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Hail and welcome back to A Satanist Reads the Bible! If you’re joining me here for the first time, this is a podcast (or blog, if you’re reading it) about exploration and criticism of religion. And I don’t mean “criticism” in its exclusively negative sense, although I am certainly more than happy to point out where religion has taken wrong turns. Rather, I mean criticism in the more analytical sense, approaching both merits and faults in the most objective way I can manage while also bringing in aspects of my own subjective experience of religion in general and of my religion, Satanism. And what Satanism is–or, more specifically, what it is to me–is something that I’ve explored elsewhere and will be returning to again here today, turning my critical eye towards myself and looking inward.
This project has been going on for just over a year now and I’m returning today from a short hiatus. The break has been great, though rather than spending it as I probably should have, getting away from the keyboard as much as possible, I actually ended up starting a novel. Some of you might be aware that November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, but I wasn’t even thinking of that at the time. Rather, a bit reminiscent of how Tolkien invented a world as a side-effect of constructing languages, I was trying to come up with scenarios so that I could practice strategic planning and in the process invented my own world, one inspired largely by Rome at the end of the 3rd century. It’s something I started thinking of as being completely separate from my work here on A Satanist Reads the Bible, but I’ve actually come to realize that the two are inextricably linked and touch on many of the same things. I’ve had requests from a few people to write a book, and when I was planning that out I was expecting that it would end up being a non-fiction work, basically like my essays but longer. But it turns out I’ve got a story to tell. I’m about 50,000 words in, which is novella-length and not bad for about three weeks of writing, out of a planned 150,000, which is just on the long side of novel-length, about as long as The Two Towers. How this project will turn out remains to be seen, but I’ll talk about it here and there as it comes up. No guarantees that it’ll go anywhere, of course, but I’ve been greatly enjoying the process and I think that it is indeed helping me to practice strategic thinking.
I have to admit that returning to A Satanist Reads the Bible has been a bit terrifying. I’ve been deeply ensconced in a world of my own imagination for the past few weeks and not doing much philosophical and religious reading, which means that I’m a bit out of the game, so to speak. So I hope you’ll bear with me as I get my feet back under me, but that said, I’m really excited about what I have for you today.
And moving on to that: the gap between what we’re able to achieve as a species and how wrong we’re capable of going in our thinking never ceases to amaze me. On the one hand, we’ve put people on the moon, and on the other–well, a quick look at the political climate in my own country, the United States, is certainly evidence of how much trouble we have thinking clearly and critically.
And what is critical thinking, exactly? Breaking it down, “thinking” is the gerund form of the verb “to think,” which refers to the active use of the brain to process information and form judgements. This is a distinguishing feature of humanity. It’s certainly possible and even likely that other animals think to some degree–for example, making conscious decisions rather than just blindly following instinct–but our capacity for thought is what sets us apart, for better and for worse. Critical thinking is, collectively, those extra steps we take in our thinking to make sure that we’re leaning towards better and away from worse, not just thinking on a superficial, first-order level but moving beyond that into the realm of metacognition, thinking about thinking, analyzing and evaluating our thoughts so as to be as sure as possible that they’re correct.
While this process might be elaborated in a number of ways, I think that any critical thinking process must have two key components:
- Asking good questions
- Not being satisfied with the obvious, initial answers
Of course, the obvious, initial answers may turn out to be the correct ones, but we cannot be satisfied with those answers unless we’ve at least tried to reach beyond them. As to what the “good questions” are, I keep a list of them in one of my notebooks, organized under the six primary English interrogatives: who, what, where, when, why, and how. What is a possible counterargument? Why is this a problem? And one of the most consistently useful: who benefits?
