ABSTRACT
This chapter increases the awareness of human collaboration in the flowering of evil. This may appear elementary, but it requires honesty to look at evil and at the complexity of the human condition and not draw distinctions between 'clean lips' and 'unclean lips'. Any group tempted by utopianism faces difficult intellectual and spiritual challenges because of evil. Most fundamentalisms contain a degree of utopianism including, for example, differentiated categories of good and evil, a sweeping vision for the restructuring of society and hope for the perfection or the perfectibility of group members. In her important Swarthmore Lecture, Janet Scott takes great pains to affirm the possibility that humans can do good. She rightly notes that early Friends distanced themselves from theological positions that they believed denied humans freedom enough to be held accountable for their behavior, such as Calvinism.
