Hey there, Wilson. I told you way back that I was going to be writing some things about Satan. Yeah, back when I was doing the Satan and Polytheism and Monotheism essays, I had meant to follow it up with some more thoughts about the ultimate bogeyman, but didn’t want to dig into things until I had gotten OG’s Crossroads story written. And of course I was riding across Europe and the Middle East on a bicycle and trying to write about other things for other people and purposes. But I am actually kind of caught up now, so I want to get started on that thing that I have been meaning to get to for a while.
Yes, I’ve portrayed myself as something of a prophet in my writing, but usually in a literary way, basically to describe myself as a dude with no discernible group to be a part of, wandering the desert, with some nuggets of wisdom and a mission for God. And yeah, this mission has involved various visions and whatnot, be they induced by drugs or some others source. But where the Apostle Paul saw a vision of the Lord Jesus Christ who sent him on a mission to preach Jesus, or Ezekiel saw a vision of seraphim to send him on a mission to tell people what he saw, or Muhammad spoke with the angel Gabriel to create a monotheistic society, I haven’t seen any visions of anything but Satan. So my mission is to tell about what I know: Satan.
I’ve thought a lot about the meaning behind the things I have seen, whether these things simply be drug-induced hallucinations or otherwise. That, I think, it what validates them. It’s not so much what I have seen, but the meaning that I have pulled from it. And that makes it real, whether I be classified as a prophet or a schizophrenic.
So I am convinced that, while Satan is accurately understood to be a principle of opposition, there is an actual personal being out there who we have given the name Satan to, among other names such as Samael, Iblis, etc. Now among people who believe in Satan, not that many actually think about his motivations. The Quran is one of the few sources that gives a motivation. Iblis rebelled against God because he didn’t want to bow down to Adam because Adam was made of clay, while Iblis was made of smokeless fire. This is a provocative statement that I will deal with in another essay. I’ll mention Satan’s dependence on humanity below, but I’ll focus on some different things here.
As I said above, I have thought a lot about Satan, so fortunately, I don’t only have personal experience to go on. I’d like to provide some thought exercises about the reality of Satan for those who consider my writings about personal conversations with the devil to be hallucinatory bullshit.
In order for there to be invisible personal spirits from other worlds, there have to be other worlds. Let’s start there. The problem of evil demands that there be a heaven. I’ll provide a review. So according to the cosmological argument, something cannot come from nothing, so everything must come from infinity. According to the teleological argument, everything works together in an organized functional system. The organization of information is called intelligence. Everything is organized. So intelligence governs everything. So everything is produced and governed by an intelligent infinity. That intelligent infinity is what we call God. Now, in order to produce a universe as complex and well organized as ours, God must be highly, in fact, infinitely intelligent. But even a moderately intelligent being would know that a universe of suffering and destruction such as ours on its own would be pointless. In short, that which can produce our world would not produce our world. This is a rendition of the problem of evil that incorporates the teleological and cosmological arguments that justify the existence of a God who satisfies the problem of evil.
But hold on. God would not produce our world if our world is the only world there is. I’ll try to clarify what I am getting at with an analogy. So two ants are sitting on a rotten bannana peel in a trashcan out behind a restaurant. They actually don’t know the restaurant exists. They’ve only ever seen the trashcan. They ask themselves, what kind of a sick jackass would make a world like the one we live in? Everything stinks! There is nothing but garbage here! However, the trashcan serves a very useful function…for the restaurant out front. In the restaurant, everything smells great, looks and tastes delicious, and there are wonderful people eating and drinking and enjoying the cuisine inside. The purpose of the trashcan is to get rid of the refuse from the restaurant, so the people in the restaurant can have an enjoyable experience. Overall, the wider world, the restaurant with its trashcan, is a perfect place where everything functions as it should.
In short, there must be another world, and it must be perfect, such that the sum totality of all that is can be considered perfect. The next bit will get on to personal spirits. This part will appeal to a smaller audience. Within spirituality, there are those who believe in God or who have a spirituality inherent to their thinking, but they think that the spiritual reality beyond our world must be completely foreign to us. H.P. Lovecraft’s stories were based on that premise. I know a lot of people who think that whatever happens beyond death must have nothing to do with anything we have going on down here, and any form of life after death must be unimaginable.
