Against Satan

The bible has a few main characters, many shared by the Torah and Koran. God is central to the plot. Jesus comes to the fore in the New Testament. Some other prophets have important roles. And then there is Satan.

Satan, or the devil, enters right at the start of Genesis, and is all over the Old Testament. It may be surprising to learn that the New Testament has a lot of Satan too, with plenty of plot lines about final judgments, hell and apocalypse. Nowadays, Christian churches tend to de-emphasise these aspects in the readings we hear on Sundays, but studying the gospels show that Jesus was quite big on Satan.

I am with the modern interpretations. I find Satan to be incredible and highly damaging to how we can interpret and gain from religious teaching. I think the time has come to banish Satan once and for all from the way we think.

There are various ways that Satan could have come to prominence. Of course, Satan may literally exist, along with serpents and women created from ribs of men and six day creation epics and St Peter at the pearly gates playing master sorter.

There are other more earthly possibilities. Most start from the idea of an all-seeing, all-powerful benevolent God. That leads clerics to need to answer the toughest question posed by us dumbass mortals: if God is so cool, how come my baby kid died of leukaemia and chunks of Mozambique got wiped out last month?

There aren’t really good answers. Some clerics tell us that there is a bigger story that we can only see a part of, that Tommy’s leukaemia was part of some master plan. Some even hint that Tommy must have committed some sin, or that suffering offers wider benefits. But most blame Satan, pitting God and Satan in some endless cosmic battle that God will win in the end but only after lots of suffering and with a bit of help from little us.

How convenient this storyline is. It can explain away seeming narrative inconsistencies, offer us a role, and help the cause of those people in power who want to cajole the rest of us to accept injustice in the hope of later salvation. But the story still does not add up.

Why should I care about this anomaly when the bible is full of them? Well, actually, the gospels have a lot fewer anomalies than the rest of the bible. True, resurrection and virgin birth are somewhat hard to swallow, but most of the life’s work of Jesus is inspiring and comes from factual sources; I find his teaching to be a strong life guide.

So it is a bit jarring that my hero seemed to put so much focus on this unhelpful villain. Perhaps he didn’t really, but those who wrote up the story were so fixed in their views of Satan that these views infected their narrative. Perhaps Jesus did use the Satan concept a lot, as a sort of marketing compromise so people only took to his wider message. Even modern heroes like Mandela have to do things like that at times.

But my problem is that whereas nearly all the gospel content points us in a good direction, the Satan stuff does the opposite. The passage that comes nearest to being helpful is the story about temptation in the desert that we hear on the first Sunday of Lent. Here Jesus is tempted by the devil, and the temptation is made quite explicit, in the form of hubris, greed and craving for adulation. If we restrict our concept of Satan to a warning to try to avoid such failings, then it can help. That particular message could certainly help a current occupant of a white house in Washington DC, and should help the rest of us in judging such people worthy of leadership.

But Satan goes so much further, it seems even via Jesus, and the rest only causes damage. Satan puts us in the wrong mind set most of the time. Thinking of judgment fills us with fear, emphasises point scoring and tribal, combative behaviour, and prioritises the distant (dead) future ahead of the present. The effects of all this can be seen throughout human history.

Taking the micro level first, Satanic thoughts lead us to be fatalistic, to judge, blame and shame. The most obvious effect is in the handling of illness. In Jesus’ time, lepers were outcasts. It was fair enough to aim to achieve a level of quarantine, but not so fair to equate sufferers with devils who must be sinners and to make no effort to look for cures, except for mystical cures.

That was two thousand years ago, but we have hardly learned. Homosexuality and suicide are persistent examples of damaging action based on flawed thinking. Then there is the whole area of mental illness. Nowadays, at least we don’t suppose the worst sufferers are infected by devils, but we still shun such people, blame them, and are far too slow in looking for cures.

In all of these cases, if our attitude were one of acceptance of difference and difficulty and of seeking ways to support others, we would achieve much better results. Jesus tried to show the way, but the Satan narrative got in the way. Why would we want to reach out to people infected by Satan?

The macro effects of satanic thinking might be even worse. A worldview based around cosmic struggle is not a good way to frame anything. We can take the position that the cosmic struggle renders us powerless or in the control of wider forces, in which case why try very hard to mitigate climate change? Or we can place ourselves as foot soldiers in the mighty war, of course on the side of the good guys.

Foot soldier thinking leads to beliefs of superiority, with all its historical consequences. The crusades started that way. Even in my own childhood, we sang “Onward Christian Soldiers”, somehow accepting its literal call to arms and implied condemnation of unbelievers as savages. The Pence doctrine is key in US current foreign policy, but, even before that extremism, we had the axis of evil. Iran’s narrative of the US as the “great Satan” is just as contemptible. Somehow religious zealotry and tribal nationalism become intertwined and combine to pull us all apart and to take up arms.

It feels credible that the root cause of all of this is doctrine around Satan. Everything becomes binary, absolute and warlike, when the more helpful way to view the world is complex, nuanced and tolerant. The thought for this blog came when I was momentarily at risk of having to sit through the latest Avengers movie last weekend – luckily I managed to dodge it, because I find such fare hard to sit through and anger inducing.

Such movies are everywhere, further feeding our attitudes. We can even argue that individual acts of terror originate with the same doctrine. Either someone is so sure their own side is right that inhuman response in justified, or they deliberately choose a devil-type role, seduced by its glamour and the frustration of more nuanced positions. And we all fall for it and hype it up with our language of good versus evil.

So it is time to kill of Satan. That means the opposite of actively trying to kill Satan, the dominant approach through history. It means casting the idea of Satan aside completely, as the damaging over-simplified tosh that always has been.