Saint Augustine, I believe it was, said he did not believe that there was a devil, that evil was not a thing, not a force of evil, but was a void. Evil was the absence of good. It was the absence of order, the absence of love, the absence of care, the absence of reasoned thought, a void.
The void of evil cannot be filled with more evil. George Fox once said that I cannot believe that that which is forbidden in the comandments is then allowed in another circumstance.
It is very hard in the face of so many very good people being killed to live our principles, even for Quakers. We are angered as well, but more, we are deeply sorrowful.
How do we fill the void? Well, at present, we are the child who does not share his toys, and the abused kid, whose parents beat on him every night has just punched him in the nose. The teacher sits the hitter in the corner, but the other spoiled rich kid, continues to not share his toys... Is the little pscho kid going to learn his lesson? Likely not.
If we as a nation, take on world hunger, take on issues of production without exploitation, of teaching tolerance, than we might live in a less frightening world. It is harder, takes more national resolve than bombing people into submission, but there you are, the result is filling the void of evil with good.
We dehumanize people and governments who do evil, and it makes it possible for us to ignore our part in making a world that does not make evil people. Is it just cooincidence that crime occures more readily among folks with less equal opportunity? Victorian writers tried to say that crime was genetic that the English working class were a separate degenerate race, and it made it possible to use force against crime rather than fairness against crime. We go on and on, using force in the face of reason, and goading others to use force in return. It is so very very simple, and yet, no one wants to do the hard work of applying the obvious solutions.
In our neighborhood we have Syrains, Bosnians, Irish, Yugoslaves, so many who have seen generations of war. All of them I have spoken to are 1. shocked at the news comentary that we are hated for our freedoms, 2. afraid to speak out in this land of liberty to say it is not your freedoms but the excesses paid for in other nations that is at the root of hatred.
Now, as in any crime, it is not the majority of those who resent our excesses who act out, it is a small minority, and our excesses do not justify the violence sent our way, but it will happen with certainty if we do not begin to work on the root causes of disatisfaction.
All the best
Larry