Why Does Evil Exist? (Full Episode) | The Story of God with Morgan Freeman

[Music] i grew up in mississippi in my neighborhood everyone was black day to day i didn't see overt signs of segregation but when i went uptown it was a different story there's no bus service here anymore but when i was a boy i was only allowed into one of these doors one said white one said color as a kid when you're confronted with an evil like racism your first reaction is confusion why does this exist where does it come from [Music] for all of our capacity to do good the urge to do evil has plagued human history if you believe we live in a world under divine control why should evil exist at all so i'm going on a journey to try to understand why evil exists i know what you did my question is can you tell me why to discover how it invades our lives people who believe that they are possessed by an evil spirit can come here how evil first stole our hearts if you're lying or doing anything evil your heart gets heavy and with a heavy heart you're not going to go to heaven and i'll see how some religions train us to fight the devil you have two mentalities one is good and one is bad to turn the darkness i did some incredibly terrible things into light you represent the hope of the world [Music] to understand why evil exists we have to know where it comes from some faiths see it as an unseen force that pervades the entire world demons that lurk in the darkness for christianity it could be the devil himself or is evil something that comes from inside us so i'm traveling to a maximum security prison to meet a man you could call evil incarnate king you ever come face to face with evil i've met some people who've done some very bad things neuroscientist dr kent kiel is trying to pinpoint the source of evil inside the brains of psychopathic killers i wanted to try to understand why people do really bad things how to how to help prevent it someday thank you [Music] i'm about to meet one of dr kiel's most notorious subjects he's serving a life sentence here his attorney tells me this man raped more than two dozen women and murdered three he's been in jail almost since he was a teenager except for very short spurts where when he would get out of jail he would go back to the same behavior of raping and eventually it evolved into murder did he confess to these he confessed all of them i'm not going to show you his face because i don't want to give any more notoriety to the man who committed these atrocities but i want to know what can make someone do what he did you know who i am yes i know what you did my question is can you tell me why it was a spur-of-the-moment thing each time i didn't have any plan to go out and snatch anybody commit any sexual violence against anybody i had a desire an impulse and i wasn't able to stop myself from acting on the impulse let me ask you about what age did you start i think when i was 21 and 22 i was out looking for something to steal and i just spotted a teacher who had stayed late so i decided to rob her kidnapper and rape her i just pulled over on an access road and she fought back slipped through the door and i just turned around and took off when did you first kill going on 27. i was going out to committee burglary and the crime map kidnapped raped and murdered i'm looking for the correct term it isn't guilt it's remorse remorse did you ever experience that that you know of i don't see emotions like everybody else um i don't feel them uh there was no remorse i think that i'm not wired the same as everybody else so can't yeah is this psychopathic in psychiatry we have a way of assessing what we call psychopathy or psychopathic personality disorder and the lack of empathy the impulse control the poor planning he scores you know in the 99th percentile what makes a person evil kent has scanned the brains of 800 psychopathic criminals this prisoner is the most extreme case he's ever seen so this is a standard mri scan looks pretty normal when you run through the mri scan but what we did is quantify all the different areas of his brain and to try to understand how dense are they how strong are they basically this area of the orbital frontal cortex it's very important for the formation of personality for the control of impulses for regulating behavior these three bars that i show here this is the average inmate this is other individuals that we call psychopaths in the red bar and you can see that he's he's really reduced he really does have a different brain and so he he really does fit that 99th percentile he's you know one in a million actually 100 million he's very rare you've been in prison now for about 30 years yep a long time what if i said i have a way to get you out would you want to go i'd want to go but since i did commit those crime i still have that capacity society wouldn't be safe i don't have the same controls as you do or somebody else does this is an evil man evil personified neuroscientists say that his behavior is a result of bad neural wiring but the question is even so does he not still have a choice can he choose not to commit a heinous crime psychopaths are at the extreme of human behavior but we all face the choice to do good or do evil and for thousands of years we