When I was a boy, my mom was pretty religious. I don't share her sensibilities but I also don't hold any ill will toward those who do. I know a lot of true believers and many of them are nice people but I always took issue with the seemingly oppressively nature of their spiritual laws and some of their explanations for why things are as they are and that, ultimately, led me to a reading of the Christian cannon and adjacent folklore which probably isn't what was intended by the cocreators of that content. Interestingly, my reading meshes well with (and may be the source of) my views on the value of personal freedom and on the tyrannical nature of the established systems of authority and I think it might be interesting to explore that connection here.
As I have said many times on this blog, I am not really of a believer in the supernatural and I don't subscribe to any particular set of religious beliefs. My point is, don't take anything here too literally or too seriously.
"You can't listen to Danzig because he's 'demonistic,'" my mom told the eight year old me some time in the mid ninety's. That sort of thing was probably the beginning of my desire to seek out hidden knowledge and mistrust the tyrants who try to hide it. In school, learning was a good thing. Knowing more facts and possessing more skills makes us better at life, I thought. So, why is knowing what Danzig has to say suddenly bad for me? Because his music is "satanic" and thus "evil" was the essence of the answer that I was given. This all sounded sketchy to me. I wondered; how would we know that this Satan guy and his musically talented followers are evil if we never hear what they have to say? Wouldn't it be better to listen to "Mother" a couple of times and make up our minds about the song for ourselves? Is that not the essence of freedom? Isn't freedom something that we value?
At some point, my mom took a little time to try to make me understand why we should think of Satan as the" bad guy" but I never really saw her point. The story goes (as I understand it), that Satan, along with some portion of the heavenly population, wants to be free from Yahweh's control and since they don't hold fair and free elections in heaven, they rebelled and lost the war. I struggled with understanding why that was wrong. Growing up in the U.S., we are taught to reviver the founding fathers and they kind of did the exact same thing except they won and are now looked upon, by some, as secular demigods. Why is George Washington seen as a hero (in this country, anyway) but Satan is a dick when they both wanted basically the same freedom to govern themselves?
She explained further, and told me that since the bible says the bible is true and the bible says that Satan hates people and caused our fall by tricking us into eating the fruit of knowledge, we know, as a matter of indisputable, fact that Satan is the bad guy but that didn't seem to add up either. I took issue with assuming that the bible is indisputably "true." I have always had a suspicious mind and I wondered if this could all be pro-God / anti-Satan propaganda (I probably didn't know that word but I think had some sense of what it was). If God wrote the bible, or inspired it, or whatever, couldn't he just lie and say that he never lies and then go on to self-aggrandize and slander his political enemies like earthly kings, prime ministers, and presidents have done throughout our history? I think that this is a healthy doubt, right? I mean, it doesn't usually seem to work out well when we take people at their word without question so why are things different in this one instance with this one book?
Satan's supposed offences didn't seem so offensive when I think about how the story plays out. Why does God want us to remain ignorant? The one thing that is off limits in the garden is knowledge but why? People are easier to control when they are ignorant. Slaves are less rebellious when they are reliant on their masters. I certainly could be wrong as I make no claims of infallibility but when I think about reasons why rulers might restrict access to knowledge, I can't come up with many that are positive. Satan decides to come along and play whistle blower (for what ever reason) by handing us the knowledge of good and evil which results in us being punished by God. However, God is the creator of all things which includes evil or, at least the capacity thereof. He draws the distinction between good and evil and he chooses the punishment for knowing where that line lies. Depending on how you interpret this tale, it kind of sounds like an exiled high ranking official from heaven leaked damaging information about his former king and the darker things, which He has created or enabled under His rule, to His subjects and that ruler responded by harshly abusing the people who were given that knowledge.
As I said before, I don't believe in these stories and I am not really, as this post's title suggests, making a literal case for Satan (a being that I do not believe in). However, when I apply the my political and social ideals regarding the value of knowledge, the importance of questioning authority, and the absolute necessity of the preservation of individual freedom to this idea of the God-Satan, they kind of push me toward the "other side." Maybe I am wrong. Maybe all those bible stories are true, and freedom is evil, and knowledge is corruption but even if that is the case, I wouldn't change my mind. If being free and seeking truth are wrong, I don't want to be right.
Peace.
All the images in this post are scoured from the free image website unsplash.com.