I grew up in Mississippi.
In my neighborhood, everyone was black.
Day-to-day, I didn't see overt signs of segregation,
but when I went up-town, it was a different story.
There's no bus service here no more.
But when I was a boy, I was only allowed into one of these doors.
One said White; one said Colored.
As a kid, when you're confronted with an evil like racism,
your first reaction is confusion.
Why does this exist?
For all of our capacity to do good,
the urge to do evil has plagued human history.
If you believe we live in a world under divine control,
why should evil exist at all?
So I'm going on a journey,
to try to understand why evil exists.
I know what you did.
My question is, can you tell me why?
To discover how it invades our lives.
People who believe that they are possessed
by an evil spirit can come here.
How evil first stole our hearts.
If you're lying, or doing anything evil,
Your heart get heavy, and with a heavy heart,
you're not gonna go to heaven.
And I'll see how some religions train us to fight the Devil.
You have two mentalities.
One is good, and one is bad.
To turn the darkness,
I did some incredibly terrible things.
Into light.
You represent the hope of the world.
To understand why evil exists,
we have to know where it comes from.
Some faiths see it as an unseen force that pervades
the entire world.
Demons that lurk in the darkness.
For Christianity, it could be the Devil himself.
Or, is evil something that comes from inside us?
So, I'm travelling to a maximum security prison,
to meet a man you could call evil incarnate.
So Kent, have you ever come face-to-face with evil?
I've met some people who've done some very bad things
Neuroscientist Dr. Kent Kiehl is trying
to pinpoint the source of evil, inside the brains
of psychopathic killers.
I wanted to try to understand why people do
really bad things.
And how to, how to help prevent it someday.
Thank you.
I'm about to meet one of Dr. Kiehl's most notorious
subjects.
He's serving a life sentence here.
His attorney tells me this man raped more than two dozen women,
And murdered three.
He's been in jail almost since he was a teenager,
except for very short spurts
where, when he would get out of jail,
he would go back to the same behavior of raping,
and eventually it evolved into murder.
Did he confess to these?
He confessed to all of 'em.
I'm not going to show you his face,
because I don't want to give any more notoriety to the man
who committed these atrocities.
But I want to know what can make someone do what he did?
Do you know who I am?
Yes.
- I - know what you did.
My question is, can you tell me why?
It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.
Each time?
I didn't have any plan to go out and snatch anybody.
Commit any sexual violence against anybody.
I had a desire, an impulse, and I wasn't able to stop myself
from acting on that impulse.
Let me ask you, about what age did you start?
Back when I was 21 or 22.
I was out looking for something to steal,
and I just spotted a teacher, who had stayed late,
so I decided to rob her, kidnap her, and rape her.
I just pulled over on a access road, and she fought back,
slipped through the door, and I just turned around and,
took off.
When did you first kill?
Going on 27.
I was going out to commit a burglary, and,
the crime happened.
Kidnaped, raped, and murdered?
Yeah.
I, I'm looking for the correct term.
It, it, it isn't guilt, it's remorse. Remorse.
Did you ever experience that that you know of?
I don't see emotions like everybody else.
I don't feel.
There was no, remorse.
I think that I'm not wired the same as everybody else.
- So, Kent. - Yeah.
Is this psychopathic?
In psychiatry we have a way of assessing what we call
psychopathy or psychopathic personality disorder,
and the lack of empathy, the impulse control,
the poor planning, His scores are in the 99th percentile.
What makes a person evil?
Kent has scanned the brains of 800 psychopathic criminals.
This prisoner is the most extreme case he's ever seen.
So this is a standard MRI scan.
It looks pretty normal when you run through the MRI scan.
But what we did is quantify all the different areas
of his brain, and to try to understand how dense are they?
How strong are they, basically?
This area of the orbital frontal cortex,
it's very important for the formation of personality,
for the control of impulses, for regulating behavior.
These three bars that I show here this is the average inmate,
this is other individuals that we call
psychopaths in the red bar, and you can see that he is,
he's really reduced.
He really does have a different brain.
And so he, he really does fit that 99th percentile.
He's, you know, one-in-a-million, actually.