battled those urges i've come to luxon capital of ancient egypt egyptologist selena ephram is going to show me one of the oldest depictions of our struggle to choose between good and evil so right over there yes all the east into the park on the other side of the nile the east of the nile was always the land of the living and then over here you have the land of the dead on the west literally all those tombs yep all of those are tombs and i want to show you one in particular these are the tombs of the nobles just around the corner from the valley of the kings where tutankhamun was buried more than three millennia ago so here's the tomb of menna here we go oh oh look at that there we are that's mena over there and he was described for the god amun and he oversaw the lands of the god amun and also over here you can see this big harvest that he's checking out it's great they're harvesting the wheat this artwork is 3 500 years old yup 1370 bc and it hasn't been touched up those are his scribes he's overseeing the scribes precisely [Music] and can i get back to the states i'm going to be a hieroglyphic expert you are indeed now let me show you a little something about how mena gets to go to the afterlife menace tomb includes a remarkable feature that selima tells me i have to see a scene where mena would be judged on the balance of good and evil he had done this is all funerary procession okay you can see his coffin being brought here that's his coffin there that's his coffin and then he's brought here finally in front of the guard osiris this is mina and then here you have complete innovation this is the first time you ever see this really in a private tomb and that is the weighing of the heart scene and here he is being judged to see if he was good or if he was evil in front of osiris the god of the underworld mena's heart is weighed against the goddess of truth not while thoth her husband writes down the judgment so it's almost as if it's a cliff note for him cliff notes so if you're lying or stealing or cheating or doing anything evil the whole thing is the fact that it reflects on your way it's on your heart your heart gets heavy i have a heavy heart yes and with a heavy heart you're not going to go to heaven that's right you won't be able to have liftoff basically just well put so in this depiction his heart is indeed in balance right right so he's cool totally cool all right good to go into the afterlife you would think that that would be the beginning at least somehow of the judeo-christian ethic as it were in terms of good and evil in that basically i think that modern religion has its roots in this idea of morality and that anything bad you do is reflected and can be judged in some way the egyptians were very literal they said you can judge it by your heart but even now when you know you can say he is pure of heart it means he's a good person right in the centuries after manna the idea of eternal reward for turning one's back on evil spread throughout egyptian society and from there it may have fed into judaism christianity and islam [Music] wearing of the heart assumes that fear of consequences is the only thing that keeps us on a righteous path which makes me wonder are we inherently good are inherently evil in fact that question is at the very root of the christian faith the early leaders of the church trace our tendency to sin back to adam and eve who ate the forbidden fruit original sin i've come to meet baptist reverend and theologian cutter calloway to find out whether original sin means we are all evil at heart hey pleasure to meet you thank you have a seat thank you or which book were you reading the first few chapters of genesis that is exactly what i want to talk about and what i want to talk about is sin what is original sin well it's a good question the christian tradition kind of coined original sin and some primal desire uh that we all have that's a very basic human urge or impulse because adam sent that original sin was passed on from one generation to the next perpetuated generation after generation after generation i have recently spent some time with a person who we could say it personifies evil and you just say why did you do these things and he would say i just felt like i'm beyond that i don't know now that's inherent evil isn't it what you saw you could name that as a sort of demonic thing this is demonic it's demonic but i think it's important for us um to acknowledge that that there is a little bit of him in all of us there's something inherent um in us that seems to bend itself towards uh death and violence is there a devil or is that just a metaphor uh it is a metaphor uh and also the devil is real there's a lot of different forms you know devils with pitchforks to goblins and ghouls etc in the new testament you even get jesus interacting with satan and yet at the same time you have jesus talking to one of his disciples and saying at one point get behind me satan so it seems even jesus is dealing with both a an actual presence what we might say is a personified evil and at the same time that we can be satanic uh demonic in in our own desire to steer away from what god wants we are born with the capacity for evil inside us most of us struggle our whole