Existe el Mal? pregunta en la Saddleback Church

El sabado en la noche fueron entrevistados por el Rev. Rick Warren de la iglesia evangélica -Saddleback Church- en California los dos cantidatos a la presidencia de los Estados Unidos: Barack Obama y John McCain. Los comentarios y los videos sobre esta entrevista están por todos lados, realclearpolitics.com es un buen sitio para encontrar editoriales y análsis.

Ambos candidatos presentaron sus puntos de vista, y demostraron que cada uno tiene una visión distinta. McCain muy conservadora; anti-aborto, anti-parejas gay, a favor de la guerra, en contra de los justices liberales. Mientras Obama se declaró al contrario, con una visión liberal y en contra de la guerra, habló sobre sus "fallas morales" al haber consumido alcohol y drogas en su adolescencia.


Una parte de la entrevista es la que más me llamó la atención, una pregunta del Rev. Warren sobre el mal. Existe el mal? y si existe, hay que ignorarlo? cómo negociamos con él? hay que contenerlo? hay que vencerlo?


Aquí copio la parte de ésta pregunta que William Kristol transcribe en su op-ed de hoy:


Warren asked whether evil exists and if it does, “do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it?”
Obama and McCain agreed evil exists and couldn’t be ignored. But then their answers diverged.
Obama said that “we see evil all the time” — in Darfur, on the streets of our cities, in child abusers. Such evils, he continued, need to be “confronted squarely.” And while we can’t “erase evil from the world,” we can be “soldiers” in the task of confronting it when we see it.
But, Obama added, “Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility” as we confront evil. Why? Because “a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil.” After all, “just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t always mean that we’re going to be doing good.”
It’s nice to see a liberal aware of the limits of good intentions — indeed, that the road to hell is paved with them. But here as elsewhere, Obama stayed at a high level of abstraction. It would have been interesting if Warren had asked a follow-up question: Where in particular has the United States in recent years — at home or especially abroad — perpetrated evil in the name of confronting evil? Hasn’t the overwhelming problem been, rather, a reluctance to effectively confront evil — in Darfur, or Rwanda, or pre-9/11 Afghanistan?

John McCain appears to think so. Unlike Obama, he took the question about evil to be in the first instance about 9/11. McCain asserted that “of course evil must be defeated,” and he put “radical Islamic extremism,” Al Qaeda in particular, at the top of his to-defeat list. In this context, McCain discussed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and concluded by mentioning “the young men and women who are serving this nation in uniform.”
So while Obama talked of confronting evil, McCain spoke of defeating it. Obama took the view that evil is generally abroad in the world; McCain focused on radical Islam and 9/11. Obama claimed that all of us must be metaphorical “soldiers” against evil; McCain paid tribute to actual American soldiers. And McCain couldn’t resist saying again Saturday night that if he has to follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell to get him and bring him to justice, he’ll do so.

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