want to see justice done in an increasingly capricious world where criminals go free; 3) Protection and Comfort – We want to feel safe and protected even while entertaining ourselves with the danger of the world.

In the early 1960s, political writer Hannah Arendt attended the trials of Adolf Eichmann, the German officer who had orchestrated much of the Holocaust. In 1934, Eichmann had been appointed to the Jewish section of the “security services” of the SS. From then on, he became deeply involved with the formulation and operation of the “final solution to the Jewish question.” He drew up the idea of deportation of Jews into ghettos, and went about gathering Jews into concentration camps with murderous efficiency. He took great pride in the role he played in the death of six million European Jews.

At his trial, Arendt expected to find a monster. Only a deranged psychopath could lend his considerable organizational skills to the mass murder of millions in Nazi Germany. What stunned Arendt was her startling discovery of a “normal” and “simple” man at the trial. The notorious architect of the Holocaust did not appear as a devil but as a banal bureaucrat doing what he was told.

Hannah Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, provides an unnerving account of unreflective living. Eichmann insisted in the trial that he was not a murderer but that his conscience demanded of him unquestioning submission to the demands of his superiors. Those demands resulted in the calculated deportation of millions of women, children, and men to their orchestrated deaths.

As Arendt reported, psychologists diagnosed Eichmann as “normal” with familial affections that were enviable. Herein lies the horror. Eichmann loved his wife; he was a good father. He was not a monster. He was banal, unremarkable, and commonplace. This “normal” man could be transformed into the abhorrent perpetrator of humanity’s grossest crimes because his banality and ambition kept him from an inner examination of his life.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Eichmann’s crimes seem far removed from anything ordinary people would commit. But without self-reflection and confession, normal people are capable of horrific evil. Psalm 36:2 (“In their blind conceit, they cannot see how wicked they really are,” NLT) has something to say about Eichmann and the banality of evil. It has something to say to us.

Everyone is acting so weird! The most obvious recent weirdness was when Will Smith smacked Chris Rock at the Oscars. But people have been behaving badly on smaller stages for months now. Last week, a man was arrested after he punched a gate agent at the Atlanta airport. People also found ways to throw tantrums while skiing—skiing. In one viral video, a man slid around the chairlift-boarding area, one foot strapped into his snowboard as he flailed at security guards and refused to comply with a mask mandate.

During the pandemic, bad behavior of all kinds has increased. Americans are driving more recklessly, crashing their cars, and killing pedestrians at higher rates. Health-care workers say their patients are behaving more violently, as a result, Missouri hospitals planned to outfit nurses with panic buttons. In 2020, the US murder rate rose by nearly a third, the biggest increase on record, then rose again in 2021. And if there were a national tracker of school-board-meeting hissy fits, it would be heaving with data points right now.

What on earth is happening? How did Americans go from clapping for health-care workers to threatening to kill them? More than a dozen experts on crime, psychology, and social norms suggest few possible explanations:

We’re all stressed out: One explanation for the spike in bad behavior is the rage, frustration, and stress coursing through society right now. Everyone is teetering slightly closer to their breaking point. Someone who may have lost a job, a loved one, or a friend to the pandemic might be pushed over the edge.

People are drinking more: People have been coping with the pandemic by drinking more and doing more drugs. A lot of these incidents involve somebody using a substance. Americans have been drinking 14 percent more days a month during the pandemic, and drug overdoses have also increased since 2019.

We’re social beings, and isolation is changing us: The pandemic loosened ties between people: Kids stopped going to school; their parents stopped going to work; parishioners stopped going to church; people stopped gathering, in general. Sociologists think all of this isolation shifted the way we behave. The rise in disorder may simply be the unsavory side of a uniquely difficult time—one in which many people were tested, and some failed.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Extraordinary times reveal that our civilized veneer is very thin. Stress strips away the manners that people use as masks and shows true character of the old nature. Only the new nature that God implants in the redeemed can cope with stressful, disruptive times (2 Cor. 5:17; Rom. 8:1-39).

When Duke Energy officials got to the bottom of the power outage, nature was to blame. It wasn’t wind or rain, or thunder or earthquakes … or even, as is sometimes the case, human nature. Like Adam and Eve in the Garden, it started with a snake.

