Images of the devil in popular cartoons and media do not help our case.
The horned man with goatee beard and pitchfork looks laughable. I was recently in Hell. During a stay in Grand Cayman we stopped for a stroll in a village with that name. It boasts a Post Office where you can send a postcard from Hell and a gift shop where the proprietor dresses in a red cape and horns.
Equal and opposite errors
If all this makes you feel a little uneasy, you are not alone. Treating the themes of the devil and hell as fuel for crude comedy and cute merchandise is poor taste at best. It might even be playing into his very strategy. In famous words introducing The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis wrote: ‘There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.’
Comedy, free speech and warnings from the past
Hannah Arendt was a Jewish philosopher who grew up in Nazi Germany. Eventually she had to flee to France and, …