Satan's Long Reach

So I've been moving away from this whole spiritual thing and more into reality and understanding the world as it really is. But every now and then some of the old superstitions pop back up as though they were natural, and not learned behaviors.

For instance, today my 8-year-old daughter was cleaning her room and listening to some Disney CD she received as a gift -- you know, the kind with a bunch of pretty people groomed by professionals, doing covers of successful songs as though they were real artist, pushed on kids as part of the Disney exploitation machine -- when I heard a decidedly un-Disney-like song coming from her room: Runnin' with the Devil.

Now, I don't know this song, and it kind of caught me off guard. I mean, running with the devil ... you know, Satan, Lucifer ... that guy. I realize the song is pretty much harmless, but the whole devil thing struck a chord. I mean, she shouldn't be listening to songs about the devil, should she?

But then again, why not?

Not too long ago, I was watching the second season of the new Doctor Who. One duo of episodes was "The Impossible Planet" and "The Satan Pit." The episodes are about a crew on a planet that's orbiting a black hole. They're drilling to center of the world, but there's supposed to be an ancient evil down there.

And the Doctor finds it. It's a remarkably Satan-like demon-thing that looks like this:



My daughter was watching the show with me when they found some occultish writing, and when the doctor found the Satan-like dude. And it made me really uncomfortable. I thought -- this is wrong. She shouldn't see this, this ... demon-stuff ... it's ... eeeviiil.

But I realized that, since the devil wasn't real, it didn't really matter. I expressed this to my wife, who said, yeah, if it had been a giant robot, I wouldn't have given it a second thought. And my daughter was moved less by this CG monstrosity than she was by the evil woman in "Madeline: Lost in Paris" (coincidentally a Disney production).

It's weird how the prejudices and superstitions of our upbringing sneak in to our daily lives, jumping out of the shadows to remind us that they're still there. It seems we are the products of our upbringing, striving always to assert our individuality.