Who or What is Evil?

Iran has been widely advertised in the media as an "evil country." George Bush openly stated that Iran was part of the "Axis of Evil." But what does this really mean? Two questions can be asked. 1) When we say "Iran" who or what exactly are we referring to. 2) What do we mean exactly by being evil?

Obviously, Bush did not consider all people living in Iran to be evil people. Maybe he meant the government of Iran. Well, even then, it is obvious that not every single person in Iranian government is evil. So if we were to be precise, who or what was he referring to?

Personally, I think people are never evil. But they sometimes "act" in an evil fashion. You might ask what the difference is. Well, it is a huge difference. When we say someone is evil, that implies that the individual has no choice - as if he was created that way and there is nothing he can do about it. We would have actually exonerated that person from any wrongdoing because we just established that he has no choice in this. But if we say "is acting" evil, then we are implying that he is doing this intentionally and that he has a choice not to act that way.

Am I playing with words here? Well, to know the answer I think it is best if you did some experiments yourself. When a child is acting rude, tell him he is rude and the tell him he is acting rude. See the difference for yourself. When you say he is rude, he feels like he was just justified in his actions. But if you tell him he is "acting" rude, then he feels pressured into correcting himself because deep down nobody wants to be acting what he/she is not!

The first question is also important. When we call "Iran" evil, we immediately get an emotional reaction from some 80 million people! But if Bush was more precise with his choice of words, this would not happen. If he had instead named specific names and actions, then most of the people of Iran would actually support him! But now, they all simply feel insulted and feel that they need to stand behind their country! So again, we can see that this is an important issue.

//re-iran.blogspot.com/