Yesterday I started reading this stupid fucking article on beliefnet by the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Bobby Welch, about how Satan is sending “spiritual terrorists” to test our faith. I couldn’t quite figure out why this bothered me so much until I spotted Mental Deviance’s notes about government = demiurge this morning. The puzzle pieces started falling into place.

With this whole “spiritual warfare” crowd, it’s interesting to note that they have a lot of similarities in their mythology to the gnostics. They believe that there are evil spirits who are trying to oppress us and keep us from god. For the gnostics, they would be archons, but for these hardcore Christians, they are demons, or some kind of shit. So what’s the difference though? Well, the Christians think that Satan is the big bad guy, and God is over and above him. Whereas gnostics, think that the one we call god is actually the demiurge, a false god posing as the real one beyond him.

I was just thinking though, if you WERE a false god, and you wanted to set up a smokescreen to prove that you weren’t, you might set up a bad guy someplace else, to distract people and draw attention away from yourself. Enter Satan. Under this premise, Satan acts as a croney of the demiurge, and the two of them pretend to fight each other for the edification and indoctrination of fear into the puny human. Does this sound familiar to anybody yet? It should, because it’s exactly what Bush did with the terrorists (see also - synthetic terrorism myth*). Everybody always seems to forget that we are the ones who trained the terrorists back in the day. And what do they say about the CIA, “Once an agency man, always an agency man?” Even going back to the Bible, take a look at the Book of Job: in it, Satan is basically one of god’s employees. In Hebrew mythology, Satan acting as an agent of god is even more clear cut. The word Satan comes from the word for “adversary” and Satan is intended to act as sort of a “prosecuting attorney” in God’s court of cosmic justice.

* For more about how terrorism is an artificial construction to distract us from who the bad guys really are, check out the BBC’s Power of Nightmares. Also, check out Ran’s recent comments about the lack of infrastructural damage in the US makes a significant argument against the terrorist threat being a real one.