From Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan:
Perhaps because God has become a nodding Santa Claus with twinkling eyes and a spun glass beard; or because television spot announcements coo us into worship; or because posters painted by airbrush smoothies and written by slogansmiths assure us that the family that prays together stays together; or because religion has become an unnatural thing of all light and no shadow, a pious bonbon so nice, so sweet, so soporifically bland that a Karl Marx can call it the opium of the people not without justice; or because dread, blood, awe, the sense of primal forces and the element of terror–without which there can be no great love, great art, great faith–have been slowly and systematically subtracted from religion; perhaps for all or some of these reasons but, more likely, for reasons we are not equipped to understand, a priest of the Roman Catholic Church was put on trial one harrowing weekend in the second half of the twentieth century.
Satan and the supernatural are indeed scary, but even scarier still are the overwhelming uncertainty and insignificance of our culture and our lives within it.
– selected by Quincy Rhoads.
#VERYSCARY: For the month of October, we are featuring your favorite scary passages, lines from poems, horror lyrics, creepy writings, etc. Send your favorite to janice@entropymag.org.