lives to resist the temptation to do wrong but there could be another source of evil in our lives the people who brought us into this world my dad was a alcoholic whether they are living or dead does evil exist in the world is it because we all have evil inside us or does it come from somewhere else [Music] i've traveled to india to understand what hindus believe is the source of evil the unhappy souls of their ancestors i'm in the city of varanasi to visit the temple of tishash mochan where exorcisms go on all day long [Music] my guide very nicely resident and educator b.a media introduces me to the head priest and to see the goblin or pishash who is said to live here so there was a goblin for 15 years was wandering around in pain so he finally prayed to shiva the great hindu god shiva puts the goblin through a purifying ritual which ends with a dip in the nearby pond that instantly cures him of his disease in return shiva orders the goblin to protect people near the pond from any other evil spirits now shiva asked okay you're cured so you're going to help all the people who suffer being possessed by evil this is a benign goblin yes he's a benign now this pond has become a place of healing a haven for people who feel their lives are haunted by an evil presence so here you look at the water it's brackish but people believe that something is going to term for it yeah so you know the uh typical theme is water cleanses everything okay i'm gonna i'm gonna buy that hindus believe that when someone's death is traumatic or unhappy their soul can become angry and haunt the lives of their children or other relatives this can cause mental or physical illness even financial troubles the correct rituals however can liberate the unhappy soul and free the living [Music] what's going on over there he's exercising yes [Music] [Music] response either screams or response in terms or they have spasm and then finally they believe that it's released most of the people who come here don't need a full-on exorcism like this man the shukla family are typical clients they are having money troubles and they worry that the spirits of their ancestors may be the cause this is a departure for the spirit that is wandering around what gives you the impression what makes one think of my parents spirits are not settled i think personal troubles then something is causing them trouble whenever there's a financial loss in the family and frequent sicknesses bad dreams and so everything is associated with this position to make their ancestor spirits happy the shuklas must prepare them a good meal one that is blessed by the priest they offer the honey clarified butter banana fruits and everything so this will be offered to dead soul which is going to eat the food so this should be a special meal after receiving all the food they offer a lamp and an umbrella and a pair of shoes so here every deported soldiers treated like a real human being uh it's welcomed if the spirit is treated like a real human being the ancestors received what they need for their journey in the afterlife after the shoot was off of the food to the sacred pond and nail a coin to this holy tree [Music] the unhappy souls of their ancestors are set free and the shadow of evil lifts in christianity you've got the devil and you've got god you've got good good evil uh don't seem to have that going on in hinduism in hinduism there's no dichotomy between good and evil the same person can become good and evil in a temple like this even the evilness treated very respectfully and is treated caringly that's very interesting very interesting concept because i think it sort of frees us up to be better oh yeah yeah there's always at the end the hope the hope that even the evil can be liberated and evil can be purified like taking a dip into the pond [Music] so i've been watching [Music] people in these temples i mean crowds of people doing ritual to ritual trying to stay in good graces of their ancestors but the thing about it is evil is not spurned evil is thought of as a spirit that needs help just needs to find peace cool hindus want to guide evil into becoming good that idea is also the basis of another faith one of the oldest and most influential religions in the world but it's one most of us have never heard of it's called zoroastrianism i've come to orange county california to meet the president of the temple here arman ariane welcome to california's zoroastrian center thank you zoroastrianism began 3 500 years ago in ancient iran the central symbol of the faith is fire today there are just a few small pockets of zoroastrians around the world mostly in india and iran but some are here in california this is the fire temple and this fire is always going this is a symbol of zoroastrianism the fire is always going it represents enlightenment the more you are aware of this world of ours the more you know what's ahead the better decisions you can make it's kind of like you're walking with a flashlight in your hand yeah the brighter the light in your life that's right how does that tie in to zoroastrian belief in the separation of good and evil in this zarathustra's school of thought you have two mentalities which were translated by westerners as spirits one is good and one