Evil

A common idea in Christianity is the philosophical notation that evil is an absence of goodness or a perversion of goodness.   I suppose this idea is fine and I cannot see that it leads to anything in and of itself, but I also cannot see that it is true.

I believe that it is the sort of the idea that if we dismiss the teaching of God on the devil and demonic realm we feel tempted to believe.

It also leads the other way our definition of evil can tempt us to dismiss the demonic world.

Evil at its worst seeks to destroy.   I cannot see how we can say the devil is in any sense lacking in goodness or perverted in goodness in his attempt to destroy Job.

None of this is very key, but I do think that by refusing to allow evil to have a seperate class or category than good we fail to grasp the seriousness of the problems of the world.  

There must be some good end or aim in an action or perversion of good if evil is an absence of good.   It seems of use to allow evil to be its own entity rather than to grasp it is some sort of perversion of good.

It seems that along with the categorization of evil as a subset of good often comes the denial or spiritualization of demonic forces.  Such slippage of knowledge opens the door to all sorts of problems.

I have only met truly penetrating evil and work of the devil in places where people see the demonic world as some sort of allegory of scripture.  And here is the problem with the definition we cannot carry its implications through scripture without risk. 

This would suggest the definition is in fact wrong.  If we hold to the definition anyhow we must be careful to not allow man made definition to override clear scriptural teaching as has at times been done.