One-in-a-million?
He's very rare.
You've been in prison now for, what, 30 years?
- Yep. - Long time.
What if I said I have a way to get you out?
Would you wanna go?
I'd wanna go, but since I did commit those crimes,
I still have that,
- Impulse... - Capacity.
Society wouldn't be safe.
I don't have the same controls as you do,
or somebody else does.
This is an evil man.
Evil personified.
Neuroscientists say that his behavior is a result of
bad neural wiring.
But the question is, even so, does he not still have a choice?
Can he choose not to commit a heinous crime?
Psychopaths are at the extreme of human behavior.
But we all face the choice to do good or do evil.
And for thousands of years, we've battled those urges.
I've come to Luxor, capital of ancient Egypt.
Egyptologist Salima Ikram is going to show me one of
the oldest depictions of our struggle to choose
between good and evil.
So, right over there?
Yes.
All the east, and to the part on the other side of the Nile,
east of the Nile, was always the land of the living.
And then over here, you have the land of the dead, on the west.
Literally. All those are tombs.
Yep. All of those are tombs,
and I want to show you one in particular.
These are the tombs of the nobles,
just around the corner from the Valley of the Kings,
where Tutankhamun was buried more than 3 millennia ago.
So here's the tomb of Menna.
Menna.
Here we go.
Look at that!
There we are.
That's Menna, over there, and he was a scribe for the god Amun,
and he oversaw the lands of the god Amun, and also over here,
you can see this big harvest that he's checking out.
It's great.
They're harvesting their, wheat.
This artwork is 3,500 years old?
Yep. 1370 B.C. And it hasn't been touched-up.
Those are his scribes.
Those are his,
He's overseeing the scribes.
Precisely.
A-ha, ha, ha. And,
When I get back to the States,
I'm gonna be a hieroglyphic expert.
You are, indeed.
Now, let me show you a little something,
about how Menna gets to go to the afterlife.
Menna's tomb includes a remarkable feature
that Salima tells me I have to see.
A scene where Menna would be judged on the balance
of good and evil he had done.
This all funerary procession,
Okay.
You can see his coffin being brought here.
That's his coffin, there?
That's his coffin.
And then he's brought here, finally,
in front of the god Osiris.
This is Menna.
And then here, you have a complete innovation.
It's the first time you'll ever see this, really,
in a private tomb, and that is the weighing of the heart scene.
And here he is being judged,
to see if he was good or if he was evil.
In front of Osiris,
the god of the Underworld, Menna's heart is weighed against
the goddess of truth, Ma'at.
While Thoth, her husband, writes down the judgment.
So it's almost as if, it's a Cliff Note for him.
Gotcha.
Cliff Notes!
So, if you're lying, or stealing, or cheating,
or doing anything evil, the whole thing is the fact that
it reflects on your heart.
All of that weighs on your heart,
your heart gets heavy...
- I - have a heavy heart.
Yes.
And with a heavy heart,
- you're not gonna go to heaven. - That's right.
He won't be able to have lift-off, basically.
Just, Good, Well-put!
So in this depiction, his heart is indeed in balance,
Right?
Right.
So he's cool.
- Totally cool. - Alright.
Good to go into the afterlife.
You would think that that would be
the beginning, at least, somehow,
of the Judeo-Christian ethic, as it were,
in terms of good and evil.
Basically, I think that modern religion has its roots
in this idea of morality,
and that anything bad you do is reflected
and can be judged in some way.
The Egyptians were very literal.
They said you can judge it by your heart.
But even now, when, you know, you can say,
He is pure of heart, it means he's a good person.
Right. Right.
In the centuries after Menna,
the idea of eternal reward for turning one's back on evil
spread throughout Egyptian society.
And from there, it may have fed into Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam.
The weighing of the heart assumes that fear
of consequences is the only thing that keeps us
on a righteous path.
Which makes me wonder, Are we inherently good.
Or inherently evil?
In fact, that question is at the very root
of the Christian faith.
The early leaders of the church trace our tendency to sin
back to Adam and Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit
original sin.
