Roger,

I dunno how you got into the next century ahead of everyone else, but congrats in any case.

Exagerrating evil -- and thus inducing fear and the need for allegiance and compliance -- is a standard routine for organized religions, and governments, and large institutions from time immemorial.

There is plenty of harm about, with or without exaggeration, but placing it in the category of evil is a different step -- it invites a whole host of ideas which follow from it. The very use of the term kind of institutionalizes resistance and invites you into a permanent state of abhorrence and avoidance. And then, since one man's saint is another's devil, the games of division and conflict begin.

A