catapult magazine

One potential danger is relativizing evil to the point where we aren’t able to say one group is in the right and another is in the wrong because, as sinners, we’re all wrong.

I believe that the sources of genocide and apathy and all things truly horrid reside somewhere within my own soul.

Taken from a Princeton student’s article at: http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2005/09/26/opinion/13190.shtml#continue

whoever wrote this certainly has a high opinion of themselves. if that’s true, find the highest bridge over concrete that you can and jump! for the betterment of humanity…

Well, no … you would be the one with a high opinion of yourself if you feel that you somehow don’t have within yourself the ability to do horrible things. It is a very convenient lie that allows us to find the blame for evil externally, as if we have no culpability for it. It is only when we recognize our own capacity to do the very things we despise that we can focus on the circumstances or choices (the Spirit moving?) that precluded us from doing them and offer those to the perpetrators of great evil.

"culpability" "precluded" "perpetrators" – did you just buy a new thesaurus or something?

related to questions of culpability and guilt and blame:

by Sufjan Stevens

His father was a drinker
And his mother cried in bed
Folding John Wayne’s T-shirts
When the swingset hit his head
The neighbors they adored him
For his humor and his conversation
Look underneath the house there
Find the few living things
Rotting fast in their sleep of the dead
Twenty-seven people, even more
They were boys with their cars, summer jobs
Oh my God

Are you one of them?

He dressed up like a clown for them
With his face paint white and red
And on his best behavior
In a dark room on the bed he kissed them all
He’d kill ten thousand people
With a sleight of his hand
Running far, running fast to the dead
He took of all their clothes for them
He put a cloth on their lips
Quiet hands, quiet kiss
On the mouth

And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid

Do apathy and genocide belong in the same category? I know it can be sin itself to categorize sin but at least we can be clearer about what is sinful about all human beings without turning everyone into serial killers and genocidal apathists.

It seems like part of the purpose of equating hate with murder and lust with adultery is to prevent us from taking credit for the outside circumstances that discourage our impulses from becoming actualized. For example, the solid relationships that inform the moral commitment keeping me from promiscuity (in spite of sexual desire) are a mysterious gift to me, not something I’ve created or earned. We can ackowledge varying degrees of destructiveness in sinful behaviors, but shouldn’t do so at the expense of confronting our own impulses (undeveloped as they may be) and acknowledging our own direct or indirect complicity, when appropriate.

I can understand the validity of (figuratively, of course) "turning everyone into serial killers and genocidal apathists." What might some of the detriments be?

, by Gerald Folkerts:

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another interesting work, along the same lines is a piece we featured in [i:4926584301]catapult[/i:4926584301] by Matthew Clark. an interesting element of this particular image is that the artist also (unintentionally) captured himself taking the photo in the reflection of the glass in the frame.

why does it seem that artists are so drawn to this theme?