I've come to meet Baptist Reverend and theologian
Kutter Callaway, to find out whether original sin means
we are all evil at heart.
Hi. Pleasure to meet you.
Thank you.
Have a seat.
Thank you.
Which book were you reading?
The first few chapters of Genesis.
That is exactly what I'm gonna talk about,
and what I'm wanna talk about is, sin.
What is original sin?
Well, it's a good question.
The Christian tradition, it kinda coined original sin.
Some primal desire that we all have,
that's a very basic human urge or impulse.
Because Adam sinned, that original sin was passed on
from one generation to the next - perpetuated,
generation after generation after generation.
I have recently spent some time with a person
who we could say personifies, REV. -
Evil. I needed to say
why did you do these things?
And he would say, I just felt like it.
And beyond that, I don't know.
Now that's inherent, evil. Well, isn't it?
What you saw,
you could name that as a sort of demonic thing.
This is demonic.
It's demonic.
But, I think it's important for us to acknowledge that,
that there is a little bit of him in all of us.
There's something inherent in us that seems to bend itself
towards death and violence.
Is there a Devil?
Or is that just a metaphor?
It is a metaphor, and also, the Devil is real.
There's a lot of different forms - you know,
Devils with pitchforks to goblins and ghouls, etc.
In the New Testament, you even get Jesus interacting with
Satan, and yet at the same time,
you have Jesus talking to one of his disciples,
and saying at one point, Get behind me, Satan.
So it seems even Jesus is dealing with both a, a,
an actual presence - what, what we might say is a personified
evil, or, And at the same time, that we can be satanic, demonic,
in, in our own desire to steer away from what God wants.
We are born with the capacity for evil inside us.
Most of us struggle our whole lives to resist the temptation
to do wrong.
But that could be another source of evil in our lives,
the people who brought us into this world.
My dad was an alcoholic.
Whether they are living, or dead.
Why does evil exist in the world?
Is it because we all have evil inside us,
or does it come from somewhere else?
I've travelled to India to understand what Hindus believe
is a source of evil the unhappy souls
of their ancestors.
I'm in the city of Varanasi to visit the temple Pishach Mochan,
where exorcisms go on all day long.
My guide, Varanasi resident and educator,
V.A. Vidya, introduces me to the head priest,
and to see the goblin, or Pischach,
who is said to live here.
So there is the goblin, For 15 years,
just wandering around in pain, so he finally prayed to Shiva.
The great Hindu god, Shiva,
puts the goblin through a purifying ritual which ends
with a dip in the nearby pond.
That instantly cures him of his disease.
In return, Shiva orders the goblin to protect people
near the pond from any other evil spirits.
Now Shiva asks, Okay, you are cured,
so you are going to help all the people who suffer
being possessed by evil.
So this is a benign goblin.
Yes. He's a benign goblin.
Now this pond has become a place of healing.
A haven for people who feel their lives are haunted
by an evil presence.
So here, you, Look at the water.
It's brackish, but people believe that something is going
Brackish? Is that a term for it?
Yeah.
So you know the typical theme is water cleanses everything.
Okay.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna buy that!
Hindus believe that when someone's death is traumatic
or unhappy, their soul can become angry,
and haunt the lives of their children or other relatives.
This can cause mental or physical illness
even financial troubles.
The correct rituals, however,
can liberate the unhappy soul and free the living.
What's going on over there?
That's the Shaman. He is preparing,
- He's exorcising? - Yes.
Their conversation, no-one can understand. It's done in a,
What, they're speaking in tongues?
He's speaking in tongues, yes.
And then the patient responds - either screams,
or responds in tongues.
Or they have spasms.
And then finally they believe that it's released.
Most of the people who come here don't need
a full-on exorcism like this man.
The Shukla family are typical clients.
They are having money troubles, and they worry that the spirits
of their ancestors may be the cause.
This is a departure ritual,
for the spirit that is wandering around.
What gives you the impression,
what makes one think
my parents' spirits are not settled?
I think personal troubles.
If them, something is causing them trouble,
whenever there's a financial loss in the family,
and frequent sicknesses, bad dreams, and,
so everything is associated with this procession home.
