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Temple of the Sacred Spiral
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A generally accepted definition of evil is hard to come by and yet we all have some understanding of its nature. Perhaps it is no accident that 'evil' is 'live' spelt backwards, for evil is in opposition to life; it is that which opposes the 'life force' and involves unnecessary killing, killing that is not required for biological survival. Killing is not restricted to corporeal murder, but also that which kills the spirit such as sentience, mobility, awareness, growth, autonomy and will. Evil is that force residing either inside or outside human beings that seeks to kill life or liveliness deliberately. Goodness is the opposite i.e. that which promotes life and liveliness deliberately.
There are a number of different theological models of evil. They all have in common a failure to adequately distinguish between human evil, such as murder, and natural evil, such as death and destruction resulting from fire, flood and earthquake. From a Pagan point of view the latter is seen as the natural, though perhaps dark side, of nature; a necessary cleansing destruction and part of the 'cycle of life'; the former from a Pagan point of view is what needs to concern us as evil.
The three major living theological models of evil are:
Human good and human evil can be seen best as a kind of continuum. Some of us are very, very good and some of us are very, very evil and the vast majority are somewhere in between. However, just as there is a tendency for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer, there is a tendency for the good to get better and the bad to get worse. Erich Fromm stated: "Our capacity to choose changes constantly with our practice of life; the longer we continue to make the wrong decisions the more our heart hardens; the more often we make the right decision the more our heart softens, or better perhaps, comes alive … each step in life which increases my self-confidence, my integrity, my courage, my conviction, also increases my capacity to choose the desirable alternative until eventually it becomes more difficult for me to choose the undesirable rather than the desirable action. On the other hand, each act of surrender and cowardice weakens me, opens the path for more acts of surrender and eventually freedom is lost. Between the extreme when I can no longer do a wrong act and the extreme where I have lost my freedom to right action, there are innumerable degrees of freedom of choice. In the practice of life the degree of freedom to choose is different at any given moment. If the degree of freedom to choose the good is great it needs less effort to choose the good, but if small it takes a great effort, help from others and favourable circumstances … most people fail in the art of living, not because they are inherently bad or so without will they cannot lead a better life; they fail because they do not wake up and see when they stand at a fork in the road and have to decide; they are not aware when life asks them a question and when they still have alternative answers, then with each step along the wrong road it becomes increasingly difficult for them to admit that they are on the wrong road, often only because they have to admit that they must go back to the first wrong turn and must accept the fact that they have wasted energy and time (the heart of man: it's genius for good and evil)."
The issue of free will, like so many great truths, is a paradox; on the one hand free will is a reality - we can be free to choose without conditioning or any other factors, on the other hand we cannot choose freedom. There are only two submission states of being - submission to the highest ideals, or refusal to submit to anything beyond one's own will, which refusal automatically enslaves one to the forces of evil as discussed above.
It is not 'sins' per se which characterize evil people, but the subtlety and persistence and consistency of their sins. This is because the central defect of evil is not the 'sin' but the refusal to acknowledge it. Evil deeds do not an evil person make, otherwise we would all be evil because we all do evil things. Evil people can be defined not by the illegality of their deeds or the magnitude of their sins but by the consistency of their sins; their destructiveness is remarkably consistent because they are characterized by their absolute refusal to tolerate the sense of their own sinfulness. Evil people do not tolerate the 'trial' of being displeasing to themselves. They go out of their way to invent excuses for their deeds and sacrifice others to preserve their self-image of perfection. This is called 'scapegoating' and evil people are chronic scapegoaters. Strangely enough evil people are often destructive because they are attempting to destroy evil but the problem is they misplace the locus of the evil. Instead of destroying others they should be destroying the sickness within themselves. As life often threatens their self-image of perfection they are often busily engaged in hating and destroying that life, usually in the name of righteousness. The fault is not that they hate life - it is that they do not hate the sinful part of themselves.
The cause of this failure of self-hatred, this failure to be displeasing to oneself, which is the central sin at the root of scapegoating behaviour of evil people is not an absent conscience. Psychopaths are conscienceless and are bothered and worried by very little, including their own criminality, they attempt to hide their crimes but in feeble, careless and poorly-planned ways, and there is almost a quality of innocence to their lack of worry and concern. In evil people this is far from the case. They are utterly dedicated to preserving their self-image of perfection and unceasingly engaged in the effort to maintain the appearance of moral purity. They worry about this a great deal. They are acutely sensitive to social 'norms' and what others may think of them. The words 'image', 'appearance' and 'outwardly' are crucial to the understanding of the morality of evil. While they appear to lack any motivation to be good, they intensely desire to appear good. Their 'goodness' is all on a level of pretence. It is, in effect, a lie. This is why they are the "people of the lie".
The lie is designed not so much to deceive others as to deceive themselves for they cannot and will not tolerate the pain of self-reproach. However the self-deceit is unnecessary if the evil had no sense of 'right' or 'wrong', like the criminal psychopath. We lie only when we are attempting to cover up something we know to be illicit. We come to a paradox. Evil people feel themselves to be perfect but they have an unacknowledged sense of their own evil nature and it is from this that they are frantically trying to flee. The essential component of evil therefore is not an absence of a sense of imperfection but an unwillingness to tolerate that sense and a desperation to avoid this awareness. Rather than blissfully lacking a sense of morality, like the psychopath, they are continually engaged in sweeping the evidence of their evil under the rug of their own conscienceness; the problem is not a defect of conscience but the effort to deny the conscience it's due. We become evil by attempting to hide from ourselves. The wickedness of the evil is not committed directly but indirectly as a part of this 'cover up' process. Evil originates, not in the absence of guilt, but in the effort to escape it.
What distinguishes evil people from the rest of us is the specific type of pain they are running away from. They do not avoid pain, nor are they lazy. On the contrary, they are likely to exert themselves more than most in their continuing effort to obtain and maintain an image of high respectability. They even undergo great hardships in their search for 'status'. It is only one particular kind of pain they cannot tolerate: the pain of their own conscience, the pain of the realization of their own imperfection.
Why do evil people not receive treatment?
Since they will do almost anything to avoid the particular pain that comes from self-examination, under ordinary circumstances the evil are the last people who would ever come to psychotherapy - they hate the light of goodness that shows them up, the light of scrutiny that exposes them, the light of truth that penetrates their deception. Psychotherapy is a 'light-shedding' process par excellence. The most significant reason we know so little scientifically about human evil is simply that the evil are so extremely reluctant to be studied.
