Timothy Mcveigh's Essay: A Continuum Of Evil

People are not born evil, they learn bad things from the world. Zimbardo defines “evil” as the exercises of power to intentionally harm (psychologically), hurt (physically), and / or destroy mortally and commit crimes against humanity. People do have the capacity for evil but that does not make everyone a potential monster. Sharon Begley says that when people look at Timothy McVeigh they do not see a monster but they see a human. McVeigh had done a lot of bad things but at the end of the day we see him as nothing more than a human. “We want to see Timothy McVeigh as evil incarnate, as Satan, as depravity in human form” (Begley 1). This proves that you can commit crimes but at the end of the day we are just humans. Some evils are perhaps greater than others but being or doing bad is just wrong. “There is a continuum of evil, of course, ranging from ‘trival evils’ like cutting someone off in traffic, to greater evils like acts of prejudice, to massive evils like those perpetrated by serial sexual killers”(Begley 2). This shows that by crimes higher up on the scales does not make people monsters just bad people. God …show more content…
Everybody knows that God wanted the earth to be filled with goodness. “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness” (King James Version, Genesis 1:3-4). This proves that he wanted a separation of good and bad. Everyone makes mistakes, and we all know the saying “one bad apple spoils the bunch”. “Now the serpent was more subtil than any other beast of the field which the LORD GOD had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden” (Genesis 3: 3). Meaning Satan was the bad one and gave knowledge of bad to Adam and Eve making them sin without knowing. With the creation of the devil gave everyone the capacity to do