Mark Shea has written a post on doing bad things for a good end. Here’s an excerpt from near the beginning:
Truly Evil People get up in the morning thinking, “How can I further the cause of Evil today?” Charming rogues like us may, sure enough, look out for number one a bit, but we mean well and, gosh darn it, you can’t help admiring that, even when we may have to get a bit rough with Truly Evil People by torturing them or dropping A-bombs on them.
Truly Evil People are monsters, and it is blasphemous to even speak of their desiring something good, because to do so humanizes them instead of righteously condemning them as the monsters they are. We charming rogues, on the other hand, should we find ourselves having to “go to the Dark Side” to fight the Truly Evil, always do so out of a noble fundamental commitment to goodness and are, in a way, self-sacrificing martyrs bravely willing to face even damnation by God Almighty Himself if necessary, if only that the greater good may be done by defeating Truly Evil people.
In fact, however, this notion that Truly Evil people are distinguished from us because they desire evil ends is false. That’s because every sin, whether venial or mortal, is committed in the disordered attempt to achieve some good end. Everything from the Holocaust to your hand in the cookie jar is the disordered attempt to obtain some good. And indeed, the more exalted the good end, the more the sinner can feel justified in doing something monstrous to achieve it. For this reason, sins do not become “not sins” merely because we intend some good end.
For the simple fact is that everybody, from the kid fibbing about the piggy bank to Adolf Hitler, is seeking some good end. What makes a sin a sin is not that the end sought is not good, but that a good end is sought by evil means. The severity of a sin is measured not by the nobility of the end we seek — Hitler, after all, sought a glorious renewed Germany risen from the ashes of World War I — but by how radically disordered are the means we use to achieve that end (e.g., the death of millions innocent people).
And later:
To say, “But I meant well” if we merely mean, “There was some good thing I was pursuing because I loved it and thought it would bring me happiness” is no sign at all that we are a saint. After all, Judas Iscariot could say as much. He wanted something good (i.e., money, peace from his tormented conscience, etc.). Hitler wanted happiness and various good ends (power, a greater Germany, etc.) He was motivated by love for something (his own glory, the glory of the Fatherland, a perverted and swollen love of country that vaunted itself again the love of his non-German neighbor and even against the love of God, as nationalism tends to do).
Every freakish monster in history, from John Wayne Gacy to Jeffrey Dahmer to Ted Bundy, was, in some way or other, seeking a good end (sexual pleasure, power, etc.) So does every sinner, great and small, who says, “Let us do evil that good may come of it.”
Any idiot can want happiness, because it’s impossible for any idiot to not want happiness. The trick — always — is to pursue happiness without cutting moral corners — like, say, “You shall not murder.” It is only when we pursue the good end without using sinful means — not robbing the piggy bank to buy Mom the present, not destroying the baby to ward off poverty, not incinerating children in their beds to win the war, not torturing the prisoner to save your skin — that we can truly say we meant well.
Desiring happiness is a defining characteristic of what it means to be human. It is a great inbuilt faculty from God. But it is not the defining characteristic of a saint. For a saint seeks happiness by God’s means only and refuses the enticement of the devil to take shortcuts to Wisdom as he whispers, “You shall not surely die. Go ahead and disobey. In fact, it will make you like God if you do!”
a ka sin.
Oh, what sin has KA been up to?
Oops, hang on,
aka sin
Silly me – Also Known as. 🙂
Of course this puts paid to the silly notion that your god allows evil for the better good of mankind.
Sort of proves my point for me that your god is evil.
KA
You’re anthropomorphising again, KA.
Let me expand.
You look at deaths and injury and define these as bad, and any agency that deliberately causes them or that fails to prevent them as evil.
I will agree with you to a certain extent. For a human to act deliberately in a way that brings about death or injury is evil except in specific defined instances. (For example, it is not evil for a doctor to cut a person open in order to perform surgery. It is not evil for a soldier to open fire on an enemy soldier who is attempting to kill him.)
Once we talk about agencies other than human it is quite clear that evil does not come into it. A man-eating tiger is a danger that should be shot; but it is not evil. An earthquake can be really nasty, but it can’t be evil. Neither of these are moral agents, and without moral choice, there cannot be evil.
