Guilt and Convenience

As you enter the Shop you quickly perceive a hooded figure by the balcony on your right, whom you suppose to be the clerk. Some chairs and sofas around the room convey a cozy feeling in spite of the abscence of a hearth or any other pitoresque element. Shelves full of books are at your disposal, but they do not really stand out to you.

“Welcome to the Idea Shop. We are selling and buying Ideas, registering them in our compendium. I am the Clerk for today and I have an Idea that came in just now. Would you be interested in taking a look at it?”

The Clerk’s voice came out in whispers, making its gender impossible to distinguish. A luminous sphere rests on its right hand protected by a glove. As you touch it, light emanates from the orb, making your vision go blank. Suddenly, a male voice begins his thesis.

***

We hate being blamed for anything,

Even when we’re the ones to blame. Sometimes we can’t escape the guilt, however, so we look for a reason why we made mistakes or our so called “sins”.

Rest assured, we’ll seldom admit our fault. Despite our feeling of guilt, we still try to reduce our responsibility by outsourcing our actions. The most common one is the Devil.

I’m not here to debate if God exists or not. I have my own answer to that and you have yours. I’d like us to simply pay attention to our own words before drawing conclusions and stick to what we truly believe in.

We, humans, tend to deal in extremes. If God is the ultimate good, there must be an ultimate evil (namely speaking, the Devil). That’s why it’s so easy to say “I have faced temptation from the Devil himself”. It’s convenient.

However, those are usually the same people who claim that God protects them from catastrophes and all sorts of evil. Also, they suggest that His power is limitless, therefore it makes sense that He can vanquish all evil from the world. Yet, He doesn’t. Yet, the Devil has more power than God Almighty to convey their own actions. How can that be?

Again, it’s convenient. “There wasn’t anything I could do, the Devil tempted me!” Bulshit. Your God either chose not to protect you or He simply didn’t have the power to do it. The first one makes more sense to me, to be honest.

But why wouldn’t He protect me from the Devil?

My humble impression is that He can’t protect you from what doesn’t exist. Dealing with good and evil is a lot easier when you take it as heat and cold. Cold per se does not exist, it is the abscence of heat. Likewise, evil would be the abscence of good, but evil per se does not exist.

We could simply accept the fact that we are to blame. I mean, the Bible alone already gave us that lesson on James 1:13~15:

When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when by his own evil desires he is lured away and enticed. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and when sin is fully grown, it gives birth to death.…

Each one is tempted when by his own evil desires he is lured away and enticed… Sure, Paul mentions the Devil every now and then, but I still think we don’t need such an evil creature or entity to make mistakes. We’re self-sufficient on that matter.

Accepting that is the hard part.

We make excuses, we claim our intentions weren’t bad, we try to justify it by talking about lesser evil… That’s no different than creating an entity, calling it Devil, Lucifer, Satan or whatever name we desire to call it and blaming solely that entity for our mistakes.

No, I don’t believe that entity exists. Or, more accurately, I believe we are our own demons. That doesn’t mean we should simply continue striding on the wrong path, though. If that was the case, the only way their God could protect them from evil would be protecting them from themselves (aka most likely eliminating every human on Earth before such human is tempted by his or her own desires). If their God is a loving being, He would have thought of another path: redemption.

I believe that once we truly face ourselves and recognise our own flaws, we can go beyond. We can start again, learn how to make things right. We may make new mistakes, but that’s life. We learn. We don’t stop at the error, we stop when we can actually correct it.

That’s why I think we should stop blaming the damn Devil (or making other excuses when we know we’re in the wrong). May we let him be, acknowledge our deeds. Then, let’s stand up and start again. We have quite a lot of cleaning up to do, so the sooner we do it, the better.

***

You are back to the shop, as if you had never left the place. Your hand is not touching the sphere anymore. The Clerk’s obscured face seems to stare at you waiting for an answer.

“I hope you had an enjoyable moment of reflection. Might I suggest that you take your time to read some other materials while sitting comfortably on one of those seats in order to meditate on the subject? Oh, and should you decide to buy such Idea, I would ask you not to take the Ideas you buy as thesis for you to defend, but as sparks for your own Ideas. Should you create a new one, we might be interested in buying it from you”

You face a choice. Meditating before deciding, passing on that Idea or buying it. I am but a narrator and cannot make such decision for you, so now, if you allow me, I shall ask you: are you buying?