Sold my soul, but not to the devil.

[Sheol]

I have been spending a large amount of time with hard core christian and a few of our talks have gotten me thinking. After a discussion about how I would believe in his god if he would provide me proof I started to ponder on the subject more. If the heavens were to open up and judgement day was upon me would I worship this god? It seems to me that I have two choices; the god or the devil. From what I have read and understand of the bible I would choose the devil. This isn't from any sort of sick fascination with the dark side but purely a moral choice. From a moral stand point I find it sick to worship a mass murderer. And is this devil so bad? He rejected the god who kills and tortures people that have no way defend themselves.

Has anybody else thought about this?

[High Lord Tolkien]

I think it depends on what your definition is of the Devil.
He's the biggest catch 22 ever.
I think he's always portrayed as a fallen Angel of God never God's equal.
So no matter what he does he's still God's patsy.
Humans supposedly have free will to resist the Devil...who was put in that position of evil by God.......to....test us?

What the heck is an Angel anyway?
Another race of beings separate from God?
Do Angels have free will too?
If not then the Devil is just God being a dick.

[wayfriend]

If I understand correctly, the Freemasons secretly revere Satan as the provocateur of everything good that humans have ever achieved.

[rusmeister]

This is only for people who seriously attempt to understand - I don't want to respond to hecklers and people just seeking to debunk - and conversely, if this thread is for hecklers only, I don't want to be a part of it.

I think CS Lewis offered a pretty clear explanation of why Satan must necessarily be inferior to God, and it boils down to evil as being something necessarily derivative of good. Evil doesn't exist (is not committed) for its own sake. It takes something initially good - good in its beginnings - as an object. Thus, good CAN exist independent of evil, but evil cannot exist independent of good. If this is so (and I believe it is) then the whole concept of Satan as inferior becomes a necessary corollary of that - and it makes efforts to put him on the same plane as God misguided to say the least. It is incompatible with Asian ideas of yin/yang, good and evil being equally necessary to each other and other justifications of darkness/evil.

As I was saying on another thread, if there were proof, it wouldn't be faith. And I think people really, really underestimate the impact that a living God would have if he were actually to appear before them (I call it 'the Godzilla effect'). Just think how much trouble Scrooge had with the ghost of Jacob Marley, who was only another man who had died. (Yes, I know it's 'only' literature.)

Dr Joad's article … suggests the interesting conclusion that since neither 'mechanism' nor 'emergent evolution' will hold water, we must choose in the long run between some monotheistic philosophy, like the Christian, and some such dualism as that of the Zoroastrians. I agree with Dr Joad in rejecting mechanism and emergent evolution. Mechanism, like all materialist systems, breaks down at the problem of knowledge. If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it? As for emergent evolution, if anyone insists on using the word God to mean 'whatever the universe happens to be going to do next', of course we cannot prevent him. But nobody would in fact so use it unless he had a secret belief that what is coming next will be an improvement. Such a belief, besides being unwarranted, presents peculiar difficulties to an emergent evolutionist. If things can improve, this means that there must be some absolute standard of good above and outside the cosmic process to which that process can approximate. There is no sense in talking of 'becoming better' if better means simply 'what we are becoming'--it is like congratulating yourself on reaching your destination and defining destination as 'the place you have reached'. Mellontolatry, or the worship of the future, is a fuddled religion.

We are left then to choose between monotheism and dualism--between a single, good, almighty source of being, and two equal, uncreated, antagonistic Powers, one good and the other bad. Dr Joad suggests that the latter view stands to gain from the 'new urgency' of the fact of evil. But what new urgency? Evil may seem more urgent to us than it did to the Victorian philosophers--favoured members of the happiest class in the happiest country in the world at the world's happiest period. But it is no more urgent for us than for the great majority of monotheists all down the ages. The classic expositions of the doctrine that the world's miseries are compatible with its creation and guidance by a wholly good Being come from Boethius waiting in prison to be beaten to death and from St Augustine meditating on the sack of Rome. The present state of the world is normal; it was the last century that was the abnormality.

