A couple of weeks ago while exploring Scotland, I discovered a monument dedicated to "The Forfar Witches". The premise behind the monument was that some 40 women had been wrongly convicted of witchcraft and had just been misunderstood.

It got me thinking about how this is a really common idea these days: "Evil is not real, it's just misunderstood." Movies like "Wicked" and "Maleficent" took the villains from The Wizard of Oz and Sleeping Beauty and re-imagined them as anti-heroes. "They're not evil; they're just misunderstood." As I discovered last weekend, the theme is even present in the reworked "Prince of Egypt" Musical where Pharaoh is depicted, not as a genocidal enslaver of the Israelites who hardened his heart towards God, but just as a hero who was misunderstood.

This way of thinking even spills into the real world now, where people commit evil crimes but are given light treatment by judges because of claims they were just misunderstood.

I think we need to talk about this. Evil is real. It's not always misunderstandings. And sometimes it needs to be confronted...