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Letters From The Earth, Letter 3: Satan Can't Adam-And-Eve'n! • The Devil’s Details • Episode 715

Letters From The Earth, Letter 3: Satan Can’t Adam-And-Eve’n!

Letter Three opens with Satan’s flattest and funniest line yet — “You have noticed that the human being is a curiosity” — and then works methodically through the Christian Bible, which he describes as a two-million-word book containing some noble poetry, some clever fables, some blood-drenched history, a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies. It’s built mainly out of the fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin, so it can’t help being unoriginal. The only two genuinely new things in it are heaven and hell, both of which he’s already established are ridiculous.

Then the cosmology. God spent five days on Earth and made twenty million suns on the sixth, apparently as night lighting. Arcturus — mentioned in Job as evidence of God’s greatness — is fifty thousand times the size of our sun, and has been classified as one of Earth’s night lamps. Sunday school still teaches this, and children go on believing it long after they’ve learned better, keeping the creation myth and the astronomy in separate drawers of their brains.

Then Eden, where God threatens Adam and Eve with death when they have never seen death and have no sample of it. They eat, and gain not useful knowledge but only the knowledge that good and evil exist and how to commit evil — the Moral Sense, back again from The Chronicle of Young Satan, which Satan argues should place man below the beast rather than above it. Like prizing a watch that has to run wrong over one that can’t.

The letter’s real payload is the parenting argument: humanity’s own best minds agree a father owes his child tenderness, protection, and never a hand raised except in kindness. God’s treatment of his earthly children is the precise opposite of every one of those things — and the same minds justify it, excuse it, and call him the all-merciful and the all-loving. These sarcasms, Satan says, are uttered daily all over the world. They are meant seriously and delivered without a smile.

The Devil is in the details. 
Join Lester Ryan Clark and Kynan Dias for a comedic deep dive into the history of the ultimate villain, tracking his journey through theology, Paradise Lost, and modern cinema.”