Do you believe in god? If so, then do you believe in the devil? Probably not! Most of us these days really have a hard time just believing in god. Maybe because we think god can do better things for us than the Devil, we have more of a tendency to believe in him, it, or her. Whichever you prefer. In our common fictions, we portray god as saving us in the end and giving us what we really need, even though we don’t deserve it. Whereas, Satan usually gives us what we really don’t want, accidents, bad luck, condemnation, extra non-removable appendages. Strange! We often make fun of Satan. We always kill him like a common street thug, which must mean he’s not all-powerful, at least not as powerful as god, in our minds. We’ve never killed god in our fictions. In fact we barely even insult god in our fictions, unless we’re just mad at it. Yet we make a joke of Satan, in the movies Winona Ryder shot him, Arnold Schwartznegger took away his concubine, the Hero on the “Seven Days” TV show blew him up with a gas pipe and set him on fire. Like fire is supposed to harm Satan. Is it maybe that in these times our ability to harness the atom and send a man into space has made us feel at least equal with the deity’s we used to fear. Is it because god can’t cook our dinner and a microwave oven can, that we’ve set him on the mantelpiece as a fancy nick knack we dust off from time to time. While Satan, we’ve just tossed out like a useless board game? My how we’ve grown. 

Splicing atoms and molecules, presuming to tamper with the building blocks of life like we know what we’re doing. Will we even pray to god to watch over our folly as we dive into the darkness in the bottom of Pandora’s box, like a SWAT team fully prepared for anything we may encounter there? Have we become brave enough to plunge into the dark without first turning on a light? Have we become the masters of our own destiny? Satan is a joke we frequently use to scare children with the dark, and yet we fear not the dark ourselves. We taunt and tease Satan with his powerlessness against us. We’ll just blow him away with gun, or run over him with a truck, or even outsmart him. While god, we hardly say a word to. So then, evil really can’t exist if we don’t believe it does. Yet everyday we hope that god does exist, so that he may one day answer our prayers. The funny part is, the most common question we query god on, is why he allows the world to be the way it is. Why does he allow mean people to hurt nice people, why do we have mean people at all, why do innocent little children die every day? Why are they killed by their parents, or someone who is supposed to be showing them love and protecting them from the evils of the world? What drives young mothers to abandon their infants in garbage cans to die? Why do stepfathers consistently sexually molest their stepdaughters? Why do jealous partners brutally murder the ones they so passionately love, usually within minutes of feeling that love, or even while feeling it? Why do confused children walk into their schools with guns and kill their schoolmates? War, violence, disease, and chaos dominate our social environments, and yet we accept it like a cloud in the sky, or a shortage of our favorite ice cream flavor. Asking god why? Is the answer staring us in the face?

Is this Evil in disguise? Or maybe it's Evil in the open, and we’ve created the disguise in our own minds, so that we can be comfortable with it. The ominous question being, who among us is capable of judging? How would we judge, according to the particular perspective from which we each individually see the world? Sort of like what I’m doing now? By sharing my opinion with you. My opinion, of course, being mine, and really having absolutely nothing to do with you or anyone else. Being simply, a product of the thoughts I’ve had in relation to the experiences that have shaped my life. Not deniable or provable, and if approached from the angle of political correctness, there is really no need to prove me wrong or right. It is simply my opinion, and equally as valid as every other opinion on the planet. Which effectively means no one is wrong, and no one is right, everyone just is. How nice! Although it could make it rather difficult to keep a clear perspective on what’s right or wrong. Good thing we have modern science to help us out. God hasn’t shown it’s face in over 10,000 years, and neither has the Devil. But technology seems limitless in It’s ability to keep evolving. Hence forth, the gods only exist in the minds of specific individuals as hyperextensions of that individuals need to place responsibility for reality outside of themselves. So they don’t have to be accountable for their own choices or actions. This is the Grey. Where reality is completely arbitrary, depending upon the specific psychosocial disposition of the individual observing. Where right and wrong are determined by time and place and material circumstances. 

