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You’ve asked me quite a few times by now whether I believe in hell. I do believe, since hell is a dogma of the Catholic faith, and not believing in it would make me a heretic. Then you tell me that hell does exist but it is empty, which saves the dogma on the one hand and saves God’s good name on the other hand, as he wouldn’t send anybody to hell to be tortured there for all eternity. I then go on to say that it is not empty since the fallen angels are in it, that is the devils. Now I’ll tell you the last chapter of the story. God and the Devil are the same person. The Bible says it. I explain. David made a census of Israel and Judah, something God did not approve of as it showed reliance on man’s own strength and resources without reference to God, and pride in his own power, and that displeased God. Still David carried out his plans and the census, and God punished him with a plague that killed seven thousand persons. (Which, of course, spoiled the whole census.) The curious thing about it is that the text appears twice in the Bible, first in the Second Book of Samuel, and later in the First Book of the Chronicles, that is, the same historical event is narrated twice in the Bible, but with a little difference. The first text begins, ‘God’s anger flared again against the Israelites and he incited David against them saying, “Take the census of Israel and Judah”.’ (2 Samuel 24:1) The second says, ‘Satan, setting himself against Israel, incited David to make a census of the people.’ (1 Chronicles 21:1) In the first writing, it is God that incites to the census, while in the second it is Satan. The rest is the same in both writings. What does that mean? The Jerusalem Bible explains in a note: ‘The Chronicler attributes to Satan, according to a more developed theology, what the Book of Samuel had attributed to God.’ In human’s first conception of God, it was he himself who did everything, good and bad, as the first and only principle of all that existed; but, as the concept of God was been perfected and refined by the wise people (the ‘more developed theology’ of which the Jerusalem Bible speaks), it did not seem proper to refer unpleasant dealings to God, and so the good things kept being referred to him while the bad ones were passed on to a new character, Satan. That was how temptation to evil changed hands from God to the Devil. The Devil is simply God’s image when he does unpleasant things. Division of labour.
Alan Watts tells a story in which God feels lonely, sees his own shadow, beckons it into existence, and it shapes into the Devil. God tells him: ‘See, things are rather dull down there on earth. Now we’ll be two to run the show. I’ll be the good guy and you the bad guy, and we’ll fight around as in the movies. At the end we’ll tell them we both were one, and we’ll all have a good laugh.’ Isn’t that a good exorcism?
‘I am the Lord, and there is none other.
I make the light, I create the darkness;
I fashion peace and I create evil:
I am the Lord and I do all these things.’
(Isaiah 45:7)
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