To make their ancestors' spirits happy,
the Shuklas must prepare them a good meal,
one that is blessed by the priest.
They offer honey, clarified butter, banana,
fruits, and everything.
And this would be offered to dead soul,
which is gonna eat the food, so this will be a special meal.
After receiving all the food, they offer a lamp,
and an umbrella, and a pair of shoes.
So here, every departed soul is fitted like a real human being.
- Is spoken... - The spirit?
Yes. The spirit is treated like a real human being.
The ancestors receive what they need
for their journey in the afterlife.
After the Shuklas offer the food to the sacred pond,
and nail a coin to this holy tree,
The unhappy souls of their ancestors are set free,
and the shadow of evil lifts.
In Christianity, You've got the Devil, and you've got God;
you've got good, you've got evil.
Don't seem to have that going on in Hinduism.
In Hinduism, there's no dichotomy between
good and evil - the same person can become good an evil.
In a temple like this, even the evil is treated
very respectfully, and is treated caringly.
That's very interesting.
Very interesting concept.
Because I think it sort of frees us up to be better.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
It, There's always, at the end, the hope.
The hope that even the evil can be liberated.
And evil can be purified, like taking a dip into the pond.
So I've been watching people at,
in these temples - I mean, crowds of people - doing ritual
after ritual, trying to stay in the good graces of their
ancestors.
But the thing about it is, evil is not spurned.
Evil is thought of as a spirit that needs help.
Just, needs to find peace.
Cool!
Hindus want to guide people into the common good.
That idea is also the basis of another faith.
One of the oldest and most influential religions
in the world.
But, it's one most of us have never heard of.
It's called Zoroastrianism.
I've come to Orange County, California,
to meet the president of the temple here - Arman Ariane
Welcome to California Zoroastrian Centre.
Thank you.
Zoroastrianism began 3,500 years ago, in ancient Iran.
The central symbol of the faith is fire.
Today there are just a few small pockets of Zoroastrians
around the world, mostly in India and Iran.
But some are here in California.
This is the fire temple.
This fire is always going?
This is a symbol of Zoroastrianism.
The fire's always going.
It represents enlightenment, and the more you are aware
of this world of ours, the more you know what's ahead;
the better decisions you can make.
It's kind of like you are walking with a flashlight
in your hand.
Yeah. The brighter the light in your life,
That's right.
How does that tie in to Zoroastrian belief in
the separation of good and evil?
In Zarathustra's school of thought,
you have two mentalities, which are translated by Westerners
as spirits.
One is good, and one is bad.
They are principles; they are a way of behaving.
So the Zoroastrian motto is Good Thoughts, Good Words,
and Good Deeds.
Zoroastrianism
is a religion focused upon defeating evil.
Zoroastrian priests wear clean, white robes.
Which, like their sacred flame, represent enlightenment
the path away from evil.
Prayers are still said in the ancient Iranian language,
Avestan, which was spoken by its founder, Zoroaster.
Professor of Religion Gregory Riley had been studying
how Zoroastrian beliefs shaped Judaism and Christianity
and how they gave birth to the idea of the Devil.
Zoroastrianism predates the Abrahamic religions.
That's right. Yeah.
Zoroaster postulated that to defeat evil in the world,
we were gonna have to have a cataclysmic battle.
And God and the Devil are gonna fight it out,
That's New Testament;
that's not in Zoroastrian though.
Yes, it is Zoroastrianism. Yeah.
And if you go to the great mass of religions around,
there's no Devil.
The Israelites, they lived without a Devil until
they are in Babylon.
The Jews met Zoroastrianism, and they began to assimilate ideas,
They come back, and the Devil begins to appear
in Jewish literature
these ideas about the Devil having caused that evil.
And so those things start to work on people.
So by the time we get to Jesus' day,
they'd actually created a name for the Devil - Beelzebub,
- if you've heard that one. - I have.
- He's got a few of 'em. - Yeah.
So the great competitor of Jesus in our New Testament
and Gospels.
This is now a new take,
That's right. Jews make it their own.
Christians make it their own.
Islam makes it their own.
