Healthy people do not have any need for Satan. Healthy people need to confront their own issues, understand themselves, and move towards the direction of compassion, creativity, understanding, context, insight, inspiration, revelation, and understanding that we are part of an ineffable mystery. That the moment we label that mystery as good and evil, right and wrong, then we create conflict in the world, and that all the trouble in the world today is between religious ideologies. There are approximately 30 wars going on in the world, and they are mostly in the name of God. So I would say be done with Satan and confront your own issues.
The sentiment is, "Let's be done with religious disagreements because they cause harm in the world." I wrote a bit about pluralism yesterday, so I won't revisit it here. However, two points: first, it's interesting that Deepak Chopra is on national television debating a theological view he has (namely, that Satan does not exist), while in the same segment saying, in effect, "let's just stop all these religious conflicts, because they cause trouble." Second, I would like to point out to Carlton Pearson that orthodox Christianity does not believe that Satan is omnipresent and omniscient. Only God is. There are two dangers when studying and teaching about Satan: 1) we can ascribe to him too much power, making us so fearful of him that we doubt whether God really has authority over him; and 2) we can ascribe to him too little power (such as believing he doesn't even exist) and unwittingly follow his way and not Jesus' way. Okay, I said only two points, but here's a third: it's a good thing to label things right and wrong. I have spent time with students this week hearing about how they have been treated very, very wrongly, and that is sin. It's okay to call something evil if it is in fact evil. In fact, that's the really healthy thing to do.
