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Letters From The Earth, Letter 8: Satan Is The GOAT! • The Devil’s Details • Episode 720

Letters From The Earth, Letter 8: Satan Is The GOAT!

Letter Eight opens with Satan’s flattest verdict yet: man is, without any doubt, the most interesting fool there is, also the most eccentric. He hasn’t a single written law in his Bible or out of it which has any purpose but to limit or defeat the law of God. And to prove it, Satan reaches for two animals.

Temperament, he says, is the law of God written in the heart of every creature, and it must be obeyed. Lust is the dominant feature of the goat’s, and the goat obeys the whole day long in the rutting season without stopping to eat or drink. If the Bible commanded the goat not to fornicate, even sap-headed man would see how foolish that is — yet he puts all men under the identical prohibition, when by temperament many men are goats and others are tortoises. And Twain’s tortoise is the funniest thing in the letter: that cold, calm Puritan, who takes a treat only once in two years, falls asleep in the middle of it, and doesn’t wake up for sixty days. The goat earns punishment. The tortoise earns praise, for doing nothing.

The commandment gets the same treatment. It makes no distinction between children at birth and men of a hundred, so it lands hardest on the people most capable of breaking it and not at all on the ones who couldn’t if they tried — and those are the ones who get congratulated, which is nonsense, because even the Bible knows that if the oldest veteran there got his lost heyday back for an hour he’d throw that commandment to the winds.

Then the letter goes somewhere we truly did not expect, and we spend the back half of the episode working through Twain’s argument that human sexual law is precisely backwards — and that the person with everything at stake in the matter should be the one writing it, rather than the immeasurable hog who has nothing at stake worth considering and makes it himself anyway. Twain closes by proposing two editions of these letters: one unedited for Bible readers and their children, the other expurgated for persons of refinement.

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.”