is bad they are principles they are a way of behaving so the zoroastrian motto is good thoughts good words and good deeds zoroastrianism is a religion focused on defeating evil zoroastrian priests wear clean white robes which like their sacred flame represent enlightenment the path away from evil prayers are still said in the ancient iranian language avestan which was spoken by its founder zoro astor professor of religion gregory reilly has been studying how zoroastrian beliefs shaped judaism and christianity and how they gave birth to the idea of the devil zoroastrianism predates the abrahamic religions that's right yeah zoroaster postulated that to defeat evil in the world we're going to have to have a cataclysmic battle and god and the devil are going to fight it out that's new testament that's not in zero australia yes it is or else yeah and if you go to the great massive religions around there's no devil the israelites they lived without a devil until they're in babylon the jews met zoroastrianism and they began to assimilate ideas they come back and the devil begins to appear in jewish literature these ideas about the devil having caused that evil and those things start to work on people so by the time we get to to jesus's day they've actually created a name for the devil bails the ball if you've heard that one yeah it's got few of them yeah so the great competitor of jesus in our new testament gospels this is now a new take that's right jews make it their own christians make it their own islam makes it their own but just as the idea of the devil in christianity evolved from ancient beliefs modern zoroastrianism has evolved too for many zoroastrians the devil is no longer a real demonic figure it's an internal combatant the struggle between good and evil is one that takes place in the mind so the zoroastrian motto is good thoughts good words and good deeds and the order is very important because you start with a thought you you talk it with a mentor before you take any actions this way you don't get yourself in trouble and there is no satan there was no devil something outside influencing us right meaning therefore that god is resident in each of us each of us school of thought is not something in the past or future but what we can do at this very time all our problems in the world are man-made therefore they should be solved by matt can be blame it on a supernatural force is not a zoroastrian notion right sorry austrians believe that good and evil exists within us all and we must make the choice for good each one of us has to purge evil from within us every day by doing good doing the right thing purging the world of evil is not the work of messiahs kings prophets it's the work of each one of us may we taylor butcher salesman actor whoever we are i like that but is it really possible to conquer evil without the threat of a real devil without the threat of eternal punishment [Music] in new zealand psychologist jesse bering believes we need supernatural beings to keep us on the right track are you guys ready to play a game jesse devised an experiment to test his theory all right why don't you guys make a circle and sit in front of me here and i'll go over the rules for you so you see this this piece of tape the first rule is that you can't step over the line the second rule is that you've got to throw with your back to the dartboard so you can kind of go like this and do the best that you can oh see oh not that easy is it you're gonna be playing this game one at a time and the person that gets the most uh points on the dartboard gets a very special prize at the end of the day all right we'll see you guys in a little bit jessie watches through hidden cameras to see if the children cheat so here we've got a little boy and you can almost see the machinations in his mind let's see if he does it you can hardly blame a six-year-old for doing that he really wants the prize and he thinks he can get away with it and it's the normal child response this little girl look at her she's going right over the line and she's putting it several balls on on the board itself and she's checking now to see if anybody's actually watching her could see what she's just done they think they're alone in the room and why not cheat if you can get away with it nobody's watching but what if someone was watching jesse runs the exact same experiment on a new group of children and an invisible supernatural being now before we begin i wanted to introduce you guys to somebody really special who's in the room with us right now now her name is princess alice have any of you ever heard of princess alice before she's a very friendly magical princess and she's got a very special ability she can make herself invisible princess alice is sitting in that chair right now so you guys go upstairs for now and then we're gonna bring you each down individually to play the game with the kids believing they're under the gaze of an invisible princess jesse sees something remarkable now this little girl she's been pretty good so far clearly not interested in breaking the rules so here we've got a little girl and she's actually touching the chair to see if maybe she can feel princess alice sitting there oh she's saying princess alice