The Devil by the Pond
As you've seen, not only is he big, but boy does he move! He's strong too. One good swat from him is equal in force to a small piano (about 450 pounds) being swung from the height of a second story window. You know that if caught, he could literally knock your head off! You’d need a good gun to fend him off if he had his mind set on rending your flesh like the skin off a thigh from Church’s Chicken. But thankfully, you don’t have to go up against him. He’s gone now and so you can forget about him just like humans do all the things on planet earth that God creates which are deadly.
So forget about the bear.
Now imagine you are at the same pond, seeing the same birds fly away. This time, you are startled to see a red beast with big red eyes, with scales instead of fur, and fangs and canines just like the bear. If you will, he has a pointed tale and horns. Hiding, you are hoping that this deer-chasing demon is no smarter or more observant than that bear.
The demon is so different from the bear, but strangely, he’s no more or less terrifying than the bear. Let’s switch them; let’s say the bear was the mythical beast and the demon was the evolved creature. Would the raging bear not be exactly as terrifying or more than the demon? Would not someone who was sheltered from nature’s harsh realities feel the same fear as if that someone saw a traditionally described demon? Of course that person would.
So, let’s say you did see that bear. And let’s say you happen to be a Christian, but then it dawns on you (if you’re a halfway thinking Christian) that all this time you’ve been afraid of the Devil when you should have been afraid of (and prepared to face) things like bears—of things that are real and that you have a much higher chance of encountering, of things that are deadly and everywhere, just waiting to bring your life to an end.
And then, for the first time, it starts to occur to you that you’ve been praising a God for building a world for his people that is full of unspeakable horrors. You are now starting to realize that anything you ever saw on Friday the 13th or Halloween or The Outer Limits is no more horrifying than what God has exposed his people to and that we take for granted on this planet.
Maybe God hasn’t created boogiemen or monsters in closets, just like we tell our children, but he did create bears and alligators, creatures that do the same things that mystical “boogiemen” do. What’s the difference? And what does your church have to say about that? They rattle on about curses and snakes and the fall of man being the cause of poisonous plants and carnivorous creatures. But you start to see a problem with that because that means bears were once herb-eaters and God modified them just to make us live in fear! Fuck you, God!
Finally, you de-convert because you keep thinking back to that devil by the pond and realize that he’s not scary anymore. He’s really stupid to oppose a deity who is all-powerful when he knows that he is outmatched infinitely and has a short time left to reign (Revelation 12:12). But he’s also not scary anymore for another reason; your heretical mind now has the blinders off and sees that the Devil and demons were just a regurgitation of man’s living in fear of clawed, powerful, fanged creatures like bears. Man, living in a world of unspeakable nightmares, sleeps and then awakes to create…what else but…“daymares”! Superstitious man lives in fear—of this world and the next.
Having joined the ranks of the godless, you now choose to be afraid only of what has claws and fangs and can smack your head clean off your shoulders. The next time you walk near the pond, you’ll only be looking out for the bear (and all the other billions and billions of things great and small that can harm you), but hopefully next time, you’ll just be pondering how stupid you were to have traipsed into God’s woods without the gun you now have!
(JH)