I was four years old the first time I was told I would burn in hell.
Not metaphorically. Not as a vague spiritual warning. I was four years old, standing in my hallway, with my mom kneeling in front of me, and told me that if I did not invite Jesus into my heart, I would be separated from my family and burn in eternal fire forever.
I was four. And my own mother is telling me that I will burn in a burning fire forever separated from everyone I love.
I spent the next twenty years inside that cult. Believing it. Fearing it. Organizing my entire inner world around it. And it took me years after leaving to understand what had actually been done to me. Not by Satan. Not by demons. By human beings who found a book, built a machine around it, and used it to control other human beings.
That is what this article is about.
I am not writing this to attack faith. I am writing this because people are connecting the Epstein network to Satanic rituals, and I need you to understand something: these men do not need Satan. They never did. They had something far more powerful. They had a theology that was built, brick by brick, to normalize exactly what they did.
Let me start with the thing that broke my own conditioning the hardest.
Hell does not exist in the original scriptures. The word itself was inserted by translators. What the original texts actually say is this:
The Hebrew word is Sheol. It appears 65 times in the Old Testament. It means the grave. The place of the dead. A neutral underworld where everyone goes. There is no fire. There is no punishment. There is no devil waiting with a pitchfork. Just death.
The Greek word is Hades. Borrowed directly from Greek mythology. Also just the realm of the dead. Not a torture chamber.
The word most often translated as “hell” in the New Testament is Gehenna. This was a real place. The Valley of Hinnom, just outside Jerusalem. A literal trash dump where garbage was burned. A place where, historically, child sacrifice had occurred. When Jesus used this word, he was referencing a physical location his audience walked past. He was using it as a metaphor for waste and destruction. Not as a description of the afterlife.
The word Tartarus appears exactly once in the entire New Testament, in 2 Peter 2:4. It is lifted directly from Greek mythology, where the Titans were imprisoned. One verse, borrowed from a completely different religion.
The doctrine of eternal conscious torment in a lake of fire was not assembled from scripture. It was built from mistranslations, borrowed mythology, and medieval literature. Specifically, Dante’s Inferno, written in the 14th century, gave Western Christianity its definitive image of hell. Dante was a poet. His Inferno was a poem. And millions of people today believe that poem is scripture.
I was four years old and I was threatened with a poet’s imagination.
Satan Was Never in the Bible Either. The original Hebrew is Ha-satan. It means the adversary. The accuser. It is a role, not a name. Not a being.
In the Book of Job, the satan is a member of God’s divine council. He has access to God. He makes wagers with God. He functions as a prosecuting attorney, not a cosmic enemy of creation.
In 1 Chronicles 21, it is Satan who incites David to take a census. In the parallel account in 2 Samuel 24:1, the exact same story is told, but it is God who does it. The same event. Two different authors. One blames God, one blames Satan. The texts directly contradict each other on this.
The fully formed Satan, the rebellious fallen angel, the cosmic enemy, the red horned creature with a pitchfork, does not exist in the Old Testament. That character was developed during the intertestamental period, between the writing of the Old and New Testaments, heavily influenced by Persian Zoroastrian dualism. The idea of a good god and an evil god locked in eternal battle is a Persian theological framework that entered Judaism and then Christianity from the outside.
The verse everyone points to for Lucifer is Isaiah 14:12. “How you have fallen from heaven, morning star, son of the dawn.” This verse is not about Satan. Read it in context. It is a taunt against the King of Babylon. The word Lucifer is a Latin translation of the Hebrew word “helel,” meaning shining one. Jerome put it in the Latin Vulgate in the 4th century. It was applied to Satan centuries later, by humans, not by the text.
The word Armageddon appears exactly once in the entire Bible.
Revelation 16:16. “Then they gathered the kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.”
That is it. One verse. No description of a battle. No timeline. No global catastrophe. Just a place name, likely referring to Megiddo, a historic battlefield in Israel.
