Some time around the middle of August of this year, my attention had been directed to an unfamiliar blog that had published an article on a rather interesting subject. The blog was TwoOrThree.net and one of its contributors, Aaron, was sharing his disdainful reaction to a new book by 71-year-old University of California professor Henry Ansgar Kelly. The book, Satan: A Biography, was published by Cambridge University Press (ISBN: 0521843391) just this August. Aaron was wryly remarking on his lack of surprise that it might soon be politically incorrect to refer to Satan as evil: “No one is ever really bad,” he retorts sardonically; “they are simply ‘misunderstood’ . . . No wonder we can’t call terrorists evil or condemn the murder of innocent civilians; you can’t even talk bad about Satan without academia defending him.” Henry Kelly’s book might be interesting as a subject in itself but what has me writing here is the comments that followed Aaron’s article; of particular and perhaps obvious interest to me was the exchange between myself and an apparent atheist named Mark Nunes (who runs a blog that reviews eclectic films and typically goes by the name of ‘Cineaste’ online).

Satan, Mark insists, is nothing more than a fiction created by Christians to give them something upon which they can lay blame for all the evil in the world. “Without Satan to blame everything bad on,” he remarks, “Christians would have only God left to blame the ills of the world on. Christians can’t have that; hence, they put Lucifer in the story. Satan has an important role to play in the Christian mythology.” (We will ignore the fact that he conflates Satan and Lucifer, and his poisoning-the-well assertion that Christianity is mythology.) The part that really grabbed my attention, however, was where he had said that people have a tendency to “confuse good and evil with morality.” He feels that anything you “think of as ‘evil’, you are confusing [it] with what you think of as immoral.” It grabbed Aaron’s attention, too, and he said he found it curious that Mark thinks good and evil are not connected with morality. Mark reaffirmed his feeling that they are not connected, and then added his rejection of all supernatural beings. (With contradictory flair, he claims that if you remove man from the picture then ‘nature’ is all that’s left—as though man were not himself a part of nature.)

I simply had to reply, of course. The following is the exchange between myself and Mark (click here).

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