This drives us to ask why so many generations rejected Dualism. Not, assuredly, because they were unfamiliar with suffering; and not because its obvious prima facie plausibility escaped them. It is more likely that they saw its two fatal difficulties, the one metaphysical, and the other moral.

The metaphysical difficulty is this. The two Powers, the good and the evil, do not explain each other. Neither Ormuzd nor Ahriman can claim to be the Ultimate. More ultimate than either of them is the inexplicable fact of their being there together. Neither of them chose this tete-a-tete. Each of them, therefore, is conditioned--finds himself willy-nilly in a situation; and either that situation itself, or some unknown force which produced that situation, is the real Ultimate. Dualism has not yet reached the ground of being. You cannot accept two conditioned and mutually independent beings as the self-grounded, self-comprehending Absolute. On the level of picture-thinking this difficulty is symbolised by our inability to think of Ormuzd and Ahriman without smuggling in the idea of a common space in which they can be together and thus confessing that we are not yet dealing with the source of the universe but only with two members contained in it. Dualism is a truncated metaphysic.

The moral difficulty is that Dualism gives evil a positive, substantive, self-consistent nature, like that of good. If this were true, if Ahriman existed in his own right no less than Ormuzd, what could we mean by calling Ormuzd good except that we happened to prefer him. In what sense can the one party be said to be right and the other wrong? If evil has the same kind of reality as good, the same autonomy and completeness, our allegiance to good becomes the arbitrarily chosen loyalty of a partisan. A sound theory of value demands something different. It demands that good should be original and evil a mere perversion; that good should be the tree and evil the ivy; that good should be able to see all round evil (as when sane men understand lunacy) while evil cannot retaliate in kind; that good should be able to exist on its own while evil requires the good on which it is parasitic in order to continue its parasitic existence.

The consequences of neglecting this are serious. It means believing that bad men like badness as such, in the same way in which good men like goodness. At first this denial of any common nature between us and our enemies seems gratifying. We call them fiends and feel that we need not forgive them. But, in reality, along with the power to forgive, we have lost the power to condemn. If a taste for cruelty and a taste for kindness were equally ultimate and basic, by what common standard could the one reprove the other? In reality, cruelty does not come from desiring evil as such, but from perverted sexuality, inordinate resentment, or lawless ambition and avarice. That is precisely why it can be judged and condemned from the standpoint of innocent sexuality, righteous anger, and ordinate acquisitiveness. The master can correct a boy's sums because they are blunders in arithmetic--in the same arithmetic which he does and does better. If they were not even attempts at arithmetic--if they were not in the arithmetical world at all--they could not be arithmetical mistakes.

Good and evil, then, are not on all fours. Badness is not even bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Ormuzd and Ahriman cannot be equals. In the long run, Ormuzd must be original and Ahriman derivative. The first hazy idea of devil must, if we begin to think, be analysed into the more precise ideas of 'fallen' and 'rebel' angel. But only in the long run. Christianity can go much further with the Dualist than Dr Joad's article seems to suggest. There was never any question of tracing all evil to man; in fact, the New Testament has a good deal more to say about dark superhuman powers than about the fall of Adam. As far as this world is concerned, a Christian can share most of the Zoroastrian outlook; we all live between the 'fell, incensed points' of Michael and Satan. The difference between the Christian and the Dualist is that the Christian thinks one stage further and sees that if Michael is really in the right and Satan really in the wrong, this must mean that they stand in two different relations to somebody or something far further back, to the ultimate ground of reality itself. All this, of course, has been watered down in modern times by the theologians who are afraid of 'mythology', but those who are prepared to reinstate Ormuzd and Ahriman are presumably not squeamish on that score.

Dualism can be a manly creed. In the Norse form ('The giants will beat the gods in the end, but I am on the side of the gods') it is nobler by many degrees than most philosophies of the moment. But it is only a half-way house. Thinking along these lines you can avoid Monotheism, and remain a Dualist, only by refusing to follow your thoughts home. To revive Dualism would be a real step backwards and a bad omen (though not the worst possible) for civilization.