Okay, you say, but this doesn’t apply to God, who we Christians claim to be the source of all morality. Fair enough.
I mention surgery and war, tigers and earthquakes only to show that you already have different categories and understand killing and injury to be not evil in some circumstances.
In the case of God we human beings have a perspective issue. Our perspective is self-centred, short-term, and experiential. That is, we see good as being whatever we perceive as good for us, and we only see the short-term effects of any action, not their long term temporal ones, let alone their eternal ones.
When we call God good, or just, we think of those in human terms; but we have no justification for doing so. God is, I believe, both good and just – indeed He is the source of all goodness and justice. But His goodness and justice are so far outside of our experience that trying to view his actions through our lens of morality can cause us to fall into distortions such as saying that He is evil, or (at the other extreme) saying that no-one goes to Hell.
As an analogy, imagine how a dog would feel about an owner who has him neutered, who starves him to control a weight problem, who leaves him locked in a cage for one week a year while the owner goes on holiday, who forces worming tablets down his throat, who baths him, and who, perhaps, throws objects at the neighbour’s dog when the neighbour’s dog is only passing messages on the fence.
As a dog owner, you’ll know how the dog feels. He trusts and loves, even though he doesn’t understand.
.
“It is not evil for a soldier to open fire on an enemy soldier who is attempting to kill him.”
Says Joyful.
Oh, no?
What about turning the other cheek?
That, in fact is why Quakers, true Christians in Toad’s eyes, do not become soldiers.
Yes, you’ve got me there, Toad. Of course it is still evil.
Sometimes our choices are not about doing an evil act in order to promote a good, but doing an evil act because we believe not doing it would be more evil.
In the old classic conundrums of ‘would you lie if there were Jews hidden in your basement and Nazis knocking on the door?’ or ‘would you shoot the man climbing in the window if it was the only way to save your babies’ I expect I’d lie and I’d shoot. But I’d be sorry.
.
“You’re anthropomorphising again, KA.”
Joyful chides KA.
Well, he probably is .We all do, especially people who say, “God wants us to do this, or God doesn’t want us to do that. ”
God cannot ‘want.’
Re: soldiers and pacificism, Toad remembers the old story of Lytton Strachey, who refused to fight in the First World War.
A member of the tribunal asked him, “But what would you do if a German soldier was trying to rape your sister'”
Strachey, who was ‘gay’, piously replied, “I would interpose my body between them.”
There’s true Christianity for you.
Toad some fragile souls from CPS&S may read that, be gentle with your humour 🙂
Once you make a clear distinction between pursuing something which is A GOOD from your perspective and THE GOOD considered objectively, a lot of his post becomes redundant.
Of course Hitler was pursuing A GOOD from his perspective, so what?
The question is can someone pursuing THE GOOD ever allow or even partake in something which would be wrong in isolation? I say yes of course.
Shea asked the wrong question to begin with.
Or to be blunt, it was all sound and fury signifying nothing.
I think the point of his post is that we all pursue the good from our perspective, and the distance between us and the worst of people is not as great as we’d like to think.
Because our perspective is – as I said above – short-term, self-centred, and experiential, we cannot know for certain that our ends will be good for all others. Indeed, I take Shea to be mostly addressing those who intend good for themselves to come out of their acts, and who (for example) lie because they believe it will be better for themselves and kid themselves it will be better for the person lied to.
What we can know is that there are a list of acts that are evil. Perhaps good may come out of them. Perhaps we even intend good to come out of them. But the acts are evil and we shouldn’t do them.
We do them anyway. And we see ourselves as basically good people because we meant well.
Mr Badger, I’ve reread your comment, and see that the key point you made was:
I think your point is valid. I have certainly done things that are wrong in isolation in order to protect and defend my children. For example, threatening drug dealers with grevious bodily harm (by proxy, through some people that could carry out the threat) was wrong. But I did it anyway, and would doubtless do it again under the same circumstances if I couldn’t think of a better way.
But I think we slide into relativism as soon as we say that the thing we did ceased to be wrong because we were pursuing the good. What I did was a sin, and if I had been a better human being I would have found a better way.
Sometimes, because the world is a tough place, our choices are between wrong and more wrong. But we do ourselves harm if we call the lesser wrong good.
