As the Christian devil’s entire spiel is about coming at you through temptation, you’d imagine Christians in the USA would ever consider scrutinizing the things they find most appealing. Evil achieves more with the icon carried on high than by a rando in funny clothes existing.
Maybe it’s not the evil per se of our favorite icons and institutions which do the most harm, but their lack of good. Cults of personality are never democratic, and enriching or benefiting one potential is something other than enriching or benefiting all potentials. Everyone really seems to define equality as the sharing of luxury, privilege and entitlement, disregarding how those matters only grow from entrapment, extortion and exploitation. It’s the sharing of burdens, namely the burden of responsibility for rights, resources and opportunities. To deny that, to argue on behalf of whichever more promising limelight of celebrated exceptionals for dominance or superiority, lives by the grace of all the many peoples surviving without, regardless the backstory. Which is probably what any manifestation of evil wants. To say your most prized possession holds greater value than the life of the worst person you will ever encounter, the devil would surely agree.
If the devil cannot tempt the man who has it all, then it suits the devil that as many people as possible be made to go without.
I’d bet your immortal soul those who act for god and country are actually just so ashamed of their natural urges, their most personal and private biases, desires, fetishes, quirks, whims and wishes, as to realize they require masking. The story of the moral then would be the less we embrace symbology, striving for our own psyches to inform culture as opposed to the versa vice of culture informing our identities, the more honest we are with ourselves and with those we encounter on our merry way. Going the road less traveled means decidedly not standing in a line. You get lost in crowds, especially if you’re dependent on human capital or human shields carrying you to the final curtain’s call. Consider how you would have no coat-tails for others to ride, were you simply to donate the thing to charity. As nightmares are freely ongoing whenever dreams are dependent on price, so too would sacrificing be freely ongoing, wherever salvation hangs on a cost.
AA has a line, about a drunk man’s actions being the sober man’s thoughts, and I’m reminded of that in the vicarious relationship of imaginary friends, manufactured on the fly to play the sadistic ideal or the masochistic scapegoat or both depending on the immediate gratifications of the believer.
To despise a person, place or thing is to deny it the power to tempt you, so it is absolutely maudlin to project such methodology for evil upon the matters you hate. Temptation arrives by what you think you need or want in life. Hence, the phrase “power corrupts” as coined by a bishop many years back, in his conclusion after summarizing all the Vatican archives had to say about the church’s conduct throughout the Inquisition. Every iota of space and time we gift-wrap for people already possessing more rights, resources and opportunities than ourselves means that much less available for the people who, by the tragedy of unintelligent designs enforced by common arrogance of church or state or industry, cannot experience for themselves whatever fleeting hopes or bliss to come of our own life, liberty or pursuits of happiness.
And should said power or power’s synonyms in wealth or authority be kept over a single life, temptation itself is freed of any struggle. No matter the appeals or assertions, if you or what you believe in might justify under any circumstances anybody anywhere knowing lesser rights, resources or opportunities than yourself or your icons, no devil would be tempted to argue against what suffering that results. For if it is indeed the lord’s work which calls you to make sacrifices of yourself in this life, then surely it is the devil’s calling you to sacrifice anything and everything but.
There are people whose vices have them dependent upon blaming the devil for anything under the sun, taking liberties while never granting them, and there are people with at least the potential for accountability.
When you deny others the chance to reveal themselves, you allow the opportunity for monsters to maintain an air of normalcy. Fox viewers as one of endless examples, never see or hear their political, religious or industrial icons at their worst, so they know no better than to grant audience and acceptance. News media should really be managed under the umbrella of the Department of Education. Because when students and news audiences either one are met only by what they’re already familiar or comfortable with, the schools and news platforms fail their one purpose of informing. It’s no less backwards than the online social networks, where all are enlivened to self-segregate into containment spells of virtual gated communities, blocking and muting and turning a blind eye to everything unflattering to who they wish to be, wish to befriend or wish to fuck. The only growth, a colonizing of whatever appeases or conforms to the ego’s abhorrence of diversity or equality. In business the opposite of diversity and equality both is monopoly, in genetics the opposite of diversity and equality both is inbreeding. What’s the opposite to either diversity or equality in thought and feeling?
Many conservatives erroneously believe free speech guarantees audience and acceptance, meeting self-determination with temper-tantrums. But many liberals wrongly believe that a preemptive sufficiency and appropriateness of audience and acceptance is what dictates whether speech can be free or not. I always understood free speech protections as not mandating for or against any specific speech short of that producing calls for the death of anybody anywhere, thus allowing everybody to democratically elect for themselves whether to replicate the thoughts and feelings of others, or to explore and harvest their own. But if personal responsibility actually existed anywhere, no justifications for governance would.
We don’t have to approve of matters vile toward others, but also do we not have to love anyone or gift them esteem sight unseen. I see self-determination as the basic human right. If we’ve no freedom and liberty to fail spectacularly in being loved, we may as well be Creationists performing scripted entertainment free of any personal responsibility. Anyone who can only function in comfort and familiarity is condemning themselves before the non-existential threats in life even get their morning coffee. Regardless of how belittling it reads, thoughts and feelings are exclusively subjective experiences, unless you’re a sadomasochist. This is why it’s so natural to disavow varying points of view. But you can’t challenge evil by pretending it doesn’t exist inside your comfort levels. To paraphrase myself, all it takes for evil to prevail is for everyone to see themselves as good.