"Evil and God" from "God in the Dock"
More here: cslewis.wikispaces.com/Dualism

[Sheol]

I wasn't hoping to start some sort of debate on wiether the god and the devil are equals. I was hoping to get an insight into how people view the moral implacations of such beliefs. A lesser of two evils sort of thing.

[Orlion]

I read at least half the article, rus (but I have an excuse, I should be studying for Physical Chemistry!) But here's an illustration on dualism just to continue the discussion: Some might question how good can exist without evil. I'm not one of those people, but I have a similar belief: that good and evil do not have any value without the other. For example, how could one choose good and claim it to be better without having evil as a comparison? Could you believe in heaven if heaven was all you had? It would seem to me that evil, in this case, serves a...well...good purpose in that it helps to show good as having positive value.

[Orlion]

I wasn't hoping to start some sort of debate on wiether the god and the devil are equals. I was hoping to get an insight into how people view the moral implacations of such beliefs. A lesser of two evils sort of thing.

In time, Sheol, in time

[Fist and Faith]

The yin/yang idea is that there would be no conception of one without the other. It is only because we notice differences that we understand the concept of opposites, and come up with words for them. If it was exactly the same temperature every day, there would be no words for "warm" and "cool", "hot" and "cold". Nobody would ask questions like: "What's the temperature today?" "What's the high today expected to be?"

Same with good and evil. If there was no choice on how to behave - if everybody always acted the same way under each given set of circumstances - we wouldn't consider those behaviors good or bad. They would simply be how everybody acted under the particular circumstances.

[Avatar]

If I were presented with incontrovertable evidence, I would have to believe that god existed. But that on its own wouldn't compel me to worship such a being.

--A

[Orlion]

If I were presented with incontrovertable evidence, I would have to believe that god existed. But that on its own wouldn't compel me to worship such a being.

--A

Ah, but you wouldn't really believe in him though, wouldn't you? You'd know

[rusmeister]

If I were presented with incontrovertable evidence, I would have to believe that god existed. But that on its own wouldn't compel me to worship such a being.

--A

And furthermore, it is my contention that that on its own (which would involve direct revelation or encounter with said Being) WOULD compel you to worship him - or attempt to flee from such an omnipresent Being, a rather futile exercise (the Godzilla effect"). And that is what Christianity says - that Satan's choice is just that - a futile exercise.

Evil is the choice of the latter.

I quite agree with Fist regarding choice. (Does that rate a "Watchy"? )
However, an all-important distinction must be made between choice as such and existence, and it is existence, not choice, that Lewis is talking about.
When the choice is made, what is its object? The object, in its ultimate form, is necessarily good, whether the choice be for good or evil. The object of the rapist, in his evil choice, is merely a perversion of the pleasure of sexual relations - a good thing in its beginnings. The thief, likewise, desires the initially good pleasure of the things that he would steal. Drunkenness is only the perversion (excess) of the good thing known as drink. Even murder and so-called "hate crimes" have an object of striking out against what they hate - and there are appropriate objects for hatred (things that ought to be hated), even though their application is totally wrong. (Hopefully that goes some way toward answering Orlion's question as well.)

But that's why I went ahead and posted that excerpt.

[Xar]

Rus, I read the article too, but I notice that Lewis does not consider the fact that historically, the dualist nature of Zoroastrianism is a late evolution of the religion - which, at its beginning, considered Ahura Mazda as the one good deity of the universe, and did not award Angra Mainyu an equal stature. Later sects, such as Zurvanism, which rose in times of tribulation for the Zoroastrians, gave more importance to Angra Mainyu as the evil counterpart of the good Ahura Mazda, to the point of giving them the status of equally powerful brothers born of Zurvan (who represented space and time himself, and was not worshipped as a deity). Even so, Angra Mainyu wasn't evil by necessity, but by choice: according to the late Zoroastrian beliefs, for example, he created the peacock to show that it isn't that he could not create anything good, but that he would not. It is also worth noting that this form of Zoroastrianism (which, by the way, is historically the first religion providing an eschatology) still mentions that Angra Mainyu will be defeated in the end.