Since the central defect of evil is not one of conscience, the question is as to where is does reside. Dr Scott-Peck believes it resides in self-absorption or narcissism.
Narcissism can take many forms and some are normal in childhood but not in adulthood; some are more distinctly pathological than others. Malignant narcissism is characterized by an unsubmitted will. All adults who are mentally healthy submit themselves one way or another to something higher than themselves, their God, Goddess, truth, love or some other ideal; they do what this high ideal wants them to do rather than that they would desire. They believe in what is true, rather than what they would like to be true. However the evil in the conflict between guilt and their will strike out the guilt so that the will will win. Evil people are men and women of strong determination to have their own way. This inner pride is often labeled as the first among the sins by Christian authorities, by the Sin of Pride they do not mean the sense of legitimate achievement one may enjoy after a job well done, which is part of healthy self-confidence and a realistic self-worth, but rather a kind of pride that unrealistically denies our inherent imperfection, a kind of over-weaning pride or arrogance that prompts people to reject or even attack the judgement implied by the day-to-day evidence of their own inadequacy. In Buber's words the malignantly narcissistic insist upon "affirmation independent of all findings". Dr Scott Peck feels that evil seems to run in families but this does not resolve the old nature versus nurture controversy, evil could run in families because it is genetic or because it is inherited, or even learned by a child in defense against evil parents. A leading theory of the genesis of pathological narcissism is that it is a defensive phenomenon. Narcissism is generally something we grow out of during the course of normal development through a stable childhood under the care of understanding and loving parents. However if the childhood is traumatic or the parents cold and unloving, an infantile narcissism will be preserved as a kind of psychological fortress to protect the child against the vicissitudes of it's intolerable life. Thus children may become evil in order to defend themselves against the onslaughts of parents who themselves are evil.
When a child is grossly confronted by significant evil in its parents, it will most likely mis-interpret the situation and believe that evil resides in itself. When confronted by evil the wisest and most secure adult will usually experience confusion; for the naďve child it is devastating. Add to this the fact that evil people, by refusing to acknowledge their own failures actually desire to project their evil onto others, it is no wonder that children mis-interpret the process by hating themselves and yet, it is more appropriate that the 'sick' ones are regarded as not the child, but the parents.
Evil should be treated as a disease but we cannot even begin to deal with the disease until we identify it by its proper name. Many people would not consider evil as an illness, some for emotional reasons e.g. we are accustomed to feel pity and sympathy for those who are ill but evil invokes in us anger, disgust and hate. There are three rational reasons that make us hesitate to regard evil as an illness.
The first holds that people should not be considered ill unless they are suffering pain or disability. Evil people certainly do not define themselves as ill, nor do they appear to be suffering. It is characteristic of the evil that in their narcissism they believe there is nothing wrong with them, that they are psychologically perfect human specimens. However there are a host of physical diseases that are wholly asymptomatic in their early stages - hypertension is perhaps the commonest. If we define diseases only in terms of the suffering they currently produce then we must state that most cases of high blood pressure are not in fact disease, which seems absurd. In addition emotional suffering used to define disease is faulty, particularly when we realize that the most spiritually healthy and advanced among us suffer often in ways more agonizing than those experienced by the more ordinary. The evil deny the suffering of their guilt, the painful awareness of their sin and pass their pain onto others through projection and scapegoating; they themselves may not suffer but those around them do, they cause suffering. The evil create for those under their dominion a miniature 'sick' society. Therefore even using this defective definition of disease as one causing suffering we could define evil as fitting this if we allow the suffering to include the suffering of others.
The second reason for hesitating to call evil a disease is that someone who has a disease must be a victim. Certainly many illnesses seem like this but the others do not conform to such a pattern at all. Is a child who runs out on a street when he has been told not to but gets hit by a car a victim? Are people who deliberately smoke after being told that they will suffer a heart attack or get lung cancer victims? Is alcoholism a disease of a victim or is it self-inflicted. The issue of evil is similar. An individual's evil can almost always be traced to some extent to his or her childhood circumstances but it is always a choice one has made. We should therefore not define disease in terms of victimization or responsibility but rather that illness or disease is a defect in the structure of our bodies or personalities that prevents us from fulfilling our potential as human beings. Finally we should realize that the evil spend much of their psychic energy to maintain the pretence so characteristic of their evil, to prevent their conscience from affecting their undeserved good opinion of themselves.
The final argument against labeling evil as an illness is the belief that evil is a seemingly untreatable condition. However there are a whole host of disorders for which there is no treatment or cure but which we don't hesitate to call diseases; the majority of cancer, multiple sclerosis, mental deficiency. Even these days old age, seen as an inevitable concomitant of living is being regarded more and more as a disease process. The fact that we do not currently know how to treat evil in an individual is not reason to reject the idea of evil being a disease.
The designation of evil as a disease obligates us to approach evil with compassion. By their nature evil inspire in us a desire to destroy rather than to heal, to hate rather than to pity, but curing human evil does require love.
If evil is to be named a psychiatric disorder it is sufficiently unique to stand in a category all by itself. The characterizations of evil to be included as a new type of personality disorder as proposed by Dr Scott Peck are as follows:
Evil is not easy to recognize, identify or manage. In fact it is the most difficult of all things with which to cope. To come to terms with evil in one's parentage is perhaps the most difficult and painful psychological task a human being can be called on to face.
We all of us tend to be more or less self-centred in our dealings with others. We usually view any situation first and foremost from a standpoint of how it effects us personally and only as an afterthought do we bother to consider how it may effect someone else involved. Nonetheless, particularly if we care for the other person, we usually can and do think about his or her viewpoint which may well be different from ours.
Not so those who are evil. Theirs is a brand of narcissism so total that they seem to lack in whole or in part this capacity for empathy. Their narcissism makes the evil dangerous not only because it motivates them to scapegoat others but it deprives them of the restraint that results from empathy and respect for others, in addition to the fact that the evil need victims to sacrifice to their narcissism their narcissism permits them to ignore the humanity of their victims as well - as it gives them the motive for murder, it also renders them insensitive to the act of killing. The blindness of the narcissist to others can extend even beyond a lack of empathy; narcissists may not see others at all.