One of my major inspirations for my religious philosophy is Socrates; or, rather, what we know of Socrates from Plato. Socrates is a name you’ve likely heard, but by way of proper context, he was a soldier and philosopher who lived in Athens in the 5th century before the common era. He was not the first of the Greek philosophers, Thales and Anaximander and others having preceded him, but he was certainly one of the most influential. However, he wrote nothing down, and so what we know of him comes exclusively from other sources: the playwright Aristophanes, the soldier and historian Xenophon, and Socrates’ student and fellow philosopher Plato, the last of those being the most extensive and prominent source. Plato featured Socrates as a character in his dialogues, which he used to explore and explicate philosophical issues, but this means that what we know of Socrates has largely been filtered through Plato.
So I can say that I am influenced by Socrates only insofar as Plato’s depiction of him is accurate, and to such a degree as it is not, I am influenced more directly by Plato himself. In Plato’s dialogue The Apology of Socrates, in which Socrates presents his legal defense at his trial, Socrates describes himself thusly:
…if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by God; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the state and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. And as you will not easily find another like me, I would advise you to spare me.
translation by Benjamin Jowett
Though I would never place myself in such exclusive terms, I think of myself likewise as a kind of gadfly, buzzing around the ears of religious thought, not with any predetermined outcome and certainly not out of an intent to destroy, dismantle, or defame religion as a whole, but rather out of a deep love and appreciation for religion, or at least for its potential as an avenue of human expression. This may be my distinguishing feature as a Satanist and as whatever kind of atheist I may be said to be: I’m religion-positive, entirely in favor of having religion in general be a part of individual lives and a part of social discourse. And this extends to particular religions as well: I have no qualms with Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or with any other religion, as they exist in the abstract. My watchword is this: religion is not a problem; there are problems with religion.
In his book Breaking the Spell, from 2006, the philosopher Daniel Dennett cites the psychologist Philip Tetlock, and in particular his paper from the journal Trends in Cognitive Science from 2004 titled “Thinking the Unthinkable: Sacred Values and Taboo Cognitions,” in describing sacred values. I’ll cite Tetlock here directly:
Many people insist that their commitments to certain values (e.g. love, honor, justice) are absolute and inviolable – in effect, sacred. They treat the mere thought of trading off sacred values against secular ones (such as money) as transparently outrageous – in effect, taboo.
Dennett distills this definition of sacred values further, stating that, per Tetlock, values are sacred “when they are so important to those who hold them that the very act of considering them is offensive.” Elsewhere in the same book, Dennett says that “one of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance,” which gets right at the heart of the matter that I’m approaching here.
What strikes me as odd is that this notion of a sacred value seems at odds with itself. If one holds a value as sacred, wouldn’t one want to put it up against every conceivable test? I mentioned the moon landing earlier; that’s not exactly a value but it makes for a useful demonstration, because I hold that as one of the greatest of humanity’s accomplishments. Even if it is not a value in and of itself, it is emblematic of my own value system. Some people believe that this momentous event never actually happened, that it was a hoax perpetrated by the U.S. government in order to fool the Russians into thinking that we had beaten them in the space race. Well, there are some people who think that the earth is flat, which is preposterous on its face–indeed, not every counterclaim warrants critical exploration. If they did, we’d never get anywhere, never having been able to get past the infinite possible variations on counterarguments to our most basic assumptions. But having escaped Earth’s atmosphere and landed on the moon is a rather remarkable thing and so the notion that it might have been staged is not so immediately preposterous as the notion that the Earth is flat. But if I believe that the moon landing really did happen, where’s the harm in testing out those claims? After all, if I’m correct, then the facts of the matter will stand up to every test, every time. Likewise, if certain values–perhaps certain religious values–really are sacred, then what’s the harm in putting them to the test? If such values are indeed worthy of being called sacred, they’ll stand up to every test, and then I can know with much greater confidence that such values are worthy of being sacred in the first place.
I recently came across a fascinating passage in the Bible, from the Gospel of Matthew, which I will reproduce for you here:
[Jesus] put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”
Matthew 13:24-30, NRSV
Jesus’ disciples ask him to explain this parable, and he says:
The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil; the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age.
