Support your idea with some information or situation based on your personal experience.

XIII. a) Below is a list of the “Top Ten” evil people of all time followed by a list of the “Top Ten” good people of all time – sorted in order of evilness and goodness. Read it and answer the following questions:

- Who would you like to see added to the list?

- What alterations would you make to the list or the ordering?

- Do the scales of good and evil balance?

- Why is it easier to think of evil examples than good ones?

- Is it much easier to do something big and bad than it is to do something big and good?

           Text 4. The Scales of Good and Evil

 

The Top Ten Evil

1. Tomas de Torquemada. Born in Spain in 1420, his name is synonymous with the Christian Inquisition’s horror, religious bigotry, and cruel fanaticism. He was a fan of various forms of torture including foot roasting, use of the garrucha, and suffocation. He was made Grand Inquisitor by Pope Sixtus IV. Popes and kings alike praised his tireless efforts. The number of burnings at the stake during Torquemada’s tenure has been estimated at about 2,000. Torquemada’s hatred of Jews influenced Ferdinand and Isabella to expel all Jews who had not embraced Christianity.

2. Vlad Tepes – Vlad the Impaler was a prince known for executing his enemies by impalement. He was a fan of various forms of torture including disemboweling and rectal and facial impalement. Vlad the Impaler tortured thousands while he ate and drunk among the corpses. He impaled every person in the city of Amlas – 20,000 men, women and children. Vlad often ordered people to be skinned, boiled, decapitated, blinded, strangled, hanged, burned, roasted, hacked, nailed, buried alive, stabbed, etc. He also liked to cut off noses, ears, sexual organs and limbs. But his favorite method was impalement on stakes, hence the surname “Tepes” which means “The Impaler” in the Romanian language. It is this technique he used in 1457, 1459 and 1460 against Transylvanian merchants who had ignored his trade laws. He also looked upon the poor, vagrants and beggars as thieves. Consequently, he invited all the poor and sick of Wallachia to his princely court in Tirgoviste for a great feast. After the guests ate and drank, Dracula ordered the hall boarded up and set on fire. No one survived.

Note: Every Romanian who contacted me said I  

should remove Vlad from the list. They said he was

not evil and seemed to like him. So the perception of

evil can differ from person to person. (Cliff Pickover)

3. Adolph Hitler – The dictator of Nazi Germany, Adolph, was born on April 20, 1889, at Braunauam Inn, Austria-Hungary.

4. Ivan the Terrible – Ivan Vasilyevich, (born Aug. 25, 1530, in Kolomensloye, near Moscow) was the grand prince of Moscow (1533-84) and the first to be proclaimed tsar of Russia (from 1547). His reign saw the completion of the construction of a centrally administered Russian state and the creation of an empire that included non-Slav states. He enjoyed burning 1000s of people in frying pans, and was fond of impaling people.

5. Adolph Eichmann – Born in March 19, 1906, Solingen, Germany he was hanged by the state of Israel for his part in the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II. “The death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction”.

6. Pol Pot – Pol Pot (born in 1925 in the Kompong Thom province of Cambodia) was the Khmer political leader whose totalitarian regime (1975-79) imposed severe hardships on the people of Cambodia. His radical communist government forced the mass evacuations of cities, killed or displaced millions of people, and left a legacy of disease and starvation. Under his leadership, his government caused the deaths of at least one million people from forced labor, starvation, disease, torture, or execution.

7. Mao Tse-tung – leader of the Gang of Four, who killed somewhere between 20 and 67 million (estimates vary) of his countrymen, including the elderly and intellectuals. His picture still hangs throughout many homes and businesses. Mao’s own personality cult, encouraged so as to provide momentum to the movement, assumed religious proportions. The resulting anarchy, terror, and paralysis completely disrupted the urban economy. Industrial production for 1968 dipped 12 percent below that of 1966.

8. Idi Amin – Idi Amin Dada Oumee (born in 1924 in Uganda) was the military officer and president (1971-79) of Uganda. Amin also took tribalism, a long-standing problem in Uganda, to its extreme by allegedly ordering the persecution of Acholi, Lango, and other tribes. Amidst reports of the torture and murder of 100,000 to 300,000 Ugandans during Amin’s presidency.

9. Joseph Stalin – Born in 1879. During the quarter of a century preceding his death in 1953, the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history. In the 1930s, by his orders, millions of peasants were either killed or permitted to starve to death. Stalin brought about the deaths of more than 20 million of his own people while holding the Soviet Union in an iron grip for 29 years. Stalin succeeded his hero Vladimir Lenin in 1924. From then on, he induced widespread famines to enforce farm collectives, and eliminated perceived enemies through massive purges.

