We don't write enough about the Devil. Western religion has over-personified its gods to the point where we can only write about them as people. Jesus had a charmed face (he must have -- for now he is White) and could walk down Sunset Boulevard. Satan is a mythological creature with a tail. How convenient that we need not take the Devil seriously. He must appreciate this.
Here are two truly fine books about the Devil, only they are partly recognized as such at best: "The Brothers Karamazov" and "The Lord of the Flies". "The Brothers Karamazov" states nakedly the connection between the absence of God and radical moral permissiveness: "If there is no God, everything is permitted."* "The Lord of the Flies"** pick up this theme in which the microcosmic island of British boys becomes a symbol for self-destructive humanity. The boy are rescued by a WWII war ship, leading the reader to ask, If the boys are saved by adults, who will save the adults?
Dostoevsky argued that in the end, it is not governments or religious institutions per se but belief in moral boundary that stops people from doing the very greatest evil they can. Why do we not boil babies? Not the law, but moral boundary. (We boil animals alive in slaughter-houses, but accept that as moral and, more to the point, convenient.) There is no physical barrier preventing physical action. The only barrier to physical evil is the metaphysical. This need not be God or belief in God. But one need believe in something beyond the physical to contain the physical.
Golding noted the physical is being run by those who only believe in the physical. At the end of the day, no one can stop corporations and governments from genocide and climate change (climate disaster is a more apt name). Now our island is burning. We have raised civilization with physical force instead of metaphysical power. We have forced the child-civilization to behave by beating him. Now he is grown too big to be beaten. Now he can do anything. And does.
The Devil isn't anything but the absence of God.
*This appears nowhere in the text, but has become a common paraphrase.
** The title is a translation of the Hebrew Baal Zvuv -- a name for the Devil.
Here are two truly fine books about the Devil, only they are partly recognized as such at best: "The Brothers Karamazov" and "The Lord of the Flies". "The Brothers Karamazov" states nakedly the connection between the absence of God and radical moral permissiveness: "If there is no God, everything is permitted."* "The Lord of the Flies"** pick up this theme in which the microcosmic island of British boys becomes a symbol for self-destructive humanity. The boy are rescued by a WWII war ship, leading the reader to ask, If the boys are saved by adults, who will save the adults?
Dostoevsky argued that in the end, it is not governments or religious institutions per se but belief in moral boundary that stops people from doing the very greatest evil they can. Why do we not boil babies? Not the law, but moral boundary. (We boil animals alive in slaughter-houses, but accept that as moral and, more to the point, convenient.) There is no physical barrier preventing physical action. The only barrier to physical evil is the metaphysical. This need not be God or belief in God. But one need believe in something beyond the physical to contain the physical.
Golding noted the physical is being run by those who only believe in the physical. At the end of the day, no one can stop corporations and governments from genocide and climate change (climate disaster is a more apt name). Now our island is burning. We have raised civilization with physical force instead of metaphysical power. We have forced the child-civilization to behave by beating him. Now he is grown too big to be beaten. Now he can do anything. And does.
The Devil isn't anything but the absence of God.
*This appears nowhere in the text, but has become a common paraphrase.
** The title is a translation of the Hebrew Baal Zvuv -- a name for the Devil.
