Faith & Spirit Quote by Kerry Thornley

The Devil shows up here less as a horned villain than as a missing piece of machinery: a concept religion keeps trying to retire, only to realize it still needs somewhere to dump the blame. Thornley’s line is a sly little pry-bar. It suggests that the project of modern religion - especially the sanitized, respectable versions that want to sound therapeutic rather than apocalyptic - has been to phase out the embarrassing metaphysics: literal demons, cosmic warfare, the cartoonish personification of evil. Enlightenment rationality, liberal theology, and PR-minded churches all prefer their evil structural, psychological, or merely "brokenness."

But Thornley’s subtext is that you don’t get to abolish the Devil without consequences. Once you remove a symbolic container for cruelty, temptation, and sadism, those forces don’t evaporate; they migrate. They reappear as pathology, as politics, as "bad actors", as abstract systems that somehow never quite implicate anyone in particular. Doing without the Devil can become a way of doing without moral clarity - or moral discomfort.

Context matters: Thornley, an iconoclastic philosopher associated with Discordian mischief and countercultural skepticism, is allergic to tidy belief systems. The quip lands like a wink and a warning. Religions try to modernize by declawing their own mythology, then struggle to explain why humans keep inventing fresh varieties of malice. The Devil, in his view, is less theology than a durable cultural technology for naming what we’d rather not own.