Matthew 13:36-40, NRSV
But this parable has a different meaning for me: the field is the world, and the wheat and the weeds alike are what we might learn of the world, truly or falsely. The time it takes them to grow is the time it takes us to consider and evaluate this knowledge. If we make our judgements too early, without critical evaluation, then we’ll pull up the wheat right along with the weeds. In this interpretation, I am taking the very atypical approach–for me, at least, though this is more the default in popular religion–of accepting this depiction of Satan at face value, in the archetype of Satan the Deceiver. If I were to write my own parable, it would be Satan sowing the wheat and religious hegemonies sowing the weeds; that would seem to be more in keeping with the depiction of Satan as the Adversary, Lightbringer, who shows us the way to knowledge.
This critical approach to religion is at the foundation of my Satanism. I might make another comparison to the figure of Iblis in Islam, which I wrote of in a recent essay, “Satan in the Qur’an.” Iblis, who is correlated in Islam with al-Shaitan (the Arabic word for Satan), is depicted in the Qur’an as refusing God’s command to bow to Adam. In certain interpretations, this defiance arises not from pride but from devotion and obedience to God, who has also commanded that They alone be worshipped. Likewise, I have a devotion and obedience to truth, which is a sacred value for me, and will question everything in order to come confidently to a good understanding.
So let’s take a look at some of my claims and see how they hold up. I’ve rarely formulated my ideas so pithily before and I think that doing so does a real disservice to the complexity and subtlety of my thought, whether or not I’m on the right track in the first place. But if I were to lay out each of my arguments in full and deconstruct them, we’d be here all day, so some distillation is necessary and unavoidable. I have a couple options in my approach: I can state my claims and see how they hold up or fail to hold up to various cognitive biases, or walk through some of the more common cognitive biases and see how they might have affected my various claims. The former would probably be the more systematic and thorough approach, but also, I think a bit more tedious, and so, out of a desire to entertain as well as inform, I’ll start with the biases themselves and go from there.
A cognitive bias is simply a way that humans are inclined to go wrong in their thinking. The world is complex and in order to deal with it in an expeditious fashion, we need heuristics, shortcuts that let us get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible so that we might make a decision. Maybe not the best decision, but the one that keeps us alive long enough to make the next one. But while these shortcuts may be better at keeping us alive, they’re not necessarily better at helping us get at the truth of things. There are hundreds of them, at least. It’s hard to know where to start.
One of the more common and pernicious cognitive biases is confirmation bias, which Wikipedia defines as “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that affirms one’s prior beliefs or hypotheses.” One of the best ways to overcome confirmation bias is to argue against your own beliefs, to try as hard as possible to prove yourself wrong. After all, if your idea is correct and your beliefs are true, you will be consistently unable to refute yourself. One must keep in mind, though, that inability to refute a particular belief does not mean that it is true, though one might be justified in having more confidence in it. Proving that false things are false is a matter of relative ease, whereas proving that true things are true is a matter of great difficulty, and often it’s impossible to be completely certain. A look into the work of Karl Popper would be helpful here, but as I don’t want to get too far afield from the central matter, I’ll leave that for another time.
Let’s start with one of my key claims: sacred texts are often misinterpreted and misrepresented for purposes of power and control. There are essentially two propositions there: one, sacred texts are often misinterpreted and misrepresented; and two, the reason for this misinterpretation is to confer power or control to the interpreter. To be clear about my claims, I’m not saying that this misinterpretation or misrepresentation is always deliberate. One might imagine a scenario in which a particular verse from the Bible has fallen into a tradition of misinterpretation, but, as that interpretation benefits the hegemony in question, there is an incentive against questioning it and perhaps landing on an interpretation that is less beneficial.
By way of getting more specific, let’s look at the second of the two creation narratives from the Bible. That there are, in fact, two distinct creation narratives in the Bible is another claim that might be disputed by the more conservatively religious, but for the sake of argument let’s take that as a given and move on. The second creation narrative in the Bible is the story of Adam and Eve, and how they were tempted by Satan to eat of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Except, the narrative never mentions Satan by name, and nor does it use any synonyms like “devil” or “the enemy.” Rather, the tempter is described in Genesis 3:1 as being a serpent with no particular remarkable metaphysical qualities. The serpent of Genesis is not Satan but only a particularly crafty wild animal. Why then say otherwise? Who benefits? This portrayal is required in order to present the Bible as a unified narrative of the Fall, of Original Sin, and of Jesus’ Atonement, and that narrative is necessary for people to believe that the religious authority figures who are offering this interpretation in the first place have some influence about whether we end up in the good place or the bad place after we die.