so she's clearly not cheating here that's the power of belief you know these kids have never heard of her before but all of a sudden she becomes real in their minds results are always the same so what we've seen after testing hundreds of kids with this study is that kids that are told that princess alice is in the room with them when they're left alone are significantly less likely to cheat she's doing the same thing that any supernatural agent or god would do in a given society she is watching them she cares about their social behavior and ultimately at least the implicit assumption is that somehow she will act if they violate one of the rules jesse's research suggests that we need to believe we're being watched to eliminate selfish behavior to keep evil in check so the proverbial question is would you rob a bank if you thought that nobody could possibly know that you've done that and i think if we're honest with ourselves many of us would walk in there and actually take all that currency then all seeing all knowing all-powerful interventionist moralistic deity that helps steer people in the direction of good behavior the reward of heaven and the threat of eternal punishment in hell keep us on the right track but what about those who have succumbed to evil can faith lead us to redemption or does evil mark us for life i'm traveling the world to discover why people believe evil exists christians jews and muslims believe it's part of the human condition to be tempted to do wrong many faiths urge us to fight temptation to put the greater good ahead of our self-interest but can we actually rid ourselves of evil in sarnath india i witness how tibetan buddhists purge themselves of evil thoughts [Music] the monks here at the vajravidya monastery perform daily chanting rituals the music puts them in a meditative state of mind [Music] buddhists believe the urge to do evil stems from our ignorance of how our minds work the ritual helps these young monks locate the source of those bad thoughts [Music] so that they can understand their cause and overcome them but not everyone wants to fight their inner demons there are plenty of people who seem to be hell-bent on doing bad things is there any way to change them i've asked kent kiel the neuroscientist who studies psychopaths to meet me again i want to know if his brain scans give us a way to combat evil i mean we always accept evil as there it is it just is there's nothing to do about it but could these brands can be used maybe to intercept some young people before they get going on this i think they can when we understand the systems of the brain that are different in people who commit these bad crimes it gives us an opportunity to try to develop a treatment for that it's like if you you know if i injure my arm and my this muscle gets atrophied just like these certain areas of their brain are atrophied i might be able to develop a treatment program that remediates that atrophy and fix it at about what age range would you think as an expert you would have to start looking following sandy hook elementary school shootings in the united states we were asked by the parents who lost their children there to to do that study to analyze brains of kids that we've studied who've killed other people versus kids in prison who have not and when we did that analysis i wasn't sure that we would find anything that different but we really did certain areas of the temporal lobes of the emotional areas of the brain were underdeveloped or they hadn't achieved a normal development so when you say kids what are you talking about are you talking about 14 15 16. yeah so that's the kids we were working with unfortunately those kids had killed about 16 people the neuroscience today is about 10 11 12 we think that we can help identify and separate kids that are problems versus kids that are just disruptive and are going to grow out of it if you were a judge and you wanted to know is this a high-risk kid or a low-risk kid we could say this there's a high-risk kid we now have a tool that can help us understand or can help predict the worst type of things that we all want to prevent a homicide to death what we really want to be able to do is get better and better at predicting and then that'll help us be better and better at preventing [Music] science may help identify those who are most prone to evil but how do you turn your back on a life of evil i've come to los angeles to meet a man who wiped all trace of evil from his life all right buddy you are all done uh i'm looking for brian brian whitener morgan freeman brad wagner how are you i'm very well indeed very well how are you i'm doing well sir tell me something about yourself i hear terrible things well for 16 years i was a neo-nazi skinhead a neo-nazi skinhead yes sir i was in uh multiple skinhead gangs i was an enforcer and one did uh some incredibly terrible things to a lot of undeserving people i was an evil person i wanted to hurt the world uh that's all i wanted to do i was i i had a sense of just utter destruction for everybody that was that was my driving goal well let me ask you how did you get to the street why were you on the street i fell in with a gang basically is what happened i fell in with the wrong people