On Evil
I had a roommate in college who was a devoted Satanist. When I say "Satanist", I mean the religion promulgated by Anton Szandor LaVey about half a century ago. My roommate told me that he had set out to write an article denouncing it for his high school newspaper, but upon studying it, he had found himself taken in, and the article he ended up writing bore a subtitle something like "the most misunderstood religion".
Satanism seems like an overloaded term. Prior to LaVey, people called Satanists were people who (reputedly) sacrificed humans in elaborate rituals in the woods late at night, to worship the devil, or some such nonsense. I don't rightly know if there ever were such people and it doesn't much matter to my point. LaVey appropriated the term to be provocative and, I suspect, as a publicity stunt.
Out of curiosity, I acquired a copy of the seminal text of the religion, LaVey's Satanic Bible. I later acquired other copies of it to be provocative as well; I found that people reacted to it when they saw it, and it made a good prop for Halloween parties. I read it one evening during college, and found some small nuggets of interest here and there.
While at university, I frequently interacted with all kinds of random people in different circumstances, which is the element of school I miss most in my later adult life. Since I'm usually keen to listen to people at great length, many people would tell me about their troubles and then seemingly to look to me for advice. I took a great deal of perverse pleasure in offering advice to religious people from the Satanic Bible, and offering people who claimed to be atheists aphorisms from the actual Bible. I would never tell them the source of the wisdom; I'd simply play it off in the passive voice. "I heard someone say once..." The advice was almost always received well.
Despite this ruse on my part, I didn't know much about either Christianity or its relation to Satanism during my college years. I only recently came across a Satanic Bible in a bookstore and decided to give it another look, since I've learned something of its enemy in the meantime. There isn't a lot of substance to the book. LaVey develops the idea that better doctrines would be precisely the logical opposite those of a Christian, say, by revering one's own birthday as the greatness holiday of the year instead of Christmas, or embracing the seven deadly sins as virtuous.
The one passage that stuck out was the exact one that my roommate had initially quoted to me in college, perhaps to inculcate me: "Belief in one false principle is the beginning of all unwisdom." This is a well-stated maxim, and it might be the only line of any value in the entire book.
There is also the cheeky quip that "Satan has been the best friend the church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years!" This is the paradox about evil that scripture itself never completely resolves. If Christian authorities ever get their way and eliminate the evil they condemn from the world, there is no longer any need for any kind of church or faith. This is also guaranteed not to ever happen since several doctrines of the faith oppose human nature itself.
The second half of the Satanic Bible is where LaVey really trips up. He spends a fair amount of time dismissing the Christian religion as a bogus mythology based on superstition, then proceeds to define a bunch of spells and incantations which, when recited aloud, are supposed to give the believer the power to conjure up circumstances in his favor. These spells are offered in two languages: English and "Enochian", which is a language of the occult devised sometime in 16th century England.
I remember asking my roommate about these, and he told me a story about how he had once read one of them aloud. It was a spell that was designed to bring about extreme fear in those around you. (What practical purpose this could possibly serve, I have no clue.) According to him, he read it while on the top of a bunk bed, and his roommate on the lower bed awoke from a nap screaming in terror and ran out of the room. When he asked his roommate about it later, he simply said that he couldn't explain why he had been suddenly stricken with fear and the urge to flee.
My roommate had tried other spells over the years, but apparently they had not worked at all, or had only worked so partially as to be unconvincing.
The question of evil is actually a long and storied one. In the ancient world, prior to the monotheisms, most tribes of people had multiple gods that they worshipped. With this plurality, it was pretty easy to anthropomorphize them with Adam Smith's specialization, so that one god was responsible for the weather, one was responsible for harvest, and so on. It's easy to attribute good occurrences to some gods and bad occurrences to other ones.
With a singular God, who is supposed to be all good and omnipotent, then where does evil come from? Christianity does a bit of legerdemain to transition from polytheism: instead of gods and demigods, we have angels and saints, respectively. One of these angels is fallen, and in hell, and makes a living for himself by tempting people to do evil.