Each of us is unique, except in the mystical frame of reference, we are all separate entities. Our uniqueness makes each of us an "I-entity", it provides each of us with a separate identity, there are boundaries to the individual soul. In our dealings with each other we generally respect these boundaries. It is characteristic of - and pre-requisite for - mental health both that our own ego boundaries should be clear and that we should clearly recognize the boundaries of others. We must know where we end and others begin.
Another form of devastation that narcissistic intrusiveness can propagate is the symbiotic relationship; this refers to a mutually parasitic and destructive coupling. In the symbiotic relationship neither partner will separate from the other, even though it would obviously be beneficial to each if they could.
Mental health requires that the human will submit itself to something higher than itself. To function decently in this world we must submit ourselves to some principle that takes precedence over what we might want at any given moment. For the religious this principle is the Divine so they say, "Thy will, not mine, be done". But even non-religious submit themselves, whether they know it or not, to some higher power - be it truth or love, the needs of others or the demands of reality. Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.
The utter failure to submit oneself to reality is called autism, coming from the Greek root 'auto' meaning 'self'. The person who is autistic is oblivious to certain essential dimensions of reality. Such people literally live in a world of their own in which the self reigns supreme. In their mind there may be some connection between themselves and others but that connection has no bearing on reality. They may say they love everyone, spreading gifts and gentle kindness wherever they walk, but this may exclude the reality as to what they are actually doing and be made up of rules that they themselves make up and have no relationship to the rules e.g. their employer.
Autism is narcissism in its ultimate form. For the complete narcissist, others have no more psychological reality than a piece of furniture; narcissists only have what Martin Buber calls 'I-I' relationships. While these people may truly believe they love others, the love is all in their head and does not exist as any objective reality.
The evil seem to have a desire for power purely for its own sake, not in order to improve society, or to care for a family, or to make oneself a more effective person, or in any way accomplish anything creative; their thirst for power is subordinated to nothing higher than themselves. Evil can be defined as the exercise of holitical power i.e. the imposition of one's will upon others by overt or covert coercion in order to avoid spiritual growth. The evil are more likely than most to politically aggrandize themselves yet at the same time being unsubmitted to their extreme willfulness is likely to lead them into political debacles.
The evil are to be pitied, not hated, because they live their lives in sheer terror. Superficially they may appear fearless and in total control, however their insistence on controlling every aspect of relationships with others is rooted in panic, the dread that they might lose control.
Until now the focus has been on specific individuals labeled as evil, distinguished from the vast majority of other individuals. However human groups tend to behave in much the same way as human individuals except at a level that is more primitive and immature than one might expect. There is therefore a capacity for groups themselves to be evil e.g. the My Lai crimes and their cover up; the crimes themselves were evil, the cover up and the atrocious lying that served it are symptoms of evil as defined above and we can therefore confidently label this whole group as evil. Whole nations can be labeled as evil when they refuse to accept reality but continue to condone atrocious acts such as war and cover up what is being done in lies, the Vietnam war is one such example. It is not only individuals who continue to regress in times of stress but also in group settings. It is almost common knowledge that the best way to cement group cohesiveness is to ferment the group's hatred of an external enemy. Deficiencies within the group can be easily and painlessly overlooked by focussing attention on the deficiencies or sins of the 'out' group thus the Germans under Hitler could ignore their domestic problems by scapegoating the Jews. American troops failing to fight effectively in New Guinea in World War II could improve their moral by showing them movies of Japanese committing atrocious acts. But this use of narcissism, whether unconscious or deliberate is potentially evil. Evil individuals will flee self-examination guilt by blaming and attempting to destroy whatever or whoever highlights their deficiencies. This same malignant narcissistic behaviour comes naturally to groups.
We must remind ourselves in this consideration that nations are themselves a group and not the whole; specifically they are one of many political sub-groups of the human race which we call 'nation states'. The human race itself is but one of the enormous number of different life-forms of the planet. That we need remind ourselves of this at all is another reflection of our human narcissistic propensity to think only in terms of our own species.
We must also remind ourselves that evil has to do with killing. War is a form of large scale killing that we humans consider an acceptable instrument of national policy. All animals kill, and not necessarily just for food or self-defense. There is something unique about human killing. Human killing is not instinctual. One manifestation of the non-instinctual nature of human beings is the extraordinary variability of their behaviour and in regard to a form of killing - some love to hunt and others abhor it, still others are indifferent; not so with cats - all cats will hunt birds, given the opportunity.
The almost total lack of instincts, elaborate, pre-determined, stereotypic behaviour patterns is the most significant aspect of human nature. It is our lack of instincts that is responsible for the extraordinary variability and mutability of our nature and our behaviour. What replaces species wide instincts in human beings is learned individual choice; each of us is ultimately free to choose how we are going to behave. We are even free to reject what we have been taught and what is normal for our society. We may even reject the few instincts we have as do those who rationally choose celibacy or submit themselves to death by martyrdom. Free will is the ultimate human reality.
Since ours is the power to choose, we are free to choose wisely or stupidly, to choose well or badly, to choose evil or good. It is no wonder that we so often abuse it and that human behaviour, in comparison to that of the "lower" animals so often seems to get out of whack. Many animals may kill to protect their territory, but only a human could direct mass killing of his own species so as to protect his "interests" in a far distant land he has never set eyes upon.
For our human killing is a matter of choice. In order to survive we cannot not kill but we can choose how, when, where and what we kill. The moral complexities of such choices are enormous and often quite paradoxical. A person may become a vegetarian as an ethical choice in order to refrain from even the direct responsibility for killing; yet to survive he or she must still bear the responsibility for hacking living plants off at the roots and roasting the corpses thereof in ovens. What ethical sense does it make, for example, to kill a murderer as an example to convince others that killing is morally wrong?
Complex though the ethics of our choices to kill or not to kill may be, there is clearly one factor that contributes to unnecessary and obviously immoral killing: narcissism. One manifestation of our narcissism is that we are far more likely to kill that which is different from us than that which resembles us; the vegetarian feels guilty killing other animal life forms but not plant life forms. Caucasians have fewer compunctions about killing blacks or indians or anything else than we do about killing our fellow white men. Probably orientals find it easier to kill caucasians than a fellow oriental.
