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The Devil Is Out To Get You

Walt McLaughlin
6 min readFeb 24, 2023

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Good, evil, and the ultimate misdirection

Photo by Tobias Rademacher on Unsplash

Philosophers and theologians alike have been scratching their heads for thousands of years over the problem of evil. If the natural world is inherently good, as is the Supreme Being that created it, then how did evil come to be? That human beings are both good and evil no one will deny. But how did we get this way? Where does evil come from?

In ancient, pre-civilized cultures, evil spirits inhabited the natural world. This seems a quaint notion to us moderns. Our worldviews are much more rational. And yet there are those among us who believe that angels and devils actually exist, and that evil came into being when some of the angels rebelled against God, thus becoming devils.

Satan is the number one devil, of course, and he is out to get you. We think of him as The Great Deceiver who leads unwitting folks among us astray.

The Devil is the personification of evil, and that’s how we get ourselves off the hook. Truth is, there was no cosmic struggle between good or evil before we came along. That’s just a story we like to tell ourselves. The Devil is, at best, a metaphor for everything that is wrong with humanity.

We Have Met the Enemy

In a comic strip created by cartoonist Walt Kelly, the main character Pogo says to

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Walt McLaughlin
Walt McLaughlin

Written by Walt McLaughlin

Philosopher of wildness, writing about the divine in nature, being human, and backcountry excursions.

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