Why and how, exactly, a fallen angel condemned to a realm of eternal torment is able to contravene God's exclusive sovereignty in the mortal realm is, naturally, a ridiculous paradox. And once you externalize evil, and people can simply invoke Flip Wilson's catchphrase of "the devil made me do it", then personal responsibility ends up on shaky ground. A German philosopher of the Enlightenment named Leibniz wrote about the problem of evil in his discourse on Metaphysics. He was a Christian who believed that God was omnipotent, and so evil must ultimately always originate from God. But why would a God who was all good cause evil to happen in the world?
The rejoinder to this might sound familiar, since it is prevalent among Christian apologists even today: evil is all part of the larger divine plan. In the 1998 movie Godzilla, Matthew Broderick is asking a soldier where the evidence is of the monster they seek. The soldier replies, "You're standing in it." Broderick is confused, as the camera pulls back to reveal that he is standing inside of an enormous footprint, which he cannot discern from his lowly vantage point. Evil is merely a problem of locality; if we were capable of gaining wider perspective on the entire chronology of human affairs, we would see that justice always is done, even when the heavens fall.
To bastardize the old axiom (and with apologies to Voltaire): if the Devil did not exist, we would have to invent God.
I remember reading through the New Testament a few years ago and writing a question to myself: "Has Jesus forgiven Judas?" I did not understand how the apostle who did what had to be done "so that the scriptures might be fulfilled" would be condemned to hell. If Judas hadn't done what he did, then we would never have had Jesus himself as the ultimate human sacrifice, and so, arguably, the world would be much worse off. There is an apocryphal "Gospel of Judas", which is not purported to have been written by Judas, but instead about him. In it, Judas is the most beloved of all 12 disciples, for precisely this reason; Jesus takes him aside and instructs him in secret, apart from the other 11 apostles, and tells him that he must be despised by all posterity for doing what is necessary. Indeed, if Jesus really had wanted to teach the world a thing or two about the importance of forgiveness by example, he could have done little better than publicly forgiving the man who had betrayed him after the resurrection.
Satanism seems like an overloaded term. Prior to LaVey, people called Satanists were people who (reputedly) sacrificed humans in elaborate rituals in the woods late at night, to worship the devil, or some such nonsense. I don't rightly know if there ever were such people and it doesn't much matter to my point. LaVey appropriated the term to be provocative and, I suspect, as a publicity stunt.
Out of curiosity, I acquired a copy of the seminal text of the religion, LaVey's Satanic Bible. I later acquired other copies of it to be provocative as well; I found that people reacted to it when they saw it, and it made a good prop for Halloween parties. I read it one evening during college, and found some small nuggets of interest here and there.
While at university, I frequently interacted with all kinds of random people in different circumstances, which is the element of school I miss most in my later adult life. Since I'm usually keen to listen to people at great length, many people would tell me about their troubles and then seemingly to look to me for advice. I took a great deal of perverse pleasure in offering advice to religious people from the Satanic Bible, and offering people who claimed to be atheists aphorisms from the actual Bible. I would never tell them the source of the wisdom; I'd simply play it off in the passive voice. "I heard someone say once..." The advice was almost always received well.
Despite this ruse on my part, I didn't know much about either Christianity or its relation to Satanism during my college years. I only recently came across a Satanic Bible in a bookstore and decided to give it another look, since I've learned something of its enemy in the meantime. There isn't a lot of substance to the book. LaVey develops the idea that better doctrines would be precisely the logical opposite those of a Christian, say, by revering one's own birthday as the greatness holiday of the year instead of Christmas, or embracing the seven deadly sins as virtuous.
The one passage that stuck out was the exact one that my roommate had initially quoted to me in college, perhaps to inculcate me: "Belief in one false principle is the beginning of all unwisdom." This is a well-stated maxim, and it might be the only line of any value in the entire book.
