Maybe it’s the holiday season (or the Holiday season, I guess), but what popped into my mind while considering the CoC entry for this week was: what about Satan?

In the early ‘Aughts I was in a rock and roll band — an “aging farts’ rock band” as I called it — where our lead singer, who had a beautiful voice but not much irony, refused to sing Sympathy for the Devil because it glorified Satan.

Two pagans and a Christian have written humorous pieces that call for attention when considering Satan:

1. The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis, a serious Christian with a decent sense of humor
2. Letters from Earth, by Mark Twain, who may have loved many a Christian but had no great love for Christianity, as shown here.
3. The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce, a mid-19th-century American writer most remembered for Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.  

These all have in common the use of unusual narrative structures.  Twain and Lewis are epistolary essays in the form of whimsical letters to or from the Earth.  Bierce’s book is a mock dictionary.

They also all assume a level of irony which I enjoy.

The Screwtape correspondence is between a senior devil, Screwtape, and his nephew and protege Wormwood.  Wormwood is looking to make his mark by winning a “patient”, as they call the humans they are tempting, over from “the Enemy” (who is God).  Screwtape keeps urging Wormwood to work with the grain of human nature.  For example:

Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

Screwtape Letter XII

Lewis is urbane and worldly, used to temptation himself.  It’s a good read.

Twain is Twain.  What can I say?

For instance, take this sample: he has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race — and of ours — sexual intercourse!

It is as if a lost and perishing person in a roasting desert should be told by a rescuer he might choose and have all longed-for things but one, and he should elect to leave out water!

His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. It consists — utterly and entirely — of diversions which he cares next to nothing about, here in the earth, yet is quite sure he will like them in heaven. Isn’t it curious? Isn’t it interesting? You must not think I am exaggerating, for it is not so. I will give you details.

Most men do not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay when others are singing if it be continued more than two hours. Note that.

Only about two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in a hundred have any wish to learn how. Set that down.

Many men pray, not many of them like to do it. A few pray long, the others make a short cut.

More men go to church than want to.

To forty-nine men in fifty the Sabbath Day is a dreary, dreary bore.

Of all the men in a church on a Sunday, two-thirds are tired when the service is half over, and the rest before it is finished.

The gladdest moment for all of them is when the preacher uplifts his hands for the benediction. You can hear the soft rustle of relief that sweeps the house, and you recognize that it is eloquent with gratitude.

And yet Heaven is sex-free, filled with singing, praying, and churchgoing…

Ambrose Bierce sounds pretty 19th-century today, but here are a couple of his dictionary entries that are fun:

DIPLOMACY, n. The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.

GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.

I loved Devil’s Dictionary when I was a boy.  It hasn’t aged as gracefully as I thought.

Growing up as an semi-assimilated Jewish boy in suburban Washington, DC, I “read” the Hanukah story as YASOOAJ (Yet Another Saga Of Oppressors and Jews).

Not hard to understand why.  I was assimilated enough, but also different.  When I started in 1st Grade everyone else in my school was saying the Lord’s Prayer at Assembly. I didn’t even know what it was (although I learned to fake it).

I was called “Jew boy” more than once, although not often or routinely.

I gravitated towards the only other Jewish boy in 5th and 6th grade.

In short, it wasn’t harsh, but I was ghetto-ized, and I ghetto-ized myself.

Natural for me to believe that the Greeks — Antiochus and his Hellenist crew — had it in for the Jews.  Natural to believe that it was David vs. Goliath all over again.

Except a few years ago I read an account — in Tikkun, I think, but maybe not — of Hanukah from the Hellenistic point of view.

The Hellenists were a pretty tolerant bunch.  They had been all over the Mediterranean by the time of the Hanukah story, and seen all kinds of different peoples.  They were tolerant of all kinds of stuff, as long as you paid your taxes and cooperated.

But what they couldn’t stand about the Jews was infant circumcision, or, as we might call it today, male infant genital mutilation.

To the Greeks, the body was sacred, and you didn’t cut parts off, no matter what your tribal God said to you.

So they forbade the Jews under their dominion from doing it.

The Jews were a bit like a Taliban today, though.  They didn’t want foreigners imposing stuff on them.  So they entered into guerrilla warfare, led by a Duck-Dynasty type family from the sticks, the Maccabees.

Lurch.  From David and Goliath to Taliban vs. liberators of male infants.

Maybe the Hellenists had a point.