Over at Unwashed Philosophy (a creation of “Haystack”, one of the early behind-the-curtain tech-guys at RedState and now living a contemplative monk’s existence in an aerie in New England) I was invited to do a series of short essays about how Satan became the political head of the whole world…except America. Central to that story has been his eons-long battles with the Creator, and recently, only 250 years or so, with America, which was never supposed to have been allowed to happen in his central world management plan in the first place.
But Satan snoozed for a bit, and “Voila!”….sort of like Venus, who the Greeks believed was born fully grown, and even wearing armor…America just seemed to happen.
If you can imagine in those terms, you can see what a great story that could be.
So, old Clootie has been agonizing over 200 years now trying to untangle and undo this mess he allowed to happen—while not letting on that he was responsible for allowing it to happen in the first place. (Copping personal responsibility is one of the Devil’s “inventions”, successfully employed for thousands of years.)
The Devil couldn’t have prevented America from happening because it wasn’t an accident. Nor was America a direct counter-attack by God against all his successes those thousands of years, as he vainly believes it was. America simply arose out of a part of Nature Satan had no control over.
Still, Satan saw America as undermining his 5000-year management design.
At my age I doubt I’ll ever get to fit this tale into a book covering 400 years, let alone 5000, so Haystack asked me to provide a few vignettes at “Unwashed Philosophy” so you can engage your own imagination. It is fun mind-candy. He even gave these “Satan’s Chronicles” their own little corner, “American Apologetics”, on the title banner.
Come by from time, for the site is intended to be a discussion site, not a seminar-site, and with no politics except the kind born out of Man’s survival instincts to be free. Even jack-legged, no-account, dirty rotten atheist communists and other layabouts are invited. I promise, you will be treated more respectfully than you’ve ever treated Christians and lovers of liberty. (Oh, while it’s on my mind, did I mention that Verizon is looking for a buyer of Huffington Post? For years HuffPo has been my favorite spot to read atheist outrage about Christian hypocrisy. It’s like Alfred E Neuman and Mad Magazine.) But at Unwashed Philosophy no one will ever try to lay hands on you, in either sense of the term, although we may try to stick a mirror in front of your face and ask you to explain to yourself exactly what you mean from time to time.
When enough people go there, it’s only natural they will want to choose up sides.
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The Cliff’s Note version of Satan and America is that Satan had been both spiritual and political head of the whole world for 5000 years, except for a tiny little red line that had moved from upper Mesopotamia, then to Canaan, then to Egypt, then to what is now known as Israel. In the year 0 A.D. they were called Jews, and the territory they occupied was approximately 2300 sq mi, roughly 60 x 40. A thousand years before Christ, King David controlled a much larger territory, but those glory days were long gone by 0 A.D. Judea was about the size of three counties in Appalachia, and, take away the sand, more the size of Harlan County, my ancestral home.
But while we had a county judge in Harlan, Judea was allowed to keep their king. He was ranked well beneath the Emperor of Rome, but the Romans, just like the Greeks and Persians before them, were a little spooked because of the Jews’ God. Just call it a “gut feeling”.
Still, on the world map, this red 2300 sq mi was the extent of God’s territory in 30 A.D. when Jesus started to preach. And Satan was the head of the rest of the world, both spiritually and politically. He even boasted this to Jesus in the Wilderness, when he offered Him all his kingdoms if He’d just bow down to him.
(Having snitches in High Places, the Devil already knew why Christ had come. Or at least thought he did.)
Of course, you don’t have to believe any of this, although a contemporary historian, Josephus, confirms the execution part in one history he wrote, and the post-Jesus Jerusalem, and his brother James, in another.
The un-believer will argue this proves nothing. But the agnostic who bases his skepticism on lack of evidence still can’t explain two major events that occurred because of this “alleged” execution and resurrection, both of which would strain even the most mind-numbed snowflake’s incredulity.
