Herewith the BBC blurb:
The Devil is the personification of evil. But he has inspired great writers down the ages. That is the theme of a new book – the Devil As Muse – by a Cambridge academic Dr Fred Parker. He discusses the cultural significance of Lucifer with Peter Owen-Jones, who is now a vicar now but was an advertising executive in another life.
I tried listening to the first few minutes of it. But the author, the BBC moderator, and the CofE priest were all so deeply confused and making so many semantic and logical errors that I couldn’t make it to the end. A small number of them:
* Because the Devil has been a great character to write about (Dante, Milton, Goethe, Lewis, many others), it doesn’t follow that the Devil exists and was inspiring these artists. For example, it could be that God was inspiring some or all of them.
* If the Devil exists, he cannot be (as the C of E priest implied) a metaphor for bad human traits. That’s just to say that he doesn’t exist. The whole point of the Devil is that, if he exists at all, he exists OUTSIDE humanity.
I also have to admit that the fey “witty” banter surrounding the whole interview, almost a caraciture of upper class British society, was vaguely stomach turning as well.
I thought Facebook had sold all our souls to the Devil a while back…