War today is at least as much a matter of national pride as of racial pride. What we call nationalism is more frequently a malignant national narcissism than it is a healthy satisfaction in the accomplishments of one's culture. In fact, to a large extent, it is nationalism that preserves the nation's state system. A century ago when it required weeks for a message to get from the United States to France the nation state system made sense. In our current age of instant global communication, as well as instant holocaust, much of the international political system has become obsolete. It is our national narcissism however that clings to our outmoded notions of sovereignty, prevents the development of effective international peace-keeping machinery.
Organized group intra-species mass killing - war - is a uniquely human form of behaviour. Because this behaviour has characterized essentially all cultures since the dawn of history, many have proposed that humans have an instinct for war; perhaps this is why hawks refer to themselves as realists and to the doves as fuzzy headed idealists. Idealists are people who believe in the potential of human nature for transformation but it is the most essential attribute of human nature that we have the mutability and freedom from instinct, that it is always within our power to change our nature. So it is actually the idealists who are on the mark and the realists who are off base.
To wage war may not be always necessarily evil but it is always a choice. Whenever there is war someone is at fault, one side or both are to blame, a wrong choice has been made somewhere. It is important to bear this in mind because it is customary these days for both sides in a war to proclaim themselves victims. This position of ethical hopelessness, this abrogation of our capacity for moral judgement is, in fact, one of the faces of evil. The war in Vietnam did not just happen, it was initiated by the British in 1945, sustained by the French until their defeat in 1954 and then, with peace in sight, it was reinitiated and sustained by Americans for the next eighteen years. Australia also got into the act at this point. America has since been judged the aggressor in this war. It was the American and Australian choices that were most morally reprehensible, we were the villains.
But how could we be villains? Others yes, but surely not us? If we were villains we must have been unwitting. As a people we were too lazy to learn and too arrogant to think we needed to learn. We felt that whatever way we happened to perceive things was the right way without any further study. Whatever we did was right to do without reflection. With our laziness and narcissism feeding each other we marched off to impose our will on the Vietnamese people by bloodshed, with practically no idea of what was involved. Only when America, the mightiest nation on Earth, consistently suffered defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese did America or Australia, in significant numbers, begin to take the trouble to learn what had been done.
We are living in the age of the institution. Today all but a small minority devote their working lives to larger and larger organizations. Responsibility become diffused within groups, so much so that within larger groups it may become non-existent. As they become larger our institutions become soul-less and faceless. We must metaphorically exorcise our institutions. The military industrial complex that played such a large role in Vietnam, and continues to be the primary creator of the grotesqueness of the arms race, submitted to nothing but the profit motive, which is no submission at all, rather, pure self-interest. It is possible for the profit motive to be operative and at the same time submitted to higher values of truth and love and if we cannot somehow engineer this submission we are doomed. The total failure of submission is always evil. For a group, for an institution, for a society as well as for an individual. Unless we can heal ourselves by submission to a higher force, the forces of death will win the day and we will consume ourselves in our own evil will. The task, therefore, of preventing group evil, including war itself, is clearly the task or eradicating the laziness and narcissism. Customarily, when we wish to influence group behaviour we first attempt to do so by influencing the individual group leaders; if our access to these is blocked we turn to the lowliest of members and start seeking grass root support. Either way it is the individual who turns. For the group mind is ultimately determined by the minds of the individuals who make up the group. This is why the individual is sacred for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle is waged and ultimately won or lost. The effort to eradicate group evil, including war, must therefore be directed towards the individual and this is a process of education. Children, therefore, should be taught that laziness, particularly intellectual laziness, and laziness of self-examination, and narcissism are at the very root of all human evil. The natural tendency of the individual in a group is to forfeit his or her ethical judgement to the leader but this tendency should be resisted. It is each individual's responsibility to continually examine themselves for laziness and narcissism and to purify themselves accordingly in the knowledge that such personal purification is required not only for the growth of their own spirit but also for the salvation of the world.
If we examine the matter of evil being a moral judgement more closely we would see that it is impossible, and itself evil, to refrain from making moral judgements. An attitude of "I'm OK", "You're OK" may have a certain place in facilitating our social relationships but only a place. Was Hitler OK? Jim Jones? The medical experiments conducted on the Jews in German concentration camps? The LSD experiments conducted by the CIA? Even in everyday life should we take the first person who comes along to fill the position for a job or should we interview a number of applicants and judge between them? Should we criticize our children for cheating, lying or stealing, or should we give them an excess of sympathy, an excess of tolerance and an excess of permissiveness? The fact of the matter is that we cannot lead decent lives without making judgements in general and moral judgements in particular and the most particular moral judgement, of course, is in that of self-criticism. To first cast out the log of their own eye and then shall we see clearly to cast out the mote of our brothers eye.
The issue then is not whether to judge, we must, the question is how and when to judge wisely. Our great spiritual leaders have given us the basics but since in the end we must make moral judgements it makes sense to further refine our wisdom with the application of scientific method and knowledge of evil when appropriate. The danger of cloaking moral judgement in scientific authority is a pitfall because we ascribe to science much more authority than it deserves; one reason is because few of us understand the limitations of science another is that we are too dependent upon authority in general. It is salutary to realize that what can be paraded as scientific fact one day can be seen as simply the current belief of some scientists the next day. Science is not truth with a capital T. Scientific knowledge is, in fact, the best available approximation of truth in the judgement of the majority of scientists who work in the particular specialty involved. Truth is not something we possess but rather a goal towards which we strive. Fortunately in our culture scientists love to argue with each other, debate is the cornerstone of genuine science, science without debate and exuberant scepticism is not science at all; for this safeguard we have against the misuse of the concept of evil by scientists is to ensure that science remains scientific and grounded in a democratic culture in which open debate is encouraged.
The gravest misuse of science may be contributed not to those scientists themselves who proclaim personal opinions in the guise of scientific truth, but to the public, industry, government and poorly informed individuals which employs scientific findings and concepts for dubious purposes. Although the atomic bomb was made possible through the work of scientists it was politicians who made the decision to build it and the military dropped it.
With the rarest of exceptions, scientific research is no longer conducted in a single laboratory by a solitary independent seeker of truth for it's own sake but is mostly financed by government or industry in the form of group efforts according to executive agendas. Modern science has become so inextricably interwoven with big business and big government that there is no longer such a thing as pure science. The end result is that science is detached from religious insights and verities which leads to the Strange-lovian lunacy of the arms race; just as the end result of a religion unsubmitted to scientific self-doubt and scrutiny is the Rasputinian lunacy of Jonestown.
