Satan’s Greatest Trick

The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing people that he could come up from the depths of hell and climb inside our enemies, fill them completely, take them over so that there is nothing left that is good.

When we consider someone to be evil, (i.e. full of satan, ignorance, hate, greed, all those things we prefer to see in everyone but ourselves), we take them off the Earth, we ban them from the Heavens. They become distilled down to a handful of actions, a series of events.

As they are discarded so are their gifts. As they are discarded, so are their loved ones.

The genius in Satan’s ruse is its contagion. So easy to hate, to take, to destroy, to strangle, to discard, at great scale, as long as the thing that is discarded is first despised.

We, the good ones, diligently avoid evil. We believe we cannot be both; no one can touch evil without being consumed by it. This is why we’re so quick to judge: because we need to separate ourselves, immediately and completely, from all forms of it.

We pull back from those we deem infected. We quarantine them into a category, discard them frivolously under the false belief that we don’t need them, forgetting that every illness, every disease ever cured, was injected first.