So, why might I be wrong about that? I’m not the only one to have ever made the claim that the serpent in the Garden of Eden was never intended to portray Satan, but it does serve as an example of how I believe the Bible has been misinterpreted for purposes of power and control. But by way of self-argumentation, let’s start with the assumption that the narrative is an accurate historical account and see if we can work our way to the serpent being Satan. One possibility immediately presents itself: the serpent was Satan, but the ancient Hebrews, not yet being aware of the full narrative picture of which their own beliefs would form but a part of the whole, mistook him for a common serpent.
If that were indeed the case, what else would we expect to see? I would imagine that later Bible verses would make that connection explicit. Do any such verses exist? One that springs immediately to mind is Revelation 12:9:
The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world — he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.
NRSV
So there is indeed some evidence to support at least one contrary hypothesis. It’s rather scant, but if it’s even a possibility, then a whole host of other possibilities present themselves that might be valid even if the second creation narrative itself is fictitious, as it very much seems to be. For example, perhaps the concept that the ancient Hebrews understood as the serpent is the same concept that later thinkers understood as Satan, in which case the portrayal is inaccurate only in the most technical sense of the word and could not be categorized as a misinterpretation or misrepresentation.
So there we have it: one way that I might very well be wrong. I still don’t think that I am on that matter, based on Occam’s Razor: the explanation that is most likely to be correct is the one that requires the fewest number of additional assumptions. It is simpler to assume that the ancient Hebrews thought of the serpent as being simply a crafty animal, and that that concept does not map neatly onto later concepts of Satan, than it is to assume that peoples separated by thousands of years of history were exactly on the same page regarding a philosophically complex metaphysical idea. But I am, perhaps, a little less certain of that now than I was before I started writing this piece, and that’s a good thing.
But that’s just a warmup. Here’s something of a bigger fish, something more central to my belief system and also more difficult to analyze and dissect:
The cosmos can be understood pantheistically as a dialectic between God and Satan.
First of all, what does that even mean? It’s a concept I explicated in some of my earliest essays, but if I’m being honest, those simply aren’t very clear. The notion is very Hegelian and I’ve always struggled to put it into clear language. Here’s another attempt: To understand the cosmos pantheistically is to understand God and the cosmos as being consubstantial. This is to say, we can understand the cosmos in the same terms that we understand God: sacred and worthy of reverence. And I’m saying that the universe can indeed be understood that way. And further, that pantheistic quality can itself be understood as a dialectic — a progressive interplay between contradictions — and that that dialectic can be understood in terms of God and Satan.
I think the key matter here revolves around the verb phrase “can be understood as,” which I had to use several times in that paragraph to break down my claim. What does it mean for something to be able to be understood as something else? This is getting into epistemologically tricky territory, so I think an example might be helpful here. Take a rose, for example. The rose can be understood as an example of the genus Rosa or higher levels of biological classification, as a distinct and individual living thing, as something that exhibits certain mathematical properties, and all those things are things that are true of the rose. It’s true that a given rose is an example of the genus Rosa, given what the thing is and the way that we’ve defined the genus. So “can be understood as” signals a certain framework of facts that belong to the thing in question. But a rose can also be understood as a symbol. For example, it can be understood as a symbol for love, for the nation of England, for the Virgin Mary in Christianity, and none of those are “facts” about the rose in the same way that its genealogical lineage makes it objectively a member of its genus, because those “facts” aren’t necessary. There is nothing about roses that means that they would inevitably and unavoidably be associated with those things. But given our definition of the genus Rosa, a rose is unavoidably and inevitably an example of that. This applies both to the concept of roses in general and to an individual rose. For example, a particular rose could be symbolic if it was a prop in a theatrical production given by one character to another, or I could reference roses in poetry and use their symbolism without referring to any particular roses. So now we can say that “can be understood as” signals the usage of a framework of concepts applicable to or associated with the thing in question. What this starts to look like is one of Wittgenstein’s language games, which are just the necessary conceptual frameworks that give words meaning. So now the phrase “a can be understood as b” just means that the language game for b is applicable to entity a.
