Sisyphus the Manichaean

Have a look at these statements:

‘As a Christian are you suggesting we compromise with evil? No friend, there can only be war between the righteous and the wicked. To tolerate evil is to become evil oneself.’

and

‘We don’t hate our neighbors, we only hate the evil inside them. With love in our hearts, we must cleanse the planet of it.’

EDIT:and

‘As a Christian I am commanded by God, at the risk of my very soul if I don‘t obey, to kill homosexuals, pagans, atheists and heretics.’

Do they strike you as odd? A ‘debate’ is currently ‘raging’ over at this thread of discussion, in which we are told that it is our duty as Westerners to ‘cleanse’ the world of our religious enemies. At the risk of turning into that esteemed Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, I must say that I am disgusted. Christian principles of άγαπη, and such-like aside (reams about this could be written, but they’ld have me fiddling around with unicode for ages; boring!), this sort of language should be ringing alarm bells in the heads of rational people.

So why isn’t it for Sisyphus, Marcia P., BJ Tabor, and their ilk?

What are the possibilities?

• (I apologise for the bullet point; RWers and CPers will now have an almost Pavlovian horror of it). The first is simply that they are parodic. This would be simple, and, as discussed elsewhere, Sisyphus is a little too extreme some of the time to be utterly credible. This runs into difficulties, however; if he is parodic, then he is very good at what he does, as he hasn’t let his guard down once, and the other posters haven’t caught him up on anything. Even if he was a joke, there are many others who seem to share the same beliefs; unless they are all sockpuppets (and we certainly know that, although it is possible, it’s very hard to keep track of who’s who), some of them still believe this, and so the argument still stands: some people still think that there is a Manichaean struggle between the righteous (them) and the evil ones (foreigner/political opponent du jour).
• The second option would be that they are hiding behind their words.  This is certainly a very plausible option; people are very good at distancing the logical conclusion of their ideas (murder, war, genocide) behind ‘reasoning’ for it, be it a distorted element of religion, as here, neologisms and euphemisms, as in ‘extraordinary rendition’, ‘enhanced interrogation’, etc, or merely an authority figure, as Milgram’s most famous experiment shows us; approximately 64% of us would kill just because the nice smiling man in the white lab coat told us that it would be for science. So, this is a certain option.
• The third, and most horrifying idea, is that they have gone away to their pleasant little houses in some American idyll, and calmly and logically decide that it is right. I’m no psychologist, but I’m not sure how the human mind can start with the same facts that we all have, and then reach such monstrous conclusions.

For all our sakes, I hope it’s the second answer. The third is too depressing.