CHRISTIAN CLAIM THAT EVIL IS A LACK NOT A CREATED THING IN THE LIGHT OF DIRECT EVIL-DOING

 
The Christian belief that good is real and evil is a bad attempt at good is interesting. It is at the root of the belief that there is no war or fight between evil and good because good was there first and is the default. Evil is the attacker punching above its weight and thus is nothing important.

It blames you if evil does not feel that way right now.  Human nature tries to find something it likes in everything in order to cope or to quell the pain of compassionate feelings.  To do this to honour God and affirm that evil is an abuse of good and thus of him is totally unacceptable.  Totally.
 
You don't need to be a Christian or even a believer in God to think that evil is just good that has lost its way. But such a belief can be very dangerous if you are wrong. It borders on arguing that you need do nothing about evil for good will handle it anyway. It borders on saying that maybe your efforts to deal with evil are not what paid off after all.  The evil was going to disintegrate with our without your help.
 
In the past, people always thought that evil and suffering were directly administered by God. Many people without relevant education in the developed world today think the same thing.
 
Before it was known that bacteria were causing many human diseases, people believed that God was causing the illness directly. He was putting the rot into a limb scheduled for a cruel painful amputation. God was putting the gangrene in. To believers, being upset about your sins and going to get forgiveness means that evil of being upset is good in that case. So the evil of gangrene must be good for some reason. To cut off the limb is to defy God. It is trying to correct God. The notion does nothing to discourage the causing of suffering but encourages letting it happen. If God makes only good and evil is merely good in the wrong place, God is still good despite putting gangrene in a person. He is still good for doing this for gangrene has a good side - for example it is being a good disease by doing destruction. In that case then he might not mind us doing nothing about suffering or even causing it. He can delegate the authority to us to cause suffering on the basis that we are making only good and not causing the failings in that goodness for the failings are not real things.
 
That people would adore a God who they see as doing direct evil is frankly disturbing. Even if they don't do that any more, we are still left wondering what kind of hearts people have when it comes to God.
 
God takes life. Is death then the mere absence of life?       

Death is probably the best example we know of evil.

If evil is the absence of good and no more, then death is the absence of life and no more. But death is a power that keeps the cells from living. When electrical activity dies out in the body other forces with no visible kinetic energy take over. These are the same forces that make a stone a non-living entity.

If evil is misplaced good, then why isn't death misplaced life?

God has to replace the power of life with a power that makes the body lifeless. Lifelessness is a power. A piece of metal is full of power when it is heated but when it cools another power takes over, cold. You can't say that heat is the mere absence of cold or that cold is the mere absence of heat for that makes no sense. They are powers. To say that death is just the absence of life is irreverent to the thing that matters most, life. If life is good then it follows that God should have made everything alive for the absence of life is evil. The defence fails totally to defend God’s reputation for he makes the forces and uses the forces that are death and which cause death. It slanders him while boasting that it salvages his good name. To claim that God doesn't kill is to belittle those who die for they know he does.

The Bible is said to talk as if God did evil directly when it in fact he is the first cause and it is secondary causes that do the evil.  So they deny that is direct.  But the Bible DOES clearly and repeatedly teach that God DOES EVIL DIRECTLY.  He gave the commands to have sinners killed and gave the commands directly.  A sabbath breaker was stoned to death at God's command.  Jesus walked to his death deliberately and thus harmed his killers if you believe the killer harms themselves as much as the victim.  That was a direct evil too.