Confusing Evils

Plenty has been written about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speeches at Columbia University and the UN.

This man is demonstrably evil. His words and actions have been evil. Just recently his government has held US citizens hostage. There's a long list of other reprehensible acts.

And he begins his Columbia speech quoting the verses from the Koran giving Muslims permission to lie to infidels.

The UN speech shouldn't surprise anyone. That institution is overwrought with a desire to be a collegial "can't we all get along because we're all basically good people" atmosphere that there is little hope for true progress.

My concern is that we, as a people, are not evidencing ability to discern evil and treat it as evil. Instead we have hot discussions about freedom of speech. We get so oriented on defining hate speech that we forget how to identify and hate evil. We contort ourselves into pretzels in the name of "tolerance."

Men like President Ahmadinejad will always be with us. Satan has to have many possible antichrists on the stage and in the wings throughout history, because he does not know the final timing.

The question for us, men, is how we're doing in the discerning evil department.