THE DEVIL??


Hi, the malignant negative One, does he exist or is this just a frightening myth.

If such an awful Being really does exist then it is very relevant in the afterlife realms.

A curious phenomenon, and one which may apply in a universal sense, concerns the fact that people who believe in the reality of the devil, people who attribute the existence of evil to a being with more power and force than ordinary human beings do, usually tend to believe that the natural, material world is morally degenerate and corrupt. There are probably exceptions to this rule, as there always are to most things that approach universality, but finding examples that conform to the rule is much easier than citing ones that contradict it.

The origin of the coupling is not obscure, since most mystical religions of the Near and Middle East described the creation of the world as being the result of a war between good and evil, light and darkness, in which "Satan" overpowered "God" and buried or encased the dismembered pieces of His body of light in the darkness of material reality. Hence, nature is necessarily evil because the world impedes the spirit or soul of goodness by locking it inside a heavy and ponderous shell of matter and darkness. Christianity appropriated the image even if it also rejected the validity of the idea that a second creative power ("Satan") existed whom had the capacity first to overpower the all-powerful God and second to create the world out of the debris left behind after the war for dominance was decided. This is probably a first case of having your cake and eating it too, since the early Fathers accepted the notion of the world's evil but rejected the cause for how it came to be that way. This creates a fundamental contradiction in Christian dogma; that is, if God is absolute goodness, how did He manage to create a world that is contains wrong, bad or evil? Since God is also omnipotent, and apparently in control of His own actions, the question becomes one of why He created a fallible world when He could have done otherwise?

Christianity has generally avoided the problem of this illogical construct in its ideology by saying that God is beyond mere human comprehension, that we, individually and collectively, simply cannot understand why God did what He did in the past or why He does what He does now. The issue of Good and Evil is a mystery of God's making and another powerful sign meant to compel us to accept our subservience to His divine will even as it functions yet another proof of His undeniable and everlasting existence. Exactly why the absence of logical structures in the essential nature of the world demonstrates the existence of a benevolent Creator is yet another argument that baffles more than it reassures one who seeks to find reasonable ground for belief. However, of course, finding a reasonable ground for belief in the mythology of any religion is precisely the kind of action that indicates a fundamental rebellion against mythological belief systems in the first place. .

Ruth Ashen (The Reality of the Devil: Evil in Man) makes the case for the primacy of myth over reason and logic where religious ideology is concerned by stating that

Myth is neither right nor wrong, logical nor contradictory. It has its birth in another sphere where consistency, truth, and reality are measured by other standards. This sphere is intuition and experience does not mean that myth is ambiguous, equivocal, or deceptive. The incompatibility of contradictory meanings is characteristic of logic and reason, not of intuition and experience. The myth conceals many meanings, the interrelations of which may vary and appear difficult to understand. This is due to the fact that the myth stems from strata of the soul deeper than consciousness and therefore beyond the reach of our thought

why in our search for understanding should we knock at the door of the temple of myth in this age of science and sophistication" For both questions and answers must transcend pure theory as well as the limitations of a particular place or historical epoch"  Put differently, since an a priori determination has been made that the question is "eternal" (What is the nature of the universe and mankind's place in it?), the answer cannot be bound by a particular time and place because such an answer would not rise to the level of the strictly "eternal." Hence, Einstein's answer that the universe is bounded by the principle that E = MC2 cannot be taken seriously, or literally at all, as an answer to the question of the nature of the universe because it was given in 1905 and not at some indeterminable date in the distant and unapproachable past.

Another way to look at this same issue, though admittedly not the way Christians anywhere would prefer or embrace, would be to recognize the fact that the people in the distant past, even the ones who invented the myths in question, were not particularly knowledgeable about the nature of the universe and simply made the best answer they could at the time. While no one can say so for certain, if those same people were brought forward into the first year of the 21st Century and shown that their perceptions of reality were still being embraced as absolute truth, they would probably be rendered speechless by the sheer absurdity of that fact. The point that seems important here is that attributing a truth-preserving quality to myth because it arises from "strata of the soul deeper than consciousness" probably obscures the more fundamental reality that people 500 or 5,000 years ago thought they existed in a cosmos that bears almost nothing in common with the nature of the universe as it actually exists. Calling ignorance of material reality truth because it is "soulful" serves no philosophical purpose other than to preserve the misconceptions that religious ideology has always used to project its bigotry against people perceived as differing from the normal terms of its orthodoxy. Galileo is one such victim of that practice.