The entire End Times architecture that millions of people believe today, the Rapture, the Tribulation, the Antichrist, the seven-year timeline, the mark of the beast, none of that exists in the Bible as a cohesive system.
The Rapture does not exist in scripture. It was invented by John Nelson Darby in the 1830s. It is a 200-year-old theological invention that has been taught to children as ancient divine truth.
The Left Behind framework, the one so many American evangelicals treat as prophecy, was popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909. One man’s study Bible became the interpretive lens for an entire movement.
The Antichrist as a singular end-times figure does not exist in the original texts either. The word antichrist appears only in the letters of 1, 2, and 3 John. In those letters it is plural and present tense. People, not a person. Already here, not coming.
Here is what gets buried under all of this construction.
Jesus was explicit about the Old Testament law. Christian Nationalists love to invoke Deuteronomy, Numbers, Leviticus. They use these books to justify the treatment of women, the punishment of outsiders, the destruction of enemies. But their own New Testament tells them they are not supposed to be reading it that way.
Hebrews 8:13 is direct: “By calling this covenant new, he has made the first one obsolete.”
2 Corinthians 5:17: “The old has gone, the new is here.”
John 13:34: Jesus says, “A new commandment I give you: Love one another.”
Matthew 22:37-40: The entire law and the prophets hang on two commandments. Love God. Love your neighbor.
This is what Jesus taught. Not the eradication of unbelievers. Not the taking of women as spoils. Not the beheading of those who worship differently. Love one another.
Christian Nationalists who invoke Old Testament law to justify their politics are not following Jesus. They are not even following a coherent reading of their own scripture.
Then There Is Paul. This is the part most people miss, and it is the most important part of this conversation.
Paul, formerly Saul of Tarsus, was a man who literally murdered Christians before his conversion. Acts 8:1-3 describes him consenting to the stoning of Stephen and going house to house dragging Christians off to prison. Acts 9 describes his conversion on the road to Damascus.
Paul never met Jesus in person. Not once.
And yet Paul’s letters make up the majority of the New Testament. His theology, not Jesus’s direct teachings, became the doctrinal backbone of organized Christianity.
Look at what Paul reintroduced.
Ephesians 5:22: “Wives, submit to your husbands.”
1 Timothy 2:12: “I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man.”
Romans 13:1: “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established.”
That last verse has been used for centuries to tell enslaved people to comply. To tell abused people to submit. To tell oppressed populations that resisting power is resisting God.
Jesus said almost none of this. Jesus ate with outcasts. Jesus touched the untouchable. Jesus told the wealthy they could not enter the kingdom of God. Jesus’s own mission statement, in Luke 4:18, was to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, and liberation for the oppressed.
The drift from Jesus to Paul is the drift from liberation to control. And the entire Christian Nationalist project is built on Paul, on the Old Testament, and on theological inventions from the 19th century. Not on the words of Jesus.
The Most Dangerous Projection is the thing that I keep coming back to, the thing that unsettled me once I saw it.
Satan is always depicted as the one who collects souls. The deal-maker. The one who wants your eternal self in exchange for earthly power or pleasure.
But Christianity is the only religion I know of that requires you to give your soul to a spirit to be saved. You are told, as a child, that you must invite Jesus into your heart. You must surrender your soul. You must sign over your spiritual self to be protected from eternal torment.
Think about the structure of that.
You are told there is a threat. That threat is eternal suffering. The only protection from that threat is surrendering your innermost self to an entity you cannot see, cannot verify, and cannot question. And the people delivering this message are human beings with institutional power who benefit from your compliance.
I was four years old when this was done to me.
The projection here is not subtle. Everything Christianity attributes to Satan, the soul collection, the spiritual contract, the demand for surrender under threat of suffering, is precisely what the institution of Christianity has practiced on its members for centuries.
Back to Epstein, these men did not need Satan. They had something far more durable.
