I have just finished reading a book called "The Dumas Club". It is about a man searching for three books written hundreds of years earlier that were supposed to contain a method of speaking with the Devil. The author of these three books was burned by the Church for the crime of Devil worship. I do not really believe in the Devil, but there have been some fantastic books written about this subject. Another book I really enjoyed was called "The Master and Margarita", it was about the Devil in Stalinist era Moscow; I highly recommend it.
Why are people so fascinated with the Devil? Do humans even really even need someone to make them do evil things? It seems like people are pretty good at that already, and do not need any help!
One reason for people paying so much attention to the Devil in the past was that the existence of the Devil was publicised so energetically by the Church. Priests used to warn people that the Devil was hunting for their souls. Crimes were the Devil's way of damaging people's souls. People thought that if they did bad things they would go to Hell when they died. This idea was used by the Church to stop people committing crimes.
Unfortunately, many people who did not fit in with society were said to be the Devil's helpers. In those days, many Priests hated women; so a lot of women were killed for being Witches, who they said were helping the Devil. These poor women were burned alive, along with any other people who argued with the Church. A pretty evil thing to do in the name of fighting evil!
The Church was a powerful political force, often more powerful than Kings or Queens. In every Church, the Priests collected money that people gave to the Church. Some of this money was sent to the biggest Church in the area, and that Church collected all the money from small Churches and sent it to the main Church in the country. The main Churches in all the Christian countries sent this money to the Vatican City in Rome, the home of the Pope. The center of the Church, the Pope, was incredibly rich and powerful. The Pope even had his own army. These days, the Church is not as powerful as it once was, because it has split into different groups and many of these groups do not follow the Pope. However, even today, the Catholic Church is the biggest land owner in the world and still has a lot of power in the Catholic countries.
Such a rich and powerful organisation does not just get power by being nice and kind - the Church often needed to be tough. With the practice of burning people who went against the Church, people were of course terrified of going against the Church and so most people kept quiet while the Church burned people alive for silly reasons.
All sorts of crazy ideas were followed, without people protesting because they were afraid of being burned as a Witch. For some reason, cats (in particular black cats) were thought to be agents of the Devil. When the Church ordered people to kill all the cats they could find, people obeyed without really thinking about the effects of their actions. With all the cats dead (or hiding from crazy humans) there was no one to kill all the rats. In the fur of rats were fleas that carried a disease called The Black Plague, which killed millions of people in Europe. Less cats=more rats=more disease=millions dead.
It is amazing that the actions taken against the Devil have been so stupid and cruel; burning people alive, drowning cats. If there really is a Devil, he/she must have been laughing at this ridiculous behaviour!
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Posted By: Eddie Palmer on March 20, 2009