i was 14 years old and i was running the streets these guys gave me a place to stay the beer made me feel accepted and wanted after about my 10th year i kind of realized this is a subculture of of degenerates i realized i'm not superior to anybody i in fact i was pretty well a lower form of humanity you know okay now we're up to 10 years after you've been running around with these people and you've had a an epiphany tell me a little bit about that some really just magical things just kind of happened out of nowhere like well i went to a skinhead concert in 2005 and i met a woman there and uh by the january of 2006 we got married by february she was pregnant it was i had to start taking a hard look at what i was doing with myself i'm bringing this child into a world and um told him i can't do this anymore i'm done i got i got to take care of my son so during that time when i made the change on the inside i actually had to make a physical change on the outside how is that let me show you that is what i used to look like i mean my neck was completely sleeved out my face was sleeved out i looked the part i couldn't escape the way i looked on the outside even though i had already changed on the inside i got in contact with the southern poverty law center they actually uh set it up to where i was able to get the tattoos taken off my face well now i mean i can see little indications of star that more like you were maybe in a fight at some point and it healed up it looked like you had all this stuff removed how long a process was that um it took about two and a half years there was 25 26 treatments something like that um every two weeks i was getting getting lasers at it was uh ungodly excruciating my face was constantly swollen i looked like the elephant man it was it was bad time and here's actually a picture of me during the process that looked like you got punched in the eye yes it looks like i was a bad boxer yeah yeah [Laughter] sort of like paying dues i very much looked at it as a penance actually yes okay i took the pain to as a reminder that i've caused enough so i might as well have some can you describe to me your sense of yourself in those times in terms of evil looking back i had absolutely no remorse i was borderline sociopathic i had no feelings i wanted to hurt the world when i was going through the tattoo removal i i found god i before that i was a pagan and uh my life was always dark i always had a whole hole in my soul i guess would be the best way to put that i don't know exactly what his name is or if it's even judeo-christian there is a godly presence in the universe and it made itself known to me it may help me realize that there is good and evil in all of us and my goal now is basically when i just leave this world a better place than when i got into it you know just try to be a good person that's all i can do and i hope that's good enough we have sometimes thoughts that evil is just existing there's no hope but you represent the hope of the world that transformation that complete transformation that you yourself made absolutely and for you and to be able to just completely turn yourself around like that it's very very encouraging and i'm honored to talk to you thank you well i gotta tell you something i just i've been noticing you're a good-looking man well thank you so are you by the way [Laughter] the outward stains of brian's past have been wiped away but i'm struck by the astonishing difference in his two lives on the inside that was evil in his heart his admission deep and remorseless but he says the birth of his son an adawning belief in god is what purged him of evil if brian can do that gives us hope that people can change evil can be contained this hope is at the core of the christian faith we have gathered today on this riverbank to perform one of the oldest traditions in our faith that of baptism people sin but those sins can be washed away we follow jesus example today as we baptize austin katie abby norman and chris [Music] these five do this as a sign of repentance and forgiveness of sin [Music] baptism points the direction to where we are headed and it's a new start on life the bible tells us adam and eve knew no evil until they ate the forbidden fruit almost every fate tells the story of how evil begins whether we believe it comes from unhappy souls the devil himself or the devil within we all eventually come face to face with evil but i think we need to know evil because in spite of all the suffering it causes it drives us to do good without evil how would we have ever developed our unique human characteristics the ability to express kindness mercy forgiveness [Music] [Music] you

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 5,193,386

Keywords: national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, culture, documentary, perpetual planet nat geo, photography, full episode, morgan freeman, morgan freeman the story of god, the story of god morgan freeman full episodes, the story of god, the story of god with morgan freeman, story of god, the story of god with morgan freeman full episodes, why does evil exist morgan freeman, why does evil

Id: ok8NYX1ddM8

Length: 50min 18sec (3018 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022