Satan and the Problem of
Evil
The first Page-One story I ever wrote for the Los Angeles Times was about Satan.
It was January 1974, and The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty's novel about a demon-possessed girl, was drawing unprecedented crowds to movie theaters in twenty-four U.S. cities. An occult tumult had seemingly gripped the nation, and a beehive of debate and controversy swirled about the existence of demons and Satan — and ultimately about the nature of good and evil. Quoting French poet Charles Baudelaire, I pointed out that if the Devil's deepest wile is to persuade humanity he does not exist, then Satan was botching his job horribly.1
This was not the first nor the last time, of course, that there has been wholesale fascination with giving the Devil his due. In recent years a spate of popular books and films — including Rosemary's Baby, Damien, Damien II, The Omen, Poltergeist, and The Amityville Horror — has examined occult themes, evil spirits, haunted houses, and diabolical deeds. Satanic symbolism shows up frequently in heavy-metal rock lyrics. The much-publicized Church of Satan, founded in 1966 by Anton LaVey in San Francisco, is only one of a number of satanic groups claiming to worship or identify with the lord of darkness. The rites of some of these groups include heavy drug use, the "black mass," animal sacrifices, ritual sex, and mutilation. New Age neopagen groups may
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also evoke demons, but they are more oriented toward Wicca (witchcraft), magic, the powers of nature, and goddess worship.
Belief in demon possession dates back at least to the time of Jesus; the New Testament Gospels contain numerous references to his casting out devils from individuals. Accounts of the early church fathers in the second and third centuries speak of godly men requiring the disciplines of fasting and prayer in order to exorcise demons. In the Middle Ages in Europe, what was assumed to be demon possession often seemed epidemic. Starting with one hysterical nun, it rampaged through entire religious communities. Ancient exorcism rites in the Roman Catholic Church predate the Reformation, and a variation of the ritual has been preserved in the Anglican tradition. But the solemn ceremonies are rarely used today.
Views of Satan run the gamut — or gauntlet — from the vaudeville caricature of fiery "Mr. Redlegs" with pitchfork and tail, to seductive tempter and superforce of evil, to "a cool dude" who lets you "be on your own."2
"Interpretations of the meaning of Satan vary," declare Robert S. Ellwood and Harry B. Partin in their Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America, "from 'traditionalist' views of him as the antagonist of the Christian God to modern perspectives which see Satan as a symbol of the 'life-force,' creative evolution, or the affirmation of innocent pleasure. Proponents of the first see Satan more or less as the Miltonic Lucifer, a proud but heroic rebel with whom they identify. He is, contrary to lies told about him by the churches, able to reward his followers with an eternity of pleasure, and with opportunity for revenge, around his dark throne."3
New Age systematizers struggle with how to accommodate Satan and evil into their worldview.
"That's a tough one," Marilyn Ferguson admitted candidly as we sipped tea in her living room and chatted about the existence of evil. "I'm coming a little more toward an appreciation of this thing called evil but I think the jury is still out on what it is. The real perversity we have — the way we behave in a way that has evil consequences — it's because of the classical Luciferian attitude that we want to be God.
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We don't understand our boundaries . . . . It's failure to understand our rightful place."
But, I pursued, in New Age aren't we all "God"?
"We are God, but not all of God ..... People get overly carried away when they realize they create their reality . . . . There are other people out there and their needs and their realities have to interact with mine . . . You can tap into this power, but you're not the sum total of it," Ferguson avowed.4
New Agers swing between explaining away evil as an illusion, or chalking it up to the "wages" of karma — the New Age equivalent of sin.
To Shirley MacLaine, there is no such thing as evil. Evil, she believes, is only what you think it is. This construct has roots in Transcendental thinking of the 19th Century, as we have seen, as well as in Christian Science. Mary Baker Eddy taught that evil and sin, in league with error, sickness, death, and all forms of matter, are simply the products of false perception and do not exist in the all-good and all-knowing Mind of God.5
In MacLaine's view, evil is denied, change is always good, problems disappear, guilt evaporates, and potential is unlimited. The New Age way to eliminate evil is to eliminate everything finite because finite experience is itself evil.
In New Age thinking, observes Art Lindsley in New Age Rage, "the only way to transform this evil situation is to eliminate the illusion of the finite, the personal, and the social. Disease and suffering are illusory — a matter of consciousness. If we alter consciousness, we eliminate disease."6
And, apparently, even war.