It should be noted that from the perspective of someone, who does believe evil exists, this is a very dangerous place to be. As a culture, we are continually shading the differences between light and dark, into gray. Which leaves us unprotected spiritually. We might treat Demon possession as mental illness, until somebody spews green vomit, and then even that might get a test for food poisoning. Up until our current period of history, our entire history and mythology has been the story of the constant battle between good and evil for our very souls. Now we casually sell our souls on E-bay, as if, someone could really come to collect. What would you give them? A sample of your DNA.  It should be noted that material circumstances are controlable. You are a product of the human culture. You are a product of your national culture. You are a product of your mother’s culture. Human culture has been formed by its collective history. Your national culture has been shaped by its specific place in human history. Your mother’s culture, is the history of her family, passed down to her by her mother. Eventually in life, we should all arrive, individually, at a point on our path where we begin to take the responsibility to step out of default culture. Begin to construct our own personal character culture, realize our individuality. Learn to see beyond time, place, and material circumstances. Or those realities will control us.

In the past the ancient philosophers and spiritualists referred to this period of history we currently reside in, as the approach of Maya, or illusion. They could observe that the course of history and evolution would take us deeper into materialism, where we would no longer believe in the world of spirit in which we live. And in doing so would fall victim to the influences therein. So what would you say, choices or influences? Does the notorious stepfather choose to molest his new wives daughter?  Is it because she’s another man’s daughter, and as such not related by blood? Does the young mother on drugs choose to dump her newborn child in the trash so she doesn’t have the responsibility? Does the child molester actually feel more emotionally akin to the young child, versus the intense emotions of another adult? Or does the molester prey upon the innocence of the child like a ravaging beast? Would all these situations simply be the question of our varying levels of civility? Does the thought of each of these situations stab at your conscience as intolerable? Would that be a spiritual or simply a moral reaction? Is it ok to kill a man if your country is at war with that other man’s country? Is it not ok to murder your loved ones because they didn’t love you enough, or exactly the way you wanted them too?

Living in a purely physical, arbitrary reality, how does one begin to make heads or tails out of these questions? I guess for my own perspective, I look at these actions as unthinkable. I can’t imagine where my mind would have to go to consider molesting a child, yet alone leaving one in a trash dumpster to die. I feel bad hitting a squirrel with my car, I can imagine killing a man, but don’t think I could ever bring myself to do it. We could all imagine killing a man, we’ve seen it happen on TV at least 2000 times before we're out of High School. I guess for me this brings up the question of the human soul. If god and Satan don’t exist, then do we really have souls? Several months ago a young man put his soul up for sale on Ebay. A woman bought it for $432.00. Did he not believe his soul was real? Did he really want to sell it to someone else? Why was she buying it, did she really think she could take it, or was she playing along with his game, or did she play with his arrogance, taunting him down a path he may later regret. Either way the Ebay people didn’t think it was polite and cancelled his account and the transaction. Do they believe in the validity of the soul? Or were they merely reacting to set good PR with those of their customers who do believe in the souls?

When we look back at history, the Catholic Church spent 2000 years trying to convince us that god and Satan do exist. Do they believe? If we were to believe for a moment, that all that was true, would the world of today scare us? Are we afraid to accept the existence of Satan? I often get the label of cynic, for thinking the way that I do. I think that in our pride we have fallen for our own bullshit. I think Satan is laughing at us. He knows we are fools, and most of us will not learn until it’s too late. He knows that humanity is prideful, and rather than admit fault or ignorance, we would rather fake intelligence and condemn ourselves to hell. We search for physical excuses for the evil that resides within us. Chemical imbalances, bad childhood’s, all the while building “complex” realities within our imaginations, of who we think we are. Complexities we have trouble finding our way out of.

