/ 9 September 2008

Sipping tea with the devil

‘How’ve you been?”

“Not too bad, thanks. Bit under the weather today. Things’ve been busy!”

Beelzebub, Lord of Darkness, flops back into the couch, flicks off her mules and curls her feet under her.

“You’ve changed your hair,” I say, “I like the grey. Honest hair. Tea?”

Nods, and reaches for my notepad.

“‘How do we know what we know,'” she reads, and rolls her eyes. “Oh god, you’re not getting existential on us?”

“No! I’m just — how do we know what we know, what’s true? You, for instance. I know you’re not real.”

Touché!” she smiles, lopsided. “I was for Hansie.”

“Oh please! You were just a good excuse for Hansie.”

“Hmmm — maybe. But I made it easier for him to live with himself.”

“You make it easier for all of us to live with ourselves. It’s easier to hold that an external agency paved the way for us, than believe we are capable of evil.”

“True,” she slurps her tea, winces. “Damn, that’s hot!”

“But how do we know what we know?” I put to her again. “If I drop this pen, I know it’ll fall. It happens every time I do it. But the psychotic chap who steps off a roof because he believes he can fly, he’s confident in his knowledge. Even if the evidence doesn’t support it, in that moment it’s enough for him to believe.”

“You mean in the moment before he hits the grass and breaks his ankle? I think you need to distinguish between belief in the evidence-based sense and belief in the faith sense.”

“Sure. We need a new word for that, don’t we? But take the Morne Harmse case.”

“Tragic,” her forehead crinkles.

“Suddenly we’ve got the police combing the kid’s home for satanic altars. What’re they hoping to find, defiled virgins and dead cats? It’s silly and ghoulish and misses the point completely. This was a troubled kid who looked for a symbol of some kind, a way to pantomime his internal misery so he latched on to hardcore music and — you, apparently.”

“Don’t be disrespectful,” she chides, “those poor families!”

“How many other disaffected teenagers are out there? Hell, I still listen to Marilyn Manson when I’m cycling and I haven’t been compelled to run down a squirrel yet.”

“Not the most original argument, my dear.”

“Ja, but if Hansie had been born into, say, Buddhist China, who would he have blamed? If I’d been born into a Hindu community, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You wouldn’t be part of my mythology. Not in this shape, anyway.”

“Hmmm —” she looks down at her dumpy figure. “I see you’ve gone to rather a lot of trouble to avoid the usual clichés, the suave he-devil look. I like it. It’s a bit — obvious, but it’s a sort of a comfy, aunty look.”

I chuckle.

“Throughout history we’ve adapted our biblical world view as we’ve understood more about the universe and how it works — when Newton explained how the Earth moves around the sun, some theists adjusted their view and became deists, removing god from the every-day working of nature. They agreed that he made it, set it in motion, and then stepped back to watch it keep going on its own. Then came evolution, chaos theory, quantum. Abe Lincoln was a deist.”

“I know, I was there.” A goading smile. “But why bring it here?” she points to my notepad.

“Because how people view you and your — erm — the other half of the equation,” I roll my eyes skyward, “has implications for international affairs, politics, how societies live with each other, or don’t, as the case may be. You’ve read Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation? Should we be worried that George Bush believes in the literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation, and that Jesus will return after a battle over Jerusalem? How does that shape his policy around Israel?”

“I think Sam overstates the case.”

“Maybe. But we get introduced to these narratives as kids, yet we seldom test them later in life. I believed you were real for the longest time.”

“Fun, wasn’t it?” she winks.

“No, it wasn’t! It was terrifying. Richard Dawkins calls it child abuse to indoctrinate kids about an eternity of burning in hell.”

“Dicky! You know they call him one of the Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse? Along with Sam, and that writer Chris Hitchens and the philosopher — what’s his name? Daniel Dennett.”

She looks at her watch.

“Drat! Gotta run. It’s been terrific …”

With that, Lucifer slips her shoes back on, throws back the tea and drops a goodbye kiss on my cheek. And she’s gone.