Evil is the Handmaid of the Lord

“All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.”

 Edgar Allen Poe

The greatest proof the "believer" has in the existence of their god, indeed perhaps the only proof they have, is that "evil" exists in the world. And the greatest proof that the atheist has that god does not exist, is that people never commit those evils "so fully and so joyfully," as Blaise Pascal exclaimed, as when they are doing it in fealty to their God. 

From flying planes into buildings to burning witches and heretics, to fighting crusades and crucifying Christ himself, without the willingness of people to murder their enemies in defense of their "morality" and their God  - and only doing so always to defend their own souls from being thrown, by that same God, into the everlasting fires of hell for failing to do so - the greatest evidence that humanity would have that God exists would not be the universe itself or even ourselves, but all those who strove to commit evil on a scale not seen since the Old Testament.  

And it is precisely because of those evils, and for almost no other reason, that religion holds such power and authority over so vast a number of human hearts and minds, and has done so for so long. As such, nothing owes a greater debt of gratitude for its unmatched accumulation of wealth and power, over the centuries and even millenniums, than God owes to the devil, and religion owes to evil. Or to put it more succinctly, there is no greater handmaiden to religion than evil itself. 

Religion, which hijacked human morality and transformed it from a system of empathy for each other to one that elevated obedience to a deity above all else, has induced men everywhere to sacrifice their own sons for a "god" whenever he commanded them to do so. From countries sending kids off to fight in far away wars for resources under the pretense of democracy and freedom, to religions convincing people their God is the most pleased when people embrace martyrdom for their beliefs, religion has largely become little more than a mask of morality, behind which evil and hypocrisy operate with impunity. Like Richard III, such evil clothes its naked villainy, as Shakespeare put it, "with old odd ends stolen forth from holy writ/And seem(s) a saint when most (it) plays the devil."

This Abrahamic obedience to God and country has served as the underlying ethos of every war ever fought over the last  five thousand years, as "parents would rather sacrifice their own children," as Marlon Brando once observed of the Vietnam War, "than change their beliefs." Some have even murdered their own children with their own hands, much like Abraham himself, out of the "belief" that "man was made to serve the law," and not the other way around. Indeed, it was for daring to suggest otherwise that ultimately lead a blaspheming upstart like Christ to be crucified. 

As any priest or Christian will reflexively parrot back to you when asked, the "problem of evil" can be explained easily enough. And it can be explained easily enough by simply dismissing the question by pleading ignorance. But they are not pleading their own ignorance, of course, so much as they are preying upon the ignorance of their inquisitor; for the Christian will assure the inquisitor that, because they know for sure that their God exists, the problem is not that evil exists, but that the inquisitor knows not why it exists, and just how useful such evil can be in bringing about God's divine plan.

And while the Christian cannot explain what exactly that plan may be, with any real degree of specificity,  they are nevertheless confident in assuring anyone who thinks evil demonstrates God does not exist, that it most surely does no such thing. On the contrary! It is the strongest proof there is that God does exist, and for perhaps no other reason than that the Christian needs Him to exist, in order to make sense of so much evil in the world.

In this respect, evil becomes the perfect opportunity for the Christian to assert they "know" certain things about the universe, like the fact that God exists and Jesus was his "only begotten son," while at the same time conveniently using their ignorance of what any of that really means to anyone in practice, whenever evil rears its ugly head; like it did when it was discovered how many Catholic priests and nuns had been raping children around the world over the last few decades or more. 

But the Christian will only double down on their certainties about the "mercy" of God when confronted by such "evils," asserting even more forcefully that God uses such evils to only produce greater good, somewhere down the line. 

On the one hand,  this is the very same justification used to firebomb Dresden and Tokyo, and atom bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was also the very same justification offered by myriad high ranking officials in the Nazi party for the "final solution," and was even used as the justifications for Pol Pot and Stalin. In fact, it was the justification offered for virtually every evil ever committed in the name of Christianity, from Charles Manson to Jonestown, and from the institution of slavery to the genocide of Christopher Columbus, who believed that his reaping of gold was the divine reward for sowing God among the natives; and that all those "heathens" who he cut down were all standing in the way of ushering in Christ's return. 

On the other hand, we have yet to see the benefits to all those who were raped or bombed or killed in the name of God or gold, even if we wish to congratulate ourselves for enjoying the divine benefits that such unfathomable human suffering has wrought. Nor is there a single person who ever found themselves on the receiving end of such evils, that would ever agree that such a "plan" that allows for benefits to accrue though such evil, is one that they therefore accept must be somehow "worth it." 

This, then, is like Madeline Albright saying that the 567,000 children who the British Medical Societies Lancet estimated had died as a direct result of the sanctions imposed by the U.S. was a "price" that  "was worth it." And the only reason no one can inquire to see if any of those children would agree, is because they are all dead. And no one wishes to dig up that ugly mess again by asking their parents, that is, if any of them are still alive today.