Next to God, it’s Evil that is omnipresent. Enormous in scale or trivial, it’s everywhere.

The very persistence and commonality of this evil has forced us to learn to deal with it, emotionally, institutionally, and theologically. Even Prophets embraced the great Evil of war.

Yet, humanity never learnt to deal with some special forms of evil. Whosoever we may be, something within us pukes at the news UmerMurtaza mentions in his ilog: Thousands of young African boy-soldiers being recruited in war, and a group of them being forced to decapitate and play with the head of a 14-year old girl.’

The form, not just the magnitude, of our actions is a defining characteristic of what it means to be human.

We know that men and women fight and die in wars. But we find the recruitment of children into deadly wars particularly appalling.

We understand that people abuse and kill one another in and outside of wars. But we feel a particular revulsion at the news of deliberate decapitation of human heads and use of these heads as objects of victorious entertainment.

When individuals or groups of people find nothing particularly beastly in such crimes, when some ladies and gentlemen are offended by these crimes no more than they are by all other crimes, it is fair to say that they have deliberately set themselves up against the rest of mankind in defining the role of evil in organizing human affairs.