Fear is the Devil

Fear is universal, everyone feels it, everyone reacts to it. Religions seek to manage it, but mostly fail and become purveyors of fear.

When levels of fear in the society are low, we demonstrate the positive side of our nature and become generous and kind, but when threatened we very easily become selfish and cruel. This is a human characteristic that we must accept and work into our self understanding.

Christians seek to promote good behavior by threat. They seek to influence the community to be "good" by condemning "bad" behavior, painting a picture of everlasting suffering for those that exhibit this "bad" behavior. In doing this the Church is exhibiting a typical human fear response. Just as human beings are "bad" when they are cruel, the Church is "bad" when it is cruel. Christians are shooting themselves in the foot by building their religion's response to threat around a typical human fear response.

When we invent gods and other spiritual beings we give them human characteristics. We need to do this in order to be able to relate to them. The Christian Old Testament God was was made to demonstrate anger and fear - typical human fear responses, but this characterization had limitations. People tend to copy their leaders and if the leader is a tyrant who drowns the world on a whim, this gives licence to his followers to do the same within their domain. This is not a good image to maintain if you want to influence people to be "good."

Jesus invented a new image of God. His followers then evolved this image to encompass all the positive human characteristics so this new God could be the example of how people should behave. They also changed the image of the devil, making him the personification of evil and giving him all the negative human characteristics. Our fear responses feature prominently, as the Devil is selfish, greedy, jealous, cruel, domineering, etc. - all the behaviors we exhibit when we are bent on self preservation (as opposed to preservation of the community) are included as characteristics of the Devil.

This separation was a good start, but instead of continuing in this vein they made a mess by combining the Old Testament and the New Testament. Perhaps circumstances did not permit the ambitious plans of the Christians to be brought to fruition and they had to settle for a compromise. From today's perspective the compromise is obvious and devastating, but the original idea behind the separation still has merit.

Coming out of this, it is apparent that the Devil represents Fear. It can possess you and influence you to do "evil" things. You can feel its influence with every threat. It is true, the Devil is within us, because Fear is the Devil.