Oh, those silly Abrahamic monotheists.
The point that is being buried in wonderful and memserizing detail (and I really have read all this stuff with delight) is the concept of theological demonization.
Is the US the great Satan?
Here is some junk of mine dredged up from some encyclopedia entries I wrote.
Through the centuries of recorded history the embodiment of evil has been called many names: Satan, Devil, Serpent, Antichrist, Mephistopheles, Lucifer, Witch, Demon, Mara, Beelzebub, Belial, Black Cat, Beast. These are the tangible forms of evil, not mere metaphysical sinister forces with no meat to their bones. But who is the master and who the servant? Even if we agree that in Western thought the Devil or Satan are the principal choreographers from Hell, they are not seen as identical figures over time.
While the metaphysical idea of evil appears across time and place, Peter Stanford observes that the figure of the Devil has ancestry in “the ancient civilizations of the Near East and in Judaism and Islam” (1996, 2). The roots may trace to Set, the Egyptian god, or Ahriman, the Zoroastrian force of evil. The word Devil originally derives from the word for “slanderer” while Satan comes from "accuser," but these figures appear variously throughout history as a tester, a tempter, or a trickster. It seems the Devil is in the details.
Pagel finds in early Christianity, “the use of Satan to represent one’s enemies [which] lends to conflict a specific kind of moral and religious interpretation, in which ‘we’ are God’s people and ‘they’ are God’s enemies, and ours as well” (1996, xix). Pagels quips, “Satan has, after all, made a kind of profession out of being the ‘other’ ” (1996, xviii).
Demonization depends on dualism, which tolerates no middle ground in disputes. Dualism refuses to acknowledge complexity, nuance, or ambiguity in debate, and promotes hostility toward those who suggest coexistence, toleration, pragmatism, compromise, or mediation. This binary model of good versus evil is found in the spiritual and secular beliefs of many cultures.
When demonization takes place, enemies are created. Aho observes that our notions of the enemy “in our everyday life world,” is that the “enemy’s presence in our midst is a pathology of the social organism serious enough to require the most far-reaching remedies: quarantine, political excision, or, to use a particularly revealing expression, liquidation and expulsion” (1994:107-121). The logical end game of demonization is discrimination or violence. If the enemy is truly evil, then why not kill them for the common good? Demonization has played a crucial role in facilitating genocide during the past century—ethnic Armenians by Turkish nationalists; Jews and the Roma (Gypsies) during the German Nazi regime; in Cambodian based on class and education; ethnic Chinese by Indonesian nationalists.
More recent social science demonstrates that demonization is a habit found across various sectors of society among people who are no more prone to mental illness than the rest of society. The “banality of evil”, as Arendt observed, is that ordinary people can become willing--even eager--participants in brutality and mass murder justified by demonization of scapegoated groups in a society, (1963). Langer raises this as a troubling issue regarding the Nazi genocide:
“The widespread absence of remorse among the accused in postwar trials indicates that we may need...to accept the possibility of a regimen of behavior that simply dismisses conscience as an operative moral factor. The notion of the power to kill, or to authorize killing of others, as a personally fulfilling activity is not appealing to our civilized sensibilities; even more threatening is the idea that this is not necessarily a pathological condition, but an expression of impulses as native to our selves as love and compassion,” (1995:182).
-Chip Berlet
Copyrighted material, dont mess with it. Copyright enforced through the evil eye by these entities:
Encyclopedia of Millennialism and Millennial Movements. Richard A. Landes, ed., (Berkshire Reference Works; Routledge encyclopedias of religion and society). New York: Routledge, 2000.
Encyclopedia of Fundamentalism. Brenda Brasher and Jeffrey Kaplan, eds., (Berkshire Reference Works; Routledge encyclopedias of religion and society). New York: Routledge, forthcoming.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Chris Brooke
> Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2001 5:47 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: Re: Tee Vee
>
>
> >At 11:16 AM 10/10/01 -0500, you wrote:
> >
> >>thus you see in any number of the books of the prophets,
> competitions with
> >>other people's gods, which yahweh wins, natch. there's one
> particularly
> >>well-known episode, but it's slippping my mind, at the moment.
> >
> >Baal? (who is an incarnation of a Ugaritic deity if I'm not
> >mistaken). I can't remember if there is a connection with Anat
> >('death').
>
> Elijah's contest with four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal is at
> 1st Kings 18:21-40.
>
> C.
> --
>