WHO IS THE DEVIL? (Whatever happened to Satan?)

Whatever happened to Satan?

At one time he was supposed to have been a rival to Jehovah himself. The God of this world that blinded minds. Known as the Prince of the Powers of the air and the Prince of Darkness, he was the rebellious star among the angels of Heaven. A spiritual rabble-riser who revolted, he was so devious that he convinced one third of God's angels to go with him and when he was banished from God's heavenly palaces he went on a rampage, tormenting mankind and to haunting the earth with evil.

Before God's court, he was the false accuser of good people, slanderous, libelous, treacherous. Yet he was a Being with such a power and dignity that he arrogantly strode right into places that even Moses and, later, the high priests dared not tread: He walked right into the very presence of God, just showed right up and demanded to speak with Jehovah face to face (Moses could not even do that.), and demanded a subpoena giving him the legal authority to strip God's servant Job down to his underwear and grind him into the ground. To smash him, crush him, pulverize him until he had nothing left but his boil-covered body, his integrity, four unfaithful friends and a heart full of rage, which he vented in a well-prepared rant against his maker. And God signed the subpoena.

So God, the story goes, just rolled over to Satan, and said, "OK, just don't kill him but you can do whatever else you want to with him." So here that impudent rascal, Satan, stands, right in God's own headquarters, and God just lets him walk away! No arrest, no torture, not even a good scolding. The way they talked almost sounded like a couple of Godfathers. "Hey, one of your guys is putting on a good show but I think he's a fake. I just want a piece of him, so what do you say? Just hold your guys off, OK? Because I have a score to settle with this Guy."

And Satan turns and stalks out, free as a bird. Well, a couple of thousand years later we are told that God has Satan under surveillance now. Sort of like the U.S. had Al Sadr under surveillance, I suppose. He has him under containment supposedly, but when Satan gets bad enough, God promises he will tie him up for a thousand years. After that, though, God is going to turn Satan loose on the earth once more. Teach a lesson to all of us little devils who are left on earth. Give us a taste of our own medicine, I suppose.

Well, God knows that this Mr. Satan is a bad guy, incorrigible and so forth and that as soon that devil is unbound he will return to his old ways. But ... God has his parole plan, and he is sticking with that plan -- no matter what the consequences, and regardless of that fact that those consequences are clearly foreseen. Satan is going to do some genetic engineering and create some man-sized locusts, and they are going to come pouring out of the earth in great swarms and in their tails they have poison. These creatures are going to be like living stun-guns which the Devil will use to fly around stinging people until they cry out, "Please, just kill me, I want to be killed." Well, yes, I am paraphrasing a little freely here, but this is the gist of it.
In the meanwhile, my friend asks me, "Where is this bad guy now?" My friend wants to know what I think. Is the Devil just going to and fro throughout the earth looking fruitlessly for that one good guy, like a modern day Job, a modern guy who still loves God? Where is Satan at work today?

According to the original episode, it would appear that Satan passed over a lot of evil men and women, looking here, poking in there, until he found the decent Job. "Ah-ha, there you are, you miserable man of religion. Just stay there and I will be right back."

Zoom, to God's thrown room.

"Have you never heard of knocking?" God says.

Satan is not in a good mood. "Don't mess with me, OK? I have been very busy looking all over hell for you servant Job and now I have located him. Let's just get down to business and forget the small talk, OK?"
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Where is this monster, Satan now, and what is he up to?" This is the question I was asked this afternoon, by my Christian friend. "Where do you see Satan at work in the world? How do you see him working?" she asked.

Here is my response:

Satan, to me, is the personification of evil, not a real person. There, I have said it. Satan is a convenient literary device. Just like we say the "sun rises" when we know that is not true. We know the sun does not really "rise." But it appears as if it does, and we all know what we mean. We don't go into the whole scientific thing of the earth rotating on its imaginary axis, we just say, "The sun is rising," when it is not really rising at all. We on earth are merely turning in relation to the sun. The same goes for Satan. We use the term Satan and we know what it means. Problem is, there are so many literalistic coreligionists, even nowadays, and believing in those teachers would be like believing that Atlas literally holds world on his shoulders.

On the other hand, sometimes, in the middle of stormy night, Satan seems as real and tangible as my own hand. There is a little of the supersticious in me, I admit, and sometimes I cannot help wondering, "Is there some kind of evil spirit which is like a counterpart of God?" But in the daytime and amongst my literate friends, I stuff that notion. And once time in my dreams I med a man, and just one look at him, I knew, he was the prince of the powers of darkness. Good looking, bald, self confident, a look of implacable, almost indifferent, invincibility upon his face. But how about you? Have you ever come face to face with an evil spirit? Hard to deny those emotions isn't it?

Never mind. These are not the thoughts of my mind but of my psyche, that place of inner darkness from which rise all the fears, demons, devils, and panic of madness?

At any rate, I suspect that most of the bible was written by literate people, for literate people. A possible exception being the four gospels, written (as I see it)  for the poor, the weak, the downtrodden as well as for the rich.

I do see the enemy of humankind (I think that "Satan" means "Enemy") at work in such things as our callous indifference to the so-called "collateral damage" in wars of aggression. I see him at work in America's policy of containment, which has often proven to be nothing but the hijacking of our government by certain industrialists and special-business interests in order to rape other nations, to strip them of their natural resources and to ensure a cheap supply of labor.

I also see Satan at work in false advertising, and in the seduction of people for the purpose of turning them in to a nation of wanton consumers; I see him in the use and misuse of people's religion. I see Satan in what has sometimes been called the "Seduction of the Spirit" (Harvey Cox). I see Satan in the the government's (apparently deliberate) propagation of "maps" that don't fit the territory concerning international politics.

I see Satan in the use of chemical weapons. And in what I believe to be the exposure of our military personnel to nerve agents in the Gulf War and probably in Iraq as well. The truth of the exposures was covered up, the mothers of veterans tell me ( I suspect that the exposures were real but may have been covered up in order to avoid the expense of caring for the injured.).

I see Satan at work in the withholding of good when it is in our hand, nationally speaking, to provide adequate health care for our citizens, and food and meaningful work for everyone.

I see Satan at work in the official double-speak that is so rampant in our institutions, and in the polarization of society, I see it in racial prejudice, in nationalism and terrorism, in greed and graft, and so-on. Satan's work is all around us, horrible, millions dead and dying as a result of our abuse and neglect, and yet, here we are, we Christians, worrying over whether or not someone believes in the Trinity or in demons and angels, so-on and so-forth, all the while condoning the propagation of misery.

My attitude is this: You want to heal people? Write your Senators and tell them to stop the killing and maiming of the hundreds of thousands of people! Easy fix! You love the orphans? Then quit making orphans of people by killing their parents! Simple things that we can to right now if there are enough of us speaking our truth. You can be excommunicated if you do something naughty in the bedroom, but you will be celebrated if you go shoot your share of the supposed enemies, many of whom were not enemies at all, until we started shooting.

If Christians/the church do not wake up, someone or something else will come along and replace them/it. I suspect that churches often do not want to empower our government to serve our needy because poverty, sickness, and distress, drive people to the churches for "help." May God have mercy on some of those who do turn to the church for help. Religion, historically, has always stripped away from its victims the most basic, God given rights: the rights to think and to speak freely. When religion replaces spirituality, I think we are done for.

For further reading: HARVEY COX is the author of "The Secular City" and many other books, including The Seduction of the Spirit, which was nominated for the National Book Award. A professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts."

Another person who speaks a lot of truth is Naom Chomsky. (http://www.chomsky.info/)

To learn more about Harvey Cox: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011224/cox