Bob, Augustine (+430), a Manichee in his youth, liked not being responsible for his sins (after all, they merely reflected his evil nature that he could not control). After Saint Ambrose weaned him away from the Manichee Faustus, Augustine saw the light (in his City of God): evil is not a gnostic being equal to God who is the highest good, but rather, an absence of good. There is no highest evil until Hobbes, who conjured up the all-powerful Leviathan to “prevent” it.
Even Satan cannot annihilate or magically transform his own nature (which God created good); he can only pervert it with the movement of his free will away from God – the first sin (for Satan and for man: “Ye shall be as gods”). Hence, Satan represents perversion of order, good, and beauty. But try as he might, Satan cannot erect an alternative reality based on evil to rival that created by God. Instead, he tempts all of us to pervert reality (the good, true, and beautiful) in every possible way. Robert Musil (The Man Without Qualities) points out that the ideologue constructs exactly such a “second reality” to justify his unlimited power (by denying God, the ideologue eliminates his competition).
The Israeli embassy spokesman in Washington insists (pounding the podium) that Israelis and Palestinians "ARE -- NOT -- EQUAL.” Of course that is Hegelian, and false, but it helps to explain how Americans and Israelis can mow down Arabs and Muslims without batting an eye.
That helps to explain our neighbor, a young Christian soldier returned from his duty in Iraq. “They’re animals,” he said – a helpful preamble to rampant killing, reminiscent of “The chick got in the way.”
One falsehood spawns another and yet another, and they all spawn violence, as Solzhenitsyn observed. As long as the lies prevail, so will the violence, But, unlike our Gnostic neocon adversaries who hate us but love violence, we must hate the sin but love the sinner, as God loves us even in our sinful state.