New Age spokesman and physician Dr. Irving Oyle was once asked how America should deal with the Vietnam War. "If we all stop thinking about it," he replied, "if we all stop agreeing on its objective reality, it will cease to exist."7
Entities Seth and Michael, as channeled respectively by Jane Roberts and Jessica Lansing, stated that evil has only as much reality and power as people give it by their basic beliefs. The same applies to devils and demons.8
This view, according to researcher Lanny Buettner, gives demons alleged power through negative telepathic suggestion: "If a man believed his neighborhood was filled with
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muggers, he would telepathically attract a mugger, thus confirming his belief."9
This understanding of evil was affirmed to me by a New Ager who told me she "created" her own stabbing in an underground parking garage because she transmitted her fears that such an attack was likely to happen.
Beyond good and evil, in New Age thinking, is the monistic One, the god who is both good and evil. Stemming from this notion is the New Age belief in the essential goodness of humanity and in the upward spiral of social evolution. These assumptions root both in Hindu philosophy about the nature of God, and in Jung's theory of the "Collective Unconscious."
Jung was enamored with the impersonal deity of Gnosticism that is beyond good and evil or moral conscience, observes Carl Raschke: " 'Good' and 'evil' from the standpoint of the Collective Unconscious are complimentary and reciprocal elements. As archetypes they have equal worth in the economy of nature. There is no such thing as an absolute dichotomy between good and evil. Good and evil are what particular societies brand them."10
Even as an apple has a top and a bottom but both are parts of the apple, so God and the Devil, good and evil, are portions of a greater reality — a greater "good." The result of such New Age teaching is believing there is only what is "right" in the moment — there are no "rules" or sure prescriptions to steer one's life. This is moral relativism (a subject that demands our full attention in the next chapter).
Following up these implications for the area of sexual ethics, Buettner points out that "Presumably, then, no stigma need be attached to divorce, premarital, or extra-marital sex, or even incest, except when these acts do violence to another; the acts themselves are not intrinsically evil."11
Ferguson and other New Agers rely on the assumption of humanistic psychology that human beings have a natural bent toward goodness and growth; therefore, there is little room for "wrong" — even "poor" — choices. Ferguson believes that the "cure to evil is education . . . . We all want the same thing . . . . a certain quality of life."
During the "evolution of intelligence," she explained in our interview, "we become prematurely crafty. We see that ignorance and greed work together to make a little mud, and
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we do dirty stuff and dumb stuff. It's only by developing our intelligence and our awareness that we see that doesn't work."12
Ken Wilber, a major architect of New Age thought, turns the biblical message of the Fall in the Garden of Eden upside down in his book, Up from Eden. Actually, he says, the "Fall" was an "evolutionary advance and perfect growth, but it was experienced as a Fall because it necessarily carried an increase in guilt, vulnerability, and knowledge of mortality and finitude."13
By eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Wilber continues, "not only did men and women realize their already mortal and finite state, they realized they had to leave Eden's subconsciousness and begin the actual life of true self-conscious responsibility (on the way to superconsciousness, or Actual Return [to godhead]). They did not get thrown out of the Garden of Eden; they grew up and walked out. (Incidentally, for this courageous act, we have Eve to thank, not blame)."14
The theological Fall, or original sin, Wilber contends, marked the "illusory separation of all things from Spirit." Creation itself was a fall because it was a centrifugal movement, the cutting off of all selves (even infants) from their remembering their ultimate inclusion in Spirit. Evolution, then, is a labored return toward Spirit, toward Source. Hence the title of Wilber's book, Up from Eden: Men and women "are up from the beasts and on their way to the gods."15
New Age karma theory appears to mesh here, for working off bad karma in successive lives supposedly would aid in the evolutionary return to godhead and negate the illusion of separate egos and paradise lost. The only sin would seem to be ignorance of wholeness and unity, the only evil belief in separation or distinction.16
Karma attempts to answer the problem of evil and suffering, as we touched upon in the preceding chapter. But if God is both good and evil, and no moral standards exist for an equitable distribution of karma in the next life, then capriciousness and nihilism are the bitter fruit of the Law of Return.
No religious system supplies a neat and easy solution to the
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paradoxes and problems of evil and suffering. But the One-Is-All philosophy that the One contains the eternal reconciliation of all opposites, including good and evil, leads to an attitude that one can do no wrong: Whatever one does is simply following his or her karma.
The deception lies in substituting our own images for reality, which is a virtual mirror image of the Big Lie of Satan that we can be as God himself.17 Thus, Charles Baudelaire was right after all: The Devil vanishes behind his own image.