A side note, since the end of time has been mentioned (and personally, I always like this part): interestingly though, Zoroastrian eschatology is much more optimistic than Christian eschatology. In Zoroastrian beliefs, sinners do suffer after death, but only until the end of times; at that point, they will be cleansed of their sins (though this may sting a bit, given that it will happen by being submerged in a river of molten metal), and all of the dead will enjoy an eternity of bliss.

Anyway, even later, some Western thinkers who came into contact with Zoroastrian beliefs (in India, if I remember correctly) attempted to explain the presence of two equally powerful deities, one good and one evil, in order to reconcile it with Christian beliefs of a single Deity; this led to the interpretation that Ahura Mazda is truthfully the one true god of Zoroastrianism, and that the "two brothers" are actually Angra Mainyu (the destructive emanation of Ahura Mazda) and Spenta Mainyu (the creative emanation). In this framework, then, Ahura Mazda is responsible for both good and evil in the world, in order to give mortals the possibility to make a free choice as to where to stand, morally speaking.

Whoops, that went a bit far afield... anyway, I originally just meant to say that dualism in Zoroastrianism is a later addition. But in order to be provocative I might also point out that dualism, or the pseudo-dualism of Angra and Spenta Mainyu, isn't any less believable than the concept of the Holy Trinity - that is, if one thinks that the idea of two equally powerful deities existing alongside each other is unlikely, one might also say it is equally unlikely that one single deity would exist who at the same time is treated as one and three personas...

[Fist and Faith]

I quite agree with Fist regarding choice. (Does that rate a "Watchy"? )

Hmm... Perhaps I'm wrong...

[wayfriend]

Some might question how good can exist without evil. I'm not one of those people, but I have a similar belief: that good and evil do not have any value without the other. For example, how could one choose good and claim it to be better without having evil as a comparison? Could you believe in heaven if heaven was all you had? It would seem to me that evil, in this case, serves a...well...good purpose in that it helps to show good as having positive value.

I think that's the fundamental basis of the idea that Satan is "the provocateur of everything good that humans have ever achieved." Without evil, we would have no choices to make. Evil has led to heroism, sacrifice, faith without evidence, temptations resisted, and every other thing that we can call good.

[Orlion]

I think I understand what you are saying Rus, and I shall prove it by way of example. Let's say that I'm baking a delicious cake. I get distracted, and the cake burns. It has not ceased to be a cake or being derived from a recipe to be a cake, but it's pretty much trash now and inferior to cake I seem to have some obsession with cake...

This concept of evil being perverted good seems to work all right so long as we are talking about objective good, or that which is good for all, but what about subjective good? Cake may be a good for me but that same cake could be an evil for a diabetic... So the question becomes, can an example be given of an objective evil that is not a perversion of good (or is good just a perversion of evil I guess it's all in the definition, though I'm inclined to say no). If such an example can not be found, does that imply that dualism only exists in the subjective realm of morality?

[Cagliostro]

If I understand correctly, the Freemasons secretly revere Satan as the provocateur of everything good that humans have ever achieved.

That's the first I've heard of that.

[aliantha]

First I've heard of it as well.

Xar, I wanted to thank you for the info on Zoroastrianism. It's a religion I know next to nothing about. (You also sent me to the dictionary to look up eschatology... )

Re Fist's what-if:

If there was no choice on how to behave - if everybody always acted the same way under each given set of circumstances - we wouldn't consider those behaviors good or bad. They would simply be how everybody acted under the particular circumstances.

That's pretty much how I see the world anyhow. I tend to struggle with Western society's need to codify everything as good v. evil. But that's just me...

[High Lord Tolkien]

So does the Devil exist?
And if so then what is the Devil? (as far as Christianity is concerned)

[wayfriend]

That's the first I've heard of that.

Just google "freemasonry + satan". I have no authoritative links handy I'm afraid.

