As a post-modernist, I don’t acknowledge any difference between reality and metaphor, fact and fiction. In making something a thing, we use language. The relationship between language and thing is always metaphoric. Or, more precisely, language doesn’t stand for the ‘thing’ but rather creates (or ‘is’) the thing.
Metaphor and reality are co-originary.
The question, “Is Satan real or a metaphor?” is like saying “Is the month of April real or a metaphor?” All language exists in a purely metaphoric relationship to something-other-than-language.
This is a very important point, and as far as it goes here, very accurate.It tends to go with the idea that we prject the world, more thatn we perceive it. and it is very easy to see and understand that we do not perceive the world as it is, in any case. The worls we wander through is the collection of thoughts we have about it. As a side note, I will have to look and see if Qoeleth has some thoughts under the thread
Why Are You a Catholic? You might imagine why.
But there are things, perceptual things, not nearly understood, that we make metaphors
about. And while we can get solipsitic, ther appears to be a postulatable word beyond our perceptions and metaphores that we share, or the metaphoric people we live with and the metaphoric objects we deal with might not have the consistency they do, as far as that idea is applicable. At quantum levels, it is hard to tell what’s what at our level of perceptioon, if at all.
All that fun stuff being said, what is the point of the Devil, and what are the various histories and etymologies of names attached to those, and what functionlly does it all mean in terms of how or why or brain codes such things?
And how do we think about such things? Clearly that is a very wide range of ideas and tools brought to this discussion as we attempt to disect this questions and others, whatever our faith or lack of faith flavor is. For instance, does Curious Seed ever wonder if not the devils and deamons, but those stories themselves are the metaphores? In any case, faith or not, as I delineated in my previous pst here, there are teaching tales and paradigms that sufficiently address the idea of a Satan, Lucifer, and othe such to render a different understanding of what all that is about, if one cares to indulge in a wider and deeper kind of consideration than the ismplifications most of us appear to have grown up with.
