The Prince of Darkness

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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I was thinking about what Bob said to me at the end of one of our long posts, (which I truly, truly, I kid you not, enjoy for the quality accompanies the quantity) where he wrote:

“There is a mysterious force that spreads darkness in this world which is not flesh and blood, but which is manifest in flesh and blood. It is against this force that the spiritual struggle against – but with completely different means to how “the world” tries to combat it. Until you have understand that, you will not understand anything that Paul is saying – or what I am saying.”

As I understand…or misunderstand…that mysterious force is “Evil”. Now there is a personification of Evil in the NT, Satan, but more disturbing to the faith is the Problem of Evil, a favourite topic of mine. I thought this was a nice moment to revisit the argument.
I agree with muse on several points:
1- We do “feel” a myterious force that spreads darkness over the world. The truth is that we have a hard time seeing the goodness, if any, inherent in the world, which manfests in our human flesh and blood.
2- It indeed against this “feeling” that hope in God operates. It is that feeling that sends the person first to his knees and to bury his face in his hands and scream at the vacuum for meaning, for that mysterious force robs the world and our lives of meaning.
3- Everyone must battle this but each chooses different ways of warfare, as is shown in the story of Job. To combat against it means to struggle for an understanding of it.

The world is filled with the cries of pain and anguish of people. But as I was writing this the Voice of Satan came to me, and he said:
-How you dare you judge my world!
O- Your world? Did you make it?

  • No but I am it’s Prince.
    O- Only by God’s allowance.
  • Then why don’t you take your case against God? For if He created all and declared it God then even I, who was- in your opinion- “created”, must also be declared “good”.
    O- But you are Evil incarnate! The very opposite of good.
  • Evil is a point of view mortal and a mortal’s point of view is never correct. Are you not evil to animals? Are you not a plague upon fishes, chickens and livestock?
    O- C’mon, eating is not evil…it is a necessity.
  • How so when you could eat very well fruits and vegestables?
    O- Well, wouldn’t we then be a plight to plants?
  • Well said. You’re, as you see, an evil on the entire planet. You cut down trees to create paper to sent countless meaningless offers and spread falsehoods and lies which then end up piling up dead leaf after dead leaf. So if I am an Evil to man, man in turn is an evil to the planet. If the planet could speak, would it not scream as you do? Would it not ask why there is this evil incarnate, not identified as myself, but identified as humanity?
    O- The world was created for the sake of mankind and not mankind for the sake of the world.
  • Therefore you make the evil you visit upon the world justified? Very well mortal. Isn’t God like a Potter?
    O- Paul says so.
  • Isaiah says so too (45:9-12). Now, listen to me. Does not Paul says that some pots are made, with great patience and care for their destruction? That is to visit this exact “Evil” you see upon them? And is it not true, that as the world was made for man that the majority of the pots was made for the sake of the noble pots? For does Paul not add that the destruction, the evil suffered by these pots has a purpose, that of showing to His elect His power, the riches of His glory to the object of His mercy?
    O- I think you’re being overly literal…
  • It is that same literal interpretation that allows you to see Evil in all of this world. You declare the world evil because you take all events literally and do not go beyond the cries, the screams, the pain, all the insignificant variations of the physical world and fail to see that which lies beyond all of that.
    O- But the screams and the pain come united with a spiritual scarring.
  • Only in those predestined for ignoble purposes…
    O- That is an Evil thing to say.
  • That is only your point of view. For the woman and children of the land of Cannan were dispossesed and killed and nothing was left alive…but isn’t that evil from their perspective? But since it was decided that it would be so by God, isn’t it good? To use your words against you once again, the world was created for man and not the other way around and the entire humanity was created for His chosen few and not the chosen few for the rest of mankind. As Nietzsche would say the Overman redeems the age. The evils of the French Revolution are redeemed by the result that it gave us Napoleon.
    O- Only too natural that you quote Nietzsche a man that said that God was dead!
  • But to whom? That is the question. Yet regardless of his words, he was but another servant of Him. Nothing happens without His approval, for He is omnipotent. Every instance of prosperity…yes, prosperity is evident in the world history…as well as every instance of disaster comes from Him and there is no one besides. Humanity has accussed me of being the Prince of this world, and since I am the incarnation of Evil, it is the supreme espression of pessimism of the oppressed. Evil is from Him because our thoughts, divine thoughts are not equal to mortal thought, nor your idea of “Evil” His own idea of evil.
    O- Then why do you exist?
  • I am the Prince, or one among many princes, but there is but one King whose decrees must be followed by His princes. I am but a servant, just like Nietzsche and just like all else in Creation, of His. Apart from Him there is no value in anything, anything at all. The screams of pain from the clay pot shattering means nothing, has no negative value, nor positive of it’s own. The shattering of a pot is not an evil in itself and it is an actual good willed by the Perfect for His own Pleasure, not ours. He brings Light just as well as Darkness. He dispatches me as well as Jesus, so to speak. Why do I exist? It is for His pleasure; by His choice; because somehow in ways beyond my comprehension, He thought it necessary that I should exist.
    O- Maybe you provide constrast…
  • Just as Hell provides a constrast to the happy state of the blessed who are allowed to see the suffering in hell that they might better appreciate their blessedness in heaven. Could it not be that the same principle applies to your mundane world? That all this evil you see is not because this world is mine, but because it is God’s?
    O- But what constrast is there where the righteous suffer as well as the wicked and it rains on the heads of both as well?
  • That is when you perceive “evil”, but it is not always so. Sometimes the wicked are punished and the noble rewarded, yet evil is always the only positive value that defines each.
    O- What do you mean?
  • That “good” or “reward” is defined as the absence of “evil” or suffering and Evil itself is defined as the presence of suffering (Schopenhauer). What a blessing it is then to have evil available to us!
    O- Now you’re being sarcastic…
  • Perhaps, but deadly serious.
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Devil’s Advocate

Perhaps, the hedonism of Lucifer is humanism at its utmost?