.
“I think the point of his post is that we all pursue the good from our perspective, and the distance between us and the worst of people is not as great as we’d like to think..”
And yet, we all know, don’t we, that Joyful expects a fair few humans (not any of us, of course!) to end up in Hell.
For eternity, for sins that cannot possibly be eternal.
For how can a limited creature do something unlimitedly bad?
toadspittle,
Nice point !
Only an eternal decision to oppose love could possibly be a decision for hell (in fact, these would be the same decision).
But only a very spiritually sick soul could would ever make such a choice and such a soul would clearly be in need of healing, something which Jesus is especially good at.
God Bless
Toad should read Balthasar’s “Dare we hope”
And also “Surprised by Hope” by N.T Wright, great material on how we should think of the concept of hell
But I did it anyway, and would doubtless do it again under the same circumstances if I couldn’t think of a better way.
JP openly abandons any pretence of moral good in favour of “lets do evil in the hope that good might come of it”. Completely opposed to the Catechism of the Catholic Church and any fundamental system of human morality but, hey, at least she’s honest about her intention to sin again.
Christians are such hypocrites, aren’t we ?
At least Jesus didn’t succumb to that rather common temptation, to “defend” himself by violence. Just us well for us.
God Bless
Yes, Chris, I’m a sinner, and I recognise my own frailty. But I don’t call it good. I hope you are never in the situation of having to make such choices.
Toad, come at it from the other end. None of us deserve Heaven. How can we, limited creatures that we are? And in the end there are only two alternatives: being eternally in the presence of God, or not being eternally in the presence of God.
Our eternal destination, thank God, can be far more than we deserve.
All we have to do is let it be so.
But those who insist on their own way, insist that they are right, take pride in not bowing the head, will – I firmly believe – in the end get what they ask for.
Who was it said that ‘Hell is other people’?
Who was it said that ‘Hell is other people’?
The depressing French guy who wrote several unreadable tomes I think.
KA,
If “god” did do evil, then he’d be an evil god. There is not one standard of intrinsic evil for us and a different one for God. What is intrinsically evil is evil regardless of who does it.
A choice to reject such an evil “god” would be a morally good choice; and, paradoxically, a choice for God and against Evil.
Your choice against the “god” you reject is actually a choice for the God of Love you do not yet know.
But there are times when refusing to intervene to prevent evil is actually the better moral choice. Jesus could have used his power to prevent his crucifixion. But he didn’t. Despite having those 12 legions of angels at his disposal.
A good example of intervening to stop evil actually causing more harm than good id the mess caused by US military intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya.
There are times when all the options on the table to stop evil are themselves evil and the good choice is simply to do nothing. (JP seems to be struggling to grasp that).
That God allows evil and does not always intervene to stop it is not evil. It’s just Wisdom.
God Bless
None of us deserve Heaven.
Maybe not. But we are created for heaven, being made in the image of God. And made GOOD, not made evil.
God’s will is that everyone make it to heaven. May his will be done. It will be.
God Bless
I struggle to do it, Chris. The whole point of this post and thread is that I grasp it.
But surely there are times when all the options on the table to stop evil are themselves evil and the choice to do nothing is evil as well? I think that sometimes there simply isn’t a good choice.
Yes. But we slip into a very unnatural place if we don’t recognise that all the choices are evil. We can defend the one we chose as the least evil one available. But it’s still evil.
I don’t think that a choice to do nothing in those situations is evil. it’s just recognizing that one’s action options are rather limited.
That’s just life and sometimes it sucks.
Of course, believers can always do something: we can pray.
Non believers can just hope for the best.
God Bless
.
As Toad now understands it, via Joyful – none of us deserves Heaven.
But some of us clearly deserve Hell.
“…God’s will is that everyone make it to heaven…”
Says Chris.
.
Well, that’s just peachy, Chris.
In other words, if God wants us all to go to heaven, then we will. If He doesn’t, then some of us ( for all we know, all of us) won’t.
It’s God ‘wanting’ again, isn’t it?
I know I deserve Hell, Toad. When the Prosecutor thunders that I’m guilty, guilty, guilty, I rely on my Lord Jesus to protect me by saying forgiven, forgiven, forgiven.