There are profound reasons to suspect that traditional value-free science is no longer serving the needs of mankind. When we lived at the mercy of beasts in the forest, flood and drought, the famine and infectious disease, our survival depended upon our race to control such vast external forces. We had neither time nor need for much introspection, but as we tamed these external threats with our traditionally value-free science and it's resultant technology eternal dangers have arisen with proportional rapidity, the major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world. Unless we can now tame and transmute the potential for evil in the human soul we can be lost, and how can we do this unless we are willing to look at our own evil with the same thoroughness, detached discernment, and rigorous methodology which we subject to the external world.
In fact, even in primitive times there was much time given to the study of morality, human spirit and spiritual growth, but it is with the end of debate on these issues that has been imposed by an authoritarian Christian church, followed by science which has been unsubmitted to a higher will, apart from the profit motive, that has led us to lose the way spiritually and therefore lose the way to make appropriate moral judgements. One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Adolf Eichmann case was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane; we equate sanity with a sense of justness, humaneness, with prudence, the capacity to love and understand other people; we rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness and destruction and now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous; it is the sane ones, the well adapted ones who can, without qualms and without nausea, aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared.
We are all in combat against evil. When we enter the fray, it is tempting to take hold of some seeming simple solution such as we ought to bomb the hell out of them, even if we are willing to blow ourselves up in the process of stomping out evil. However, although evil is anti-life it is itself a form of life. If we kill those who are evil we will become evil ourselves, we will be killers; if we attempt to deal with evil by destroying it we will also end up destroying ourselves spiritually if not physically and we are likely to take some innocent people with us as well.
Like the patient we must begin by giving up the simple notion that we can effectively conquer evil by destroying it. Evil can be defeated by goodness, or more specifically, evil can be conquered only by love. This does not mean loving the evil but rather to embrace ugliness with the sole motive of hope that in some unknown way a transformation into beauty might occur. The myth of kissed frogs turning into princes remains; how does the kissing turn it into a prince? How does the methodology of love work? How does it heal?
The first task of love is self-purification. At this point the boundaries of the soul can become transparent and a unique light will then shine forth from the individual and by the use of spiritual and psychological alchemy absorb and convert the evil of others. There are dozens of ways to deal with evil and several ways to conquer it. All of them are facets of the truth that the only ultimate way to conquer evil is to let it be smothered within a willing, living, human being and when it is absorbed there like blood within a sponge, or a spear into one's heart, it loses it's power and goes no further. A willing and loving sacrifice is required. The individual healer must allow his or her own soul to become the battleground and must sacrificially absorb the evil. It is the mysterious alchemy whereby the victim then becomes the victor. As C S Lewis writes in "The Lie, The Witch and The Wardrobe": "When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards".
Perhaps the greatest question in theology, particularly dualistic theology, is why God/Goddess, having created Satan in the first place didn't wipe it out after its rebellion. The question presupposes that God/Goddess would wipe anything out, it assumes that God/Goddess can punish and kill. Perhaps the answer is that God/Goddess gave Satan free will and God/Goddess cannot destroy, only create.
The point is, however, that God/Goddess does not punish, to create us in his image God/Goddess gave us free will; to have done otherwise would have made us puppets yet to give us free will God/Goddess had to foreswear the use of force against us. We do not have free will when there is a gun pointed at our back. It is not necessary that God/Goddess lacks the power to destroy us or to punish us, but that in love for us, God/Goddess has painfully and terribly chosen never to use it; intervening only to help, never to hurt; having foresworn the use of power against us if we refuse help, God/Goddess has no recourse but weeping and watch us punish ourselves. In the Old Testament the God/Goddess is clearly punitive but in the New Testament with Christ, God/Goddess suffers death at the hands of human evil and does not raise a finger against the persecutors.
Of the holocaust, as well as lesser evils, it is often asked "How could a loving God/Goddess allow such a thing to happen?" Having forsaken force God/Goddess is impotent to prevent the atrocities we commit upon one another and can only continue to grieve with us. God/Goddess will offer himself/herself in all his/her wisdom but he/she cannot make us choose to abide with him/her.
For the moment then, God/Goddess tormented weights upon us through one holocaust after another. It may seem to us that we are doomed by this strange God/Goddess who reigns in weakness, however, in this weakness the battle will be won against evil.
There is a tendency in Wiccan and Neo-Pagan circles to insist that any concept of sin or evil is devoid in their religious belief system and Starhawk, one of the prominent figures in modern Wicca, echoes these sentiments in her book The Spiral Dance. This tendency assumes that "sin" is an invention of Judeo/Christian religious tradition, or based on victorian prudishness, or the last vestiges of patriarchal religious manipulations designed to keep humanity in the chains of guilt and fear. However the concept of "sin" in human relationships with one another and with divinity pre-existed Judaism and Christianity. Early Pagan theologies are based on moral ethics and ritual purity. A consciousness of sinfulness is pervasive in ancient religious preoccupation with sacrifice and salvage. In Pagan Babylon the penitential psalms were characterized by sentiments that affirmed that none of the human race was exempt from sin and that all had committed offences. Confession of sins was a liturgical requirement for initiation into the mysteries of Samothrace; the Egyptians, Hittites, Babylonians, Sumerians and Greeks all had concrete conceptualizations of sin and it's affect upon the human/human and human/divine relationships, though their approach and emphasis varied from culture to culture. Native American tribes insist on public confession of personal sins at special times, understanding that sin can be a barrier to harmonious relationship between individuals and deities; many liturgical invocations to the Goddess implore forgiveness for their sins and to look upon the penitent with favour: "Oh my mistress, make me to know my deed, establish for me a place of rest! Absolve my sins, lift up my face!" (invocation to Ishtar). Every major religion of the world has a concept of sin within its belief system and morality. For Pagans to pretend they can sidestep this issue to show liberation from personality inhibiting rules and regulations is fraught with shallowness and deceptive thinking.
Theology of sin is important because it forces some Pollyanna Pagans to confront and consider the brutal reality of evil and negativity which does pervade the world, the human collective unconscious and the submerged shadows of our own individual psyches. No power of positive thinking and New Age optimism that proclaims evil is only a figment of matter-bound imagination will mitigate the chilling spectre of a civilisation polluting itself in the noxiousness of its own miasma.
