A common argument for belief in God and the acceptance of religious creed is one of risk and reward. Supposedly, if you don't accept Jesus as your savior and Yahweh as your lord you risk going to hell. If you believe and are wrong, nothing lost. But if you disbelieve and are wrong, you end up suffering an eternity in the Inferno, forever a museum exhibit for the Dantes and Virgils of the future.

However, there's not a whole lot of safety in numbers. By many people's reckoning, it isn't just enough that you accept the existence of Jesus and Yahweh: you have to accept an entire philosophy on the nature of the diety and a system of values to boot. Of which there are over 1,500 (religioustolerance.org, 1995), and if we are to believe some of their practitioners a hair's width deviation will land you amongst hot coals for the rest of time.

Of course, you must be a True Believer. After all, you are you. You do things the way your Good Ol' Parents did things, or you do things the way God himself especially told you to. But there's a problem: the people holding the 1,500 other viewpoints, with millions of individual variations, had the same kind of revelation as you, but they don't agree with you. And don't forget the Muslims. And the Jews. And the Hindus, Jains, Pagans, and Zoroastrians.

Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, a Devil revealing to you all the diverse faiths in the world for you to choose from. It's the ultimate game of Russian Roulette. Over forty times a thousand slots in this revolver, all of them loaded save one. If you guess right, eternal life is yours. But if you take a misstep, you're shot to hell. It is an intense predicament.

But what if this is just all part of this Devil's game? What if there is no right choice? Could it be that the Devil's temptation is not to choose the wrong faith, but choosing any at all?

And just who is this Devil, anyway?

This Devil, of course, is a rhetorical device, but one which represents a real force in our thinking. When I think of the Devil, I think of Damn Yankees. In Abbot and Wallop's musical, the Devil takes the form of cunning salesman "Mr. Applegate." His job is to sell you exactly what you want, or what you think you want, for the ultimate price. That's what he does with Joe Boyd. Joe Boyd is obsessed with baseball, and wants to beat the Yankees. So Applegate turns him into baseball champion Joe Hardy, at the cost of his soul, letting the middle-aged Boyd taste fame, prowess and popularity.

But that's not ultimately what fulfills him. What fulfills him is his love for his wife, whom he estranges with his obsession with baseball. It is only when he is reunited with her at the end, after using the escape clause built into his bargain with the Devil, that he is truly happy. And, in mythological terms, romantic love represents the coming together of two parts of the same being. Through the acknowledgement of the other, his significant other, Joe Boyd acknowledges himself.

So then, the Devil doesn't represent a physical being wreaking havoc in people's lives, but the temptation to indulge in lesser pleasures when we are too afraid or blind to acknowledge what is truly important. And this Devil isn't necessarily evil. Satan has many counterparts amongst world mythologies, and many are not the malevolent mastermind the Prince of Darkness is made out to be. In one creation myth, the "devil" figure is the brother of the creator god. The creator god makes fish and people, and his brother, aspiring to his elder's skill, creates sharks and predators that end up eating the other fish and bring death into the world. Though he is a bumbling hazard to all living things, he is well-meaning.

And so is the Devil that lives within us. Our temptations are intended to serve positive ends. We take that drink to wash the pain away. We stay with that abusive lover because we want some past horror to have a happy ending. We surrender our reason at the feet of a religious creed because we want eternal life, to live without doubt, to find some semblance of meaning in our existence.

Blind faith promises an end to questions, that we will never be wrong again, that we will never have to venture out of the pasture and into the wilderness beyond. The religions of the world promise us that if we choose the right one, eternal bliss is ours. But to buy that is to play the Devil's Roulette, and every bullet kills. In exchange for security you surrender the reins of the mind's chariot to the preacher and the priest and become their marionette. Mythology, whose symbols inform art such as Damn Yankees, is killed by dogma and literalism. We are promised spirituality, but lose the soul we are supposed to protect.

In Christianity there is nothing but temptation. We are tempted by God with eternity and by the Devil with pleasure. Together they are the Scylla and Charybdis of the mind. Where is the middle path—the path of illumination, the path of reason—leading to the great open seas beyond? Only one thing is certain: we must embrace uncertainty. We must vigirously question ourselves and the claims of others, and only then can we avoid the monsters on either side of the clashing rocks.