This doesn’t make sense, however. Especially given the fact that our world must be a secondary world. A good God would not create an evil world like ours unless it was useful to or in some way a part of a good world. So the good world must be primary, and our world must be somehow adjunct to it. This idea is confirmed by the fact that all religious scripture, legend, and mythology confirms that our world was, in fact, created by a being or beings from another world which is higher than ours. Find me a religion that doesn’t talk about higher, perfect beings, such as the gods, angels, etc.
There is no point in creating our world like it is unless it is somehow relateable to the primary world on which it is based. So while we have two arms and legs, and the beings from the primary world may have three, or some other number, we can conclude that our basic configuration as consciousnesses encased in bodies that exist in local areas within space and time, where things like sight, sound, smell, and taste have some relevance. The beings there may have four senses, or six. They may be larger or smaller, their bodies may be made out of different substances and have different capabilities, etc, but we can understand that there must be enough commonality to the point that if those beings ever had anything to do with us, or we had anything to do with them, there could be some relationship. Otherwise, there would be no point of creating us for their benefit, or them being any benefit to us. And lo and behold, all scriptural, religious, and mythological thinking involves these higher beings called gods, angels, whatever, who rule over us, watch us, aid us, create us, and that we go to another world when we die. So, all spiritual and scriptural thinking involves a relationship between beings as described.
The above contemplation is a logical buttressing of my own personal experience of talking to beings from other worlds. Now again, my personal experience involves interacting with personal spirits, sadly evil spirits, that I have seen via their channeling themselves through people around me while I am in strange mental states. Call it shizophrenia if you want. I am not in the least bit afraid of that term, as if you want to use the term, I’m at least like that guy in the movie A Beautiful Mind who maintained a tenured chair at a prestigious mathematics department while seeing people who weren’t there. I just rode a bicycle across Europe, and you can ask my mom and dad and my daughter. I am more or less a fairly cool, functional guy. But these things could also be considered vision quests, lucid dreams, or…wait for it…prophetic experiences. I mean, I don’t want to go around tooting my own horn, really. I am probably just crazy. And I don’t deal in this stuff all the time. But I want to convey that I consider myself to have had personal experiences with spiritual realities on the one hand, and on another these things I have experienced are butressed by the logic of the cosmological and teleological arguments, the problem of evil, etc.
So moving on then from my conviction of the reality of Satan, who I think I have interacted with in a way, I want to talk about my thoughts on what actually motivates this guy. Many people don’t even consider any kind of motivation for Satan. They just think he is out to oppose everything for no particular reason. This actually fits the theme of Satan as simply opposition itself, but I think that any personal being out there opposing everything is going to have a reason to do so.
More than one person has compared my writings to The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. That is a book where a demon called Screwtape is outlining all the tactics for destroying and corrupting humans, but it never really describes why the demons are trying to destroy or corrupt humans in the first place. At least as far as I remember.
The general reason that Christian theologians give for Satan’s war on God is that he wants to be God himself. This does align somewhat with what OG saw in Puerto Vallarta, with Sam’s statement to OG, “you can take his power,” and the ensuing dialog there.
So after knowing about OG’s Crossroads story, you can understand why it’s impossible for me not to think of Satan as a personal being in rebellion against God. Whether that episode was some sort of drug-induced hallucination of a tourist getting rufied or whether it was some sort of lucid dream or some kind of prophetic vision really doesn’t matter. What matters is that I see the logic underlying what happened to the guy. He had some kind of a crossroads experience of the kind I talk about in The Choices We Make. Now I am going to talk about the motivations of this being. Even though many people personalize Satan as I do, very few think about his motivations.
So I’ve been saying that Satan wants to be God on the one hand, but that he doesn’t believe in God on the other hand. He is in a fight with the being that represents God, who the Christians call the Messiah, and the Jews call an angel such as the archangel Michael. He thinks that guy is God, and he wants to be that guy. That guy has power over material reality. That guy can make a bottle of beer appear out of nowhere, as described by the myth of the Prince and the One in the fourth chapter of my book. He can regrow lost limbs. He can light a mountain on fire and give divine laws to mankind. That guy can walk on water.