However there is some sympathy for the attitude to deny the existence of sin and evil because of the negative conditioning that most of us have received from the religious establishment which equates sins with such petty practices as playing cards, drinking of beer, smoking, dancing, using condoms or having sex in any other than the missionary position, or before marriage as defined by the Church. What this actually represents however is the Christian church's puritanical trivialization of its own definition of sin. The Christian writer John wrote a succinct definition of sin: "Sin is the transgression of law" (1 John 3:4). This does not refer to a specific legal code such as the Law of Moses, but rather a broader picture conceiving law in a wider generic sense such as moral law or natural law. In the sense that sin is lawlessness or moral anarchy we see that it exercises no consideration and submits to no constraints; it is malignant narcissism where there is no submission to a higher ideal. Anyone who objectively looks at the panorama of human history with its parade of carnage, geographical greed, institutional oppression, insensitive arrogance, should have no problem admitting that the human race has definitely got off the track. When it comes to listing specific kinds of sins, St Paul - long a Pagan bęte noir - utilized and incorporated parts from lists of vices used by the Pagan stoics in their own moral apologetics; greed, murder and theft listed among their vices or sins - hardly anything respectable Pagans would have a problem of viewing as evil manifestations of human behaviour.
The significance of sin from a Pagan perspective is first that we must squarely face the uncomfortable fact that sin is real. However we should be careful not to get entangled in the abstract arguments of those who insist that sin is indefinable and totally relative, since what is considered taboo or a moral social offence varies from culture to culture, certainly there are some religious and social taboos which have relevance only in the context of their own native culture and they cannot be implied in any kind of universal imposition upon the human race as a whole. But deep down within the human conscience there is an inherent knowledge of basic distinctions between right and wrong, and when we transgress these basic standards of decencies we succumb to the sway of sin. After all, the tree of knowledge between good and evil was the tree whose fruit Yahwee tried to prevent Adam and Eve from tasting lest they become as one with the Gods. It is this ability to distinguish between right and wrong that in fact is part of our divine nature.
Sin is a violation of respect in community, respect of self and respect of nature. A desecration of the law of love, whether it be defined as the golden rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you), the Wiccan Rede (do as you will an it harm none), or the Three-fold Law (what you do shall return three-fold). It is ethically specious and morally indefensible to refuse to classify as sin such offences against common and individual humanity as murder, genocide, torture, theft, sexual deceit, greed, cruelty and child abuse. It is from these traits of evil that we see the rising manifestation of sins against Mother Earth. Because of their greed for money and land people are daily sinning against the Goddess as they strip the rainforests from her terrestrial skin, pollute her planetary atmosphere and poison her rivers and seas. The ecological catastrophe facing this planet is the direct result of human sin. Likewise the nuclear conflagration that had long hovered upon the horizon of our future is an offspring of our liaison with evil: the greed for world domination, power and territory and the devaluation of human life as a means to the end of such geopolitical selfishness. Closer to home we are constantly bombarded with the reality of sin in the fabric of our own communities: crime, drug trafficking, domestic violence, racism, gay bashing, the plight of the victimized homeless.
Indeed Pagans, even those who have no concept of sin or external rules that make sin possible, adhere to the tenet of the three-fold law in the Wiccan Rede. In this one sentence they succeed in contradicting themselves because to violate by actions the intent of the Three-fold Law and the Wiccan Rede is to sin against that law (sin is the transgression of law). Perhaps what the real problem is is a strong aversion to any words or moral concepts which hint at being left-over Christian baggage. The legalistic nonsense of puritanical prudery, which is often attached to the concept of sins in the mind of people who left the church because of it's preoccupation with instilling a sense of personal guilt as a means of manipulation through fear, is a very good example. But in reaction to pretend that sin does not exist we only obscure its presence from the direct gaze of our consciousness but its reality remains the same.
What then should be the Neo-Pagan approach to the moral dilemma of sin and evil? First we need to honestly acknowledge the reality of evil, all we need to do is to take a hard look and we will be unable to avoid the sight of sin's ravages all around us. Secondly, we need to perceive that sin is not something out there, done by other people, none of us are immune to its reality. However this does not give the right of any church or Pagan group to use this as a baseball bat with which to clobber us into believing that we are depraved and evil to the very core of our being, as the doctrine of original sin would have us believe. Humans do not bring sin into the world but are born into a world previously permeated with evil. We should acknowledge that we have been placed by higher powers into a world where we are subject to manifold choices to do that which is either destructive to ourselves and common humanity or constructive. The statement of the serpent, originally a symbol of Goddess wisdom, to Adam and Eve was "and ye shall be as Gods knowing good and evil." We should replace the doctrine of 'original sin' with 'original innocence' and come to realise that it is us adults who actually teach our children through example about sin.
What about guilt? Won't the acknowledgement of sin in ourselves and others be a stepping stone to living in a continuous state of guilt? Isn't that why we left the church in the first place? An acknowledgement of sin is, however, not antithetical to a healthy Pagan way of life. First, there is nothing wrong with guilt. It is a natural reaction of the conscience and the higher function of the human psyche. Without guilt we are, in fact, psychologically disturbed to such an extent that we become psychopaths and sociopaths. A well-adjusted person does feel guilt and remorse at lying, cheating and stealing. However we need to constructively deal with guilt - that is, to make amends with those we have wronged, to ask for forgiveness and to learn to forgive ourselves for our faults and failings and then to go on with the future without overemphasizing the skin, the sin and the guilt. When a sense of inner forgiveness prevails the inner conscious is freed from the condemnatory burden of guilt. However Christian doctrinal abuse in this area is based on using sin and concomitant guilt as a means of converting the masses through fear of hell fire, therefore it is extremely important in Christian and other patriarchal religions to emphasize the evil to the extent that the person doing evil is themselves evil and depraved, to play upon the guilt and to prevent the person from carrying on with their life having learned the lesson before.
The early Christian church did not shrink from declaring a message which called for personal introspection and repentance; repentance means to turn around and to go in the other direction and to have a change of heart. It is "wake up, turn around, take a hard look" at ourselves and the world's negative state of affairs but realize there is hope for change if we take hold of the divine potential that is within us when we have the spiritual live faith.