There is also the cheeky quip that "Satan has been the best friend the church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years!" This is the paradox about evil that scripture itself never completely resolves. If Christian authorities ever get their way and eliminate the evil they condemn from the world, there is no longer any need for any kind of church or faith. This is also guaranteed not to ever happen since several doctrines of the faith oppose human nature itself.
The second half of the Satanic Bible is where LaVey really trips up. He spends a fair amount of time dismissing the Christian religion as a bogus mythology based on superstition, then proceeds to define a bunch of spells and incantations which, when recited aloud, are supposed to give the believer the power to conjure up circumstances in his favor. These spells are offered in two languages: English and "Enochian", which is a language of the occult devised sometime in 16th century England.
I remember asking my roommate about these, and he told me a story about how he had once read one of them aloud. It was a spell that was designed to bring about extreme fear in those around you. (What practical purpose this could possibly serve, I have no clue.) According to him, he read it while on the top of a bunk bed, and his roommate on the lower bed awoke from a nap screaming in terror and ran out of the room. When he asked his roommate about it later, he simply said that he couldn't explain why he had been suddenly stricken with fear and the urge to flee.
My roommate had tried other spells over the years, but apparently they had not worked at all, or had only worked so partially as to be unconvincing.
The question of evil is actually a long and storied one. In the ancient world, prior to the monotheisms, most tribes of people had multiple gods that they worshipped. With this plurality, it was pretty easy to anthropomorphize them with Adam Smith's specialization, so that one god was responsible for the weather, one was responsible for harvest, and so on. It's easy to attribute good occurrences to some gods and bad occurrences to other ones.
With a singular God, who is supposed to be all good and omnipotent, then where does evil come from? Christianity does a bit of legerdemain to transition from polytheism: instead of gods and demigods, we have angels and saints, respectively. One of these angels is fallen, and in hell, and makes a living for himself by tempting people to do evil.
Why and how, exactly, a fallen angel condemned to a realm of eternal torment is able to contravene God's exclusive sovereignty in the mortal realm is, naturally, a ridiculous paradox. And once you externalize evil, and people can simply invoke Flip Wilson's catchphrase of "the devil made me do it", then personal responsibility ends up on shaky ground. A German philosopher of the Enlightenment named Leibniz wrote about the problem of evil in his discourse on Metaphysics. He was a Christian who believed that God was omnipotent, and so evil must ultimately always originate from God. But why would a God who was all good cause evil to happen in the world?
The rejoinder to this might sound familiar, since it is prevalent among Christian apologists even today: evil is all part of the larger divine plan. In the 1998 movie Godzilla, Matthew Broderick is asking a soldier where the evidence is of the monster they seek. The soldier replies, "You're standing in it." Broderick is confused, as the camera pulls back to reveal that he is standing inside of an enormous footprint, which he cannot discern from his lowly vantage point. Evil is merely a problem of locality; if we were capable of gaining wider perspective on the entire chronology of human affairs, we would see that justice always is done, even when the heavens fall.
To bastardize the old axiom (and with apologies to Voltaire): if the Devil did not exist, we would have to invent God.
I remember reading through the New Testament a few years ago and writing a question to myself: "Has Jesus forgiven Judas?" I did not understand how the apostle who did what had to be done "so that the scriptures might be fulfilled" would be condemned to hell. If Judas hadn't done what he did, then we would never have had Jesus himself as the ultimate human sacrifice, and so, arguably, the world would be much worse off. There is an apocryphal "Gospel of Judas", which is not purported to have been written by Judas, but instead about him. In it, Judas is the most beloved of all 12 disciples, for precisely this reason; Jesus takes him aside and instructs him in secret, apart from the other 11 apostles, and tells him that he must be despised by all posterity for doing what is necessary. Indeed, if Jesus really had wanted to teach the world a thing or two about the importance of forgiveness by example, he could have done little better than publicly forgiving the man who had betrayed him after the resurrection.