Evil

[Tartarus Sauce]

What do you mean?

This is my belief so make of it what you will.

Whenever people talk about evil they actually assume there’s such a thing as good. When they assume there’s such a thing as good, they assume there’s such a thing as a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate between good and evil. When they assume a moral law they must assume a moral lawgiver. Why do we assume a moral lawgiver? Because ultimately when you raise the question of evil, it’s either raised by a person, or about a person. That means either the question-raiser or the object of the question is assumed to have intrinsic worth and that can only be so if we are the creation of God.

We often see evil in large-scale examples such as the Holocaust or the Communist purges under Stalin. Here's a provocative question regarding these extreme examples: Are we talking about the volume of people killed that makes them evil, or the fact that any person was killed? The risk that comes along with invoking such monstrous examples of evil is that we will lose sight of the fact that instances of evil are not measured in sheer numbers.  It was not the fact that tens of thousands were slaughtered but that tens of thousands of times, the sacred was violated. A single, human life is never anything less than a specimen of essential worth, an example of that which is sacred. Every time the sacred is violated it is either intentionally or unintentionally an act of evil. Evil is ultimately that which violates the purposes of God for life and living in community with each other.

I had figured you were ultimately referring to the purpose of God. 

I'd say your analysis is correct in the more traditional sense of the word evil, although I'd argue there's also a more informal usage associated more closely with our value judgements on actions and behavior that doesn't necessarily assert a source for those values, just their application. For example, your definition would probably be more relevant in the case of somebody asking another "do you believe evil exists?" On the other hand, I don't think the narrator of a criminal documentary on TV is asserting the existence of a moral lawgiver on TV when they offer us to "delve into the mind of evil" when they begin talking about a serial killer.