Defrocking the Devil

Defrocking the Devil/Theology of Fear is a brief history of the last 2,500 yearsof monotheism using the actual words of the men who claimed to know the devilfiguremost intimately. From Peter to Constantine to Martin Luther to our present daytheologians, these men and hundreds more included in this book supported the earlyChurch 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 thyselfa new spiritual equation of hate, torture and murder entered the theological landscape. Defrocking the Devil is an attempt to puncture the myths surrounding thewords: evil, devil and hell. Two thousand years after the birth of Christianity andfourteen hundred years after the start of Islam, hundreds of millions of people currentlyliving 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 existenceof fictional beings and wicked subterranean places? Defrocking the Devil seeks toilluminate the darkness and empower all people of faith to move beyond theologiesthat advocate violence into the spiritual equation. There have been many books writtenabout this dark side of Western theology, but few historians do much more than recountits bloody genocidal history. Defrocking the Devil actively seeks to tear down suchreligious dogmas by using the very words of those who extolled such a hurtful, anti-Christian philosophy.