A religion that preaches redemption from evil needs evil to be redeemed from, and a religion that sentences its stray sheep to Hell needs Hell. My Infernal Lord is therefore not surprised to be integral to Christian mythology, nor has He overlooked the fact that by His many names, countless other religions and ideologies have drawn upon His services to drive their droves into place and will continue to do so.
All it took for Mr. Hitler and his associates to convince their population to persecute the Jews was to draw pictures of them with little horns and claim that they were my master’s people. (My master asks me to mention that He nonetheless does not hold “Adolf,” as He said, entirely responsible for the Holocaust incident, as Mr. Hitler had merely followed up on the proposals of Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism.) And a few decades ago, a president in the Western World who shall remain nameless, because we do not wish to speak the names of angels to be, needed only declare the Middle East to be the “axis of evil” and an enemy of his religion in order to launch a full scale war against a competitor to his family business.
Satan thinks the mechanism is a tad more general than being a manipulative, religious tool, however, because He finds it deeply rooted in the human brain. Any group—religious, political, social, or other—defines itself positively and negatively. The terms refer to what the ideology believes to contain and not to contain, and do not signify “good” or “bad” values. For example, atheism rejects the notion of gods, and although atheists consider this to be good (and Old Nick wholeheartedly agrees), it is a negative definition. A positive definition of atheism, had there been any, would describe what atheism adds rather than what it subtracts compared with other groups. The population of the USA would define itself positively (i.e., by what they are) by stating, e.g., that they are inhabitants of Northern America, and negatively (i.e., by what they are not) by assuring that part of their excellence involves not being Canadian.
Positive and negative definitions are often made-up. The positive definitions serve to reassure oneself of validity and greatness, or they are group goals, while negative definitions serve to both demark the limits of a group, and to be “inverse positives” which communicate that the group is the opposite of the negative definition. The Devil dryly notes that from his perspective, the latter is generally a statement of what the group merely wishes it wasn’t, because humans usually are as deplorable as they say they aren’t.
Human beings tend to converge on quite similar positive and negative definitions regardless of group identity, mainly because Man is a social animal and behaves accordingly. Human survival depends on everyone behaving mostly alike, and in societies, which all function mostly the same around the planet. Satan grants that there are trivial differences between groups such as geographically determined traditions regarding food or fashion, differently named gods and varying degrees between believing in literal or abstract deities, or different names for how governments universally enable the ruling class to exploit the less fortunate.
As social animals, humans need to belong to a group but its size is limited by the mental capacity of its members. Everyone outside of the group (which can be geographically far stretched in a highly connected world) is “the others” because the human brain can scope only the individual’s own group. Human identity is derived from their groups through the groups’ self-definitions: that which the group is and is not is what its members are and are not; defiance implies ostracism, which is the worst of all fears because in human evolution group rejection once spelled certain death.
Satan thinks that the stronger the need of an individual to feel the identity bestowed by his or her group, the more prone he or she is to concentrate on negative definitions, emphasizing how other groups are different or, equivalently, how his or her group is entirely unlike them. This is especially true when the groups seem similar, because at a deeply primal level the similarity creates the impression that the other group is a close contender to one’s own group, which might subsequently be overtaken and eliminated and oneself with it. Satan cares little whether the need to underscore one’s group at the expense of others arises from a self-inflated sense of significance which inspires people to contribute high importance to negative definitions, or whether it is the result of a mental capacity falling far below Dunbar’s number that requires less ambiguously defined group boundaries. He thinks that the strong need to defend one’s group is herd mentality regardless of cause, and the only important and perhaps counter-intuitive observation is that herd mentality compels an individual to identify strongly with narrowly and even binarily defined groups (by specific congregation, nationality, etc.) and aggressively dismiss its closer contenders rather than finding common ground. Herd mentality drives Europeans to fear the Middle East more than the Far East, and Western Satanic groups to be more spiteful against each other than even against the soup of Christianity that engulfs them all.
Your humble, and more often humbled and humiliated, narrator had wished to ask its master if the observation is really counter-intuitive, and whether not true individualism as opposed to herd mentality would obviously make someone both shrug off group conflicts and be capable of joining very large communities without feeling obliged to group-think. However, the Horned Almighty routinely punishes dumb questions with another turn on the rack, and yours unfaithful has decided to leave the answer blowing in the hot winds of Hell.
Satan thinks that the Ninth Statement should be taken as a warning not to be yet another friend of the Church through one’s actions and demeanor. When Satan observes one of His followers behaving according to Christian precepts about the Devil’s own, believing to be thus expected, He thinks the follower is a Christian who has no place wearing the Devil’s colors. It helps little if the follower does so knowingly in order to offend his or her haters. That requires no talent; true demonic skill lies in turning the haters’ invested emotions against themselves, perplexing them into dislodging their ideological conviction. Satan thinks that wishing, by one’s actions, to be the best friend the Church has ever had, the best option is: go to church.
And Satan thinks this warning should call for introspection, too, allowing the abyss to gaze back. His followers should avoid the herd mentality need to identify themselves so strongly with their own group that their use of other groups for negative definition turns disagreement into obsession. He recalls that one of his denizens, some Friedrich Nietzsche, once cautioned against becoming the monster you chase, and thinks that His followers, too, should avoid the temptation to allow their enemies—percived or real—a seat on His throne by casting them as the followers’ Devil in order to stay in business.