As Chris says, we were created good, in the image of God. And it’s been mostly downhill from there.
Here’s one of my favourite poems – I think most mothers can relate to it.
For a Five-Year-Old
A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.
I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
And we are kind to snails.
Fleur Adcock
toadspittle,
It’s the teaching of the Catholic Church and Scripture that God wills everyone to be saved.
God Bless
Chris et al,
Do you need me to remind you of all the evil acts attributed to your god in the OT? You can’t have it both ways I’m afraid.
I return to my previous comment (of some posts ago), that if your god is truly good and loving he would have chosen and would continue to choose a much better way of showing us what he’s all about.
I also refer to Mr Seeker’s point of that same thread (I think) – and I paraphrase – why was it OK for your god to do miracles on the spot, at the drop of a hat so to speak, in those early days, but we see nary a solitary miracle preformed in this modern age. Could it be because, you think, that we have a much better understanding of how the world works and don’t need to attribute the rains/earthquake/thunderstorms etc, etc, to some supernatural cause.
Of course, there are still those who believe that their god controls all this stuff, which is why I (and others) still hold you to account for the actions of your ‘loving’ and ‘good’ god.
KA
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“..As Chris says, we were created good, in the image of God. And its been mostly downhill from there…”
Says Joyful.
Maybe. Toad certainly agrees with the second sentence.
But he also suspects we were created neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, but it is circumstances that make us so.
Such as earthquakes and typhoid.
If this is the image of God, Toad will take a raincheck.
But weren’t we also created originally ‘sinful’?
Oh, forget it. Bed for Toad.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive, Toad. We have inherited a natural tendency to pride and self interest. That doesn’t mean we’re not good.
KA, several points:
First, I repeat my question about whether or not the acts in question were – in fact – evil when performed by Someone who had made the people in question and could take them into eternal life.
Second, we are not biblical literalists. We know that the various books were written and compiled by human beings, and record their interpretation of what they thought God wanted.
Third, you are assuming that there is another way of achieving God’s purpose, which (I take it) is an immortal physical being who chooses to be in a loving relationship with the source of all good. As we see from efforts to control almost anything, as soon as a little freedom is allowed, there are people who will take advantage of it to do stuff they shouldn’t, and more control needs to be applied. Your assumption that God could achieve His purpose in another way is not only unproven, it is illogical.
Fourthly, while some do assume that God ‘controls all this stuff’, and most of us talk that way, the idea that God is a micromanager is explicitly ruled out by everything I’ve just said.
This seems to be a fairly good coverage of the counter to your argument.
And incidentally repeating the claim that we don’t see miracles today doesn’t make it true. Lots of us have seen miracles.
KA,
all the evil acts attributed to your god in the OT?
Well, there’s attributed and attributed isn’t there ?
What I mean is that in scripture lots of stuff is attributed to God in the sense of God as original cause, God as creator and sustainer of the universe.
There’s also attributed in the sense that someone made a moral choice to go and do something directly.
There is an important and very real distinction between the two. According to the eminent Catholic scripture scholar Fr Joseph Fitzmeyer SJ, this distinction is not explicit in scripture, but was a later theological development. The Navrarre bible commentary on the OT (an Opus Dei work) says much the same.
As for miracles, I’ve seen them with my own eyes. They certainly still occur.
if your god is truly good and loving he would have chosen and would continue to choose a much better way of showing us what he’s all about.
If you open your eyes and look all around you, you’ll see the goodness of God breaking out everywhere all the time. I can’t think of any better way than that.
God Bless
Second, we are not biblical literalists.
That Catholic sense of “literal” is what the sacred author intended by what he wrote.
That’s often rather different from what a 20th Century English speaker might understand from a Hebrew text written in a completely different culture some 2-3,000 years ago.
Most of the OT is actually poetry, and should be read as poetry. It is also literature and should be read as literature.
God Bless
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“If you open your eyes and look all around you, you’ll see the goodness of God breaking out everywhere all the time. “
Says Chris.
Except in certain parts of Japan right now, of course.
But then, most of them are not Christians.
So, tough luck.
