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If only they could have possibly been not completely naive to the idea that folks like you would intentionally do evil things in attempts to wreck stuff. Hmmm... what's this?
Oh, but you say, it's only a particular type of evil attempt to subvert others that you'd try. You'd try being overly-restrictive in your readings, giving you license to ostracize others and kick them out. If only they weren't completely naive to some people being overly-restrictive in their readings! Hmmm... what's this?
Obviously, there are no guarantees when trying to protect something from evil people such as yourself trying to subvert it. Like all of civilization, it takes work and effort to be on guard for folks like you. You've done a pretty good number on society in general, but at least now you've come clean in saying that you like to destroy societies for the lulz. I'll try to remember that you're a self-admitted bad faith actor the next time you make suggestions as to what our current society should do.
Evil? I do not consider myself evil at all, I would do this out of boredom rather than evil. Provide me with a more interesting way to spend my time (say by discussing the local gladiatorial games) and I'd spend my life doing that instead. Our current society has enough other high quality outlets for boredom that attempting to destroy it doesn't make sense, plus I mostly like our current society and think tinkering around the edges is better than destruction.
I don't consider my hypothetical discussions here as being any more evidence of me being evil than a similar discussion I might have about eradicating every last trace of the Carolingians from the earth in Crusader Kings III. That wouldn't make me a genocidal maniac, just a bored person looking for a way to spend my time in an interesting way. In fact if you put me in the environment above but gave me access to a super secret side room with a PC installed with enough of the latest games to last a lifetime I'd probably just whittle my life away playing the games rather than try and usurp society because the former is simply more fun than the latter (which is at least more fun than dedicating your life to be closer to Jesus).
In fact I will go one step further: I will say a society where everyone has a mindset like me will very likely be extremely successful while a society where everyone is like the ordinary man will collapse post haste. Only caveat is that I am not smart enough to invent all the things we take for granted these days, so a society of BurdensomeCounts will probably stagnate around the Iron Age, but then again the society made up of copies of the ordinary man only wouldn't even get past the mesolithic. But assuming that there's a proper distribution of intelligence for both cases (so we have the few super geniuses who really propel humanity forward) a society made up of people like me would very quickly get settled into a game theoretic positive equilibrium where any deviations are swiftly punished (we would be able to impose this equilibrium because we are smart enough to understand the payoffs), and then everyone, down to the lowest mentally retarded BurdensomeCountClone would behave because e.g. the rest of society would be open to beating him whenever he defected, realizing that he is so stupid that the only thing that works on him is something that works on dogs, namely operant conditioning.
However a society made up of people who think like the ordinary man would devolve very quickly into some socialism-esque monster that keeps everyone poor and suffering where the members preferentially give scarce resources to the failures rather than the successes (you'd prefer to invest in a successful company rather than a failing one, wouldn't you? So then why to we pretend it's better to invest in failing humans rather than successful ones?) who proceed to squander them, but yet another fault of this society is that it is too "luvvie" to impose the correct punishment on defectors so the farce will go on, leading to a veritable kakistocracy before long that goes nowhere and squanders all its potential.
Such a world would in fact be an affront to Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw and I would say that it is Just and Right, nay, a Duty, for the next BurdensomeCount genetic mutation that arises to attempt to take over and rule in a manner that better befits humanity. Eventually one of these mutations will be successful and then that society can break out of its self imposed trap and proceed on the path to Greatness.
Now of course our real life society is none of these, fortunately we have enough correct thinkers running things that we can control the worst impulses of the ordinary masses and we've ensured a system where there's at least some sort of link where the successful get more stuff to play with which means Humanity will eventually reach escape velocity but the current situation can be thought of more like a horse cart in how quickly it gets us to our rightful place as suzerain of the observable universe while I want a society where we're more like a rocket ship in how quickly we get there.
But this works both ways: yes you can use it to criticize the person who tries to be holier than thou, but the person who wants to discuss the local gladiatorial games can also use this to push back against and usurp the elders who want to stop people discussing the local gladiatorial games because it's not Christ-like. This makes me think a better strategy for usurpation would be to use a two pronged approach where we have two groups of usurpers secretly working together, one on the ultra strict side where they try to slice off the less intensely committed genuine believers (Apollonian) while on the other side you have a rabble of superficially committed people who slowly yet openly try to degrade community norms, all the while using passages like your ones above to discredit the true elders (Dionysian) and lead a bottom up revolt against them. So now instead of just slicing people on one side you're doing it on both sides.
You'd need to ensure that there's minimal friendly fire (the Apollonians never go after the Dionysians unless absolutely necessary to keep up pretenses) but an additional benefit you get now is that the true believers are gonna see the hypocrisy of the Apollonians who are blended in with the true elders in how they go after them for minor infractions but seem to leave the Dionysians relatively unchecked. Assuming the Apollonians are relatively well blended the true believers will blame the hypocrisy on all the church elders as a group, thereby causing further internal strife and fragmentation.
All this is not even getting to the fact that the early Church members were very willing as a group to die for their beliefs. Your opponents an-heroing themselves is one of the biggest blessings you could ever ask for. Getting the most zealous true believers to choose to be persecuted and die (like how Ignatius of Antioch did) is a boon to you, even if it leads to more short term converts as the new members are likely the most uncertain about the faith so if you can get one of your agents to go over and feed them your twisted version of the beliefs before the OG ones reach them you'll have a higher success rate than trying out your tricks on already committed members. Plus once the true believer elder is dead they are no longer able to contradict you and what you are doing, you can even try to coopt their teachings and twist them around to to your goals by saying stuff like "XYZ is what St. ABC really meant in their writings, we are the true intellectual descendants of their thought rather than those other guys there" after they are gone.
Like I said, all these passages people are quoting are making it sound like a bigger and bigger challenge and all that's doing is piquing my curiosity and making me even more interested in trying my hand at it (this is probably a more general trait of Elite Human Capital but that's a discussion for another day). Maybe 20% was generous for me on my own, but I think if you give me 50x clones of me and a definable target, e.g. "you and your group are placed in Antioch in the year 200 AD. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to usurp the Church so much that by the year 400 AD Mithraism has a bigger following than Christianity across the Roman empire" I'd still say we would have like a 20% chance of success.
EDIT: Reading this again I sorta sound like Judge Holden which doesn't really help me when I'm trying to say "I'm not evil", maybe a different tone would have been better.
A bit, yeah. I don't think it's all that redeeming to say that it is everyone else's job to entertain you, because if you get bored and can't think of anything other than rapin' and murderin' to do to keep yourself busy, well then...
Boredom is not evil, but it is also not an excuse for choosing evil acts. You could instead put your bored mind toward coming up with positive acts to improve matters.
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