Now that guy is not the only person who has superpowers, obviously. Two angels with him blinded the inhabitants of Sodom when they were trying to rape them. An angel killed a hundred thousand soldiers of the Assyrian king Sennacherib in a night. However, all of these angels accepted limitations to their power such that everything they did was in obedience to and conformed to the program of their king, this Captain of the Host that Joshua bowed to. But Satan has none of this. He is just a shade, forced to twist the minds of humans in order to get anything done, as we humans have been given a certain amount of power over the world in which we live. At the very least, we have the power afforded by the fact that our minds control our bodies, and we can manipulate the world through our hands and feet and whatever. Many see that our control over the world actually extends beyond that with tales of magic and whatnot, though that is a separate topic of conversation.
So Satan wants ultimate power, but has very little – only what he can steal via humans. It’s all reminiscent of an old Love and Rockets song, actually.
Let’s not get bogged down describing the condition of things, though. There are many who do that. We want to discuss the ‘why’ of the matter. Satan is on the losing end of an argument with this Captain of the Host. He hates him passionately. Infinitely. Apparently at the beginning of things they got into a disagreement. I wrote a legend about a bottle of beer in my book Electrochemical Girl in order to provide some conjecture about some aspects of a possible origin of this argument, but we can be more certain that Satan has been punished for thousands of years now, cursed to live in powerless darkness because of his actions, and he is fighting mad about that in itself, regardless of how any such conflict may have originated.
The reason Satan is so mad at the Captain of the Host is that he thinks the Captain is doing whatever he wants without regard to anything higher than himself. Satan does not believe in God. The Captain sees himself as merely obeying God by saying the things he says and doing the things he does. So Satan thinks the Captain didn’t have to cast him out of heaven. He thinks the Captain didn’t have to curse him in the Garden of Eden.
Because he is so certain that God does not exist, he spends his time trying to prove the Captain wrong. There is a lot packed into that sentence I just wrote. So let me explain it.
So if there is a God, then the things that the Captain says and does represent God’s will. The Captain doesn’t say and do things that he thinks don’t represent God’s will. So if the Captain curses the serpent in the Garden of Eden, it’s because he has to. It’s not just a whim. But if God does not exist, then the Captain’s cursing the serpent in the Garden of Eden is just the Captain’s whim. He could also choose to not curse the serpent if he wanted to. Now if I were the serpent, and the Captain cursed me, and I thought he didn’t need to do that, I would be pretty mad at him. If I thought the Captain had no choice but to curse me, I at least would have a harder time blaming him. If I thought the Captain were being obedient to God by cursing me, I would have to think that there must be something wrong with me to deserve the cursing I got. Satan certainly doesn’t think the Captain didn’t have any choice. And he certainly didn’t think the Captain is being obedient to God by doing what he does. And most of all, he doesn’t think he deserved what he got.
Basically, the Captain does not see reality as being governed by a supreme intelligence. He thinks reality can be anything he wants it to be, and anything that impedes reality from being whatever he wants it to be is getting in the way of his progress. You can’t be obedient to something you don’t think exists.
So Satan’s motivation is not simply mindless malice. His motivation is consistent with what he thinks the truth of the nature of reality to be. He just doesn’t believe in God. And he has some evidence. He has done horrible things, and if there were God, we would not have been able to do so. Or that’s what he says. He does not believe in God, so he has not figured out that God is so loving, God would let him do such things. And he hasn’t figured out that God has a greater purpose for letting him do such things. Satan has seen many, many things in his thousands of years of life and has been able to interpret what he has seen within his framework of a Godless reality. He has, of course, had to ignore and deny many facts that have been presented him during his lifetime, and he has chosen to understand many things in his way when he could have understood them another way. He wants to understand things the way he understands them, and he has seen many things and understands the meaning of what he has seen in accordance with what he believes to be true. Finally, and this is the kicker, after all these thousands of years, he cannot unsee what he has seen. It is very doubtful that it will be possible to convince him that he is wrong about the nature of reality, no matter what happens to him going forward. He is what he is and will always be that.
Because his view of reality is so entrenched, he has been willing to do everything that he has done over these thousand of years. Inciting wars, tempting people to falsehoods, lying, inspiring hate, killing, every horrific thing you can imagine has his stamp on it. He has been willing to do those things all because of what he firmly believes to be the true nature of reality: that there is no God, that reality is just whatever we imagine, and that there is no higher purpose that must be conformed to.