[rusmeister]

Rus, I read the article too, but I notice that Lewis does not consider the fact that historically, the dualist nature of Zoroastrianism is a late evolution of the religion - which, at its beginning, considered Ahura Mazda as the one good deity of the universe, and did not award Angra Mainyu an equal stature. Later sects, such as Zurvanism, which rose in times of tribulation for the Zoroastrians, gave more importance to Angra Mainyu as the evil counterpart of the good Ahura Mazda, to the point of giving them the status of equally powerful brothers born of Zurvan (who represented space and time himself, and was not worshipped as a deity). Even so, Angra Mainyu wasn't evil by necessity, but by choice: according to the late Zoroastrian beliefs, for example, he created the peacock to show that it isn't that he could not create anything good, but that he would not. It is also worth noting that this form of Zoroastrianism (which, by the way, is historically the first religion providing an eschatology) still mentions that Angra Mainyu will be defeated in the end.

A side note, since the end of time has been mentioned (and personally, I always like this part): interestingly though, Zoroastrian eschatology is much more optimistic than Christian eschatology. In Zoroastrian beliefs, sinners do suffer after death, but only until the end of times; at that point, they will be cleansed of their sins (though this may sting a bit, given that it will happen by being submerged in a river of molten metal), and all of the dead will enjoy an eternity of bliss.

Anyway, even later, some Western thinkers who came into contact with Zoroastrian beliefs (in India, if I remember correctly) attempted to explain the presence of two equally powerful deities, one good and one evil, in order to reconcile it with Christian beliefs of a single Deity; this led to the interpretation that Ahura Mazda is truthfully the one true god of Zoroastrianism, and that the "two brothers" are actually Angra Mainyu (the destructive emanation of Ahura Mazda) and Spenta Mainyu (the creative emanation). In this framework, then, Ahura Mazda is responsible for both good and evil in the world, in order to give mortals the possibility to make a free choice as to where to stand, morally speaking.

Whoops, that went a bit far afield... anyway, I originally just meant to say that dualism in Zoroastrianism is a later addition. But in order to be provocative I might also point out that dualism, or the pseudo-dualism of Angra and Spenta Mainyu, isn't any less believable than the concept of the Holy Trinity - that is, if one thinks that the idea of two equally powerful deities existing alongside each other is unlikely, one might also say it is equally unlikely that one single deity would exist who at the same time is treated as one and three personas...

Hi, Xar, and thank you!
I'm willing to learn more about Zoroastrianism, if necessary for Christian apologetics, and appreciate what you've posted.

I think, though, that what you posted doesn't do anything to refute Lewis's point. The fact that Lewis doesn't deal with the entire history of Zoroastrianism and its permutations leaves the basic fact that a good portion of it did become dualistic - and his following arguments based on it, not as something in isolation but as a type of all dualism, remain valid.

To me it appears that you have taken details of Zoroastrianism and use them to avoid Lewis's argument - which is intended for dualism in general, which would include any part of Zoroastrianism that became dualistic (you could argue its irrelevance to parts that held Ahura Mazda as supreme, but that would be irrelevant to Lewis's argument in general).
(Hey, you wanted to be 'provocative'!


The one point on which I'll say that you are actually mistaken is on Christian eschatology. It is the kind of generalizing common among non-Christians, who primarily get exposure to radical fundamentalism which does tend to have pretty negative spins, although I won't claim that is the case with you. C.E. varies widely, depending on what the source of authority is, and I'd say that Orthodox eschatology is about as optimistic as it gets. What you describe in Z. is actually called "universalism", and it is generally considered a Christian heresy among the traditional faiths, and for a good reason - because it is not so optimistic as it sounds. Examined as a philosophy and taken to its logical conclusion, universalism basically leads to the ultimate denial of any motivation to reject selfishness - aka "sin". It focuses on love for others - a very good thing - to the exclusion of the need for metanoia, the changing of oneself. If all will be forgiven in the end, why should I try to be good in the here and now? It actually eliminates a need for repentance, a need to really be good (Although I should add that in orthodox theology, God is always ready to forgive - it is we who accept or reject the forgiveness - and acceptance requires repentance as a condition, not because God is legalistic, but because God's forgiveness is meaningless; His attempts at reconciliation useless if we have deliberately chosen to reject Him, to reject what is good, and to choose ourselves over God. That's not intended to be an in-depth expose, only as a demonstration that Christian doctrine, including eschatology, is not such a simple cut-and-dried unity that your post gives the impression of, just as Zoroastrianism is not merely dualist.