We are not to be demonisers.
Satan is considered to be the worst of evildoers. Jesus said he was only about destruction and a murderer from the beginning. Then there is the notion of Hell. We are told that some people despite God's love will wallow there forever and refuse his grace. Even those who say there is no Hell for God's love reaches all eventually and they turn to him still hold hypothetically that if person's could resist forever that must be respected. And their whitewash is not as loving as they say for why could God not win Stalin before he made the blood run everywhere? It sounds fake and as if they just want evil persons to end up getting away with it ultimately.
Let us concentrate on Satan and not the damned or his supposed angels.
Saying there is a Satan is just outsourcing our judgemental instinct unto an easy imagined target for there is no decent evidence for him or his malice. Believers soon start attacking others. It cannot stop with a bogeyman. And will not.
If Satan were verified and real, it remains true that human nature will
inevitably hate him and this will corrupt it. But this issue is worse if
Satan is imagined.
Claims to not wish evil on a real/imagined Satan
seem insincere.
What if you dismiss the idea of a Satan with power to
tempt and intervene?
If one then implicitly or explicitly thinks evil
is a force that infects the universe that is also outsourcing.
Why
project or outsource anyway?
Because you want to deny the darkness in
you and distract yourself by looking elsewhere for the evil. While you do this
your evil is preserved and may fester.
Or because you hope there is an
evil power out there that potentially can do the evil for you. You want your
hands clean.
Or because part of you feels you are not so bad when
something worse is out there.
Or because you get a smug glow by
thinking you are not in the firing line but someone else is.
You get a
sense of self-approval when you do good - that "others" the immense evil.
The human likes the thought of a monster out there as long as it only
harms one's enemies or strangers. Fantasy is inherently human. The person
wants Satan or a force to be evil. Or for both to be true.
It is
probably always a bit of all of those.
Human energy, attention, and
empathy are finite resources. When we spend our moral energy fighting a
phantom cosmic war against a bogeyman, we have less energy left to fix
systemic, real-world human problems. It acts as a massive distraction. We
fight windmills in the sky while ignoring the literal exploitation, cruelty,
and inequality happening right in front of us.
Once you believe a
supreme evil power exists, you inevitably begin to classify human beings not
just as flawed, but as "agents" or "vessels" of that supreme evil. It is
impossible to compromise, empathise, or reason with someone you believe is a
puppet of Satan. This shifts human conflict from a resolvable disagreement
between peers to an apocalyptic, zero-sum war where the total destruction of
the "other" is the only righteous outcome.
Humans have a tendency to
elevate their petty personal dislikes into cosmic battles. If I dislike a
neighbour, a political opponent, or a rival group, claiming that they are
aligned with a "force of evil" elevates my personal grudge into a holy
crusade. It allows me to express my own malice and cruelty under the guise of
doing "God's work" or defending the universe.
No matter how grave an evil is in our society, the fact remains that given
the vast scale of human existence and the universe it remains petty. It
is still not the existentially important thing it is turned into.