Most Japanese are, at least in a cultural sense, Confucians. Which is why we haven’t seen looting; why neighbours are helping one another; why people wait quietly and patiently in queues for their share. If that’s not goodness, what is?
.
Toad forgot “God bless.”
Sorry.
I wish there was a ‘like’ button on here as there is on other sites. I would use it frequently because Toad makes me smile.
Toad makes me smile, too. He is never sanctimonious, and he has an excellent facility for homing in my weak points and puncturing my bombast. Yay for Toad!
I tried to add a like button a few months ago, but couldn’t make it work. I’ll try again; they’re improving the system all the time.
Bang! go the drums!
The trumpeters are tooting and the soldiers are saluting,
And the cannon they are shooting and the motor-cars are hooting,
As the – Hero – comes!
Shout – hooray!
And let each one of the crowd try and shout it very loud,
In honour of the animal of whom you’re justly proud,
For it’s Toad’s – great – day!
🙂
.
“Most of the OT is actually poetry, and should be read as poetry. It is also literature and should be read as literature.”
Is it not possible that it is also pernicious drivel, and should be read as pernicious drivel?
God Bless
*pushes the ‘Like’ button*
Is Ecclesiastes pernicious drivel? well maybe, maybe we should get rid of the whole thing, and sanitise our civilization. But let’s make a job of it, what is the Iliad worth with all its bloodshed? And the Aeneid? Well that won’t make much sense without the Iliad. we’re a grown up civilization now, we don’t need pernicious drivel, what could it offer us? We can go about our business in Nagasaki or Dresden, or Baghdad just fine without it.
“This and only this is what the Lord God asks of you: to act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)
Yeah, that old Testament God, eh?
BUT, say KA et al, isn’t JP just choosing a nice bit? No. The common understanding of Judaism and Christianity is that Old Testament revelation was through primarily the prophets and the Law. — The Law included contingent and flawed regulations, but had social justice as its ultimate aim; as Paul and the early Rabbis realised. The most direct revelation in the OT was through the prophets, who are consistently on the side of the weak, the dispossessed, and the marginalised.
The epic stories of the founding of the nation are full of bloodshed, but they are not the primary source of the OT understanding of God, they are about a primitive people developing an understanding of, and relationship with, God.
toadspittle,
And there’s absolutely no goodness breaking out anywhere in Japan right now ?
The faith communities of our ancestors considered lots of works, some of them probably being pernicious drivel, and rejected most of them. In a few of them they did find the word of God, if understood properly, and they collected them into the bible.
The pernicious drivel stuff was filtered out long ago. Otherwise the Bible wouldn’t have remained the world’s top selling book.
God Bless
.
Sorry Chris,
…that was unduly unkind.
But, seriously (!) the problem – when reading the OT, or the NT – or Joyce’s Ulysses, or the Da Vinci Code or the New Zealand Railway Timetable, is just how to know whether what one one is reading is poetry or literature.
It would be a bit “relative” to decide for ourselves, and the Pope doesn’t care for that, it seems!
Best stick to the “Alice” books, thinks Toad!
Anyone who has read a Wellington train timetable then waited at a station knows that it is not be taken literally.
🙂
pernicious:
1. causing insidious harm or ruin; ruinous; injurious; hurtful: pernicious teachings; a pernicious lie.
2. deadly; fatal: a pernicious disease.
3. obsolete . evil; wicked.
drivel:
1. saliva flowing from the mouth, or mucus from the nose; slaver.
2. childish, silly, or meaningless talk or thinking; nonsense; twaddle.
Well thank you JP, the bible fits beautifully into categories 3 and 2. Prosecution rests m’lud
KA
.
As to the Bible being the world’s top-selling book, being in itself a recommendation, Toad has long held a belief that anything popular is, almost certainly, no good.
And, if it were to be shown, either now or in the future, that the Koran had emerged as the world’s top-selling book, would Chris feel obliged to change his faith?
the problem – when reading the OT, or the NT – or Joyce’s Ulysses, or the Da Vinci Code or the New Zealand Railway Timetable, is just how to know whether what one one is reading is poetry or literature.
No one said that understanding good literature or poetry was easy 🙂
Why would anyone think that understanding God was easy ?
