How To End Fear and Laugh At Evil

“Our greatest evil flows from ourselves.” Rousseau

Rolling Stone has a cover story about HBO’s vampire-sex show True Blood, and for the photo… well, they got stars Anna Paquin, Alexander Skarsgard and Stephen Moyer naked and sprayed them blood.

“They’re Hot. They’re Sexy. They’re Undead,” the cover text reads.

It made me think about where our concepts of “evil” come from. I have met a lot of seemingly “evil” people in my time. However, none of them sucked blood, knew how to fly, ate people or shapeshifted. None of them were risen from the dead and there was absolutely nothing supernatural about them. Their “evil” deeds revolved around bad business, bad politics and even worse choices in life. Mainly they caused pain and suffering to others and themselves.

I watched a documentary about the ultimate “evil people” our society has known: Serial Killers. While some mimicked what they saw on TV and were believed to be “evil”, almost all were a far cry from the powderfaced teen heartbeats committing supernatural atrocities. These real serial killers were not supernatural or influenced by some “evil” supernatural power. Even more disturbingly,they were mostly the victims of abuse themselves and without a doubt, mentally ill.

So where exactly does this image of “evil” come from? Pale faced demons, ghouls,and blood sucking, and human eating Vampires?

The answer that keeps repeating is simple: Religious scripture written centuries ago by males frantically attempting to exercise mass mind control over an ever increasing impoverished, discontent and dissident population.

The only “historic” record ever of anyone ever coming across these “entities” has been in the bibles and religious holy books of the world.

Our media mimics the fantastic images we have been taught to fear for centuries. It may be the most ancient form of mind control: control by fear.

If you had no religious knowledge or context for this stuff, then would these images mean anything to you? If that was the case, then what would real “evil” look like?