I have never understood two questions that seem to continue to be debated. In my mind they reduce to the same point, but I'm not sure that's true in the minds of people who think either question is worthy of debate.
The first is whether there is evil in the world. Well, of course there is. People do bad things for malicious reasons. End of discussion.
The second, and perhaps the one real question being debated, is whether Satan exists. Whether there is a fundamental source, indeed a personified source, of evil in the world. It seems to me that, at least in New Testament terms, Satan is introduced as an explanation for why we are tempted to depart from good behavior.
To me, this is just another example of the ancients making up magical beings to explain things that we were not at the time capable of explaining logically. I think it's fair to say that the fact that we are tempted to do things that our religion tells us we shouldn't do is the result of our having evolved largely or entirely before we created civilization, and in fact the prescriptive elements of religion exist precisely to adapt uncivilized man to the needs of civilization.
In a sense, that means that our invention of Satan was the inevitable by-product of our invention of God.
Of course, the killer question is if Satan is a fallen angel, and is the source of all temptation to evil, what tempted Satan to evil?
All of this, I think, should be fairly obvious to anyone who spends a moment of thought on the matter. Grown-ups who haven't spent a moment of thought on the matter, or who can't, and who therefore profess an actual belief that the red guy with the tail is real, would be mostly harmless. The fact that they are not inclined toward rational reflection simply means they won't gravitate to the hard sciences, for example.
But some of them, who are really incapable of rational reflection or much of anything else productive, gravitate toward politics.
And at least one of them wants to be President of the United States. You can accuse me of having a religious test for office all you want, but a person's propensity to truly believe the truly unbelievable is a disqualifier in my book.
The first is whether there is evil in the world. Well, of course there is. People do bad things for malicious reasons. End of discussion.
The second, and perhaps the one real question being debated, is whether Satan exists. Whether there is a fundamental source, indeed a personified source, of evil in the world. It seems to me that, at least in New Testament terms, Satan is introduced as an explanation for why we are tempted to depart from good behavior.
To me, this is just another example of the ancients making up magical beings to explain things that we were not at the time capable of explaining logically. I think it's fair to say that the fact that we are tempted to do things that our religion tells us we shouldn't do is the result of our having evolved largely or entirely before we created civilization, and in fact the prescriptive elements of religion exist precisely to adapt uncivilized man to the needs of civilization.
In a sense, that means that our invention of Satan was the inevitable by-product of our invention of God.
Of course, the killer question is if Satan is a fallen angel, and is the source of all temptation to evil, what tempted Satan to evil?
All of this, I think, should be fairly obvious to anyone who spends a moment of thought on the matter. Grown-ups who haven't spent a moment of thought on the matter, or who can't, and who therefore profess an actual belief that the red guy with the tail is real, would be mostly harmless. The fact that they are not inclined toward rational reflection simply means they won't gravitate to the hard sciences, for example.
But some of them, who are really incapable of rational reflection or much of anything else productive, gravitate toward politics.
And at least one of them wants to be President of the United States. You can accuse me of having a religious test for office all you want, but a person's propensity to truly believe the truly unbelievable is a disqualifier in my book.
