What is Evil?

My church yahoo group discussion board is having a spirited discussion on evil based on this excerpt from the NY Times.
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Evil is a dangerous word, if you fling it about irresponsibly. But it is an important word to keep in our moral vocabulary, because it sharpens our moral reactions and stiffens our moral resolve. The idea of ruthless malice, the love of death and destruction for its sake, constitutes a real category of human agency, and this is what the word evil is designed to connote.

It is a strong word for an extreme phenomenon. The English language can sometimes seem weak in its resources for the description of extreme wrongdoing, so we find ourselves reaching for alien words: pogrom, holocaust, ethnic cleansing, fascist, sadist, gulag, intifada. The word tragedy is often made to perform duties beyond its scope, with its suggestion of inevitability. (Atrocity is better, implying that someone committed an evil act.) The word terrorism is actually far too weak for what it denotes: not merely creating terror, but doing so by the calculated murder and maiming of innocents because they are innocents. So let's keep the old-fashioned word evil, and let's use it with all the seriousness and caution it requires.

Colin McGinn, professor of philosophy, Rutgers University
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I am guilty. I use the word evil quite a bit, and probably sometimes not for very "evil" things. The upcoming war with Iraq is fueling this discussion, and we are now all pondering "the just war" theory. "Are acts, themselves, good or evil, or do the consequences matter?", asks a member of my church. I think heinous acts have sometimes been committed in the name of good, and I'm sure the "good" people had the best of intentions at the time.