The first event began very quickly, for the Word went out quickly, within 40 days. In the months and years that followed what also followed was the death of virtually everyone who took the Word out. Hoaxsters don’t carry out their frauds all the way to the guillotine. They give it up. That’s called circumstantial evidence. Very dispositive circumstantial evidence, the sort that moves a jury, which clearly it did, for the Word grew, by word of mouth and letters, into a large movement that spanned the Roman Empire, causing Emperors to ban it, thus dogging and killing many Christians in a variety of ways for 300-400 years. ISIS in Libya gave us a filmed example of several black Christians being beheaded after being offered the chance to save themselves by renouncing their Faith. So that beat goes on, for they all said “No”.)
But the people who took the Word out in 120 different directions got a real head start before the state (the Romans) or Satan even had heard that Jesus had risen. (How that head-start occurred is an interesting tale in itself, for some of the people most responsible for Christ’s crucifixion, such as High Priest Caiaphas, Jesus’ most enthusiastic prosecutor, actually may have helped keep the story of His resurrection quiet, just to avoid political blowback.) So it’s anybody’s guess when Satan actually found out because he never dirtied his hands with snitches at ground level. He stuck to the front offices of the King and the Romans and it seems they had never been told that the stone had been rolled away. In short the media never heard a word of it.
But Word got around so fast that within just a few hundred years, about 300, the world had flipped almost upside down, and Satan found himself no longer the spiritual head of the whole world, and in sight of losing a good portion of his political leadership…
…and all in the name of this “alleged” Risen Christ!
Satan was no quitter. And a helluva schemer. It wasn’t for nothing that he was once, a long time before the earth was made, the best of the best of the archangels beneath God. He was as sharp as a tack.
And he had designed the “management system” of every civilization from the Egyptians to the Sumerians to the Greeks, all pretty much the same, all top-down. And he even installed his own gods in those places, each one of them signifying their loyalty to him, as witnessed by that serpent wrapped around their spear or ankle or on a nearby tree. (You’ll have to tune in to Unwashed Philosophy to get more of this background story.)
Satan had some serious intellectual property, and thousands of patents and copyrights, not to mention personal rank to protect. Just look around to see how important those investments still are.
Finally, after about 1600 years of backing and filling, with the Reformation in the 16th Century, Satan was able to settle back in his nice Corinthian leather chair, put his feet up, light up a big Corona, thinking things were returning to normal, for he had Christians killing one another as if they were Goths and Visigoths. The Devil was “laughing with delight”.
And not for the last time.
Then came that second event, involving that same Jesus Christ he’d talked to in the Wilderness 1600 years earlier. Only that event came ashore in a lonely, almost desolate part of the world, by ordinary men and women, farmers mostly, and they carried Christ in a canvas bag strung over their shoulders instead of a parade down Main Street.
Satan had been quietly having his self-satisfied snooze while a few hundred, then a few hundred more, and then a few thousand, mostly English, built little cabins along the eastern shoreline of what, for almost two hundred years, would only be known to the rest of the world only as “the American colonies’.
They were mostly Christian. But this no longer startled Satan, especially since that Italian Columbo, who today is the most reviled name in America every October 12th, laid anchor off a small island in the Caribbean (the current home of French Haiti and Spanish Dominica). The Spanish and their Church ripped and tore through all the Americas south of the Carolinas all the way to the Argentine, searching for gold and turning the local natives who didn’t die from the new diseases they imported into vassals to the land.
Assuming it was more of the same, I suppose, Old Clewfoot paid little attention to that 1200 miles of coastline, from Cape Cod to Jacksonville until about 175 years later, when they turned into “damned Yankees” (from a popular Broadway play.)
Satan didn’t sense any threat to his existing management organization until those damned Yankees declared war on the world’s greatest military…then beat them, by not fighting fair (shooting from behind trees), thus gaining their freedom—Then, Gad!, they wrote a document that still sends tingles up the spines of people yearning to be free even today, witness all the slave colonies of the USSR in 1990, and the people of Hong Kong, even as I write here today. And still sending shivers up their governments’ spines.
Damned Yankees, only the Russians never quite said it that way when the saw me walk into one of their clubs, “You feelthy effing Amerikan!”
In 1600 Satan never even paid attention to people that far down the social ladder. Now he has to.
It’s a good story, even if you don’t believe it. So come on over.