10.Genghis Khan – The Mongol Temjin, known to history as Genghis Khan (born 1162) was a warrior and ruler who, starting from obscure and insignificant beginnings, brought all the nomadic tribes of Mongolia under the rule of himself and his family in a rigidly disciplined military state. Massacres of defeated populations, with the resultant terror, were weapons he regularly used. His Mongol hordes killed off countless people in Asia and Europe in the early 1200s. When attacking Volohoi, Khan convinced the city commander that Mongols would stop attacking if the city sent out 1,000 cats and several thousand swallows. When he got them, Genghis had bits of cloth tied to their tails and set the cloth on fire. The cats and birds fled back to the city and ended up setting hundreds of fires inside the city. Then Genghis attacked and won. At another time, Mongols rounded up 70,000 men, women and children and shot them with arrows. Genghis told his comrades: ”Man’s greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding, use his women as a nightshirt and support, gazing upon and kissing their rosy breasts, sucking their lips which are as sweet as the berries of their breasts”.

The Top Ten Good

1. Buddha – Buddhism, far more than Christianity or Islam, has a very strong pacifist element. The orientation toward nonviolence has played a significant role in the political history of Buddhist countries.

2. Baha’u’llah – Baha’is believe that all the founders of the world’s great religions have been manifestations of God and agents of a progressive divine plan for the education of the human race. Despite their apparent differences, the world’s great religions, according to the Baha’is, teach an identical truth. Baha’is believe that Baha’u’llah (d.1892) was a manifestation of God, who in His essence is unknowable. Baha’u’llah’s special function was to overcome the disunity of religions and establish a universal faith. Baha’is believe in the oneness of humanity and devote themselves to the abolition of racial, class, and religious prejudices. The great bulk of Baha’I teachings is concerned with social ethics; the faith has no priesthood and does not observe ritual forms in its worship.

3. Dalai Lama – head of the dominant Dge-lugs-pa order of Tibetan Buddhists and, until 1959, both spiritual and temporal ruler of Tibet. In 1989 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in recognition of his nonviolent campaign to end Chinese domination of Tibet.

4. Jesus Christ – for the preaching of love.

5. Moses – just the idea of “resting on the seventh day” improved the life of countless people.

6. Mother Teresa – Once Mother Teresa was asked how she could continue day after day, visiting the terminally ill: feeding them, wiping their brows, giving them comfort as they lay dying. And she said, “It’s not hard because in each one, I see the face of Christ in one of His more distressing disguises”.

7. Abraham Lincoln – for paving the way to freeing the slaves.

8.Martin Luther King – American clergyman and Nobel Prize winner, one of the principal leaders of the American civil rights movement and a prominent advocate of nonviolent protest.

9. Mohandas Gandhi – Indian national leader, who established his country’s freedom through a nonviolent revolution.

Who should be number 10? Would you ever consider someone like Carl Djerassi, “ father of the birth control pill”? Because millions of unwanted children were not produced, countless suffering has been abolished (including decreases in crime, child abuse, and ecological nightmares). With women gaining more control over their reproductive fate, society has changed. Reliable birth control became as easy as taking a pill, which some call the single greatest factor in helping women achieve equality. Although religious people may debate whether a fertilized egg (zygote) should be accorded the same rights as a child (and therefore the pill is evil), no one debates that the pill has decreased the suffering of fully formed, multicellular humans.

Note that “zygotic personhood” (the idea that a fertilized egg is a person) is a recent concept. For example, before 1869, the Catholic church believed that the embryo was not a person until it was 40 days old. (Aristotle agreed with this 40-day threshold). Thus, the church did not believe a human had a soul until day 40. Pope Innocent III in 1211 determined that the time of ensoulment was anywhere from 12 to 16 weeks. This means that the Catholic church, for centuries, did not equate abortion with murder.

                               (Cliff Pickover)

b) Referring back to the text discuss with your partner the following questions:

If you had scales and put Stalin’s massacres on the left side, what could you put on the right-hand side to balance it? Extreme kindness and attempts to alleviate suffering? Curing cancer? Ending world hunger? Charity? Elevating the thinking of humankind with respect to human rights? Perhaps the very best people don’t seek publicity for their good deeds; these are the unknown heroes who work tirelessly with the poor and the sick. When considering religious leaders, do we need to consider possible negative results that evolved, such as fundamentalist groups that suppress women, or the concept of Jihad, or holy war? If the Inquisition arose out of Christianity, need we consider this in assessments we make?

 

c) Give your list of ten top evil and ten top good.

Discussion Activity