But just as the idea of the Devil in
Christianity evolved from ancient beliefs,
modern Zoroastrianism has evolved too.
For many Zoroastrians, the Devil is no longer
a real demonic figure.
It's an internal combatant - the struggle between good and evil
is one that takes place in the mind.
So the Zoroastrian motto is Good Thoughts,
Good Words, and Good Deeds, and the order is very important,
because you start with a thought, you,
you talk it with a mentor, before you take any actions.
This way, you don't get yourself in trouble.
And there is no, Satan.
There is no, Devil.
Something outside, influencing us.
Right.
Meaning, therefore,
that God is resident in each of us.
Each of us.
The Zoroastrian school of thought is not something
in the past or future, but what we can do at this very time.
All our problems in the world are man-made.
Therefore, they should be solved by man.
Can be. Must be.
To blame it on a supernatural force is not
a Zoroastrian notion.
Right.
Zoroastrians believe that good and evil exists within us all,
and we must make the choice for good.
Each one of us has to purge evil from within us every day,
by doing good.
Doing the right thing.
Purging the world of evil is not the work of messiahs, kings,
prophets.
It's the work of each one of us.
Be we tailor, butcher, salesman, actor, whoever we are.
I like that.
But is it really possible
to conquer evil without the threat of a real devil?
Without the threat of eternal punishment?
In New Zealand, psychologist Jesse Bering believes
we need supernatural beings to keep us on the right track.
Are you guys ready to play a game?
Yeah!
Jesse devised an experiment to test this theory.
Alright. Why don't you guys make a circle,
and sit in front of me here, and I'll go over the rules for you.
See, see this piece of tape?
The first rule is that you can't step over the line.
The second rule is that you've gotta throw with your back
to the dartboard.
So you can kinda go like this, and do the best that you can.
See?
Not that easy, is it?
You're gonna be playing this game one at a time,
and the person that gets the most points on the dartboard
gets a very special prize at the end of the day.
Alright, we'll see you guys in a little bit.
Jesse watches through hidden cameras to see
if the children cheat.
So here we've got a little boy,
and you can almost see the machinations in his mind.
Let's see if he does it.
You can't really blame a six-year-old for doing that;
he really wants the prize, and thinks he can get away with.
And it's the normal child response.
This little girl, Look at her, she's going right over the line.
And she's putting several balls on, on the board itself,
and she's checking now to see if anybody's actually watching her,
or can see what she's just done.
They think they're alone in the room,
and why not cheat if you can get away with it
and nobody's watching?
But what if someone was watching?
Jesse runs the exact same experiment on a new group
of children, and an invisible supernatural being.
Now before we begin, I wanted to introduce you guys
to somebody really special,
who's in the room with us right now.
Now her name is Princess Alice.
Have any of you ever heard of Princess Alice before?
No.
She's a very friendly magical princess,
and she's got a very special ability
she can make herself invisible.
Princess Alice is sitting in that chair, right now.
So you guys go upstairs for now, and then we're gonna bring you
each down individually to play the game.
With the kids believing they are under
the gaze of an invisible princess,
Jesse sees something remarkable.
Now this little girl, She's been pretty good so far.
Clearly not interested in breaking the rules.
So here we've got a little girl
who's actually touching the chair
to see if maybe she can feel Princess Alice sitting there.
Princess Alice?
She's saying Princess Alice,
so she's clearly not cheating here.
That's the power of belief, you know?
That these kids have never heard of her before, but
all of a sudden she becomes real in their minds.
Jesse's results are always the same.
So what we've seen after testing hundreds of kids
with this study is that kids that are told
that Princess Alice is in the room with them
when they are left alone are significantly less likely
to cheat.
She's doing the same thing that any supernatural agent or god
would do in a given society she is watching them;
she cares about their social behavior, and ultimately,
at least, the implicit assumption is that somehow
she will act if they violate one of the rules.
Jesse's research suggests that we need to believe
we're being watched to eliminate selfish behavior
to keep evil in check.
So the proverbial question is,
would you rob a bank if you thought that nobody
could possibly know that you've done that?