There is one very powerful bit of evidence that there is a God, however. Determinism. And there is one very powerful bit of evidence for determinism: prophecy. I am not talking about the general prophecy of just having wisdom from God, however. Here, I am talking about full-on grade A knowing the future. You can’t know the future unless, in some sense, it is already there. And the future cannot already be written unless there is something beyond time and space writing it such as God. Satan cannot accept the idea that the future is already written and that there is something that wrote it and knows it and passes information about it to us.
This is why I say Satan is trying to prove God wrong. Regarding the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the Captain told Adam and Eve, “in the day you eat of it, you shall surely die.” Satan said, “Did God say that? You won’t die.” They ate. They did not die in the sense that we think of the word. They were cut off from God spiritually. But they didn’t just cease to exist. The angels had to adjust their understanding of what the Captain said to understand a deeper meaning within it, but Satan and the demons just said, “Look! He is wrong!”
Now when you look at prophecies of the future, you will often find that it can be difficult to determine what is a prophecy to begin with. They are often cryptic, and often the prophets don’t know the details of the things they are uttering. We have to look back after the fact at the prophecy and the events that came later and determine that the prophecy applied to this or that event, and it did or did not come to pass.
However, there was one giant prophecy that is pretty hard to deny that seems to be coming true. Four thousand years ago, the Captain told a Hebrew shepherd with an old woman for a barren wife that he would have descendants like the stars of heaven, that all nations would be blessed through him and his descendants, and that his descendant would rule the world.
Here we are at the dawn of the 21st century. Despite the exile to babylon, the destruction of Judea and the Temple by the Romans, and despite the expulsions, ghettos, and pogroms, and despite even the holocaust, the descendants of Abraham exist and are the only nation to have revived an entire language and recreated an entire country. Furthermore, two billion Christians take inspiration from the Hebrew Bible and await the arrival of a Jewish descendant of David to rule the world. Two billion Muslims take inspiration from a prophet descended from Abraham’s other son and await the arrival of this Jewish Messiah as well.
Yes, there are many who don’t believe Abraham was a historical person and that the existence of Israel is a prophecy. However, two thousand years ago, Israel effectively ceased to exist, and after two thousand years, poof, the country reappeared. There are only a couple of hundred countries on earth, folks. One of them really should not be here, but it is. This is some very strange stuff, and everyone on the earth knows about it. We are not talking about the strange goings on of some dude in Carracas that nobody has ever heard of. We are talking about one of two hundred nations existing currently and an entire nation that has existed practically from the dawn of human civilization until today. This nation that won’t die, or that comes back from the dead, as it were, is right there for everyone to see. And furthermore this nation is still yet prophecied to be the capital of a perfect worldwide kingdom in the future.
For this, Satan urgently desires to prove the Captain wrong in order to demonstrate that the future is not set, and that there is nothing that can know the future absolutely. So those who advocate the cause of God must be destroyed, but most specifically, the nation of Israel must be destroyed in order to make that four thousand year old statement from the Captain out to be false.
ٌReally what this is about, folks, is that the understanding that our free action conforms to a known and determined pattern being proof that God exists, and the clearest and most demonstrable example of that proof is the existence and flourishing of the nation of Israel and the people of God all over the world who are the people of God through Abraham, the nation of Israel, and the Jewish Messiah.
Knowing these things will tell you Satan’s game plan. It will tell you about what kinds of ideas he is going to put in people’s heads. It will tell you who he is going to go after to destroy and who he is going to recruit to his cause. Because it will tell you what his cause is. Knowing these things actually reveals to you what is in the heart of the dragon.
There are more facets, dimensions, tangents, and tendrils that come from this analysis, but this is the basic and primary sign of the plan of Satan: to destroy Israel and everyone that comes from it in order to demonstrate that the universe is not governed by infinite intelligence, otherwise known as God. Now you know why the Nazis came up with the final solution. And now you know what the Moshiach Sheqer, the مسيح الدجل (masih addajjal), the Antichrist is going to want to do when he shows up: get rid of Israel.