Do you believe in Satan?

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I read an interesting piece this morning titled "Is Monsanto Satan? The pleasure and problem of conspiracy theory."

It's sort of about the cognitive crutch of believing in a Great Deceiver.

http://religiondispatches.org/is-monsanto-satan-the-pleasure-and-problem-of-conspiracy-theory/

Does resistance against a Great Deceiver help define your life, and give it meaning?

I wouldn't say Montsanto is Satan because they do provide food at a relatively low price to the consumer. Their business practices might not be so scrupulous but most businesses are cut throat to their competitors. If you don't like them, buy something they do not produce. That simple.

Satan is destructive energy. When someone tries to destroy another, it's Satanic energy as far as I am concerned. When someone channels Satanic energy, they can destroy others including themselves.

Yeah, but what the article is about is more the fervence of people battling a great, super-powerful, imagined enemy.

For me perhaps that is the teeming millions of people who weren't really paying attention in math and science classes and now apply their degrees from Google University to warning everybody about how every business is trying to kill them or something.

I mean recently I saw where the Environmental Working Group expressed a dire concern about having detected tylenol in one brand of bottled water, at a concentration of 1.7 parts per trillion, because there is no research on what effect long-term exposure to tylenol at that concentration might do to people.

Which is horsefeathers, because 1 part per trillion is a single drop from an eye dropper into 400 olympic sized swimming pools. 1.7ppt could mean that someone at the factory handled an uncoated tablet of acetaminophen and then later touched some bottling equipment. It could mean that they merely opened a bottle of tylenol near the bottling equipment. It will do exactly nothing to you, and there is no poison in the world that can hurt you at that concentration.

So, what of EWG? Are they being deceitful, or do they just not know?

We really do have equipment that can detect attomoles of contamination. Even at the femtomole level, the reality is that if you look, everything is everywhere. If we are talking about radioisotopes, we have detectors that can identify a single atom in a sample.

But the human mind is fundamentally incapable of conceiving of very large numbers, and by association, very small numbers. We have a built-in irrationality that doesn't believe it, so people who want to understand science have to just assert a belief that the numbers are true, even if they don't feel true because they really don't make sense to our brains.

In short, and possibly too vague/abstract to be of much use, most people are dreaming. They dream while their awake, project archetypes from cheap old movies in constantly, and they spool themselves around those archetypes as data-organizers. Whether something's true or not seems to have less bearing than whether or not it gratifies a timeless story and you can often add to that whether or not it gives them a cheap and unearned self-esteem boost.

By C.S. Lewis' standard, I guess I do. My favorite Lewis book is The Screwtape Letters.

Something with a name like Environmental Working Group sounds alarmist so they would make a big deal about every little thing just to get you to mistrust what you eat and drink to the point you will join them in some capacity. Like, let's say you take some Tylenol with a glass of water. They want you to fear an overdose so you will be motivated to join their crusade so they make it sound worse than it is.

Take this quote from the article you linked and cited:

Some call Satan a symbol of evil and sometimes, that is true, but often, it is energy we detect that is Satanic. Energy that destroys in some way. An adversary often wants to destroy the opponent. Satan is thought of as the Adversarial One. All adversaries do is spend their energy in ways that undermine or harm you. So, again, it's about how energy is channeled and if it is a certain way, as in, you endeavor to destroy others, it is Satanic.

In your article, Satan is the symbol attached to Big Business and like anything, it can be somewhat Satanic because businesses want profits and compete with one another and this can in turn destroy some in the process. Businesses come and go because they can't hack it. One business could be another's "Satan" in this process of competition.

I do know MSG sensitivity is real because my Aunt, who has had Chinese food on occasion, went to the mall once, ate it, and suffered a horrible attack, with anaphylaxis, requiring an ambulance. It wasn't psychosomatic because that kind of response wasn't as publicized as it is today. It was something the rest of the family hadn't heard of before, a reaction that strong, that interfered with her breathing. So she couldn't have read about someone else having an episode, experiencing some kind of placebo effect.

Agent Orange, during the Vietnam War, was thought of as helpful fighting and winning. It wasn't loathed until later on so can it be truly Satanic? One could argue Napalm and the war itself was Satanic energy at work.
As far as the other practices, that goes for what corporations do in all markets. So, if you sense a Satanic element here, it is present in the majority of corporations but it's not entirely satanic because it's not trying to destroy the world. It tries to produce products while turning a profit.
Calling a company Satan would bias people against it instead of just reporting facts about it. If you dig enough, you might find disturbing facts about most corporations, sort of like you would a hurricane.

My opinion from what I have read, is GMOs are less damaging than hysterics believe. What I have read about them doesn't lead me to believe they will affect anyone's DNA or the future DNA of offspring. Some of the fears people have, it's just too irrational concerning GMOs. There's no science to back them up. It sounds like what you might see in science fiction, where the plant can suddenly walk, talk and devour human beings. The greatest danger can be the altering in the nutritional content due to genetic modification. It would render the plant resistant to certain things while growing but it would be like eating junk food instead of something nutritious which can be bad, depending on how the particular plant is modified. It would deprive you of vital nutrients.

I believe the Bible, so yes I believe in Satan. But he is defeated!

I think most of the evil in the world is caused by humans, but I think it's perfectly reasonable that someone or something had gotten the ball rolling, and had caused something terrible to happen to our human natures. Invariably, we make the wrong choices when it comes to loving our neighbor, choosing hate and greed instead of charity - all human history backs this up. And the fact that we are aliens in our own world, unable to survive like other creatures do without the benefits of civilization, shows that something is up with us.