But that’s still a bit of a mess. By way of doing some cleanup, what my claim comes down to is that we can talk about the cosmos in this way — as a dialectic between God and Satan — and it will, a.) make sense and b.) be true, at the minimum, in the way that a rose’s symbolism is true of a rose.
Admittedly, this gives me a great deal of epistemological leeway. Certainly not infinite leeway, because while poetry and art give us a great deal of freedom in creating meaning and truth, certain understandings are simply not valid. One of my favorite examples, courtesy of the philosopher David Kyle Johnson, is that the movie Schindler’s List cannot be understood as a pro-Nazi film. So, despite allowing for my claim to be valid even if only in a very loose and creative sense, there is still plenty of room to say that I’m wrong. But that example concerns intent; to understand Schindler’s List as a pro-Nazi film would be to misunderstand the obvious intent of the film on every possible level. We cannot imagine a rational person making that interpretation. I’m not claiming that there’s necessarily any intent to the cosmos, only that there are various creative forces, which I think is obvious enough, and it doesn’t seem like a stretch to use the language of the sacred as a context for talking about the cosmos.
I think that the main risk here is one that I’ve mentioned before, which is the cognitive bias of anthropomorphism, the tendency to understand non-human entities as having human qualities. While humanity is certainly an aspect of the cosmos, vanishingly little of the cosmos itself is human in any meaningful way, and the rest seems entirely inimical to human life. Religion is, of course, a human invention, however divinely inspired it may or may not be, and so to understand the cosmos in those terms–in human terms–seems arrogant.
The way I get around that is, full disclosure here, entirely circular. The term “god” necessarily and definitively describes something that is beyond us, and so it seems fitting to include in that definition the full, inhuman grandeur and hostility of the cosmos. That doesn’t actually do anything to escape the anthropomorphic problem; rather, it just relocates it. Now the question is whether the term “god” can truly be said to apply if the concept is something that is overwhelmingly inhuman and hostile to human life.
My argument there is that our understanding of the divine must encompass our place in a vast, alien, hostile universe, in which we may be a very rare and vanishingly small statistical anomaly or even not special or remarkable in any way, because otherwise we have conceived of a god that is necessarily less than something–the universe–that we already know to exist, and then it is that concept to which the term “god” is of questionable applicability.
In closing, I’ll mention that I’m amazed at how little ground I’ve covered in this episode. Only a couple claims and cognitive biases. But this is an approach I’d like to include more of in everything I write, so it’s not the last you’ll see of it if I’m doing my job well.
I’ll also mention that this understanding doesn’t lead me to certainty, but rather to a kind of bewilderment. But I take that as well to mean that I am on the right track, because what authentic understanding of the divine would lead to something so banal as certainty? Certainty would mean that I have successfully and perfectly encompassed the whole of the divine within the understanding of my own limited human mind, and then I would have fallen for the anthropomorphic bias without any doubt. I think that that’s something along the lines of what Rumi was saying in this poem, which I’ll close with:
The work of real religion is bewilderment;
I:311-315, from the translation of Kabir and Camille Helminksi, The Rumi Daybook, 2012
But not a bewilderment that drives you away
From Him, no, but bewildered like this —
Drowned and drunk with the Beloved.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and to sign up for my mailing list (form on the sidebar) so you can stay current on my latest work. And if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content. I’ll be publishing new work every Friday evening. I also have a reading list, which contains links to the books I used to research this and all of my other stories. Clicking through and buying books is a great, easy way to support my work.