Do you believe in the devil

...And for the musical interlude, here's old Nick Cave And the Bad Seeds with "Up Jumped The Devil".

I believe the leader of the current transport strikes is the devil.

Luascifer.

As a kid I was convinced of The Devil's existence. I remember one evening, when I was about five or six, at home watching the evening news. The headlines were flying by. I didn't really comprehend what I was watching, but I was aware that I was watching footage of pain and suffering from some far flung war that was going on at the time. I remember that some of the footage was focused on images of children, probably in refugee camps. They were about my age. The thought of something as awful as this as being just a fact of life for some poor bastards, who were just like me, made me instantaneously doubt the idea of all knowing and ever loving God, "God's a f!cker", thought I.

Of course, almost immediately afterward, my primary school religious education and weekly mass going sent thoughts of guilt flying back into my head - If God did truly exist, and everyone said he did, I'd actually committed a terrible sin. Maybe the worst of all: I'd thought he was an uncaring arsehole! I was dammed for sure.

And even then I knew what dammed meant. They usually went softly, softly enough on us at school, in infants, when it came to religion; God seemed to be a lot about Jesus and The Apostles, coloring in and singing songs, but I could read between the lines; I knew at the back of all this messing about there was some pretty heavy stuff. Stuff like Hell and The Devil. That's where God sent ya if you displeased him, and there was no coming back from that - You were goosed forever, with no chance of escape. So now I'd ruined my chances of eternal happiness because of some spontaneous thought I'd had while watching the TV. How could I have been so stupid?

So for the next few years I existed in this weird dual state - 95% of the time I was a usual happy child, but, whenever the subject of anything religious came up, I'd remember, with frustration in my heart, that I was going to Hell.

That was a bit of a bummer. It was weird, being able to go about most of the time without a care in the world, and then to occasionally be reminded not to forget that, someday, I was bound for The Pit of Fire. Contradictory, I know. But when I was a kid death in general was such a hard to grasp idea and I knew that Hell would come after my own death - which was supposedly ages off. So, it was easy to ignore potential eternal damnation sometimes, and to be, in the back of my mind, totally convinced and petrified of it at other times.

So growing up it was stuff about The Devil and Hell that sent the fear up me in a big way. I could watch horror movies all day long, as long they were about murderers, aliens or even ghosts. But, if there was even a hint of The Quare Fella involved I’d have to give it a skip. Ghost Stories about random meetings with Satan used to unsettle me deeply and I was always deeply frightened by tales of possession. I figured that if such things were real, the fact that I was so freaked out by them made me susceptible to my own bout of head spinning and pea-soup spewing. The Devil and his diabolical ways could smell my fear.

Crazy stuff. By the time I hit double figures I was beginning to realise that it was all phoney-baloney nonsense. There is one good thing about having to sit through mass week after week as a child: you get to focus on how stupid it all really is. The Devil is a personification of all the evil that lurks in the heart of man and a fairy story drummed into you from a young age to keep you in check and put some fear into you. And it works, but it has no business being told to children to be accepted as fact.