[perl4ever]

This sort of discussion makes me think of a book I once read by someone who was raised in a fundamentalist Christian sect, maybe Pentecostalism? Anyway, they described how, in their upbringing, the devil and his temptations was so omnipresent, that it was almost as if he was more powerful than God. Whenever you took your mind off the dangers of sin, the devil would come in and take control, one was continually warned. Eventually, this created a kind of cognitive dissonance, because God was remote but the devil was always by one's side, whereby they ended up losing their faith and becoming atheistic.

If we are aware of a negative principle that infests and invades every part of life, though we do our utmost to repel it and mitigate it and remediate it, how can we maintain the conviction that it is not the natural order of things, but is a product of solvable human faults?

I'm not denying the importance of anti-racism or of examples of bias as mentioned here; my point is that when faced with an all pervasive adversary, whether a personified devil or something more abstract, human minds tend to find relief in submitting to the seemingly inevitable via some rationalization.