Evil, Serpents, devils, and Mara

For some reason I've been thinking about evil a lot this week. Because of the bombings, and who did them. and How the more I find out about these guys, the more similarities I see between my life and theirs, well their life in America anyway. That religious image of the serpent in the garden of Eden, or Mara whispering into your ear, or the devil on your shoulder, seem to be such a great representation of what goes inside your mind. Whether you believe in the devil or you just believe that these are representations of thoughts in your own mind is really just nuance.
I have been thinking about how in most cartoons, the villain used to be good and then slowly they change and then after a lifetime, years of doing evil deeds they slowly change into the villain. I also grew up in various school's and programs whose goals were to get kids past adolescence safely with the assumption being that once you get to adult age, and you have already been through college and made it that far, that you have made it, that you are formed, and that you won't be as susceptible to temptations or misguided decisions that can ruin a life. But from my experience with people I know, and with working at the DA's office or watching arraignments on my internship, or just watching the news, that seems not to be the case. Some pretty successful people end up falling pretty low or doing some pretty messed up things.
Not only this, but it seems like people can change for the bad, acquire the ability to do pretty evil deeds pretty quickly. And not only that, but in the case of these bombers, still appear completely normal on the outside, well almost. They can still be a stay at home dad. They may say things that seem weird or telling in hind site but still. Evil seems to me much more complicated than "a bad guy." That image of Mara going around whispering in people's ears and getting them to go down the wrong path seems so real right now. When you decide to do something like scam people the way Bernie Madoff did, people say they don't get it, but ultimately we do. That's greed. You gain something. Wealth and status. But then he already had wealth and status.
When you cheat or sleep around, that's lust.
 Rape and murder usually seem more twisted and harder to understand. But its still lust. Animals do it. We understand it better. But then a lot of rapists seem to be sexually attractive themselves, in their physique, status as a sports player or a famous lawyer. So why rape?
Then there's war, power. And once you get to war killing massive amounts of innocent people no longer seems that unthinkable. And countries like North Korea always seem on the brink of war. Why risk your entire kingdom and so many lives just to say something? What can North Korea gain from war? More territory? Not really. What do we ever really gain?
But bombings during peace. Bombings sort of makes sense during war. So these two were somehow at war in  their mind. Or something. There's nothing to gain it seems. Why not start robbing banks? Bomb stores and snatch and grab. Start a gang. Why not do these things, at least you gain something, and your harming people, but your not killing people.
Actually there is plenty of evil in government in systems of behavior, in Big business polluting that creates a lot of damage. We all participate in it on some level, even though we are not trying to do evil, but in the end, the result is. Deaths of species, greenhouse gases bringing us closer to the possibility of some global apacolyspse. It's not like most of us deliberately want to kill our planet, or a whole species, or systems where the developing world does not have a fair shake. But we still participate either out of laziness or complacency, or some of the guys at the top of say, BP do that stuff on purpose, and these bombers did what they did on purpose. But for all of these actions, there is really no logical benefit. Maybe Mara or the devil is just in our head, something made up, but it is definitely in a part of our brain, or mind that we don't understand. That demon, guiding down a false path of evil seems to be as good an explanation as any for why evil exists. No human is sitting back, laughing maniacally at the damage they have caused. Everyone seems to think in one way or another they are doing what is best, for a company, for a country, for God, for their family, for the economy, for the greater good, for themselves. Evil seems to be more about being misguided than anything. Misguided, tricked, deceived by something, ourselves, the devil, whatever it may be.