What if the devil is the good guy

Edgar Hoover. Satan's basic intention is to uncover wrongdoing and treachery, however overzealous and unscrupulous the means. But he's still part of God's administration. The view runs in opposition to the beliefs held by many Christians and others about key religious concepts like original sin and the nature of good and evil. But what would you expect of someone's whose 72nd birthday fell this year on June 6 and who felt disappointed when nothing momentous occurred that day?

Actually, Kelly is no stranger to bubble-bursting. After digging deep into the history of Valentine's Day, he pronounced 20 years ago that he had not only uncovered the holiday's origins but that it should be celebrated in May, not February.

Still, if Kelly could be considered scandalous, it's not because he doesn't know any better. Kelly started his academic career at a Jesuit seminary and was ordained in four of the seven holy orders on the way to the priesthood, including the order of exorcist. The book is Kelly's third on the topic. When it comes to the Old Testament, Kelly insists that Satan's profile is considerably lower than commonly thought and significantly less menacing.

By Kelly's count, Satan only appears three times in the 45 books that make up the pre-Christian scriptures, the best known being in the Book of Job. On each occasion, Satan is still firmly part of what Kelly calls "God's administration," and his activities are done at the behest of "the Big Guy.

Perhaps most surprising is not the figure Satan cuts, but his notable absences in the Old Testament. In the Bible's first reference to Lucifer, for instance, Satan doesn't appear — even by implication, Kelly points out. Originally written in ancient Hebrew, the passage, on face value, refers to the tyrannical Babylonian king who boasts of his conquests but who is "about to be cast to the ground.

Ironically, the only mentions of Lucifer in the New Testament — and there are three of them — refer to Jesus, Kelly said. Another prominent omission in the Old Testament, Kelly said, can be found in Genesis. Kelly traces the correlation of Satan and the serpent to not long after the New Testament was completed.

By causing Adam and Eve to fall, Satan caused his own fall. Meanwhile, in passages in Luke, Matthew, Corinthians and elsewhere in the New Testament, Satan continues to act as a tester, enforcer and prosecutor but not as God's enemy, Kelly points out.

Throughout, Satan is someone who works for God. A scene in the New Testament's Book of Revelation is often cited today as evidence that Satan was the deceiver of Adam and Eve, but the interpretation stems from a fundamental misunderstanding, Kelly argues. In addition to linking Satan with the Garden of Eden, the passage from Revelation also has been used to prove that Satan fell early on in the Bible, but Kelly insists that is not accurate.

Similarly, a passage in the Gospel of Luke, when Jesus reports having seen "Satan fall like lightning," has been misinterpreted, according to Kelly. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no part may be reproduced without the written permission. From this moment on, religious history records the conflict between God and his angelic forces and the Devil and his demonic army.

Within the Christian tradition, it was the Devil — in the form of a serpent after his own fall from heaven — who brought about the Fall of humanity in the Garden of Eden.

Yet this story is deeply paradoxical. Read more: Thoughts and prayers: miracles, Christianity and praying for rain. Within the Christian tradition, Satan was a master of illusion. Unlike God, he could not perform miracles because he was bound by natural laws. Satan was seen as a master of magic.

In early Christianity, magic was reprehensible because demons were at the heart of it. For Saint Augustine , the demonic was present within all magic and superstitious practices in other religions. For Isidore, bishop of Seville c.

Thus, witches, magicians, and sorcerers whether acting benevolently or malevolently were seen as in league with the Devil. From the middle of the 15th century, their research was written up in text books for demon hunters — Demonologies. Modern conservative Christianity still views magical practices along with a range of popular occult practices — tea leaf reading, horoscopes, seances, tarot cards, and ouija boards — as dangerous dabbling with the Devil.

Read more: Is God good? In the shadow of mass disaster, great minds have argued the toss. The Devil has been imagined and pictured in many forms. In the television series Lucifer he is a handsome, well-built man. Poet and painter William Blake depicted the devil as a chiselled Greek god. In the medieval period, however, because he dwelt on the boundaries between the human and the bestial, he was often depicted in animal form.

He was often imagined as goat-like and depicted with animal features: cloven hooves, talons, horns, tail, webbed hands. In demonological literature he was portrayed as a spiritual being without any bodily form. The rakish figure that Nicholson cut as a leading man was always defined by his toothy, predatory-looking grin—a smile that seemed to suggest he knew many important things that you did not. There is a type of cinematic Satan that is depicted as being in constant agony as a result of The Fall—sad-sack devils who continue to rue their own personal excommunication from heaven.

Everything about his character luxuriates in the tactile pleasures and carnal desires of being alive. John Carpenter takes the title literally and imagines Satan as the offspring of a deeper evil in Prince of Darkness. In the basement of an abandoned LA church, a cylinder of sentient green goo waits, churning out endless streams of data to be eventually translated by a quantum physics professor and his young group of horned-up grad students. The Day of the Beast is profane.

With fingernails like talons, an overtly evil, Seagal-esque beard and a cane that one would guess has no ambulatory purpose, Cyphre seems less like the physical embodiment of Satan and more like shallow cosplay. He could get what he wants, the ending he demands, without putting the film and our gumshoe protagonist Mickey Rourke through an increasingly nightmarish ordeal. The whole of Angel Heart need not happen at all, really.

The devil is just fucking with us. Jabez Stone James Craig is a young farmer fallen on hard times in New Hampshire, and his idle cursing summons up Mr. Scratch, a plain-looking Walter Huston whose emergence from eerily lit smoke and the panicked howling of barn animals leaves no doubt to his true identity. Jabez signs his name in Mr. But when the devil comes to collect, Jabez wants out. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on the deck.

Its agent on earth is Mr. Scratch, ready to offer up a loan or a jug of rum to the unwary, and willing to bring it to a jury trial—as long as that jury includes Benedict Arnold and Captain Kidd, and is presided over by a Salem witch trials judge, of course. Regardless, the fact that this depiction of the archfiend is animated would surely have been of little comfort to children seeing Fantasia in the s or s, given how purely menacing he is, looming over Bald Mountain.

Utterly massive and clearly evil to the bone, Chernabog smirks and seems to gloat at his own grandiosity as he summons all manner of ghosts, goblins, witches and wicked creatures to his orbit. And when that happens, all hell truly will break loose. If The D wins, Satan will let them be.