Put in more concrete terms with regard to cosmology: Ptolemy argued that the planets and fixed stars revolved around the earth on solid spheres and always maintained the same distance from the center of the whole. Christians added the idea that the spheres were turned in place by angels. Copernicus shifted the center of that universal structure from the earth to the sun but retained the notion that the spheres were both solid circles and moved by angels. Kepler and Galileo demonstrated that there were no solid spheres and that the orbits of the planets were not circular but elliptical in shape. Neither included the notion that angels turned the ellipses. Newton, with his discovery of gravity as the force that both held the planets in place and caused their motion, managed to explain why the planets and fixed stars did not fall from the sky in the absence of angels holding their spheres or ellipses in place. Newton's calculations, however, contained an irresolvable anomaly, which gave great hope to Christians, I suppose, that science was wrong and they were right to insist on solid spheres and angels as the cause of everything that happened in the universe. Einstein, in his General Theory of Relativity (1905), resolved the anomaly in Newton's calculations and successfully predicted Mercury's periodicity with virtually perfect timing and exactitude. Gone was the hope, then, that angels were turning solid spheres.

The point here is that E = MC2 states unequivocally, unambiguously, definitively, and wholly without deception that the universe has always existed as a material reality in either the form of energy (E) or mass (M) and has probably stood as equal (=) parts of both forever. Does this informed, scientific conceptualization of reality contradict the mythic idea that God created the universe out of nothing? The challenge is not to think of ten thousand more ways to say that science is evil, that science destroys spirituality, that science is the true form and shape and guise of Satan in the modern world; the challenge is to prove and demonstrate that E = MC2 is false, that it is mathematically unsound, that it does not truly and accurately reflect the nature of the universe.



Among all primitive and half-primitive peoples, the shaman lives apart from the community. Various reasons make this isolation not only desirable but also imperative. The people themselves fear that the shaman's manna, or supernatural force, might be harmful to them. In addition, the shaman himself has every reason to avoid the routine of ordinary life. Such intimacy could only diminish his prestige and profane his work by allowing an easy access to his art and its paraphernalia. Thus, his isolation is an expression of his mysterious powers, a protective measure and an inner necessity. The shaman, the witch doctor, the medicine man are the ancestors of a long line of successors, magicians and alchemists, conjurers and Faustian figures  imitate-unconsciously, of course-their overlord, the Devil. For the Devil, as we said before, is enthroned in utter loneliness.

The  idea of two almost equal forces light and darkness in some yet to be determined war is a really really frightening thing to contemplate on don’t you guys think so? Light must prevail, "one candle dispels the darkness"

ALAN

Hi Muzac,

If god is omni-everything then he/she/it must have either created evil or negativity or allowed it to exist. The alternate is a ying/yang eternal battle between apposing forces of evil and good, something I dont like to think about and hope is not fact.

alan

Or, here is another view from Wikepedia, the Devil Card in Tarot is defined this way:

Interpretation

The Devil is the card of self-bondage to an idea or belief which is preventing us from growing—an example could include believing that getting drunk each night is good for you. On the other hand, however, it can also be a warning to someone who is too restrained and/or dispassionate and never allows him or herself to be rash or wild or ambitious, which is yet another form of enslavement.

The Devil is the 15th card of the Major Arcana, and is associated with earth and Capricornus. Though many decks portray a stereotypical Satan figure for this card, it more accurately represents our bondage to material things rather than any evil persona. It also indicates an obsession or addiction to fulfilling our own earthly base desires. Should the Devil represent a person, it will most likely be one of money and power, one who is persuasive, aggressive, and controlling. In any case, it is most important that the Querent understands that the ties that bind are freely worn, and you are only enslaved if you allow the abuse to go on.

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love, blink

Yeh,

Some Evangelicals seem to be obsessed with this beast calling him the Enemy, more worried about what it can do to them than what God can do for them.

alan

If we want to have a devil we can - I agree with Vajra. I'm not sure what to feed a devil, but dog food might be OK. In Tasmania they feed their devils road kill, which seems much more economical.

Further, we have God who created everything, so It must have created our pet devil as well. And since everything in everything else, God is the devil? - That would certainly surprise some of those isolated souls who are buried up to their hocks in pride and rejection in the underworld.

My impression is that our notion of the existence of a devil was very strongly flavored by the Persian's Zoastrian belief system of Ahura Mazda and Ormazd. We don't see this in the usual historical lineage of Satan, but we do find it popping up here and there, such as Manicheans, Cathars and Albigtensians, and all the way to the present in some anti-religious sects. The idea is thus a bit obscure, varying between personal boogetmen from the closets of infancy, to the rather extreme acts of some of the world's misguided leaders.

My personal feeling is that we create our own evil spooks by the attitude with which we create our subjective world. One person sees a hurtful act as arising from ignorance and stupidity, another sees it as a moral flaw, and others see it as inefficiency in capitalism etc. I look into the air in front of me at all the millions of passing shapes, and I can imagine them to be just about anything I desire.  Sometimes I see big jaws gnashing their teeth at me as they try to bite me (very hard to do without material substance), others bring color, flowers, scrolling fillagrees to decorate the room for a moment etc. And occasionally I get flames, brilliant colors, and a sense of being dragged through some kind of cosmic knothole.

If I take the attitude that these are malicious spirits in action I can get very much involved in fear. Or if I take all this to be God, communicating to me in symbolic form, then I get all manner of excitement and fun. That might be confusing to some poor spook who can't tell whether to be a good guy or a bad one, but that's not my department.

dave