The Catholic Church teaches that it isn’t even possible to fully understand God. Maybe some of us believers should keep that in mind.
God Bless
KA,
The Bible, incorrectly understood, can certainly be used for great evil. History establishes that quite clearly. Think , for example, slavery, which it took the Catholic church some 2,000 years to get correct.
God Bless
Toad has long held a belief that anything popular is, almost certainly, no good.
So, you’re going to give up eating, drinking, breathing, sex, and reading, as they are all popular and so cannot possibly be any good ?
God Bless
And, if it were to be shown, either now or in the future, that the Koran had emerged as the world’s top-selling book, would Chris feel obliged to change his faith?
Chris is a Muslim so would be quite happy should that occur, which he thinks it probably will. No change of faith would be required for me.
God Bless
Chris,
I’m just reading through comments I missed. In the more relaxed environment we enjoy here, as opposed to BF, may I ask you how you square your position with the Catholic faith?
— I understand why you want to acknowledge and experience the truth in other traditions, but don’t you run into problems with the Catholic claim to be (at least) the fullest expression of our relationship with God, surely most Muslims would disagree with that claim?
How do you adhere to multiple faiths without undermining the integrity of any one of them?
I respect the fact that you see no contradiction, though I myself would. But don’t you run the risk of losing what is particular to Catholicism by only looking at what is universal? E.g was the ultimate and final self revelation of God the incarnation of Jesus or not? What is the status of the Koran?
*no contradiction. (oh for an edit function) 🙂
What, the entire collection of books, KA?
Or just the use some parts of them have sometimes been put to.
“..Why would anyone think that understanding God was easy ?”
Asks Chris. And rightly so.
And why would anyone in their right mind expect that expecting anyone in their right mind to think that understanding God was easy, was easy?
Regardless of whether you believe in Him or not?
.
Nope, the whole collection of books.
KA
“So, you’re going to give up eating, drinking, breathing, sex, and reading, as they are all popular and so cannot possibly be any good ?”
Wow, Chris, Toad never thought of it like that before!
By Allah, you’ve got him (Toad, that is, not Allah,) bang to rights!
He will stop breathing as of now! Night night!
.
toadspittle,
Well, people are simpler beings than God, and understanding people ain’t easy, is it ?
God Bless
Chris, you’ve already said that you don’t understand god, so how can you say that humans are simpler beings?
The beauty of making god up is that you can make one up to be anything that you want. If you want your god to be simpler than you, that’s fine, if you want your god to be more complex, such that there’s no way you could understand it, that’s OK too.
I suspect that the complex god is the best one to make up though, because if anyone challenges you about your god you can simply reply (as theists so often do) that “my god is too complex for us to fully understand, that’s why he/she/it allows [insert evil of choice here]”
KA
KA,
If God is going to really be God, as in a superior divine being who created and sustains the universe, and more powerful than all other spiritual beings, then I think it follows that God is going to be incomprehensible to us mere mortals.
But even us mortals allow all sorts of evils all the time, because we don’t think that our efforts to stomp them all out is actually going to make the world a better place.
A God of Love is going to act in love. And love allows a great deal of freedom for the one loved to play things out their own way (both people and nature). So I think that a loving God would allow evil.
The Christian contention is that God even allowed man to kill God. Our religion VERY EXPLICITLY understands God as allowing evil.
But from that evil he can even resurrect the dead. So, not only God can bring good out of evil, but he already has.
I know that God allowing evil is one of the pet arguments in the atheist arsenal, but we also know a thing or two about theodicity 🙂
God Bless
Great fun all this, but I can’t possibly dive in. Snowed up with work still.
Just to respond to Badger’s query several thousand posts back, which should interest most parties here.
“Hell is other people” comes from Satre’s play “Huis Clos” usually translated as “No Exit”. I love it. Three characters end up in Hell, which (presumably due to a Thatcherite efficiency drive) offers no torment other than their own company. As their stories unfold, each ends up wanting the approval of one companion, and utterly distaining the other. The hellish circle is thus complete.
The characters are a male elderly pacifist journalist who’s all for the people’s revolution, but when the trouble starts he runs away, gets caught and is killed; a middle-aged lesbian who drove her lover to gas them both; and a flirty young woman who killed her illegitimate baby.