Evil is an attribute that people may come to possess through various means (ideology is a big one), which becomes manifest through their actions when they demonstrate severe selfish disregard for the lives of others.
The above does not rest on religion. Christians/etc having their own theories about evil is irrelevant. When most people say Pol Pot was evil, they're not talking about demonic possession or some silly nonsense like that; they mean he was a mass murderer, which is evil.
> When most people say Pol Pot was evil, they're not talking about demonic possession or some silly nonsense like that; they mean he was a mass murderer, which is evil.
Well, no. Most people I've heard say something like that would mean that he was innately evil as a person. They wouldn't spell it out like that but the underlying assumption is that a "normal human being" couldn't do what he did and therefore he was a freak mutation in some way. Most people even struggle with the idea that there was a time in such a person's life where they weren't "evil" yet. Even when talking about Antisocial Personality Disorder ("psychopathy") they rarely know that this is often in part caused by severe early childhood trauma, e.g. sexual abuse or parental abuse and emotional neglect - most seem to believe these people are "just born evil" and any prior period where they didn't do anything sufficiently evil were just a mask.
This is easiest to see when talking about the Nazis. Instead of trying to gain a systemic understanding of how the Nazis came to power or how "ordinary citizens" could be made to commit massacres and genocides we single out the big names as uniquely evil and make up excuses for the rest. For the longest time I had been told that soldiers who participated in massacres were implicitly threatened with death or at least physical punishment but we know that this was not the case and the mere threat of social ostracization by the other members of their unit was enough. The majority of those involved in the massacres saw themselves as victims for having to carry out those commands and deal with the trauma because denying their own agency helped them cope with what they had done.
So no, they don't mean "a person who has done something evil" when they say a person is evil. They usually mean something more transcendental than that. When most people say Pol Pot or Hitler or Milosevic was evil they mean he wasn't human the same way "normal humans" are human. They may not think he was literally possessed by a demon or the physical manifestation of a demon but they will think there was some essence of evilness inside him that would inevitably manifest. He wasn't evil as a result of doing evil things, he did evil things because he was an evil person. This is called essentialism and it's extremely widespread and antithetical to a systems theory based understanding of social dynamics and behaviors.
Pol Pot wasn't "innately" evil and I doubt many people would say such a thing. Pol Pot is evil because he did evil things, not the other way around. For that matter, most Christians believe that all people are prone to sin and the difference between people is whether they seek forgiveness after giving into sin. The innate sense of evil exists in all people which is why Christ had to sacrifice himself to atone for that sin. Personally I am not a christian and blood sacrifice (of anybody or anything) to atone for sins doesn't make logical sense to me, but that's what their bible says and that's what most of them preach. A few, like Calvinists, are notable exceptions.
> Pol Pot wasn't "innately" evil and I doubt many people would say such a thing.
> Personally I am not a christian
You really shouldn't extrapolate from yourself then.
I've seen this discourse repeatedly in Germany when it comes to Hitler and the Nazis:
1. Hitler did unspeakably evil things.
2. Therefore Hitler was evil.
3. However the evil he did was so uniquely evil he can not be compared to others.
4. Therefore Hitler was uniquely capable of committing such evil.
5. This implies Hitler was already innately evil prior to committing those acts.
This usually extends to falsely distinguish the evil SS from the "patriotic" Wehrmacht (who were "ordinary soldiers just following orders" and only "incidentally" ended up participating in mass murders). It's directly tied to the Great Man narrative of history: only Hitler could have been Hitler because he was innately different. The idea in the Great Man narrative usually being that a great leader emerges and changes history, rather than history changing through the conflict of material conditions (or ideas, if you're a Hegelian) and the actual figureheads being largely incidental (i.e. what Marxists call dialectical materialism).
According to demographic data, over 40% of Germans identify as non-religious whereas in the US it's a bit over 20%, so I would expect Americans to actually be more likely to think this way (if not outright going with the "demon person" idea of evil).
Also, according to most Christian faiths Jesus specifically atoned for the Original Sin (Adam and Eve disobeying God by eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil). The entire "redemption" thing is also a bit more complicated: in practice even Protestant and Catholic Christians generally behave as if they were following the Eastern Orthodox view of mortal sins where mortal sins are irredeemable and the separation from God they inflict on the sinner is permanent.
But this is a digression. The point is, most people view evil when it comes to person not as a mere descriptor of having done something but
- either: having a pre-existing innate essence of evil-ness that allowed them to do it
- or: having been so corrupted by the act itself that they now possess a permanent essence of evil-ness
or a combination of the two. In other words: an Evil Person™ is not just a person who has done an evil thing but a person uniquely capable of and predisposed towards doing evil things to a greater extent than a Normal Person™ would be. Pol Pot wasn't just evil because he did evil things, he did those evil things because he was Pol Pot, an evil person.
I'll shut up now before I get started on how different ideas of free will play into this.
The above does not rest on religion. Christians/etc having their own theories about evil is irrelevant. When most people say Pol Pot was evil, they're not talking about demonic possession or some silly nonsense like that; they mean he was a mass murderer, which is evil.