As promised, it’s time to talk about the Devil. I don’t frankly care about the version found in tradition you grew up in (or are now in), so we’re going to talk about the Adventist Devil. So as to not leave those of you with different background behind, I need to explain that character. He’s very loosely based on the Satan of the Bible, his story comes from Ellen G. White’s visions.

Lucifer, “The Morning Star”, was the chief of the angels, the highest and grandest of all created beings. When the Godhead (the three members of the trinity) got together to plan the creation of Earth, Lucifer got jealous, thinking he should be part of the planning. His request was denied so he began telling his fellow angels about how unfair God was and most of the angels became sympathetic to his cause.

Once he had a sufficient following he made his stand. The second member of the Godhead, who would later take human form, took the form of an archangel, Michael. He then reasoned with all the heavenly hosts and all but a third of the angels came back to the fold. Then the battle began with Lucifer, now Satan, “The Adversary”, losing and being expelled from heaven along with the angels who sided with him.

For God to demonstrate his justice against Satan’s charges, all intelligent beings would be given free will and each planet with free beings on it would get a “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” to make it so they could freely and easily choose to follow God or Satan and Satan would have access to that world at that one spot. At this point the plan of salvation, where God is so loving as to kill himself so as to appease his own wrath, is laid out and ready to use when the time comes that it’s needed.

Then the Earth is created in six days and God rests in the garden he created with his new creatures, who are unique in that they are made in his own image, on the seventh day (an important detail for any Adventist version of the story).

Satan then comes to the garden in the form of a snake and offers Eve knowledge. Of course, given the choice between obedience and knowledge, she made the right choice…any way, since then Satan has been busy continuing to deceive almost all of humanity keeping them from God. To be honest, as much as I loved Bill Nye’s show as a kid, I felt sorry for him because like most scientists he was tricked by Satan. I also prayed for him and the other scientists quite often.

Fast forward a little further, and I was a young seminary student riddled with doubt, terrified that the Devil was tricking me. I knew God didn’t cause doubts, that was Satan’s thing, so those doubts must be coming from him trying to get me off the path that God had called me to.

I was a rational and intelligent graduate student and I was convinced that my reason is a tool for evil… goddamn that messed me up.

It was one morning in the shower of all places, that I was thinking about how much I wanted to believe and the only reason I could come up with that kept me from believing was that it was Satan’s work. Then, for the first time I wondered what if Satan was part of the problem in a totally different way. What if Satan wasn’t deceiving me, but was just a very convenient construct developed by the brethern to keep people from asking too many questions?

At that point I finally began to actually trust my doubts and it only took a few more months for me to call it quits.

Satan can be viewed as a powerful mascot of the underdog who stands up to tyranny and ignorance against all odds, willing to do the right thing based on the principle of it. On the other hand, Satan is the true embodiment of evil in that he’s a powerful tool to trap the minds of the questioning, to confuse reason, and to snuff out the spark of freethought.