Plays were intended to uphold virtuous conduct and to point out the dire consequences of evil.
We have, necessarily of course, been preoccupied with issues of blame, responsibility and cause in such disasters, almost as if we were following the examples of 18th-century sermons about the sea, as if catastrophes could be fully understood as the consequences of evil human actions or the violation of some deep principles of contemporary faith.
Various magical practices developed in the 9th 10th centuries to ward off the consequences of evil spirits, such as the Buddhist recitation of nembutsu (invoking the name of the Buddha Amida) to send off angry spirits to Amida's paradise; the exorcising of spirits by Shugen-dō (mountain ascetic) rites; and the use of in-yo magic, derived from Shintō and Daoism.
But freedom would be a sham if an evil will could never have its way, and the locus of sin lies not in the consequences of evil willing but in the willing itself.
Merriman treats all Communard atrocities as the result of provocations and a misguided effort at self-defense — the Archbishop was taken hostage partly to protect the life of the left-wing leader Blanqui, then in a Versaillais prison — while atrocities committed against the Communards were, in his account, solely the consequence of an evil campaign of reactionary terror.
It was no longer the consequence of inexplicable evil, it was part of thousands of impulses and failures that by chance had reached lethality when they arrived at her child.
On the fringes of the European left there were voices suggesting that the attacks on America were a consequence of the evils of American foreign policy.
Swinburne argued that humans must have first hand experience of natural evil in order to understand the consequences of moral evil and that for God to give humans moral free will, he must allow human suffering.
Today, the 19th-century critic John Ruskin's observation that "the neglect of art... has been of evil consequence to the Christian world" sounds so overwrought to us — so filled with moral outrage — as to verge on the unintentionally hilarious.
If in ethics you hold that there should be no preventable suffering for any reason, regardless of the cause or consequence, then the problem of evil will conflict with your acceptance of traditional theism.
