The Devil Made Me Do It

I used to have the spirit scared right out of me by Baptist preachers. Now many religious bloggers and strangely enough secular bloggers are starting to scare me a little. The reason they scare me is that they insist on the presence of a Satan. I am comfortable enough in my beliefs that I am not concerned I will be converted, but instead concerned that a figure known as “Satan’ can be blamed for so much in the world.

I heard all about Satan as a child. I once dressed as Satan for Halloween. I suppose if there is an actual red Halloween costume complete with pitchfork and long tail, then the reality of the rascal is oddly difficult to dismiss.

However I have managed to reason the devil out of my existence. I trust in a natural law system of belief. I believe man is already complete and perfect in concept. The key phrase of course is ‘in concept’. I find it intellectually small to imagine that across our universe a loving God is doing battle with a Satanic force. It defies credibility if we observe the natural pattern of our world. Why wouldn’t Satan simply pull the sun from the solar system if he were real and possessed powers enough to torment the Creator? It would shorten his work load here in a dramatic and creative way, and certainly it would be evil and demonstrate his equal powers.

If we were created to be complete in perfection, how would an evil force be co-created? Over the years I have convinced myself that our world is one of natural law and natural order. It will not surprise you to know I think the perfect harmony is grounded in our ability to love not only one another, but all things that surround us. Simplistic? Yes.

Inside all great beauty lies simplicity. Even when we unravel the remarkable complexities of biology we simultaneously discover the remarkable simplicity of evolution and adaptation.

Can the world be so simple that Satan is made up to explain away the fallibility of human choice? I believe this is partially true. I also believe Satan has been created to control other humans. There is no Satan, there is merely the function of free will imperfectly executed. We are granted free choice by the Creator for a simple reason. If we were not, we would be mere slaves to a steady state of nothingness. With free choice we become an experiment in learning the good way, the natural law of our world. When we fail it is only because of inappropriate choice.

Amid all of this preaching of mine a signal is arising that life is easy and all we need do is go out and make the correct choice. Having fallen many times in my life I know the weaknesses of my theory. It is one of those difficult thoughts that send us forward into complexity only to emerge years later with an understanding of the simplicity. It can resemble a tangled string that we labor to unravel from the middle rather than searching for the two ends before we begin. Once we have it all untangled, we see the ends of the string clearly. Or are we seeing the beginnings of the string?

I believe all the things that surround us that we call evil or we attempt to attribute to a Satan are nothing more than failures in the perfect exercise of free choice.

This is the natural law I embrace.

If I walk across the street tonight and murder my neighbor, is it permissible to blame it all on the Devil? I think not. It is permitted within the design of free will to make disastrous and unnatural choices, and that is all.

Satan does not exist.

I could go on and on and on. Perhaps you would move to your links and click ‘next’ if I did? Still I want to make a point to you about something I have learned. There is no Satan. There is no evil that operates in an absence of human choice. Perhaps we can fear choice and maybe we can seriously fear the choices of others. But, can we please quit absolving ourselves of the responsibility for our searches and our choices and quit scaring the children in church?

Satan does not exist. If we concern ourselves with expressing our innate perfection, we can transcend such shallow thoughts as believing in evil forces at work on us, but we must begin with purging ourselves of such an easy excuse for our failure to search.