A snake got into the electrical equipment in a local substation, which ended up causing an electrical fire that created the outage. By 10am that morning, more than 1,400 people had lost power.

Duke Energy Spokesperson Jeff Brooks said,

This is one of the reasons we are making electric grid improvements in the region. We often think of storms and trees which are the leading cause of outages, but other items like cars hitting utility poles and snakes and squirrels getting into equipment also cause a number of outages for electric utilities. That’s why it’s so important we make these improvements to strengthen our electric grid and protect it from a variety of disruptions.

Power in the region was restored later that day.

Possible Preaching Angle:

All it takes is one agent of sin and destruction to bring dishonor and harm to many in the community. The same is true in the spiritual community. The “ancient serpent” brings havoc and harm to the entire world.

Hell is not a popular topic today, except for all the wrong reasons.

The theme song for the film Cruella tells us right up front that Ms. de Vil was "born to be bad." Estella Miller is a creative child with a talent for fashion but has a cruel streak, leading her mother Catherine to nickname her "Cruella." After a tragic series of circumstances Estella finds herself an orphan on the streets of London. She tries to be good, but when she befriends fashion legend Baroness von Hellman, she embraces her wicked side to become the raucous and revenge-bent Cruella.

The chorus to the theme song reads:

Call me crazy, call me insane

But you're stuck in the past

And I'm ahead of the game

A life lived in penance, it just seems a waste

And the devil has much better taste

And I tried to be sweet, I tried to be kind

But I feel much better now that I'm out of my mind

Well, there's always a line at the gates of Hell

Possible Preaching Angle:

The truth is, almost everything about these lyrics is wrong. Penance is not a waste, when won through Christ. The devil does not have better taste. But the one area where the lyrics are spot on, there is a long line at the gates of hell.

Robert Coles, a former professor at Harvard published an article titled “The Disparity Between Intellect and Character.” The piece was about “the task of connecting intellect to character.” He adds, “This task is daunting.”

His essay was occasioned by an encounter with one of his students over the moral insensitivity—is it hard for him to say “immoral behavior of other students, some of the best and brightest at Harvard.” This student was a young woman of “a Midwestern, working class background” where, as is well known, things like “right answers” and “ideology” remain strong. She cleaned student rooms to help pay her way through the university.

Again and again, she reported to Coles, people who were in classes with her treated her ungraciously because of her lower economic position, without simple courtesy and respect, and often were rude and sometimes crude to her. She was repeatedly propositioned for sex by one young student in particular as she went about her work. He was a man with whom she had had two “moral reasoning” courses, in which he excelled and received the highest of grades.

This pattern of treatment led her to quit her job and leave school—and to have something like an exit interview with Coles. She reviewed not only the behavior of her fellow students, but also the long list of highly educated people who have perpetrated the atrocities for which the twentieth century is famous. She concluded by saying to him, “I’ve been taking all these philosophy courses, and we talk about what’s true, what’s important, what’s good. Well, how do you teach people to be good? What’s the point of knowing good if you don’t keep trying to become a good person?”

Walt Whitman, one of the greatest of American poets writes in, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" of his capacity for evil:

I am he who knew what it was to be evil,

I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,

Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,

Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,

Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,

The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,

The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,

Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting, ...

Notorious cult leader Charles Manson was responsible for the brutal deaths of nine people in the summer of 1969. The murders were so gruesome and sensational that Manson has been an obsession for many people even after his death.

This summer (2019) a Quentin Tarantino movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is being released. It is based partially on Manson’s crimes and stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Kurt Russell, and Al Pacino. Film historian Peter Biskind writes about Manson’s appeal in an issue of Esquire.

Some examples of our fascination with Charles Manson and evil:

-At least 50 books have been written about Manson.

-Helter Skelter, the book on his investigation and trial, has sold over seven million copies. It is the “best-selling true-crime book of all time.”

-One opera entitled The Manson Family was produced.

-Eleven feature films, documentaries, and TV series focus entirely on him or he is a large part of the subject covered.

