Defrocking the Devil (ePub)

Defrocking the Devil/Theology of Fear is a brief history of the last 2,500 years
of monotheism using the actual words of the men who claimed to know the devilfigure
most intimately. From Peter to Constantine to Martin Luther to our present day
theologians, these men and hundreds more included in this book supported the early
Church fathers arguments for the inclusion of Satan into Christian polemics.
A dualism appeared in the story of Jesus immediately after his crucifixion.
Instead of tirelessly promoting the Christian message of love thy neighbor as thyself
a new spiritual equation of hate, torture and murder entered the theological landscape.
Defrocking the Devil is an attempt to puncture the myths surrounding the
words: evil, devil and hell. Two thousand years after the birth of Christianity and
fourteen hundred years after the start of Islam, hundreds of millions of people currently
living on this planet are in real fear of one day ending up down in the devils lair.
How did Christian belief in Jesus become conditional upon the existence
of fictional beings and wicked subterranean places? Defrocking the Devil seeks to
illuminate the darkness and empower all people of faith to move beyond theologies
that advocate violence into the spiritual equation. There have been many books written
about this dark side of Western theology, but few historians do much more than recount
its bloody genocidal history. Defrocking the Devil actively seeks to tear down such
religious dogmas by using the very words of those who extolled such a hurtful, anti-
Christian philosophy.