Conversations / Live Q&A

Yes, I think you're right. People want to attribute the bad things happening out there to something or somebody. This is the biggest theological problem in religion. How could a loving God who created the world create so much pain and hardship? A sophisticated religious understanding doesn't allow a believer to pull all the bad stuff on the devil.

I'm not sure that's right. There are universalist religions that say, essentially, that everyone gets to heaven and there is no hell. That worst a person can experience is a kind of separation from God or distance from God.

You know, this is the question presented by the Book of Job. How does one stay faithful to God when God does all these terrible things. People have studied this question forever, and the answer is (I think) about continuing to wrestle and struggle and to have some humility in the face of this question. But certain people have abandoned God for this very reason and I have a lot of respect for that position too.

Here is a piece I wrote for Newsweek last year that addresses this question.

It's about the same -- maybe slightly lower since the new atheists made their mark several years ago. It's been hovering at about 90 percent forever, and now it's about 86 pc. What's most interesting to me is the number of "unaffiliated" is rising fast. These are ppl unhappy with organized religion but who would still say they believe in God or a universal spirit.

You should check out the SNL skit in which even the devil is horrified at the goings on at Penn State and decides to go back to his day job,  as a customer service rep at Time Warner cable.

I think Martin provides the answer in my column. It's a name for the thing that tempts you to do terrible things against your conscience. According to this view, God created people, but he created them with free will, and the Devil tempts people to act against God.  In our conversation, Martin talked about the three personas the devil takes on in people's lives, according to St. Ignatius.

1. the spoiled child: I want this and I want it now.

2. the false lover: the liar, the secret keeper, the unfaithful.

3. the army commander: the tyrant, the one who goes for the weak spot in others.

these are helpful ways,  I think, to think about the way humans are tempted away from what their moral consciences tell them.

Of course, the devil's been around forever -- both as a real belief and in more recent times as a joke. (As I was writing the column I kept thinking of the Mike Meyer's church lady on the SNL of the 1980s. "Could it be.... SAATAAN??) But the real increase in the number of believers in the devil according to Gallup was startling to me. And I agree with posters above that it has to do with some of the hard times we're going through and looking for causes or reasons.

In monotheistic religions -- Christianity, Islam, Judaism -- it's impossible to attribute all bad to the Devil and all good to God, for the simple reason that God is God and the devil is not God. He doesn't have equal power, equal standing, right? Or else the fundamental concept -- the first commandment "I am the Lord your God you shall have no other gods before me" -- would be flawed.

Don't get me started...

so sorry. you are right. i'm corrected.

This is slightly off the point, but I once asked the cartoon editor at the New Yorker how many cartoons had been drawn about heaven, and he said that heaven was second only to the desert island scenario in cartoons. heaven, hell, devil, st. peter -- all these have been fodder for jokes and pranks at least through the 20th century.

My website is lisaxmiller.com -- you can reach me there. I also have a Facebook fan page. And I'm on twitter @lisaxmiller.

I'd like to recommend Bart Ehrman's book called "God's Problem." He's a religion professor at UNC and he's studied the Bible his whole life. He was once religious, but finally abandoned religion after contemplating te question of suffering and finding every answer unsatisfactory. I agree with the posters who say it's too convenient to blame random human suffering on the devil.

http://www.amazon.com/Gods-Problem-Answer-Important-Question--Why/dp/B001FOR5CG/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1321550983&sr=8-8

right. my mistake.

I love the name "The Adversary" instead of Satan. It speaks to the great forces that tempt people away from good and the struggles people encounter to stay faithful, upright, optimistic, true, etc. This helps me, at least, understand the idea of the devil without having to give up on God.

Yes, in a way this is Pagels point. There are folks who in the 2008 election were calling Obama the anti-Christ. Evil is what we call "the other" and "the other" is the thing that doesn't look/act/talk/raise their children like us. This is the LEAST productive way to think about the devil, in my view, for it creates boundaries between people and forces us to see the world in terms of "us" and "them."

I think it has to do with the emphasis on apocalyptic theology predominant in American Protestantism especially since the early 20th century and the publication of the Scofield Bible.  American Protestants have long been preoccupied with end times and the Book of Revelation and the encoded predictions within Scripture (Harold Camping is a recent example). The devil has a major role in this drama, and so that's why his theatrics have been so prevalent. I agree with you that a deeper discussion of the nature of evil is more interesting.

i have never personally heard an nde talk about seeing satan -- but i know that not all near death experiences are pleasant, walk into the light type visions. more broadly, though, i don't believe that ndes actually give us any empirical evidence about an afterlife.  there are those would would disagree with me about this, but i can't see how a vision upon dying amounts to proof of anything but the experience of having had a vivid vision.

I both agree and disagree with you about this. I think it's easy to say "yes, I believe in the devil" when a pollster calls you up at dinner time without having thought very hard about what you mean. But I also think it's important -- crucial even -- to try to probe what people do mean, because otherwise we make all kinds of presumptions about rligious belief that aren't real or true. (This is where the "all religious believers are crazy" stuff comes from.)  It's also important, on a personal level, to force oneself to examine one's beliefs. If you tell a pollster that you believe in the devil while you're cooking hamburgers in the kitchen, then what are you talkign about? what do you mean? these are conversations worth having.

That may be the ideal, but it's not empirically true. All kinds of religious believers do bad things.  Also not true is the claim, made by many believers, that atheists have no morality.

This is interesting. Thank you.

I think this mess we've made is very human and we humans have to clean it up.

No. I'm  Jewish.

Are you suggesting the work of the supercommittee is the work of the devil?

I certainly think it would interest readers to know just how much fear of hell and the devil motivated people in the Middle Ages. There were these descriptions of trips to hell, which circulated like pulp fiction. They were horror stories -- screaming people strung on torture racks and hooks, fire, snakes etc. -- and their purpose was to keep believers on the straight and narrow.  This was no SNL skit.