Humanity Is the Devil: Faith and the Responsibility for Evil

Humanity is the Devil: Faith and the Responsibility for Evil

Every religious movement faces the contradictions posed by the existence of evil in a universe supposedly under the dominion of a loving and benevolent God. It is one of the most debilitating questions posed to every faith, in fact, and requires rationalization in imaginative ways. Explanations vary from attributing the presence of evil as a test presented to humanity by God to sift out the worthy from the masses, a challenge conjured up by a malign force which opposes God, an illusion of the human condition, or some variant of the above designed to placate the questioning faithful.

Not many religions have turned the blame from alien figures of darkness to humanity itself. Though faiths such as Protestantism delegate blame onto humanity for the moral failings of the race and the suffering that exists in the world, still Satan or some corresponding figure is placed as the root of all evil, the tempter who led humanity out of the good path into darkness. Nevertheless, the Process Church of the Final Judgment does attribute the propagation of evil to a human origin: in their belief, the existence of evil comes from humanity. Evil was especially attributed to the disconnection of humanity from God, humanity's flouting of God's plan, and the division of God from the unity that once was into four parts which allowed the universe to exist.

In his essay "Social Construction from Within: Satan's Process", Bainbridge asserts the rational aesthetic and intellectual integrity of the Process Church, espousing their construction of a richly mystical religious community. However, amongst Brainbridge's excellent and valid observations on the Process Church, he neglects to elucidate the maturity and sense of responsibility reflected in the philosophy of the Church. By their acceptance of the darkness within human nature and within God, the Process Church took on a rationalization of evil that demanded humanity to take responsibility for redemption into its own hands. Rather than an isolated God who looked down and passed judgment upon the earth, for the Processians, the divine spirit was alive, although not well, within the human heart. The apocalypse was visible on the horizon not as a cataclysm wrought by God for punishment but as the reunification of God from four disparate and sometimes conflicting parts into one.

The co founder of the Processian Church, Robert de Grimson, asserts in his text titled "Humanity is the Devil" that in the beginning God gave his children the choice "whether to remain subject to the Will of its Creator, or to set out upon the path of destiny by the power of its own free will". Humanity chose free will and thereafter guided their own actions, with two poles of morality to guide them: the light that led to God and the temptations that led to hell. Naturally, however, when humanity is left to guide itself, the race collectively tends to choose the path of temptation and doom itself to Hell. Thus the human race becomes propagators as well as victims of the evil they created by turning away from God. Even when tendencies towards hateful and violent behaviors are suppressed for a time they eventually, inevitably must break free, these compulsions made uncontrollable and intrinsic to the human state because of humanity's disconnection from God. In his essay "As It Is", de Grimson grimly states that "Earth is hell, and humanity has made it so."

The Process theology revolved largely around their conceptions of four different God-aspects which were reflected in the world and in human nature, and around their belief that each follower had a strong kinship to one or two of these God-aspects. Named Lucifer, Jehovah, Satan, and Christ, different characteristics were attributed to each, and each believer who found their connection to a God-aspect was redeemed from the masses of the "gray" people that surrounded them. The kinship with these aspects was not the end-all of the faith. Rather, Processians were further encouraged to use the self-knowledge granted by finding their dominant spirit to dissect their mentalities and find their innermost goals. As Bainbridge says, "Process theology was a logical structure explaining the nature of existence and showing how people of different natures could cooperate to bring a quartet of warring Gods together and establish a new age of harmony".

As such, the inclusion of Satan, a force carrying a massively negative stigma for the mainstream Christian faith, was not the lurid and dangerously self-indulgent branch of Satanism which it was condemned as in the public eye. As Bainbridge argues, the acceptance and embrace of Satan was a tool which facilitated three ends:

"First, it encouraged acceptance of one's darker, socially suppressed impulses, private and subconscious longings that a Freudian might call primary process phenomena connected with the id. Second, it was an attempt to bridge the gaps between people of very different needs and personalities, to achieve cooperation where hostility had reigned. Third, it was a structural theory of the origins of existence, part of an intellectual world".

The inclusion of Satan within the pantheon represented the acceptance of the darkest of human impulses as well as the higher desire to transcend the physical plane and become soul entirely, a wish which the Processians attributed to the higher of Satan's two aspects. Already the Processian's dealings with spirits of chaos and discord stand in sharp contrast to the repudiation exhibited by the mainstream faiths. In their acceptance of these impulses the Processians made a commitment to making even apparently dysfunctional emotions productive parts of the social system. No blanket condemnations there; if energy could be put to some good work, then it would be.

The inclusion of Satan appears incriminating to those not versed in the Process' theology. However, one of the Process Church's most striking beliefs stated that Satan would eventually reconcile with Christ, and at the end of days while Satan would play executioner to Christ's judge. In fact, all four of the aspects of God must eventually reunite into the one being GOD, which will mark the end of reality, as the universe is something that exists inside and is composed of GOD. Bainbridge interprets Processian beliefs as the idea that "the Great Gods of the Universe are parts of God. In the beginning, there was only God, and no universe". From this Bainbridge continues that "Although standard Christianity conceives of the world as partly outside God, something