The entire mission of Satan is dehumanizing people.
You don’t have to believe in a literal Satan to understand how that name represents the collective evil consciousness within the human race. We see his hand prints throughout history. Today we have a plethora of theorists who describe various threads of his awful plans to bring the whole world under his thumb through his human proxies. Some of those proxies are depicted as willing, knowing participants, but most are simply tools who don’t really understand what they are doing. Either way, we end up with a lot of discussions about satanic this and that because it’s an appropriate adjective to describe the unconscionable injustices we see around us today.
Sometimes it serves a useful purpose to break down the various diabolical schemes by examining how this or that plan serves Satan’s purpose. Too often those efforts to expose and explain will end up calling for people to embrace some noble hope which misses the point. Those hopes assume we can fix things on this plane of existence, that we can defeat him, albeit temporarily, by erecting some sort of system which excludes the bulk of Satan’s influence. This misses the point because all systems are his, in a manner of speaking. Ask anyone alive on this planet today about what ought to be in order for justice to be served, and you’ll almost surely get a description of something which often sounds like the popular notion of “Rule of Law.” That such a notion holds so great a sway on all humanity today is simply proof how thorough is Satan’s power.
The concept “Rule of Law” is based on a certain raft of assumptions. I wish I didn’t have to harp on epistemology all the time, but that’s where the problem lies. I wish I could find a way to put this same challenge out there and force everyone to deal with it. You can search the Net and find any number of people very adept at using reason and logic, and I highly recommend you read their works, because it will help to clarify your own grasp of how propaganda works. It will sharpen your perception, cut through a lot of confusion and quicken your wit in slicing off all the crap encrusting most thinking and communication today. But once you get some of that under your belt, recognize this is not the end of understanding. What most people think of as logic is merely one kind of logic; it is not the ultimate and universal truth. Nor is that universally admired logic superior to other valid forms of logic. It is simply the most popular today. Don’t be a sucker for the arrogance it brings when you “get it.” That business of “Rule of Law” assumes too much, and rejects the ultimate source of truth, which comes from outside this broken plane of existence.
The whole foundation here constitutes a surrender to whatever you imagine Satan to be. As long as we buy into the analytical thought process as the quintessential path to ultimate truth, we have entered Satan’s realm. This is so very much what he has tried to accomplish throughout history, starting from the Garden of Eden. When you boil it down to the essence, that business of the Tree of Knowledge is all about placing the highly limited human intellect in the driver’s seat so nothing higher than the objective reality can be involved in our decision making process. It was as if to say, “I don’t need revelation any more; I can work this out for myself!” In other words, to be Aristotelian in your approach is the whole point behind the temptation in the Garden. Being consummately rational is being precisely fallen and wide open to evil.
The opposite of this, even on this human level of existence, is opening up your understanding, your decisions and actions, to another level of reasoning. You cannot stand on the grounds of Aristotelian epistemology and drop a chunk of revelation on top. You cannot insist all revelation has to say can be processed and evaluated by reason and logic. To insist on reason and logic is to reject revelation, because revelation never comes to the mind directly. Those who wrote Scripture and left it for us to read did not get it by their reason and logic; it come to them by mysticism, by some process which was above the intellect. Their minds kicked in only after they had a powerful burning impression in their spirits. They had to grasp revelation with an entirely different faculty far above mere intellect, a sort of logic which is entirely in the subconscious, which includes intuition and all manner of things despised by Aristotelians. Once revelation was absorbed through that higher faculty, they could then let their minds understand what to do by way of reflecting off the divine imperatives of conviction.
That path to understanding is where we find the cosmic moral law, which I equate with the Laws of God. While those Laws demand first a recognition and worship of God, I want here to emphasize the second aspect: treating your fellow humans fully as human. Jesus proposed it this way:
Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40)
So the whole issue of justice among your fellow humans can be expressed as recognizing your fellow humans as humans (“neighbors”), and investing the same compassion in their needs as you would for your own needs. Thus, the entire issue of justice is the reverse of dehumanizing. The whole of our existence on this plane is rightly a matter of a human focus. People are the most important thing in the universe. In some fundamental way, you should be placing your needs in the same basket as those you encounter.
Granted, what you can do to make life better for people may well mean spending a lot of time and energy on activities which take you away from human interaction. For example, a great many serious computer hackers are so good a computers precisely because they are so bad with people. But social ineptitude is not a sin; not caring about people is sin. If all your basement hideout hours spent facing that phosphorescent screen is fired by a genuine wish to help your neighbor the best way you know how, then you are doing justice. It’s not about the activity itself, nor actively engaging other humans, so much as it’s about the reason and motives. If the only real motive you have is the purity of computing logic, then you are lost.
If people are not your mission, then you don’t have a mission — you have an obsession, a false religion, or whatever you want to call it. The whole of the Laws of God is compassion for other people. An orientation which objectifies anything as a good or an end in itself is failure from the start. I keep using the phrase: Ultimate truth is a Person. That’s my way of trying to get your focus off what’s merely rational. If your intellect is fully capable of grasping it, then it’s not truth, and it will not lead to justice. If what you seek is as fuzzy as human nature itself, then you are on the right track.
We cannot defeat Satan with mere logic. Getting you to try that is the key to all his work.
