The devil made them do it by Ellen Goodman

[YankeyMCC]

(snip)
SO WHAT'S the deal with the devil anyway? First, Hugo Chávez, the sulfur-sniffing president of Venezuela, calls President Bush the devil. Then before the air clears, Jerry Falwell is cheerfully and unfavorably comparing Hillary to Lucifer.
(snip)

(snip)
Happily, we can ignore the Chávez charge. The National Association of Evangelicals reassures us in a press release: ``NAE theologians and scholars have conducted a thorough exegetical study of the biblical texts concerning the person, disposition, and earthy manifestations of Satan . They have incontrovertibly concluded that, contrary to the assertion of Hugo Chávez, President Bush is not the devil." Heck, Bush doesn't even wear Prada.

But the polarizing language of good and evil, us and them, God and Satan frames a clash of cultures at home and a clash of civilizations abroad. The vocabulary of absolutes freezes the way we think and act. The black and white narrative suggests that anybody who doesn't side with us has gone to the dark side.

In ``The Origin of Satan," a social history of the devil, Princeton religion professor Elaine Pagels explains how Satan is ``invoked to express human conflict and to characterize human enemies within our own religious traditions." These days, the ``use of Satan to represent one's enemies 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."
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http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/09/29/the_devil_made_them_do_it/

[Wetzelbill]

1. that was a very interesting op-ed

:)