Get Thee Behind Me, Satan

Satan exists.

Not as you think Satan exists, but Satan exists.

Popular contemporary Christian folk-religion conflates the Biblical concepts of Eden’s serpent / Job’s Satan / Ba’al / Jesus’ Satan with non-Biblical concepts of Lucifer and Hades (the Greek god, not the post-mortem destination).*

First off, Satan isn’t an individual name, it’s a title.

Satan’s job in Job is as God’s tester.

He doubts God’s claim that Job is a righteous, devoted follower and basically places a bet with Him that Satan can get Job to curse God.

So God -- apparently not the omnipotent / omniscient deity of the Christian era -- takes the bet and allows Satan to slaughter Job’s family, wipe out his personal wealth and property, then cover him with painful boils.

This version of God is apparently not the all-loving God of the Christian era, either.

Jump ahead a few dozen centuries to the Current Era.  In the gospel stories Jesus, after his baptism, goes off into the wilderness to pray and meditate.  Once there he’s tempted three times by Satan, each time raising the stakes for Jesus to see if he’ll break and take the moral short cut.

So here’s the thing:  Stop thinking of Satan as some grand demonic entity of evil and instead recognize “him” as the anti-Jiminy Cricket.

You know Jiminy Cricket.  He’s the independent entity who serves as Pinocchio’s external conscience in the Disney version of the story.

He is, of course, a metaphor, a literary device, a fictional figure even in the context of the story.

Pinocchio is a hand carved AI-guided robot bereft of experience and knowledge.  Jiminy Cricket is assigned to guide him into making correct decisions.**

Pinocchio is a cautionary tale for young children, to teach by example.  It shows Pinocchio turning from wise counsel to the blandishments of immediate gratification.  The story teaches children to develop their own internal conscience. 

In the original novel Pinocchio kills the talking cricket that tries to advise him only to be sporadically haunted by its ghost throughout the rest of the book; in the Disney version Jiminy Cricket eludes grylluscide to remain Pinocchio’s traveling companion.

Satan as a character is no more real than either version of the talking cricket or of Jiminy Cricket.***

As a metaphor, just as real.

Back in the 1960s comedian Flip Wilson used the catchphrase:  “The devil made me do it.”

That’s a particular metaphor many people -- especially Christians! -- use to this day. 

It absolves us of ill-intent, placing the blame on an outside agency, in effect rendering us as much of a victim as those whom we harm.

Jesus’ temptations -- like our own -- did not come from some hostile exterior force.

Jesus’ temptations -- like our own -- came from his own wants and desires.

“Satan” represents nothing but the internal conflict within his own consciousness / mind / psyche / soul, a conflict of competing desires.

One set of desires being to achieve the end goal as expeditiously as possible, but at the cost of losing the war by winning the battle.

The other set quired Jesus to take the long, patient view, to work slowly and steadily toward his objective knowing whatever setbacks he might face, staying true to his principles would serve him best in the end.

To surround ourselves with demons and devils and literally “satanic” entities is to surrender the battle before it even starts.

To place the blame for our bad emotions and ideas and thoughts outside us instead of acknowledging they’re a part of who we are means we can avoid self-reflection and examination, avoid confronting and challenging and changing the things about us that we really don’t like yet feel so comfortable doing.

Couple that with a pop culture concept of a savior who will forgive us (but not you) just by saying, “Opps!  Sorry!” and you get the recipe for disaster we seen infecting all Christian institutions at one degree or another today.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, “The fault, dear friends, lays not in our Satans  but in ourselves.”

© Buzz Dixon

 * It can be argued that the evangelical movement needs Satan far more than it needs Jesus.  Satan allows them to act swinishly with an easy out.  By threatening eternal torment at the devil’s hooves for anyone who dares break the slightest cultural norm of the movement, the evangelicals create a morbid fear that only they can alleviate through forgiveness-by-proxy.  As a bonus, one may indulge in all sorts of shenanigans as an evangelical and not need to do any real life atonement or repentance, just mealy mouthed lip service to the evangelical concept of Jesus, a quick prayer for forgiveness, then you’re off to sin again -- a sin not brought by your shortcomings but by an evil boogeyman lurking outside.

** Correct in the sense of cultural norms for that time and place.

*** Jiminy Cricket = J. C.  Subtle, Walt, really subtle…