How many times has the pain of heartbreak driven you to consider killing the source of your pain? If never, can you imagine what it would take to get you there? We frequently hear of people killing each other for this reason. Is it a cultural deficiency that we don’t have the social mechanisms to deal well with the intricacies of interpersonal relationships? Why don’t we have a class in High School that teaches us about the intricacies of interpersonal relations? The only socially established education we get for that comes from the church and religion. Mythology teaches us that it has always been the struggle of humanity to control its animal nature. That the human spirit is capable of enduring any amount of pain, and still staying in control. We lose control and people we love die. I have never heard of an incident, where someone lost in the rage of heart wrenching pain unconsciously performed a random act of kindness. We lose it and destroy; we never lose it and build. Makes you want to question what happens in those moments. If you believe in evil, its very easy to believe that in that moment when we lose it is when we are most vulnerable, and open to outside influences stepping in to compromise our rationality. We never even imagine that through the course of our lives, we are responsible for mentally constructing a form within us that can endure pain. Forms that will help us climb out of the limitations of being solely in the flesh. A form that will lead us to see that love is infinite and that every soul is free to make it’s own choices, especially in the path it walks through life. Or constructing a form that is unorganized, and unskilled at managing itself. A personality form that lashes out in its fright and insecurity. We make this choice and walk this path everyday.

Of course, if you don’t want to believe in evil, then those moments of random violence just get explained away as passion, when even in that sense we don’t have a clear understanding of what passion is. Energy, emotion, where does it come from? Are we comfortable with that explanation? Probably not if your family member, or perhaps your best friend, has been a victim of passionate homicide. Or maybe another child at school gunned down your child. Or perhaps your child or friend committed suicide because no one could understand them or accept them as who they were. Or maybe just because they were terrified of this world. It happens everyday in our culture, and the reasons just don’t seem to justify the actions, and we are left with too many unanswered questions. I think it shows we spend far too little time delving deeper into the nature of the human experience. Where do we come from and where are we going? This question is age old for a good reason.

I think evil spirits walk among us(Shadow People #1, #2), influencing us to do things we will later regret. In mythology, we learn that Lucifer dominates our thoughts, while a character named Ahriman embodies the struggle in our physical body. Satan is the third player. The concept of Christ’s sacrifice is that it was the point in our evolution where we achieved spiritual liberation. The current story on a path of spiritual evolution spanning centuries, and the culmination of all that experience. The essence of Christ(love) that resides within us, is the fact that we all inherently have the same definition of true love within us. We only modify it to fit our particular perspective of the world. The Christ concept of love resists Satan, and holds balance between Lucifer and Ahriman. Lucifer and Ahriman are the two poles the human Ego swings between on a daily basis. Lucifer is the fear we experience in our minds, Ahriman is the urge and the pain we feel in our bodies. Happy, sad, indifferent, our imaginations and emotions go on a daily journey, influenced by the various encounters we have throughout the day. While god and Christ would see us be free willed angelic beings, moving above the influences of materialism. Lucifer and Satan and Ahriman would enslave us in our thoughts and emotions, trick us into believing the physical world is the real world. When we ignore the repercussions of our actions, and feel justified because of our pain. When we act in hate and malice, we consciously chose to compromise the true expression of our heart. We harden our heart to its sensitivity’s, and ignore the pain we cause others, and ourselves. Growing to eventually feel vindicated by the pain we cause others. All the while ignoring the well of pain within us getting deeper and deeper. This was the danger of free will for humanity. That we would not make wise choices, and as a result, condemn ourselves. The power of choice is the power to resist evil. The presence of conscience gives us a mirror in which to see the results of our choices, before we make them. We need to learn to control our choices; we need to stop lashing out in pain.

The final proof is where evil resides in our world. Trees are not evil, animals are not evil just instinctive, rocks are not evil, water is not evil, plastic in and of itself is not intentionally evil, it was made evil. Evil comes into our world through us. We perform the acts of evil that appall us. We are the windows through which evil shines into our world. Actions speak louder than words. Words are more wise than actions. Only humility gives us a space to step out of ourselves and look at who we act like, not who we think we are. Our thoughts and our actions transmit evil into the world. Our thoughts of love transmit balance into our world. We are the port of entry, we make the choice. This is the freedom of individuality. This is the responsibility it bears. God created the trees so we could breathe, we cut them down because they were in the way. We build the nuclear weapons, we launch them. We promote racism and oppression. We perform genocide, and we molest small children for selfish pleasures. God has nothing to do with this, but Satan does. Just as god would encourage us to do good things. We must acknowledge the force that motivates us to do bad things. Then we must choose to control ourselves. It really does hurt when you fall down. The path your soul takes is a one way path. Reality is for keeps. This is not a test. This is a real time strategy exercise.
 

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