On the Origin of Satan and God of Wrath

Here is another excerpt from 'Conversation with God' by Neale Donald Walsch that I found very helpful. I always have a sense that 'God' is not this terrible 'God' that is portrayed by the Bible, but I have no way of proving it. Here is a passage on the 'Origin of Satan and God of Wrath' that is revealed from the book from 'God'.

Before this 'God of Wrath' period was the matriarch period, where God was perceived as the loving God. Men during this time have little power. Men simply do physical work to make themselves valuable. They are merely companions to females, who acted as servants and fulfilled their robust desire for lustful celebration of their Goddess magnificence. So it was not easy for men who were powerless to convince other powerless men to seek power ... until they discover fear.

Fear, with seeds of doubt, sown by the most disgruntled among the males. What if the women are wrong? What if their way of running the world wasn't the best? What if it was, in fact, leading the whole society into sure and certain annihilation?

This is something many men could not imagine. After all, didn't women have a direct line to the Goddess? The gift of bearing kids was given to women. And was not the Goddess good?

The teaching was so powerful, so pervasive, that men have no choice but to invent a devil, a Satan, to counteract the unlimited goodness of the Great Mother imagined and worshipped by the people of the matriarchy.

The one thing all of their society understood was the theory of the 'rotten apple'. Even the women saw and knew from their experience that some children simply turned out 'bad' no matter what they did.

So a myth was created. One day, the myth went, the Great Mother, the Goddess of Goddesses brought forth a child who turned out not to be good. No matter what the Mother tried, the child would not be good. Finally, he struggled with his Mother for her very throne.

This was too much, even for a loving, forgiving Mother. The boy was banished forever - but continued to show up in clever disguises and clever costumes, sometimes even posing as the Great Mother herself.

This myth laid the basis for men to ask, 'How do we know the Goddess we worship is a Goddess at all? It could be the bad child, now grown and wanting to fool us'.

By this device, men got other men to worry, then to be angry that women weren't taking their worries seriously, then to rebel.

This being you now called Satan was thus created. It was also not difficult getting anyone to accept that the bad child was male. Weren't males the inferior gender?

This device was used to set up a mythological problem. If the 'bad child' was male, if the 'evil one' was masculine, who would be there to overpower him? Surely, not a feminine Goddess. For, said the men cleverly, when it came to matters of wisdom and insight, of clarity and compassion, of planning and thinking, no one doubted feminine superiority. Yet in matters of brute strength, was not a male needed?

So, now a male was needed who could do more; a male who could also protect the Goddess and defeat the enemy. This transformation did not occur overnight but across many years.

It was not a major leap from male as protector to male as an equal partner, now standing alongside the Goddess. The male God was created, and for a while, Gods and Goddesses ruled mythology together.

Then, again gradually, Gods were given larger roles. The need for protection, for strength, began to supplant the need for wisdom and love. A new kind of love was borne in these mythologies. A love which protects with brute force. But it was a love which also covets what it protect; which was jealous of its Goddesses; which now did not simply serve their feminine lusts, but fought and died for them.

Myths began to emerge of Gods of enormous power, quarreling over, fighting for, Goddesses of unspeakable beauty. And so was born the jealous God.

It wasn't long before the jealousy of the Gods extened not only to the Goddesses - but to all creations in all realms. We had better love Him, these jealous Gods demanded, and no other God - or else!

Thus, the God of Wrath was borne. Soon, the whole idea of Deity was subverted. Instead of being the source of all love, it became the source of all fear.

A model of love which was largely feminine - the endless tolerant love of a mother for a child, and yes, even of a woman for her not-too-bright, but after all, useful man, was replaced by the jealous, wrathful love of a demanding, intolerant God who would brook no interference, allow no insouciance, ignore no offense.

The smile of the amused Goddess, experiencing limitless love and gently submitting to the laws of nature, was replaced by the stern countenance of the not-so-amused God, proclaiming power over the laws of nature, and forevermore limiting love.

This is the God you worship today, and that's how you got where you are now. It's important for you to know that you've made it all up. The idea that 'might is right' or 'power is strength' was born in your male-created theological myths. The God of wrath and jealousy and anger was an imagining. Yet, something you imagined for so long, it became real. Some of you still consider it real today. Yet, it has nothing to do with ultimate reality, or what's really going on here.

What's going on is that your soul yearns for the highest experience of itself it can imagine. It came here for that purpose - to realize itself in its experience.