Evil

While contemplating Satan, my secular humanist friend Kristin writes the following:

"The very sense of divinity and devilry - of a god and a devil - is one that intrigues me so deeply that I've decided to dedicate my life to it. I believe not in the literal nature of such things, but in the symbolic value of them. Evil - and Satan - is something that human beings use as a scapegoat: 'he's evil, that's why he did it,' and that sort of thing. Now evil in the sense of abject cruelty, sociopathic behavior, murder, and so on I can believe in. People who are intentionally sadistic and whose behavior does far more harm than good - if any good at all - most certainly fall under the domain of 'Evil.'"

I need to ponder this, especially whether the abject cruelty really gets you away from using "evil" as a scapegoat and what the implications of that are.