Kyle Cupp decodes the contradictory elements of many religious symbols:
[T]he Christian conception of evil as a stain or blemish that the cleansing waters of baptism remove envisions evil as a kind of thing, as something with being, and yet, in the same tradition, evil is also considered as a privation, as a lack of a good that ought to be there, as not a thing at all, as not having any being. These two conceptions of evil aren’t entirely compatible, and yet both are very much at home in the same faith tradition. …
Ultimately what we know about evil, or anything else that we use figurative language to conceptualize, cannot be made into a single, coherent, all-encompassing conception. Its truth is not one, but many, at least in so far as we have its truth figuratively in mind.
The Dish 