What is this to do when we proclaim our Paganism? The more prophetic aspects of the contemporary Pagan movement are often in the frontline for ecological reform, animal rights and world peace - to name a few pertinent causes. They all, in their own way, call our civilization to a collective ecological and moral repentance for its sins against the environment, the land, endangered species and humanity itself. Pagans, by word and deed, sound forth a call to repent, to have a change of heart about the way we look at nature, life and one another. Modern Paganism is fulfilling a similar function to early Christianity by calling the masses to repentance from the multitudinous sins of self-destruction which threaten to doom our existence on this planet.
Not every personal and political act can automatically be considered black or white, shades of grey always lurk in the shadows of moral dilemmas, but the significance of sin lies in the fact that it keeps us acutely aware of weaknesses common to humanity and it is an essential element in the fulfillment of the serpent's promise "Ye shall be as Gods knowing good and evil". When we have been sufficiently transformed through the process of spiritual growth to the point we have learned to avoid the lure of evil through the knowledge of its deception, then sin as an ongoing reality may be relegated to a mere memory; but to proclaim its demise or irrelevancy until that day would be to deceive ourselves and prolong the ordeal of mankind's moral and spiritual adolescence.
Where does sin originate from? Is it from an outside agent such as Satan, or does it come from within ourselves and have a tie with the rest of humanity from the shadow collective unconsciousness that lies within us all? I believe it is the latter and to this we should be very grateful because this does mean that we are able to have an optimistic view of the future because human beings are capable of change and great transformation. We create our own evil entities, we are not perverted by them. The fact that slavery is now outlawed throughout the world (although I admit not totally adhered to), the fact that in the Western world the role of woman is given greater prominence than ever before, that the notion of racism is regarded generally as abhorrent, that even homosexuality is now regarded as other than an abomination which should be legislated against, is indication that the human race can, in fact, progress. Democracy itself is a transforming act which enables every individual person to take responsibility for the actions of their leaders. In one sense this makes us then more responsible for the sins of the nation as a whole but it also gives us the mechanism for repairing those sins.
A confession for ritual use could well be as follows:
Therefore,
We ask the all glorious Queen of Heaven
To baptize us
In Her forgiving compassion
And grace us with Her guidance,
That we might become progressively
Conformed to the completed stature
Of spiritual maturity
Through the presence
Of Her empowerment from within.
May the mercy of the Divine Mother
Cleanse us from all unrighteousness,
That we might kneel, before her sanctity,
Our faces full with radiance,
And our hearts exuberant,
In the expectation of Her holiness.
A purpose of this confession is to create an inner realization within each person of their own shortcomings in order to illicit a resulting sense of humility as we approach the holiness of divinity within ourselves and without in the miracle of the ritual. However it is careful to avoid the overblown negativity and sense of self-loathing so common in many of the confessional prayers found in older and traditional Christian liturgies.
Perhaps the major basis of sin within humanity is in fact a lack of balance combined with a lack of submission to a higher ideal so that we can continue with an untrammeled journey of greed for spiritual power, for political power, for land, for money, greed all based on our own desires regardless of anybody else or anything else. Most of us engage in this sort of behaviour from time to time and most of us, when we have it pointed out to us or become aware of what we have done, feel remorse and wish that we could undo it. If we are able to do so we feel a lifting of the burden of guilt which operates in the same way that pain operates to the material body i.e. it serves as a signal that something is wrong and needs to be rectified. When it is rectified the pain or the guilt, if properly handled, will disappear. Unfortunately there are some people who hang on to their pain and also who hang on to their guilt because they have learned that it is better to feel guilty rather than to deal with the problems or to have pain rather than rectify the illness. And, of course, after a time the pain and the guilt become chronic and ingrained, distorting body, mind and soul.
The Wiccan Rede "do as you will an it harm none" is probably regarded as the Pagan Ethic. This has often been understood to mean that one can do what you like so long as nobody is harmed by it, including yourself. For some this refers only to magickal work and for others it refers to both magickal work and a non-magickal way of living. As Isaac Bonewits has said "your magickal ethics should be the same as your day-to-day ethics and even more so in reverse". I would like to look closer at this Rede since it is often used as a weapon to clobber people on the head when they are not doing the 'right thing' according to other Pagans. And who said Pagans don't have a concept of sin? Perhaps the concept of sin is reserved for what others do rather than ourselves? Perhaps the biblical injunction to put out first the log in your own eye before worrying about the splinter in the others' is to be taken note of here.
The word 'Will' in the Wiccan Rede really refers to the manifestation of the 'true and higher self' talked about as the Holy Guardian Angel by ceremonial magicians, the Divine Within by Neo-Pagans, the Self by Jungian psychologists, the Innermost Essence of our Being. This manifestation or Will is, if you like, our raison d'ętre, our goal and mission in this incarnation. So we are adjured to do what is our true will, not just to seek after self-gratification, or to indulge upon an orgy of do-gooding for others (often with very questionable motives behind it). The next part of the equation is the verb 'to do'. This is a direct command to action, not to inaction, not to thinking about it, not to putting off for another day, as many Neo-Pagans and indeed many of any religion seem to do, paying nominal allegiance to their religious practices and saying to themselves "I'll put this off for another day". Time and tide wait for no man.
'An it harm none' is perhaps the most difficult part of the Wiccan Rede. The word 'an' is a medieval English word meaning "so long as" or "if". However the adjuration to harm none is, as I will show, an impossible pipe dream and no ethical system should base itself on an impossibility. When faced with the issue of, for example, a mass murderer the community, rightly, incarcerates that mass murderer when caught and duly tried; the community as a whole accepts the need to harm the individual to protect the greater number of people. In the same way, for us to shirk the responsibility to fail to cause harm to those who are harming very many others is in fact, by our inaction, causing harm to others; we therefore can, by neither action nor inaction, fail to harm. What is important is judgement and the judgement should be based on two aspects, first of all the greater good for the greater number and secondly that whatever is done is done with a sense of love and justice, not in a sense of revenge or self-satisfaction or willfulness; in addition the action to be taken if in fact any is to be taken should be the least harmful necessary. We therefore incarcerate the mass murderer, we do not invoke the death penalty; we acknowledge the possibility of repentance and growth through the realization of the sins committed by the mass murderer in the incarnation as well as, hopefully, the next. I will give an example below:
A Catholic priest (who else?) has been interfering with a number of children over his years as chaplain to a private school. This becomes known to you via the parent of one of the abused children. What should you do? First of all, in a non-magickal way, should you take no action since to do so would be to harm the priest, destroy his career and probably end up with him being thrown in prison, where most of the prisoners regard child molesters with a degree of horror that they reserve for none others and take action accordingly? Should you get somebody else to do it, thus shirking your responsibility and remaining, in one sense, 'pure' but knowing that you have abrogated the responsibility of doing the right thing in dobbing in this criminal to somebody else, so exactly how pure does that really leave you if you leave the dirty work to others? Have you in fact not done something wrong because by not dobbing in this criminal you have, in fact, adopted the attitude of allowing him to continue to abuse further children?
