Who is responsible for evil?

that's my question is for dr. Zacharias how do you respond to those in this country who run our elite schools who write our textbooks the evil is not within us but without outside of us like in a person who has a handgun or social-economic created conditions that it is otherwise well since that's their right just you want to go ahead you know I'd be happy to respond to it that these are the kinds of specialties that this gentleman really writes about I think you want me to go first but I'd like you to respond on this to give the question a bit of a point a pointed edge here I think I'm hearing what you're saying but how do you respond to the to a culture that is saying the evil is outside of us and not inside us yes it seems my vague or little perspective of the universities those who write all the textbooks end up in our elementary education schools do not hold a judeo-christian worldview anymore and that our evil is like President Obama said it's in the streets it's people who are poor because of people oppressing them not so much something that comes from within a person you know then we should not be imprisoning people like Madoff and the head of Enron we should be imprisoning their neighbors because of his environment that these people did such things there's a you know these things have partial truths in them and I said it in a bit of a flip off the cuff man and what they're really trying to say is that we are oftentimes the product of our environment and you know I won't name the countries but my wife and I were visiting there with there's a constant war going on in the in the in the border there and we were pointed to a man who took his twelve-year-old son up to the hill every day every day he would take his boy right from the time he was a little boy take him up to the top of the hill and point to the country across the line there and he said your whole goal in life should be to kill as many of those people in that country as you possibly can that is your purpose in life and why you are here and you take a little boy by the hand and day after day you pummel that kind of stuff into him and then he wraps bombs around himself and blows himself up one day you can see what they did with a young mind like that that they ultimately radicalized and influenced and control and the tragedy is that this a deadly half truth but it is a half truth all right it is your environment and your upbringing has an awful lot to do with this and so you watch the movies in our time look at the impact pornography has taken on this culture I'm dealing with it with young men all the time as I travel and it is a horrific thing to be trapped by because what it actually does is destroy personhood in the process and makes you pursue a feeling rather than even a person because no one person can ultimately bring you the happiness it's a feeling that you're in search of and it'll never be parked in that feeling all the time so the environment that is conditioning our minds is taking a heavy toll but what is conditioning the environment are these Minds also cumulatively just the product of all kinds of ideas nobody ultimately have to take any responsibility there was a great case in India recently and in that case the head of a large IT company one of the largest which is actually called Satyam which actually in that language means truth but they were fudging on their books they were cheating in billions of dollars and finally he was caught and he's in jail now and here's what he said my problem is this I was riding this Tiger of deceit for so long I was afraid to get off lest it eat me up it was not his environment it was what he had chosen to do so ultimately we have to have responsibilities individually not just blame the society and otherwise next thing you do you're pushing your neighbor off a cliff because your mother didn't let you push your roots of your tray when you were a little boy or something like that this kind of ad infinitum reasoning if you take away responsibility you actually take away the possibility of any court of law dealing with any act in any nature if it is always someone else's fault you have to ultimately have evil explained and it is on the outside because it is on the inside first it did not come on the inside from the outside all that is within you is evil and all the lists that God gives to us comes from the heart of man that's what really defiles and he thoughts from that were whores what you're describing is the fruits of the 18th century enlightenment which doesn't believe in evil doesn't believe in sin or responsibility so looks to things like more psychology better politics higher education and this will solve the problem and clearly 20th century evil has blown a huge hole in that now when you meet people who still believe in it I think this is the way to approach them they have never met or evil let me give an example the great poet WH Auden came to faith through me de Ville he was a socialist and atheist and a left-wing radical who'd fought on the Republican side in Spain in the Civil War came to America to escape Nazism but one evening watching a documentary in New York saw Hitler's troops entering Poland bayoneting women and children and most of the German audience were on the side of the Nazi storm troopers and cried out in the darkness kill them kill them egging them on and Alden said in two minutes my whole worldview was turned around on the one hand I knew we were evil I was looking at something that no psychology no education and no politics could ever change this is radical evil but then he said I realized as European intellectual I spent all my life removing the absolutes everything's relative but I wanted to say that Hitler was absolutely evil so he said I left the cinema a seeker after an unconditional absolute and I met Christ in other words many of these people have a very shallow view of human life and also very shallow political policies too and it always runs the ground on the rock of reality and real evil [Applause] yes your men

Channel: Ravi Zacharias International Ministries

Views: 1,426,119

Rating: 4.8459048 out of 5

Keywords: Ravi Zacharias, Ravi, Zacharias, Os Guinness, Os, Guinness, RZIM, human nature, problem of evil, Atlanta Civic Center, christianity

Id: xUohtd2hP78

Length: 7min 38sec (458 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2010