And I think if we're honest with ourselves,
many of us would walk in there, and actually take
all that currency.
An all-seeing, all-knowing,
all-powerful interventionist, moralistic deity
that helps steer people in the direction of good behavior.
The reward of heaven,
and the threat of eternal punishment in hell
keep us on the right track.
But what about those who have succumbed to evil?
Can faith lead us to redemption?
Or does evil mark us for life?
I'm travelling the world
to discover why people believe evil exists.
Christians, Jews and Muslims believe it's part
of the human condition to be tempted to do wrong.
Many faiths urge us to fight temptation.
To put the greater good ahead of our self-interest.
But can we actually rid ourselves of evil?
In Sarnath, India,
I witness how Tibetan Buddhists purged themselves
of evil thoughts.
The monks here at the Vajra Vidya monastery perform
daily chanting rituals.
The music puts them in a meditative state of mind.
Buddhists believe the urge to do evil stems from our ignorance
of how our minds work.
The ritual helps these young monks locate the source
of those bad thoughts,
so that they can understand their cause, and overcome them.
But not everyone wants to fight their inner demons.
There are plenty of people who seem to be hell-bent on doing
bad things.
Is there any way to change them?
I've asked Kent Kiehl, the neuroscientist who studies
psychopaths to meet me again.
I wanna know if his brain scans give us a way to combat evil.
I mean, we always accept evil as how it is.
It just is; there's nothing we can do about it.
But could these brain scans be used maybe to intercept
some young people before they get going on this?
I think they can.
When we understand the systems of the brain that are different
in people who commit these bad crimes,
it gives us an opportunity to try and develop
a treatment for that.
It's like, if you, you know, if I injure my arm and my,
this muscle gets atrophied, just like these certain areas of
the brain are atrophied, I might be able to develop a treatment
program that remediates that atrophy, and fix it.
At about what age range would you think,
as an expert, you would have to start looking?
Following Sandy Hook elementary school shooting
in the United States, we were asked by the parents
who lost their children there to, to do that study
to analyze the brains of kids
that we've studied who killed other people versus
kids in prison who have not, and when we did that analysis,
I wasn't sure that we would find anything that different,
but we really did.
Certain areas of the temporal lobes,
of the emotional areas of the brain were underdeveloped,
where they hadn't achieved a normal development.
So when you say kids,
what are you talking about? Are you talking about.
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Yeah.
So that, that's the kids we were working with.
Unfortunately, those, those kids had killed about sixteen people.
The neuroscience today is about ten, eleven, twelve, we think,
that we could help identify and separate kids that have problems
versus kids that are just disruptive
and are gonna grow out of it.
If you were a judge and you wanted to know,
is this a high-risk kid or a low-risk kid, we can say,
this is a, this is a high-risk kid.
We now have a tool that can help us understand,
or can help predict the worst type of things that we all wanna
prevent - a homicide; a death.
What we really wanna be able to do is get better and better
at predicting, and then that'll help us be better and better
at preventing.
Science may help identify those who are most
prone to evil.
But how do you turn your back on a life of evil?
I've come to Los Angeles to meet a man who wiped all trace
of evil from his life.
Alright, buddy, you are all done.
I'm looking for Brian - Brian Widner
Morgan Freeman.
Brian Widner. How are you?
I'm very well indeed. Very well.
How are you?
I am doing well, sir.
Tell me something about yourself.
I hear terrible things.
Well, for sixteen years I was a Neo-Nazi skinhead.
A Neo-Nazi skinhead.
Yes sir. I was in multiple skinhead gangs.
I was an enforcer in one; did some incredibly terrible things
to a lot of undeserving people.
I was an evil person.
I wanted to hurt the world.
That's all I wanted to do.
I was, I, I had a sense of just utter destruction for everybody.
That was, that was my driving goal.
Let me ask you, how did you get to the street,
and why were you on the street?
I fell in with a gang, basically, is what happened.
I fell in with the wrong people.
I was 14 years old, and I was running the streets,
these guys gave me a place to stay, they bought me beer,
made me feel accepted and wanted.
And after about my tenth year I kinda realized
this is a subculture of, of degenerates,
I realized that I'm not superior to anybody.
