The Devil’s Loophole

          The Devil’s Loophole

 

Imagine if one of my satirical fantasy stories had a character with these qualities:

* He was proud, wrathful, envious, gluttonous, avaricious, lustful and slothful.

* He always cheated on his deals and his wives.

* He surrounded himself with crooks and fools.

* His wealth was fictitious.

* His taste was atrocious.

* His manners were vile.

* He was incompetent at management.

* He was brilliant at public relations.

* He preached chaos and conflict.

* He told Big Lies.

* He led an insurrection.

* He planned revenge on his enemies.

* He called himself the Chosen One.

* His skin had a weird color.

* His body had a foul odor.

Given all this, could that satirical-fantasy character be anyone other than the Devil? But you know who I’m really referring to here. He isn’t literally the Devil, but he does resemble him.

I grant that the resemblance is imperfect. His skin is a weird orange, not a weird red; he has cotton-candy hair, not horns; and he has a mushroom-shaped penis, not a barbed tail. But that’s close enough for fantasy satire.

The Devil benefits from a loophole: namely, that the secular Left won’t call out the Devil because they don’t believe in him, but the religious Right won’t call him out either, because they don’t believe in anything else.

As for me, I take the Devil seriously but not literally. He doesn’t exist in space-time; he’s just a metaphor; but poetry has power.

I do not take the Devil metaphor literally, but the Religious Right does, so I challenge them with this critique: 

You had one job. By your own narrative, you were tasked to warn the rest of us upon the arrival of the Devil, or anyone like him. In this you have failed. Therefore the rest of us cannot trust your judgement.

So here is the handwriting on the wall: you have been weighed, and found wanting!