Additionally consideration is to be made of a critical appraisal of a situation, within contemporary history, where an onslaught of violence both natural and man- made, were inflicted upon a people whose lives and practices can be considered to be relegated to that of being evil. In brief, the story is that San Francisco’s growth as a city was energetically phenomenal. Spurned on by the riches of the gold rush, and the rapid growth of commerce, and abundance of opportunities, the night-life activities, of theatres, casino-gambling, prostitution, homosexuality and other immoralities which flourished, positioned the city’s evils to be the likes of Sodom and Gomorrah. The records show that the worlds worst criminals took harborage there, and during that era the crime rate soared, along with other types of violence. A severe and devastating earthquake shook San Francisco in April 1906, causing fires to break out in various sections, of the city, as scores of gas lamps overturned, electrical wires broke, and gas mains exploded. Fire fighters could not have battled the flames effectively because the city’s water- mains were damaged. The destruction by the earthquake was then to be compounded by the dynamiting of entire blocks of buildings throughout the city, as a means of control of the fires. At least thirty thousand persons died, almost two hundred and fifty thousand lost their homes and most of the city lay in ruins. Property damage exceeded five hundred million dollars.
There should have been no doubt, that the evil activities of the people of San Francisco precipitated the City destruction’s, particularly when the spiritual principles and consequences of Sodom and Gomorrah are paralled.. Not withstanding this pragmatic view, an entirely different perspective, possibly one that is Seismographic, can be fashioned as well. From this perspective the Theory of Plate Tectonics describes a situation where huge plates or layers of rocks situated tens and hundreds of miles under the earth’s crust are subject to shifting and sliding horizontally against each other”. The shifts and slides are said to create areas called transform- faults or boundaries which are generally the root causes of devastating earthquakes. The point is, that San Francisco strategically lie on one of those transform- faults which must be considered to be the reason for the earthquake disaster. This slant of argument negates the one ascribing evil, and one would hasten to question why other cities along the same fault or other similar faults of the world have not experience similar type disaster.
Natural violence, due to nature’s climatic or geological processes, includes cyclones, floods, volcanic-eruptions, hurricanes, and typhoons among others, and also violence due to human error or misjudgments like air, sea and land-collisions or explosions, atomic or nuclear type disasters, and others, are also not easily argued to be associated with the activities of evil people. However, there is a type of natural violence, which issues from somewhere within the soul’s nature of man and manifests itself in murder, arson, theft, physical and psychological abuse terrorism and other acts which endorses the concept of man’s inhumanity to man. This type of violence encompasses a type of invasion of the sanctity of the human soul and generally unleashes untold trauma on mankind, animals, and the environment. Arguments which sanctions or opposes this type of natural violence to be the domain or nature of evil people, has been and will continue to be advanced. The genesis of natural violence include, vengeance, jealousy, envy, lust, greed, hate, and ignorance, of one kind or another all of which have their roots in the domain of evil. The fact is, that significant psychoanalytical and spiritual studies and investigations have proven, that violence actually underpins evil. Other schools of learning on the issue, however, can provide counter arguments. For instance the term “evil” is described in the Holy Quran as ‘a taint in the soul’ of man. The Holy Bible describes it as ‘the absence of good’, ‘the corruption of what is good’, ‘sinful passions’ or ‘anything that is not faith’. Evil is understood in many doctrines as the manifestation\s of a spirit entity called the Devil, who ministers to people as a counterfeit or a corruption of the Truth. Generally, it presents itself in the form of crafty and sometimes diabolic suggestions, which ultimately leads to man’s withholding of a proper response to the Creator’s Majesty and Grace. Instead, man pays homage to the adversary, the Devil, and/or to his own ambitions and achievements.
In contrast, a relatively different argument in the concept of evil lies in Theodicy, which, as a matter of speaking, has to do with “the vindication of the justice of God in establishing a world in which evil exists”. This excuses, and glorifies malevolence as an explanation of the evil acts to which men in society are but simple prey. One may reasonably conclude therefore, that man’s miseries are ineluctably the product of his nature. The root of all evil is therefore man, and so he himself must be seen as the province of any specific evil.
