The Mythology of Evil

One of the biggest problems we face in promoting an ancient Hebrew outlook is the cluttered field of lies contained in western mythology.

All the way back to Beowulf we have a string of powerful evil men who, using some connection to dark forces in the universe, are able to rise and torment the good or innocent humans. This is read back into the Bible, but is wholly unbiblical. These dark evil lords do not represent a proper understanding of Satan and his agenda.

There are no dark forces in Creation, and certainly nothing capable of opposing God against His will. That’s a sort of Zoroastrian pagan mythology. There is nothing dark in Creation; there is no matching dark and light forces. There is a very subtle difference between that and the proper Hebrew symbolism of stability versus chaos. Chaos is not darkness; chaos is just a reset of things that have gotten off course. It can result in evil, but it is not inherently evil itself. Stability and order can also result in evil.

And lest we forget, I’ve already posted a few times trying to explain that the biblical concept of evil is not something inherently dark, but an outcome that is unpleasant in context. To get a proper grasp of evil requires that you not take yourself too seriously. Not every unpleasant situation is inherently dark; it may be that you were simply standing in the wrong place and/or at the wrong time. Or maybe you are Job.

And you should not get the feeling you are being targeted or persecuted unless you have good evidence. It may simply be time for chaos to come on your human activities. Of course, that’s the other lie, that human aspirations are of any real value. The Bible makes it very plain that all human activity is vanity. The whole point of the Fall is that humans are utterly incapable of grasping the nature of good and evil by their own capabilities. Only God can reveal it, and it’s not the kind of revelation that can be delivered in a neat package to be kept and managed by humans. The nature of revelation is a living connection that must be maintained, moving and shifting as human events pass.

In God’s creation, there is no Grendel. There is no wicked creature(s) capable of tapping into dark forces, because there are no dark forces. There is no inherent evil, because evil is inherently contextual. Satan is nothing like Grendel, the Dark Lord of Mordor, etc. Those images are all false.

Indeed, the one really nasty thing Satan can do in this world is restricted to the End Times: He is not permitted to attack faith itself. Everything he does is limited to attacking humanity at large, and all of his efforts to plan and provoke humans to wickedness are restricted to basic stupidity. He was confined to human space, and his powers are distinctly limited to what is here within the time/space continuum. He ends up doing only the same thing he did in the Garden: He tempts humans to trust their own capabilities instead of relying on God.

Thus, the evil we can expect to see is limited to what humans can dream up in their own ambitions. Until the final apocalypse comes, that’s all we have to face, along with cyclical natural disasters. And the latter are merely expressions of chaos, resetting things periodically. Humans might read that as “the end of the world” because they are frustrated with the way their grand ambitions keep getting crushed. They blame it on Satan, when the real problem is their ambitions, not whether God will permit those ambitions to be realized. Human ambitions are inherently stupid in the first place. Humans without God will always reach for something that could not possibly exist.

It is the nature of mortal existence itself that militates against human ambition. The material of which this reality is constructed in itself cannot be pushed to meet human ambitions. For example, humans could never become space-faring beings, because space is so incredibly hostile in the first place. Just the background radiation out there would extinguish us in very short order. There is no material nor power within our reach that can create sufficient shielding, and at the same time sufficient propulsion, to take us very far outside our planet’s gravity well. Just a short visit to the moon or space stations does terrible things to the human body.

But the real reason humans can’t overcome all this is that we keep turning to deceptions any time we get organized enough to reach for such things. There is an incredible amount of deception about just the limited exploration we already have done. The whole point of the deception is to protect the activity from the vagaries of human sentiment about the costs and return on investment, among other things. We cannot do that stuff without robbing whole nations and depriving them of the bare necessities of life.

And once that lying gets started, it demands a context in which men lie to each other even when they are on the same team reaching for the stars. It generates the kind of self-serving plotting that robs the programs and makes them ineffective. The disasters to which they have admitted are sufficient testimony of that. It gives new meaning to the concept of “lowest bidder contracting”.

These flaws cannot be overcome. They are human nature. To rule over other humans in order to centralize sufficient resources for grand ambitions is so morally perverted in itself that nothing good can ever come of it once you scale up beyond a hundred people or so.

In God’s eyes, those ambitions are off-track, completely the wrong path for humans to take. His purpose in putting us here is to expose those failures in human ambition. The whole system is designed to make us fail such things. It is simply not possible; the deck is stacked against us. Those ambitions point to nothing; it is all vanity. That’s the whole point; our only hope is to kill off those ambitions and just live simple lives with only the barest minimum of human organization.