What Should We do with Satan?
"In the Old Testament, he is merely the Adversary, a forbidding member of God's retinue. How then did Satan become the Gospels' Prince of Darkness, who brings about the crucifixion of Jesus as part of a cosmic struggle between good and evil? And why did Jesus' followers increasingly identify Satan with their human antagonists - first Jews, then pagans, and then heretics of their own faith?
In this groundbreaking work of religious and social history, the author of The Gnostic Gospels traces the relationship between the embattled members of a breakaway Jewish sect and the myth they invoked to explain their persecution. The Origin of Satan is at once a masterpiece of erudition and a book resonant with contemporary implications. For in its pages we come to understand how the gospel of love could coexist with hatreds that have haunted Christians and non-Christians alike for two thousand years."
- From the back cover, The Origin of Satan, Elaine Pagels, Knopf Publishing Group, 1996.
The above writing contains the phrase, "a cosmic struggle between good and evil."
To understand our feelings about Satan we must also address our personal cosmic vision first and foremost. We need to understand the assumptions we have made as we internally constructed our definition of both reality and, if we are spiritually inclined, the spiritual world.
In a very powerful subconscious way, those who practice a Christian religion do so with an internal image (something imagined) of that spiritual reality not seen but that we believe exists; the very reality where God "is", where Jesus "is" and to many, where Satan "is" or "wants to rule."
In mortal or human terms I call that internal image of the spiritual world upon which we have based our Christian religious foundation a "mental construct" - a perceived spiritual reality. That reality is what each of us personally has imagined the spirit world and/or realm of God to be. This construct serves as the context for how we combine our mortal practice of religion with our understanding of God and Jesus.
Although for all or most Christians the realm of God truly exists, we do not all agree on what that existence means or how it impacts our lives. For many Christians, the spirit world exists in some other dimension and interacts with our own world in supernatural ways.
This is consistent with a view of a purely supernatural, all-wise, all-knowing and almighty God who some times intervenes in the affairs of mortals in dramatic or not-so-dramatic ways. These believing Christians easily accept and live according to the idea of an invisible Jesus/God personage who is vitally invested in human life and directs forces of good against the other supernatural power and source of evil, Satan.
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