"The Devil Made Me Do It"

Using Satan as an excuse for bad behavior is one of the greatest scapegoats for Christians—or any other religious groups that believe in Satan (next to Jesus). It allows Christians (from here on out I will just refer to Christians to make it simpler) to ignore accountability for their immoral behavior by their standards or those excusing them.

For example, this father tortured his baby by putting it in a safe; then a refrigerator; after which he put the poor thing into a microwave causing severe burns, especially to the face. This is obviously very disgusting behavior. To make matters worse the wife stood by the husband claiming "Satan is responsible for my husband's behavior, it's not his fault" (paraphrasing). She stood by her husband, and in fact, is fighting to get her child out of the care of foster parents and back with her and her insane husband. This is just one example of Christians using Satan as justification to ignore wrongful behavior. There are obviously many problems with this sort of logic: first of all if Satan were real and he is to blame, then wouldn't an all-knowing/all-powerful God be equally responsible? It is sort of like seeing a person hanging on to the edge of a cliff. You walk up to the edge, becoming fully aware of the situation, the person cries out of your help, but you do nothing, and watch the person fall to their death. Christians in this case (while using the described logic) would blame gravity for the person's death, not holding you responsible at all for not helping. You could have saved the person's life, you had all the power to do it—in fact it would have taken a few moments of your time.

This of course is an argument that has been beaten to death. The point here is that the people that are unable to take responsibility for their actions are not as bound to the consequences of such behavior. This makes them less able to avoid/change bad habits: this is because if they do something bad, they have the ability to pretend that an imaginary enemy is responsible. Now the rational do not buy such nonsense, but unfortunately the rational are also the minority.

This video has a mother claiming demons were why she murdered her children:



Another point I would like to raise is how come a nonbeliever will go to hell—but if a person is influenced to do something nasty (like putting their baby into a microwave) and blames Satan—responsibility is transferred to an invisible super-villain. If this was not the case then Christians would outright disallow people from using Satan as a scapegoat for bad behavior.