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Many people sort of snickered at Ronald Reagan’s comments about the Soviet Union being the “Evil Empire.” To them it was a kind of embarrassment. We see the rhetoric used effectively, again and again, in the world of politics. Hostility is as old as the species and as contemporary as can be. I would never suggest that Christianity or Islam invented hostility. Stop the fighting.” Their response was the title of the piece: “They Call Each Other Devils.” He said they all call each other devils. Along with the various political leaders, he went to the leaders of the Orthodox church and the Serbian church and the Muslim religious leaders and said, “We need your help, too. I was very struck by an article that was written by a noted statesman who was trying to negotiate a peace settlement. This kind of hostility can be used to justify war.įor example, in what used to be Yugoslavia, there are three groups at war - Muslims, Roman Catholics, who are mostly Croatian, and the Serbians, who are mostly Orthodox Christians. Then you introduce the possibility that is attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John, in which he says, “Whoever kills you will think he’s doing God a service.” That is, you introduce the possibility of acts directed against people - violence, murder, even genocide - in the name of a moral cause. What is quite different is when you introduce the idea that others are evil. That seems like an instinctive, almost species kind of protection.
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Maybe not crocodiles, but sort of animalistic, inferior, you smell bad, that kind of thing.
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This approach seems almost universal: that every tribe and people will think, Our people are people, and your people are crocodiles. One sees this in a culture like the Egyptian culture, in which Egyptian simply meant “human.” Therefore, in the Egyptian culture, if you’re not Egyptian, you’re really not fully human. In the ancient world, the idea of “we are God’s people they are not God’s people,” the “they” are often considered sort of subhuman. But when you have a divided universe like that, what you’re also seeing is a divided social world in which “these are God’s people these are Satan’s people.”ĪS: How profoundly different is the notion of “we are God’s people those are Satan’s people” from “we are God’s people those are not God’s people,” which seems to be the structure that exists in the Old Testament?ĮP: It is different. But for Christians and Muslims, the centerpiece of their cosmology involves the idea of a universe divided between the forces of good and the forces of evil. With Jews, it’s really only a few extremist groups who describe their enemies as intrinsically evil. In the Mideast, I saw the way that Muslims and Christians fall into this language of demonization. You couldn’t go that fifteen minutes across from Cairo to Jerusalem. For example, I was traveling between Egypt and Israel when I was working on The Gnostic Gospels, and at that time, because of the ongoing war in the Middle East, you had to fly to Athens. The discourse is not just a matter of, “we disaree,” but, “They are evil, and what they are doing is morally wrong.”ĮP: Oh, yes - this pattern of demonizing one’s enemy is very much present in people today, and in many different ways. It’s used to much in politics it seems to be the driving force of so many of the cults that have been building up in recent years it comes up so much in the movies - and it seems that anytime sex or sexuality comes up in an open way, there’s someone out there talking about the devil’s work. The notion of the demon is very strong today. In thinking about all this, I was struck by how that polarized view is so prevalent today. I’m particularly interested in one of the central ideas in The Origin of Satan, which has to do with what you call “demonization.” In that book you describe how Christianity introduced the idea of a universe divided between the forces of good and evil, and you go into how the act of demonizing something or someone created the foundations for a polarized view of the world. I got interested in them because I live in today’s world.ĪS: Let’s talk about how some of the issues you raise in your books apply to today’s world. I don’t write and teach about these subjects because I’m an antiquarian. One of the things that I’ve always found so compelling about your writing is how the issues you address in these books, from Adam, Eve, and the Serpent and The Gnostic Gospels to you latest book, The Origin of Satan, seem to apply to so many things going on in the world today.Įlaine Pagels: As I’ve often said, I am not an antiquarian. Source: Wikimedia Commons.Īndrew Solomon: I’ve read your books for years. Belphegor the Demon, from Dictionnaire Infernal, 1863.