What have we learned in over a year since 9/11? We have learned all the easy security measures in airports are porous. We have learned that an attack against Iraq would leave us without allies. We have learned that any proposed solution to terrorism will be opposed by enough people it will fail. The principal lesson of 9/11 is that evil really does exist in this world and that evil will kill us unless we find salvation from it.

When I assert we have learned this, I mean those with wisdom and insight have learned this. But so much of what is being done in an attempt to protect against terrorism is at once foolish and blind.

It is as if we appease an enemy that does not exist.

Assaults are terrible but not themselves terrorist. We were assaulted not so much to kill several thousand who happened to be in the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The terrorists didn't care who was there and would have been willing to station their own operatives in those places if it would have helped. The goal was the mood of terror that resulted and spread quickly around the world.

The worst factor in terror is the unknown. While terrorists are capable of keeping time, location, and method unknown, our intelligence community is working diligently to make these terrifying unknowns reasonably known. The worst unknown, however, is the very nature of terror, and we are in a state of denial about this.

In a word, terrorism is not just evil as an adjective; it is an evil as a noun. Evil, by historic definition, is the result of sin. Now you have before you too naughty, politically incorrect words: "sin" and "evil."

Sin and evil, we are being told, do not exist. They are medieval inventions of superstitious, uncritical pre-moderns. What our fathers called sin are innocent mistakes. What they called evil are harmless imperfections.

Forget the current misuses of the words, which have made the modern invention convenient. Sin is a human being acting in opposition to native human nature. That is, a person sins when he or she acts as other than a human being. Sin is as simply defined as that.

The Apostle Paul put it this way: "…all [people] have sinned and fall short of the glory of [what] God [created them to be] (Romans 3:23). That's sin: falling short of genuine humanity by inhuman acts. Evil, again, is the corruption created by acts of sin.

To assault a person is sin, and this person's injury is the resultant evil. Terrorism is an evil, and until we address terrorism as evil, we not only will be defenseless against it but actually encourage it.

We excuse the evil of terrorism by perceiving it as something other than evil. The terrorists are not really terrorists but innocent Arabs resentful of American prosperity or fervent Muslims who became overly zealous. It's all America's fault because we haven't solved world poverty or we support Israel against Palestinian terrorism.

Call it anything you will, the politically correct preach, but don't call it what it is: evil. To admit the existence of evil is to admit the reality of sin--and that's so inconvenient and unsophisticated in this post-modern world.

Terrorism being evil, we recognize it results from the sin of human beings gone wrong. Sin has never been eradicated by redefining it with euphemisms or excusing it by rationalization. Sin can only be punished so the sinner repents and is converted.

Confronted as we are with the reality of evil in terrorism, let us first seek our own moral and spiritual salvation and, through the strength of our salvation, convert the sinners to genuine humanness.

Dr. Wallace Alcorn’s commentaries appear in the Herald on Mondays