Is Mankind Evil?

While at work yesterday, I tuned into the end of a Christian talk show. (Not WOTM Radio)
The host was in heated debate with some of his callers about the wicked nature of man. The callers into the show argued that, sure, we are all sinners, but we are not evil. The exchange went something like this:

Host: Hello, caller.

Caller: Hello, I'm calling because of the point you said about us being evil. I'm a Christian, and I know we're sinners, but I wouldn't call us evil.

Host: How would you define, "evil?"

Caller: I would call a murderer or a rapist, or someone like Adolph Hitler evil.

Host: So what about things like lying?

Caller: Well, that's a bad thing to do, and we're sinners, but still, we're not evil.

Host: And when the Bible says that lying is a wicked act, that doesn't make us evil?

Caller: Well, no. God loves the sinner but hates the sin.

Host: But God isn't going to differentiate the sin from the sinner. God doesn't send lies and murders to Hell, He sends liars and murderers to Hell.

Caller: ... well, still, we're not evil.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

The reason I bring this up is because of a witnessing encounter I had a couple of weeks ago with a young girl who could not get her mind wrapped around mankind's evil nature. In explaining to her how one lie makes a person a liar, just like one murder makes a person a murderer, she turned this idea upside-down and asked the opposite.

"Suppose," she asked, "you have a man who is completely wicked. He does evil all day and all night. But on one occasion, he does something benevolent. He heals someone of a wound. Wouldn't that one healing make the man a healer?"

To show her the problem with this thought, I pointed her to Heaven. "Heaven is a perfect place, right?" She nodded her head. "And if anything imperfect entered into Heaven, it would no longer be a perfect place, right?" I could see that she was slightly confused by this idea.

"Imagine for a moment that you have two buckets of paint. One is completely white, and one is completely black. If you put even a single drop of black paint into that white bucket, it's no longer white, right?" She agreed. "From that point on, it's a shade of gray, even if it's a tiny little bit.

"Now, no matter how much you pour white paint into the black bucket, even if it overflowed over, it would still be a shade of gray as well. You can never remove the blackness from the bucket. This is the same with what you are talking about."

We continued talking about how the bad person cannot enter Heaven without corrupting it, and no many how many good things someone does, they cannot erase their own wickedness. This made sense to her, but she still did not like hearing how we, mankind, are essentially bad, wicked, and evil.

The truth is that we all think that we are all good (Proverbs 20:6). We all think that what we do is right (Proverbs 21:2). But, our hearts are deceitfully wicked (Jeremiah 17:9). None of us do good (Romans 3:10). All of our works are like filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6).

Mankind is evil. And unless God changes us, we never see it.