I think that most of us would have no difficulty in adopting a course that would lead to this man's apprehension, trial and incarceration and most of us would have no hesitation in saying that "this will cause the priest harm" and none of us have no hesitation in saying "and so be it in order to prevent harm to many others."
Why then is magickal work so different? If doing a spell to prevent the truth from being obscured (which spell would undoubtedly result in harm to the priest) could be performed, then why would we not perform it? If binding the priest so that he will not abuse any more children could be performed then why would we not do it? If doing a spell that would cause the priest to own up to his crimes, therefore undoubtedly causing him harm, then why would we not do it? Each of these spells would result in justice and they would result in reduced harm to many other people and two of them in particular would be done in such a way as to allow the civil authorities to take the necessary action with appropriate penalties that we, as a community, feel are justified for such a crime i.e. doing a spell to enable truth to be told or doing a spell to force the criminal to admit to his own actions.
The third choice, that of binding the criminal so that they do not perform any acts I have chosen for a specific reason. There is no doubt that restricting a person's free will is causing harm to that person. However in the upbringing of a child we often restrict that child's freedom of action in the interest of that child's spiritual, intellectual and social growth. Restricting a criminal or quasi criminal (such as the sexual harasser in the office) causes more good to the perpetrator than harm since they will no longer be performing acts which will ultimately cause them severe harm (such as incarceration or being sacked from a job). I therefore think we have to re-word the Rede to include the greater good for the greater number and to state the we cause the least harm possible so that it should read "to do as you will so long as it causes the least harm possible and is done with love and with a sense of justice and to the benefit of the greater number to the greater good." This makes it, of course, more 'wordy'. Why is it that we need to adopt the One Nation/notion attitude of "simple slogans are best"? Volumes have been written about ethics, why should we be afraid to distil our ethical summaries into one or two sentences rather than in a catchy eight word phrase (or even worse, as I have recently seen, a two word phrase "harm none").
To choose between two seemingly harmful choices is in fact a common situation in life and it is by looking at the shades of grey, rather than an extreme of black and white, that we are more likely to obtain a conclusion which is between that of mercy and blind justice (the right and left pillars of the Qabala) and thereby obtain the balance or union (the centre path in the Qabala). Shirking hard decisions does not make us better people but rather worse, it is the sin of indolence, of spiritual sloth.
I understand that this re-wording of the Wiccan Rede is likely to draw the opprobrium of certain Wiccan fundamentalists; to me the answer should be "we are not Wiccan we are Pagan and Pagans have always adopted a more responsible and complex system of ethics than Wicca". We recognize shades of grey and we do not see ourselves involved in a Christian dichotomy of black versus white, for this is what Wicca (the system that purports to uphold a complementary polarity) has put itself in the situation of - the upholding and policing of an ethical opposing dualism of 'do harm or do no harm'. What makes this simplistic ethical statement even more laughable is in fact its very impossibility.
The original meaning of the words Satan and devil were not negative as they are today. Devil and diabolic come from the Greek verb "diabalein", meaning simply to "oppose". The word "Satan" commonly meant "adversary". In the Book of Numbers God himself states that he was proceeding against Balaam as a Satan. Seeing the necessity for mankind to be detested and tempted by something in opposition to his own will, God delegated this oppositional (diabolic) and adversarial (Satanic) function to the chief of his archangels.
The invention of the Devil is, in fact, not a Christian invention. It stems back to Zoroastrianism approximately one and a half thousand years BCE when Zoroaster proposed that there were two major forces in the universe, (1) the Good Creator and (2) the Bad Co-Creator who was responsible for all the evil in the world. This God was often depicted as having horns. As you will be aware Zoroastrianism was the major world religion at the time of Christ and influenced not only many Roman religions such as Mythraism but also a little known Jewish sect called the Essenes of which Jesus Christ and his parents were members.
The Evil One in the Old Testament is little mentioned and Satan himself is seen as a prosecuting angel rather than the chieftain of evil in the world.
In the intervening period between the Old Testament and the New Testament the apocalyptic prophecies, talking about the end of the world and the restoration of the old Jewish Kingdom were rife and it is in this environment that the Essenes, with their teachings very similar to that of Christ in the New Testament, grew up. They were greatly influenced by the teachings of the Good Creator with the Evil opponent, the battle both in the heavens above and the earth below between these two great forces and the eventual triumph of good heralded by the birth of a savior who would be born miraculously with no earthly father. The Essenes, and later Christianity, took over the idea of an evil opponent to the good God, only they diminished his role somewhat, making him a rebel - albeit the chief of the angelic host and, in some way, brother to Christ.
Initially this evil opponent was seen as 'fair of face but foul of spirit' and was not depicted as having horns, as this was seen in the classical world as indicative of divinity and sanctity. However, in the Middle Ages came the rediscovery by the Crusaders of the Persian Evil Gods which had been demonized by the Islamic religion and depicted as having horns. The opposing Pagan Gods often now reduced to that of woodland deities, were depicted as having horns, particularly Pan and Cernonnos, which were the vestiges of the old Horned God of the Paleolithic era. And so they were now cast into the form of the devils as described in the East with their sinister horns. And thus today any group who worships the horned God is likely to be branded by fundamentalist Christians as worshipping the devil. Unfortunately fundamentalist Pagans, or Pagans who are ignorant, then counter with the claim that the Christians invented the devil. They did not, but they certainly 'took to him' with a relish greater than any other religion before or since. One is entitled to propose the theory that the Devil is the Great Shadow within the whole of the Christian religion and collectively Christianity projects this Shadow onto all those it sees as encroaching on its so-called rights and authority.
Blessed be and Never Thirst from Kim and Quenten.
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