February 2026
It has become more acceptable to believe in invisible systems than in invisible evil. We speak easily of structures and mechanisms and also incentives and unintended outcomes. But we grow uneasy the moment intention enters the conversation. Truth is no longer something to be examined. It is something to be handled carefully, approached with suspicion, even avoided.
You can hear it in the nervous qualifiers. “I might be wrong, but…” “Not everyone agrees, but…” Truth is no longer stated. It is negotiated. Almost as if people pre apologize for believing something, especially when that belief is not politically acceptable.
To ask certain questions today is not to invite discussion, but to risk being classified. You become labeled very fast. Something has shifted in how we relate to truth itself. It is no longer opposed openly. It is quietly treated as dangerous.
We are comfortable with the idea that forces we cannot see shape our lives. Economic pressures. Social dynamics. Algorithmic influence. Cultural momentum. These invisible systems are treated as sophisticated insights into how the world really works.
But if you suggest that evil itself might also be intentional, personal, and operative beyond what can be measured, then you will find that the tone changes fast. It is dismissed as primitive, unscientific, or dangerous. The invisible is acceptable only when it is impersonal. Once it has a will, it becomes unacceptable.
When someone says evil has a will, we call it madness. When someone says a system has a flaw, we call it insight. The difference is not intellectual, but moral.
One suggests responsibility beyond human error.
The other allows everything to remain abstract, technical, and safe.
We tolerate explanations that dissolve guilt into processes, but recoil from those that suggest intention. Not because the idea is incoherent, but because it is costly. A world in which evil acts deliberately demands discernment, courage, and accountability. It is far easier to believe that no one is truly responsible, that harm simply happens, that darkness has no author.
Certain words are enough to end a conversation before it begins. And they dont always end through argument, more often they end with tone. To ask in the wrong way, or to notice the wrong pattern, is no longer treated as curiosity, but as a threat. Truth is not challenged head on. It is made socially dangerous. People learn quickly what can be said aloud and what must remain unspoken. Not because it is false, but because it is costly to be associated with.
Some lose their jobs for reasons that are never officially named. Others are paid generously to make sure certain stories are never told. These are among the more acceptable forms of silence. Most readers know of at least one such case.
This is why Jesus was never merely a moral teacher. Moral instruction can be ignored, absorbed, or safely ritualized. What cannot be tolerated is exposure. Jesus did not threaten Rome by preaching morality. He threatened it by naming what stood behind power. He spoke of rulers unseen, of kingdoms not built by human hands, of a will at work beneath the surface of law, religion, and order. That is why He was not debated into silence, but removed. Not because His ethics were offensive, but because His vision made the invisible visible, and that is always dangerous to those who benefit from darkness.
A world that denies the devil will always look for human villains.
When evil can no longer be acknowledged as something that exceeds us, it must be located somewhere else. Preferably in individuals, groups, or enemies that can be named, shamed, and destroyed. Guilt is no longer discerned. It is assigned. Violence becomes moral once it is justified as necessity. The rejection of transcendent evil does not make the world more humane. It makes it more ruthless, because it removes the possibility that all stand under judgment, and replaces it with the certainty that someone must be sacrificed.
And so truth becomes something to manage rather than seek, something to soften rather than face. Not because it has been disproven, but because it has become inconvenient. In such a world, silence feels safer than clarity, and suspicion replaces discernment. Nothing is resolved here. Only exposed.
What remains is the quiet question of what kind of world emerges when truth itself is treated as a liability.
It is a question worth sitting with.
-From the work surrounding The Fall