"We know there is no such thing as an evil man. We know the truth: the devil made them do it."

Fascinating essay. Worth reading in full at the link.

the League of Satanists:

"One of the most poisonous inventions of Christianity is the idea of a malignant force upon which the ills of the world can be blamed. This belief in a demonic scapegoat is the root of several potentially dangerous lines of bad logic, and history paints a bleak portrait of the results of this thinking with lurid flourishes of unnecessary bloodshed.

...Man would find his ultimate scapegoat within the confines of Christian theology, complete with cloven hooves, horns and skin red as sin. This arch villain was made easier to hate by early Christians who saw fit to name it after a God of oppressive Rome, Lucifer. In Roman theology, Lucifer was the morning star, the God of light and wisdom. The Romans were the enemies of early Christendom, and so it followed that their Gods became the demons of the new faith....

...The religiously devout would claim that we are on a steady backslide toward decadence caused by our embrace of reason, but compelling evidence suggests that the opposite is true. A recent article in the London Times details a study done by social scientist Gregory Paul in which the relative societal merits of Religious societies are compared with those of secular societies. In the study, religious America is compared with secular Britain, France and Japan using the contrasting statistics of crime rate, abortion rate, divorce rate, suicide rate and infant mortality rate. In all cases, religious America scored markedly higher in these negative values, which begs the question: are we worse off with God on our side? Do we, by placing greater emphasis on an afterlife rather than the present time, contribute greatly to the decay of our lives and the lives of those around us? Do we become something worse than what we are already by making a conscious effort to disassociate ourselves from our humanity?"