I, In fact, I was pretty well a lower form of humanity,
you know?
Okay. Now,
we're up to ten years after you've been running around
with these, people, and you've had a, an epiphany.
Tell me a little bit about that.
Some really just magical things just kinda happened
out of nowhere.
Like?
Well I went to a skinhead concert in 2005,
and I met a woman there.
And by the January 2006, we got married.
By February she was pregnant.
It was, I had to start taking a hard look at
what I was doing myself.
I'm bringing this child into a world,
and I told 'em I can't do this anymore; I'm done.
I got, I gotta take care of my son.
So during that time I made the change on the inside,
I actually had to make a physical change on the outside.
How was that?
Let me show you.
That is what I used to look like.
I mean, my neck was completely sleeved-out,
my face was sleeved-out.
I looked the part; I couldn't escape the way I looked on
the outside, even though I had already changed on the inside.
I got in contact with a southern poverty law center.
They actually set it up to where
I was able to get the tattoos taken off my face.
Well now, I mean, I can see little
indications of scars, that,
more like you were maybe in a fight at some point,
and it healed up.
It looked like you had all this stuff removed.
How long a process was that?
It took about two-and-a-half years.
There was 25, 26 treatments, something like that.
Every two weeks I was getting, getting laser-zapped.
It was ungodly, excruciating.
My face was constantly swollen I looked like the Elephant Man.
It was, it was a bad time.
And here's actually a picture of me during the process.
That looked like you got punched in the eye.
Yes. It looks like I was a bad boxer, yeah.
Yeah..
Sorta like, Paying dues.
I very much looked at it as a penance, actually, yes.
I took the pain to, as a reminder that,
I've caused enough, so I might as well have some.
Can you describe to me your sense of yourself
in those times, in terms of evil?
Looking back, I had absolutely no remorse;
I was borderline sociopathic.
I had no feelings.
I wanted to hurt the world.
When I was going through the tattoo removal, I, I found God.
I, Before that, I was a pagan, and, My life was always dark;
I always had a hole, hole in my soul, I guess,
would be the best way to put that.
I don't, I don't know exactly what his name is,
or if it's even Judeo-Christian.
There is a godly presence in the universe,
and it made itself known.
It, it helped me realize that there is good and evil
in all of us, and, My goal now is basically when I just leave
this world a better place than when I got into it, you know?
Just try to be a good person.
That's all I can do, and, and hope f, that's good enough.
We have, Sometimes,
thoughts that evil is, just exists, and there's no hope.
But you represent the hope of the world.
That transformation - that complete transformation
that you, yourself, made.
Absolutely.
And for you, to be able to just completely turn
yourself around like that, it was very, very encouraging.
And I'm honored to talk to you.
Thank you.
Well, I've gotta tell you something I,
I've been noticing.
You're a good-looking man.
Well, thank you! And so are you, by the way!
The awkward stains of Brian's past
have been wiped away.
But I'm struck by the astonishing difference
in his two lives, on the inside.
That was evil in his heart.
His admission.
Deep, and remorseless.
But, he says, the birth of his son,
and a dawning belief in God is what purged him of evil.
If Brian can do that, it gives us hope that people can change.
Evil can be contained.
This hope is at the core of the Christian faith.
We have gathered today, on this riverbank,
to perform one of the oldest traditions in our faith
that of baptism.
People sin, but those sins can be washed away.
We follow Jesus' example today,
as we baptize Austin, Katie, Abby, Norman and Chris.
These five do this as a sign of repentance and forgiveness
of sin.
A baptism points the direction to where we are headed,
and it's a new start on life.
The Bible tells us Adam and Eve knew no evil
until they ate the forbidden fruit.
Almost every faith tells the story of how evil begins.
Whether we believe it comes from unhappy souls,
the Devil himself,
or the Devil within,
We all eventually come face-to-face with evil.
But I think we need to know evil,
because in spite of all the suffering it causes,
it drives us to do good.
Without evil, how would we have ever developed
our unique human characteristics
the ability to express kindness,
mercy,
forgiveness?