Yet our society of rewards and punishments is predicated upon the belief of biblical religion that human beings are able to choose between good and evil, right and wrong.
Said Judaism expert Robert Gordis: "The idea of freedom [of choice] is fundamental to the very nature of man and the universe . . . . Freedom means the right to be wrong."18
The suffering caused by Hitler's Holocaust — though we can never fully understand it — was the natural consequence of a monstrously wrong choice, Gordis said.
The Nazis — Hitler, and his gang — chose the monstrous evil as against good. But that was necessarily part of the divine plan because God gave us all the right to choose . . . . The perspective is the goodness and glory of God revealed in the world. Also a fundamental idea that is basic: the concept of the moral freedom of man . . .
This approach helps us in our understanding — if not in our accepting and certainly not in our applauding — even the horrors of the Holocaust. There is only a quantitative difference between the murder of five people and six million. The death of one child, the suffering of a baby, is part of that great mystery of the world. But to the extent that we can understand it, it is part of the very nature of the universe and the constitution of man.19
The Bible, as opposed to the Eastern religious texts and the New Age worldview, speaks of a conspiracy of evil against God and his rule, and of Satan's influence (Job 2:6-7; Rev. 12:9-12). The New Testament is steeped in a dualistic view of human nature and abounds with descriptions of a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil (nineteen of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament speak of Satan). And, as we noted at the beginning of this chapter, Jesus and
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his disciples took the existence of demons and the "powers and instruments of darkness" very seriously.
A satanic explanation of evil may seem to be a quaint cultural myth that is passe in sophisticated, late twentieth-century society. Many prefer to speak about mental derangement and schizophrenia.
For others, the facetious remark, "The Devil made me do it," is a convenient cop-out to duck personal moral responsibility. But before we dismiss it altogether, shouldn't we at least consider the demonic as an alternative explanation for evil that seems to break in unbidden? Perhaps there is spirit possession. The existence of evil incarnate personalities is well established; why not discarnate evil personalities who interject themselves into our lives and institutions?
Many of us, however, may believe in too many evils: "We believe in a thousand evils, fear a thousand dangers, but have ceased to believe in Evil and to fear the true Dangers," wrote Denis de Rougemont. "To show the reality of the Devil in this world is . . . to cure ourselves. We are never in greater danger than in moments when we deceive ourselves as to the real nature of a threat, and when we summon our energies for defense against the void while the enemy approaches from behind."20
C.S. Lewis, the British author and common man's theologian, wrote advice in 1941 that stands well in this New Age:
"There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors, and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight."21
Chapter 30 || Table of Contents
1. Russell Chandler, "Exorcism Issue Putting Satan in the Spotlight," Los Angeles Times, 19 January 1974, pt. 1, 1.
2. Cited in George A. Mather and Larry Nichols, "Doorways to the Demonic," Lutheran Witness Magazine (October 1987): 3.
3. Robert S. Ellwood and Harry B. Partin, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988), 176.
4. Marilyn Ferguson, interview with author, Los Angeles, Calif., 12 January 1987.
5. See Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, authorized ed., (1875); (Boston: First Church of Christ, Scientist, 1971), 496–97.
6. Karen Hoyt et al., New Age Rage (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1987), 234.
7. Quoted in Debbie Alexander, "The New Medicine: A New Phase in Cultural Transformation," Spiritual Counterfeits Project Report (1975, rev. 1984), 4.
8. Cited in Lanny Steven Buettner, "Ethics in Contemporary Psychic Experience: A Descriptive Analysis," M.A. thesis, University of Southern California, 1984, 65–67.
9. Ibid.
10. Carl A. Raschke, Interruption of Eternity: Modern Gnosticism in the Origins of the New Religious Consciousness (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1980), 147.
11. Buettner, "Ethics in Contemporary Psychic Experience," 95.
12. Ferguson, interview with author, Los Angeles, Calif., 12 January 1987.
13. Ken Wilber, Up from Eden (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1981), 297.
14. Ibid., 298.
15. Ibid., 1.
16. Hoyt et al., New Age Rage, 234.
17. Brooks Alexander, "The Disappearance of the Devil," Spiritual Counterfeits Project Newsletter (July–August 1984): 6.
18. Robert Gordis, "The Book of Job," Thesis Theological Cassettes (audiotape) 15, no. 7 (December 1984).
19. Ibid.
20. Denis de Rougemont, Devil's Snare (New York: Meridian Books, 1956), 20–21.
21. C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1961), preface.