They had thousands of years of written, institutionally sanctified theology that said women and girls are property and spoils of war. That powerful men answer to no one but their own covenant. That outsiders can be destroyed. That obedience to authority is holy.
Numbers 31:17-18 instructs the keeping of virgin girls as spoils after killing their families.
Deuteronomy 21:10-14 gives explicit instructions for taking captive women from defeated enemies.
Deuteronomy 7:1-2 commands the utter destruction of other peoples with no mercy shown.
1 Samuel 15:3 commands killing every living thing, including children and animals, in an enemy population.
This was not hidden. This was written down, taught in Sunday schools, read from pulpits, treated as the word of God.
Epstein’s operation was not occult worship. It was a blackmail operation. An intelligence operation. It used the sexual exploitation of children to control powerful men worldwide. The men involved had connections to Mossad, to the Mega Group, to extremist religious networks. They weaponized every structure available to them, financial, political, religious, intelligence, to build protection around their crimes.
The redactions in the Epstein files that protect powerful men while exposing the names of survivors mirror exactly what these theological texts do. Protect the patriarch. Erase the victim. Name the powerful as untouchable. Render the harmed as nameless.
That is not Satan’s work. That is the work of human systems built by human men to serve human power.
The Supernatural explanation protects them. I understand why people reach for the Satanic ritual explanation. I genuinely do.
It is psychologically easier to believe in a supernatural enemy than to believe that human beings, people who look like us, live near us, hold positions of authority over us, could systematically choose to abuse and exploit children for pleasure, control, and blackmail.
It is easier to create a devil than to face the ordinary human face of institutional evil.
But that psychological comfort comes at a direct cost. Every time we say these men were performing Satanic rituals, we hand them a shield. We make their evil into something foreign, something other, something that requires supernatural explanation rather than human accountability.
They are men who chose this. Men who built systems to enable and protect this choosing. Men who used every institution available to them, including religious ones, to make themselves untouchable.
Eros and Thanatos: The Drives Behind the Network. People hear Eros and think love. That is not what Eros is.
Eros is compulsive desire. It is the drive that wants beyond what it needs. It does not seek connection. It seeks consumption. Eros is the energy that turns bodies into objects, that requires degradation to feel anything, that cannot experience pleasure without control over another person. Eros is porn built on belittlement. Eros is appetite with no floor and no conscience.
Thanatos is the death drive. The pull toward destruction, domination, and annihilation of whatever stands in the way of its own power.
The Epstein network was the place where both converged.
Eros provided the appetite. Insatiable, compulsive, requiring younger bodies, more vulnerable bodies, more controlled circumstances to satisfy a desire that can never actually be satisfied because it is not seeking pleasure. It is seeking power over another person’s body. That is what pornography built on degradation is. That is what the trafficking of children is. Not sexuality. The weaponization of sexuality against people who cannot consent or cannot refuse.
Thanatos provided the willingness to destroy. To take a child’s life, future and body and treat it as expendable material in service of that appetite. To build an entire intelligence operation around the systematic destruction of the powerless to control the powerful.
Neither of these drives requires a devil. They are human. They live in human institutions. They are fed by human theology that has spent millennia telling powerful men that their appetites are sanctioned and their victims are nameless.
What stands against this is not the opposite of Eros. It is something Eros cannot comprehend.
Embodied, mutual, relational sexuality that does not require a victim. Pleasure that comes from genuine presence with another person rather than control over them. The matriarchal understanding of sexuality as something that moves between equals rather than something one person takes from another.
That understanding has been systematically destroyed by the same institutions that produced the Epstein network. That is not an accident. A population that understands embodied mutual pleasure is a population that recognizes violation immediately. You cannot traffic that population easily. You cannot shame them into silence. You cannot use pornography built on degradation to normalize what these men did.
The destruction of that understanding was part of the design. The Epstein network is not an aberration of the system. It is the system expressing itself without its usual disguise.
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