Mitchell Stephens is working on a book about the history of atheism, and he reports the striking absence, in the atheistical literature he’s been reading, of the Devil. “Am I reading badly”, he asks, “or does the devil really not fit, even as an object of scorn, in the atheist’s cosmos?” In my comment on Mitchell’s post, I explore an idea that I’ve been mulling for some time now.
If there were a Devil, and if he were as devious and clever as he is purported to be, and if his most persistent desire is to corrupt God’s highest creation, Man, then would he attempt that corruption through drug addicts, drunks, and various types of thugs? Not a very attractive picture of evil.
No, I think that the Devil works by presenting himself as the messenger of God, and persuading those who accept him to behave in wicked ways - ways that contribute to the increase of pain and sorrow in the world and to each individual’s own degradation and unhappiness. I think that the Devil exists in the person of those priests and ministers, rabbis and imams, who persuade their congregations that hatred of others is the will of God, that greedy accumulation of wealth is not only acceptable but proof of God’s grace, that the environment was given to Man for his exploitation, that those who think or behave differently, or belong to different tribes, or speak a different language, or have skin of a different color, or who accept different scriptures, deserve death at the hands of the faithful - i.e. those who are deluded by the Devil’s imposture.
So the Devil, in my way of thinking, exists, and his minions include Fred Phelps, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Muqtada Al-Sadr, Baruch Goldstein, Binyamen Kahane, and Pope Benedict, among many, sadly many others. If you look for those who are causing most sorrow in the world, and leading the greatest number of people to behave cruelly, ungenerously, and murderously, it is those and their allies. To the Devil they’ve gone, and to the Devil may they go!
mitch | 27-Mar-06 at 12:27 pm | Permalink
attractive notion. but there seems such a strong morality lurking in it. where’s that from? upon what is that based? isn’t it in part (though, of course, not exclusively nor even originally) Christian? (Slovoj Zizek: “Today, this properly Christian ethical stance survives mostly in atheism.”) Don’t we risk ending up with an opposition of the Godly (tolerance, protection of the environment, etc.) and ungodly — a good and evil — that is rather religious?
richard | 27-Mar-06 at 1:37 pm | Permalink
Mitch, I don’t think that good and bad behavior is a matter of religion, but of ethics. And the point I was trying, more than a little facetiously, to make is that very much of the bad behavior in our world today is stimulated by men (they are almost all men) who claim to be preaching the word of God. God and the Devil do belong to religion, along with the morality over which they tussle. And we can safely ignore all of that.
Ethics belongs to all of us; we can’t escape it. The Buddha used terms which have been translated as “skillful” vs. “unskillful” behavior, but we are much more comfortable with good and bad, and if we accept that we are talking about our actions rather than our being, we can continue, I think, to use those terms without getting caught up in the battle between God and the Devil, and the moral duality that drives that battle. Skillful behavior, or good behavior, leads to the reduction of what is named, in Pali, dukkha—emotional or existential pain & suffering, dissatisfaction, frustration, anxiety, peril—the term is loaded. Unskillful behavior—harmful or hateful actions, dishonest or divisive or dismissive speech, power-mongering, sexual predation, addiction, etc.—increases dukkha. And all questions of good and evil, God and the Devil, aside, I think that it’s clear that the men I spoke of in my post are engaged in unskillful behavior and increasing the level of dukkha in their own lives and the lives of everyone they touch, which, in our media-connected world, is almost everyone there is. As I said, if there were a Devil, he could not wish for more.
Richard