Evil, Chaos and Deception
Marvel movies are among the most popular in the world today. Every movie seems to light up the box office with success and comic book characters that were once nerds only have become mainstream. Some of these characters are original creations, who were created for the comics out of the imaginations of the writers, but others find their source material in ancient sources. One of these is Loki, the Asgardian god of mischief. He comes from ancient mythology and had a long history before he ever appeared in Marvel comics.
Loki is the trickster, the mischief maker, the one who exists to cause chaos above else. As such, in some depictions he is played as neither good or evil, but existing on a sliding scale in between. In the modern narrative of the Marvel movies, Loki began as a cold-blooded murderer in his earlier appearances, happy to see the destruction of everything. But as time has gone on he has developed into a sympathetic anti-hero, who in part thinks to the excellent acting of Tom Hiddleston, has grown to be one of their most popular characters, so much so that he has his own series planned for Disney +.
Why mention Loki in this article? In part because he is an excellent representation of one of the faces of evil that we see acting today, agents of chaos who are taking the legitimate protests of our fellow citizens and undermining them to see the world burn.
Evil is sometimes apparent, and unfortunately we hear of atrocities regularly which most people identify as evil. We saw this in the recent deaths of two men, one in Minnesota and one in Georgia. In both of these videos, we saw men with power use that power to take the life of unarmed men. These events were horrifying and as more people heard of the tragedies, they had a strong potential to be seminal moments, drawing disparate parties together in order to enact real change.
It would be good to see action come out of these specific situations in order to see changes brought about, not only in those 2 communities, but around our country where so much pain exists from past conflicts and abuses of power. Justice is longed for and the belief of true justice out of the rule of law is a foundational principle of our society. Unfortunately, evil is real in this world today and it is not limited to outright acts of violence. Sometimes evil is more deceptive in the way it attacks order, justice and good.
Just as it was evil for one man to keep his knee on the neck of another until he was no longer moving, it is evil for Antifa and others to disrupt protests in the way they have done the last few days. Evil men, paying young protesters to cause trouble. Evil men and women breaking the windows of stores to start the looting. Evil men providing bricks or breaking the concrete in order to try and get peaceful protesters to throw them at the police. Evil, sinful people burning and destroying not out of grief, but out of hatred and a desire to see chaos reign. There is evil in this world and we have seen a lot of it over these days of protest.
Don’t be deceived and don’t join their path to chaos and destruction. We could be encouraged to believe by media reports and unthinking memes that are shared on social media that everyone is our enemy and that anyone who is different than us is not to be trusted. This is not the truth. Many honorable, just people are marching for real change. They want a better community for themselves and for you. Some of them want to be able to live in the same framework of law and justice that a person like myself has almost always enjoyed.
Evil is sometimes open, and sometimes obvious, but other times it comes in through the back door. Sin is real and temptation is real, and while the number of agitators who are causing much of the real destruction we are seeing is overall small, the number of us, who could contribute to the chaos is very large. Don’t be an agent of chaos, be an agent of change. Stop, listen and care about others. You have more in common with them than you may imagine.
I challenge you to listen to the excellent podcast below, which has some significant thoughts on how to be a part of the solution, not the problem.