Obviously, and appropriately, what your religion teaches you about goodness is what most of us emphasize about our faiths. But I would suggest that what your religion teaches you about evil is equally, if not more important. This is a topic that deserves a lot of study, there is so much to explore here, I hope I can revisit the question in subsequent posts.
The Jewish and Christian narrative about the Devil differs from the version we have in Islam, in ways that may seem minor, but which, I think have a significant impact on our respective views on evil. The same applies to the concept of sin. Furthermore, in Islam we have the concept of the nafs versus the ruh, which very much presaged Freud’s conception of the Ego and the Id, and even more so, Carl Jung’s idea of the persona and the shadow self. I think Muslims have long possessed an understanding of evil far more complex and nuanced than other Monotheistic faiths.
When you understand, for instance, that Satan has no power in and of himself, except that he calls you to evil, and you choose either to respond or reject; this leads to a multitude of related conclusions about human behaviour. This is something quite different from the implications of the phrase “the Devil made me do it”.
I think it is also significant that, in Islam, we are taught that, by and large, evil is chosen through a rational process; albeit a flawed one. We are told that Shaytaan makes the evil thing appear good to us. In other words, it almost dismisses the possibility of evil people; rather, there are people who have allowed themselves to rationalize an evil act into being a genuinely proper thing to do. And hence, we have the incredible graciousness of the Quranic description of sin as “self-oppression”.
There is no denial of responsibility, and no hint that one is irresistibly coerced into wrongdoing; nevertheless, there is a reasonable limit on the extent of condemnation, and it is mixed with a sense of pity. “You have convinced yourself that you were right to do the wrong thing, you chose, it occurred by your agency alone, and you are responsible for it; but this does not mean that you are inherently wicked, and ultimately, you have harmed yourself by what you did.”
And, appropriately, in Islam, the atonement for wrongdoing is undertaken through the same process of individual responsibility and reason…