Demons are no more real than the Christian god is. Nonetheless, Ross Douthat has summoned demons to do his dirty work.
Welcome back to Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat.
I said at the beginning of this podcast, in the first episode, that we were going to be going page by page, line by line, and okay, I'm not examining every word of Ross Douthat’s book, but boy, he just packs in a whole lot of nonsense very densely.
If you're just hearing this podcast for the 1st time, let you know what book it is that we're talking about. We're talking about a book by Ross Douthat, who is formerly from the New York Times, as an opinion writer. He's really just a professional pundit. He's now with 60 Minutes, which is controlled by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Now 60 Minutes has become an ideological kind of rag on the television.
Ross Douthat is the author of the book Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious. We are now in the 4th chapter and we're at the bottom of the page, 119.
Today's episode is going to be brief because I'm just talking about one paragraph. This one paragraph shows how nonsensical. Ross Douthat’s whole perspective is and what it's really all about. It reads like this:
“For some, a small but meaningful minority, welcome is the straightforward answer, and if you're setting out to discover Satanism, then you probably aren't going to be talked into joining a more mainstream faith without some hard experience first, but other spiritually mind open-minded people experience a chronic uncertainty about how to handle negative encounters, and the mere appearance of the dark or negative or devilish, no less than the appearance of a ghost or monster in the horror movie isn't by itself enough to convince them, not to keep opening doors and looking into basements and wandering down corridors that might be better left unexplored.”
This paragraph at 1st appears just to be about monsters and demons, devils, dark things, negative things, going places, they're not supposed to go, thinking things are not supposed to think doing things that are against the rules of God.
We all know that monsters don't exist. Devils, demons, ghosts, they don't actually exist. There's no evidence for them.
If at this point, you don't get that. I really don't know what to do with you because there's no photographs, there's no, you know, genetic samples from them, no videos, and we have so much research equipment that's all around the world right now, that if there were ghosts and demons and monsters showing up, We would see them. We would see them. They're not there.
Why is Ross Douthat talking about these imaginary magical creatures? Yes, it is ridiculous and irrational for him to believe in these things. Nonetheless, they are doing work for him. Ross Douthat’s writing in this paragraph shows us what that work is.
First of all, when it comes to Satanism, Ross Douthat doesn't even bother to engage with what Satanism actually is. Satanists don't believe in gods. They don't believe in the literal reality of Satan. They believe in actually kind of a more atheist approach.
Satanists use Satan as a symbolic character to represent independent thinking and rebellion against tyranny, against authoritarianism that is represented by the Christian God. The Christian god is a tyrant, an authoritarian. The Christian god set up a world that's full of death, that's full of misery and suffering.
Of course, no, God hasn't really done these things, because God doesn't exist. We're talking about God as a character.
God is a symbol of kingship. That's why Christians love calling their god the “King of Kings, the Lord of Lords”. The Christian god is a monarch. It’s an authoritarian tyrant that Christians are worshiping.
Ross Douthat says that you need to worry about demons because they're negative. Negative sounds so, you know, bad. It sounds so wrong.
But hey, wait a minute. You know what negative really is? Negative is the right to say no. Negative is the right to set boundaries that other people are not allowed to cross, when it comes to your own life.
Being negative enables you to say no, you're not allowed to touch me in that way., no, you're not allowed to take my things, no, you're not allowed to come into my house in the middle of the night and bother me, no, you don’t have the right to tell me who to love and how to live my life.
The thing with Christians like Ross Douthat Is that they're terrified by other people saying no to them. They are terrified by other people rejecting the beliefs that they believe everyone must have, as Ross Douthat said earlier in this book when he talked about the obligation of religious belief.
Ross Douthat believes that obeying the kingship of his god, the cosmic dictator, is the only way that you can save yourself from being tortured by that same god. That's what the Book of Revelation is all about. That kind of punishment after death was not there in Judaism. That's something that was invented by the followers of Jesus. Christianity invented the threat of Hell and divine torture. They invented a sacred cult of pain as a manifestation of their worship of tyranny, of the power of one monarch.
Christianity is the worship of monotheism. Monotheism is mythological monarchy, mythological dictatorship, authoritarianism with magical beings.
With that, along come those devilish characters. What do the devils and the demons represent? In Christian cosmology, they represent angels who said no to God.
They said, no, we don't like what you're doing, and we're going to make our own choices. To punish them God, tried to kill them all, and tortured them and imprisoned them. We're supposed to be afraid of the demons, but all this while, God is still threatening us with torture if we don't obey.
Again, remember this isn't really happening. There are no gods. There are no demons, there are no devils. So, what is the actual project?
The actual project is an ideological system that supports totalitarian dictatorships that supports tyrannical kings, queens, monarchs, the idea that power should be concentrated in the hand of one person.
The role of everybody else is not to question is simply to obey. Look at what is happening in the United States of America right now. It’s a Christian restoration of ugly, ruthless authoritarianism.
It's not for nothing that Ross Douthat fails to even try to engage with the idea of Satanism as it actually is, as a metaphorical kind of social movement.
Satanists don't believe that Satan is real or gods are real. What they believe in is the value of independent thinkers.
All that Ross Douthat says about Satanism is this:
“If you're setting out to discover Satanism, then you probably aren't going to be talked into joining a more mainstream faith.”
It’s telling that Ross Douthat only supports mainstream faith. Conformity is what his Christianity is all about. It's all about getting everybody to do the same thing, the thing that human priests and human dictators want you to do, what they tell you to do. Conform. Obey.
He's simply deciding that Satanists aren't going to be convinced.
Well, has he even tried to reason with Satanists? Has he even tried to actually talk with them?
Ross Douthat doesn't want to construct any rational arguments against Satanism because in order to do that, he would have to publicly acknowledge what Satanism really is, not what the Catholic Church says, it is.
If Ross Douthat were to do that, he would have to acknowledge that Satanists are rebelling against tyranny, that they're standing up for freedom, the freedom of people to think as they want to, to act as they want to, without cruelty. They're standing against the concentration of power in the hands of a few.
Ross Douthat doesn't even engage in a rational discussion with that idea. Once again, he's betraying the promise that he made at the beginning of the book.
Ross Douthat is not being an honest writer. He is not being an honest thinker. He's simply using scare tactics.
He's comparing independent thinkers, skeptics, atheists, and nonconformists to monsters. He is saying that they are actually in league with real monsters that literally exist.
Ross Douthat is doing that in order to scare you, to intimidate you, so that you stop thinking for yourself. It's a really cheap trick.
That's why not everyone believes, Ross Douthat