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And the Angels of God sang in a chourus…
Why, we’re humanists as well and never will mankind, as a whole, ever be rejected. But God is that dicerning eye that Judges, that eternally separates and organizes. He moved over the eternal chaos of matter and chaos and gave it order and form. He does not accept All, but forever separates and gives order and humanity He divides between noble and ignoble. Only the noble count as humans.
O- How rude!!
A- But true. Behold Satan, a being half beast and hald man. Does he qualify, in your opinion, as “human”?
O- Well, no, not really…But you have wings, which animals possess so I don’t think that form of demons, devils or angels helps us understand what you mean.
A- It is hard discussing this truths with the ignoble. I present things to you that your mind was never designed to accept.
O- Well, is that my fault?
A- As if you had the power to do anything…no, no, of course it isn’t. I will try to do the impossible, with God’s help, and use reason to enlighten your ignoble mind. Satan is a malcontent. To him has been accorded the possession of certain vessels of destruction, such as yourself. He wants to give the impression that God is unfair, unjust and to justify himself, elevate himself.
O- But why was he created that way?
A- To demonstrate His greatness. Sometimes, even when your rule is undisputable, you still create the illusion of enemies, if nothing else, for the sheer enjoyment of destroying them…like a child who builds sand castles near the tide because he knows that he will then get to witness their destruction. From God’s perspective Satan is like those sand-castles…That said, if I may continue, Satan is a malcontent. I don’t know why it pleases the Lord to continue to endure his existence, but that is the Lord’s bussiness, I am just a faithful servant.
Satan’s so called “humanism” is actually moral blindness. Satan is a child of Chaos…The Lord formed him most carelessly.
O- But how can that be? God is Perfect. How does imperfect issue forth from the perfect?
A- Because God is more perfect for it.
O- What?
A- What is more perfect: A god which can only create perfect things, or a god that can create perfect or imperfect beings, noble or ignoble, at will? Or to put it another way, what would you rather be: a man with a bad leg who cannot help but to limp, or a man with two good legs who chooses to walk with a limp sometimes and other times walk straight? Pick.
O- I guess I see your point.
A- As I was saying, Satan was made that way, and so he always lacked insight and understood, much as you as well, everything materially and never in their full sense. He never did agree with the desicions of the Lord and always confronted Him. What God saw as noble, Satan could only see as ignoble and what Satan thought was ignoble was in fact very noble. If it was up to Satan, everything would remain the same. All would be stacked as equal. He is the untimate democrat…some may even say humanist, but the fact is that he is unjust because not everyone has been created equal, yet his measure of man is taken by the lowest majority rather than the highest minority. For him, there are no saints, no possibility for self-denial, for self-ordering, self-limitation, the aspiration for power in hardness towards one’s self. It is not that no one deserved Hell, but that no one deserved Heaven in his opinion…praise God that Satan is not the Judge.
Satan is not a humanist…he is an animalist; that is, in his malformed mind, humanity, defined by it’s worst examples, is but a form of animal. He cannot see what is really humanity that could only be present in the highest of men…the few are humanity.

Then Satan appeared out of nowhere, or may be just allowed himself to be seen for the first time.
Satan- I shall end this little chat. God is, as you know, like a little child…He easily confounds things and confuses classifications left and right. I am the Principle of Reason. If Reason is a whore, then I am her pimp. God sees what He wants to see. I see things as they are. God sees His own illusions of saints and I show Him that they are human…all too human. God wished to order men by their own desicion for self-denial and I told Him that it could not be done. God is not omnipotent and must always put up with the Will to Live, which is selfishness. He of course disagreed with me and resented my lack on faith in man, but every child, sooner or later, must be told that Sata Claus does not exist, just as I had to open God’s eyes to the truth. He never appreciated my sincerity and so I am called names, I am called a liar, when in fact all I speak is the ugly and unwanted truth.
When God created Adam and Eve he set out unrealistic expectations for them. I told Him this but He did not believe me. “They are saints!”… They are chaos given form, and all they know is that this self-denial is a bit like death. like a suicide, yet they want life and eternal life, eternal self. Adam had to be told that he would die from it in order that he would deny himself the apple. That is how God deceived Himself. I knew that as soon as mankind knew that it’s survival was not in danger that it would deny itself nothing.
Then God offered Job, good old Job as his champion against my humble reason, and proclaimed Job as righteous, a man who feared the Lord and shuned evil. But why did he do these things? For his sake or Yours? Once again, I made God eat His words.
It came about that eventually God stopped trying to deny the fact that people were inherently selfish, even His so-called “Saints” and decided to “save” them in spite of their selfishness. He basically agreed with me and said:“No one is righteous” and that all deserved what I pretty much told him they do…Hell…that is, Chaos, where they belong. If God insist on keeping some for Himself it is out of spite for me. Since I am right, He basically goes beyond reason and for His own pleasure, for He has no reason, He saves whom he freaking pleases to save…but make no mistake, there are no saints and no noble or ignoble distinction but simply a child playing with sand…