-According to the recent article in Esquire: “In addition to comic books and multiple websites devoted to him …, jewelry, coffee mugs, and T-shirts displaying his image sell on eBay, Etsy, and Amazon. ... You can download his singing and talking ringtones to your cell phone—for free.”

Biskind ends his article by delving into the essence of this fascination:

One thing Charlie liked to say was “Look straight at me and you see yourself.” Maybe one answer to the riddle of Manson and his girls is that they remind us of the ultimate unknowability of other people, even the seemingly unremarkable ones. Theirs is the story of Little Red Riding Hood in reverse: The smiling young girl at the door selling Girl Scout cookies is herself the Big Bad Wolf, and may be hiding a dagger under her cloak.

People magazine once undertook a part-serious, part-tongue-in-cheek survey of its readers on the subject of sin. The results were published as a "Sindex," with each sin rated by a sin coefficient. The outcome is both amusing and instructive. Sins like murder, child abuse, and spying against one's country were rated the worst sins in ascending order, with smoking, swearing, and illegal videotaping far down the list. Parking in a handicapped spot was rated surprising high, whereas unmarried live-togethers got off lightly. Cutting in front of someone in line was deemed worse than divorce or capital punishment. Predictably, corporate sin was not mentioned at all. The survey concluded, "Overall, readers said they commit about 4.64 sins a month."

Possible Preaching Angles: Of course calculating our sins (according to our standards) is not this easy or precise. In the Bible, sin is not just a few bad acts that we do. It is a power that we are in (See Romans 3:9). As the writer Dorothy Sayers once said, "[Sin] is a deep interior dislocation at the very center of the human personality." The 20th century poet W.H. Auden called sin "The error bred in the bone."

In 2009, a German scientist named Jan Souman took a group of subjects out to empty parking lots and open fields, blindfolded them, and instructed them to walk in a straight line. Some of them managed to keep to a straight course for ten or twenty paces; a few lasted for 50 or a hundred. But in the end, all of them wound up circling back toward their points of origin. Not many of them. Not most of them. Every last one.

"And they have no idea," Dr. Souman told NPR. "They were thinking that they were walking in a straight line all the time." Dr. Souman's research team explored every imaginable explanation. Some people turned to the right while others turned to the left, but the researchers could find no discernable pattern. As a group, neither left-handed nor right-handed subjects demonstrated any predisposition for turning one way more than the other; nor did subjects tested for either right- or left-brain dominance. The team even tried gluing a rubber soul to the bottom of one shoe to make one leg longer than the other.

"It didn't make any difference at all," explained Dr. Souman. "So again, that is pretty random what people do." In fact, it isn't even limited to walking. Ask people to swim blindfolded or drive a car blindfolded and, no matter how determined they may be to go straight, they quickly begin to describe peculiar looping circles in one direction or the other.

Commenting on his performance in the gangster drama Black Mass, actor Johnny Deep said, "I found the evil in myself a long time ago, and I've accepted it. We're old friends."

Researcher Dan Ariely did a massive study to try and understand why some people lie, cheat, and steal. Ariely and his team went to college campuses and offered to pay students for every math puzzle they could solve in five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, the students were asked to grade their own papers and shred them in the back of the room. Then the students stood in line and received money for every right answer. But the students didn't know that the shredder didn't actually shred their papers so the researchers could check to see if they were telling the truth. Ariely found that, on average, students reported solving six problems, when in fact they solved only four.

Over the course of their research, after testing 30,000 people, Ariely found only 12 "big cheaters," compared to 18,000 "small cheaters." The big cheaters stole a total of $150, while the small cheaters stole a total of around $36,000—just one or two dollars at a time. Ariely did this research project all over the world—in the United States, Western Europe, Turkey, Israel, China, and many other countries—and the results were always roughly the same.

Ariely concluded that most dishonesty happens among ordinary people who think of themselves as basically honest. But when added together, all this "little" dishonesty has a huge impact. Most of the problems faced by the human race are not rooted in the lives of outliers and psychopaths—life's big cheaters. Our problems are rooted in the lives of typical, ordinary people who find ways to rationalize their own bad behavior. In other words, we want to think of ourselves as honest people while enjoying the benefits of dishonesty.