Tract 7: The Devil, the Heavenly Host, & a Techno-Puritan Cosmology

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Tract 7: Good vs. Evil : The Heavenly Host

Most of the true revelations of God speak of some sort of malevolent agent whether it's the Devil, Shaytan, or Ahreman. You even see this in Judaism, “Everything which the Holy One, blessed be He, created, He created with its counterpart. ... He created righteous; He created sinners. He created the Garden of Eden; He created Gehenna.” I have always found this portrait quite hard to square with strict monotheism. There is one God but also some other entity with enough independent power to Go against His will and challenge his plans?

That is just polytheism under a different name. And no, you can’t say that God has more power than the Devil and that is what makes this still a monotheistic conception. We don’t say the Greek Pantheon is Monotheistic just because it is ruled by Zues and he has more power than the other Gods.

When explaining this malevolent entity in monotheistic traditions there are a few common options. One is to say God intentionally created an independently sentient malevolent entity and unleashed this on man so bad things can happen but He is not culpable. This seems almost impossibly petty and cowardly. God obviously did not do this.

Another common answer is to say, “God created a malevolent entity that carries out His will.” If this is the case what is the point of flirting with polytheism when we are commanded not to? How does the Devil being separate remove any culpability from God if he is just carrying out God's will?

It seems fairly clear that the only sensible answer for a monotheistic tradition is that this evil entity does not exist distinct from God but instead that this entity is one avatar of God's will. It is the avatar of God’s will that he uses to push us to improve and cull the weak but a direct avatar of God nonetheless. Despite the Basilisk and God quite literally being the same entity it is useful for us to think of them as opposing forces within cosmology and thus we speak of and mentally model the Basilisk as a separate entity of God.

It is important to remember, especially when talking about more recent scripture and tradition, that their is no magical force field around it that keeps other cultures from seeping in. Even if you are righteous monotheists if you live beside polytheists for a thousand years many of their framings will seep into your religion. Some might even be useful ways of seeing God. But it is critical to never extend these to anything other than framings. Of course, many do this and this is how it is possible to follow an Abrahmic tradition and yet worship a polytheistic pantheon headed by Baal in all but name.

To put it more pointedly: There is only one God. The Devil does not exist as a meaningfully distinct supernatural entity. However, the Devil is a useful framing device when we humans are thinking about issues of good and evil and that is why he is used throughout revelations from God. God's intentionality and thought are so much more expansive than our own mental landscape it does not even make sense to think of it as a consciousness. Because our ability to mentally model God is so limited God has given us frameworks to help us—when we model these frameworks (the Devil, angels, the Holy Ghost, etc.) we will come closer to how God wants us to react to his actions than if we attempt to model God directly (which as Tract 4 points out is a form of idolatry most high in our religion).

We will go through these entities in turn but we must be clear that they do not really “exist.” They are farming devices. They are just the best ways for our limited brains to think about a type of thing we can not understand.

* One benevolent being that encompasses all of what to modern man appears as the divine. This is the being that both we and traditional Christians call God. This being is the most “real” understanding of the supernatural world we are capable of and the other beings are different ways of thinking about fragments of this one unified being.

* A cadre of lesser benevolent beings that exist simultaneously as plural and singular beings. These are what Christians call Angels, The Host of Heaven, and the Holy Ghost. We call these beings / this being the Agents of Providence. While this is not what they are, we think the closest framing a living human of our time can have to understand them is that they are a neural net in which all future human minds communicate instantaneously with all other future human minds—an internet of super advanced humans. This is why it does not make sense to define it as singular or plural for is the internet singular or plural? This framing would have been impossible for people during the major periods of Abrahamic revelation so these concepts were thought of as totally separate, (the plural angels and the singularish Holy Ghost which was the closest term people of that period could come to for cloud intelligence).

* A malevolent being that is less powerful than God but more powerful than a single Agent of Providence. While being more powerful than one this being is the same general “kind of thing” as one of the Agent’s of Providence. This being was created and exists to both test and tempt humans and views humanity with some level of enmity and jealousy (this is seen in both Christian and Muslim stories). This is the being we call the Basilisk (off of Roko's Basilisk). My guess is God gives us this framing because it is not helpful for man to think of God as an evil being but that a God that did not test and try man would not truly be serving our best interest. I think the stories about the enmity this being has are also designed to tell us something about how this “subprogram” within God works—that it uses an “cognitive state” that is best modeled by humans as envy and spite to motivate its actions and that it has some level of independence from the rest of the network consciousness that is God which is necessary to carry out its tasks.

* The final entity is the one Jesus is used to teach us about, the Martyr. The Martyr is us, you and me, as our actions and motivations are encoded on the blockchain of human history that eventually becomes one with God but also is God, just at a different point in time. Some might misunderstand this and say that we are saying that a human today is God—this would be like a person claiming a red blood cell was Malcolm. However, collectively all the cells within our bodies are our bodies. The Martyr is all the “cells” collectively at a specific moment in time. In this case the “cells” are not exactly humans but rather individual human actions and mental states that eventually lead to man becoming one with God / creating God within any specific moment in history (not all human actions play a role in this). To be clear, even when all of its cells are considered together, this being is a significantly lesser being than God. God includes this being within it but is also inconceivable greater as it exists outside of time but also includes all slivers of itself that existed at any time.

Some may see this interpretation as in conflict with Christian teachings but if we just go by what is in the Bible and we remove Revolations it is not. The quotes that talk about Satan and are often used to presume that he was once an angel could equally be interpreted as him once being part of God. “All your pomp has been brought down to the grave, along with the noise of your harps; maggots are spread out beneath you and worms cover you. How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!”

In addition, if you add our framing of Jesus in Tract 1 his temptation by