In high school I had a teacher who was in Vietnam. He told us how nobody wanted to be the guy with the radio (back then one guy in the unit carried a big radio on his back). The reason nobody wanted to be the guy with the radio was because that was the first person the enemy would kill. The enemy knew that if they could destroy the radio then the unit couldn’t call for help and it would be easier to kill them all while minimizing the risk of being killed.

In war and in battles, communication is critical to success. In terms of your own side’s success it is critical to have open communication lines. In terms of defeating your enemy it is critical to cut their communication lines off, and a lot of effort goes into this.

Satan has been around a long time, and he knows this as well as any general or field commander. Thus, he does anything he can to cut off communication between man and God. He knows that if man communicates with God, then man will have the truth, and the truth will make it more likely that the man will do what God wants and not what Satan wants, and therefore Satan will lose. Satan uses the following techniques to cut off communication between God and man. He teaches that:

1. There is no God. Obviously you aren’t going to talk to somebody who isn’t there. If Satan can convince you there is no God, he’s got it made.

2. God isn’t listening. Second best for Satan is if he can convince you that while God is there, he isn’t listening. Sure, he used to listen to people, but he’s not there anymore. He’s on vacation, or unemployed, or just pre-occupied with other things. Or maybe God isn’t really the kind of being who listens, he’s just a “force” in the universe, something intangible and so “listening” isn’t really the kind of thing that he does.

3. Not everybody can pray to God, just certain people. Ok, so you believe God exists and that he listens, but the thing Satan would have you believe after this is that you can’t pray to God. You’re not worthy. Pastors and priests can pray, but not a normal person like you. So if you want to say something to God, you’ve got to go ask someone else to do it for you.

4. You can’t pray directly to God. Ok, if 1-3 fail, then Satan might convince you that God’s really busy, and so you don’t pray to God, you pray to someone or something else, and they’ll deliver your message to God.

5. You can’t pray to God all the time, just at certain times or in certain places. Rats, are you still trying to pray? If you are, then Satan would tell you that it’s fine if you pray, but you can’t just do it willy-nilly, whenever you want. Come on, have some respect! You can only pray to God when you’re in church, or on Sundays, or when you’re in a quiet place, or when you’re alone, or when you’ve got a shirt on, or when your hat is off. But don’t just go saying a prayer in your mind whenever you want, that’s just inappropriate and disrespectful of deity.

6. You can only pray to God about certain things. Ok, so you’re still praying all over the place, but Satan will take what he can get. Certainly you’re not going to pray about small, insignificant, meaningless things, right? I mean, we’re talking about God here. He’s a busy guy. Don’t bother him with the small stuff. He only wants to hear about the really important things in your life, like choosing who you marry, and maybe one or two other things. He certainly can’t be bothered with you feeling sad today, or feeling a little bit sick, or wanting help on your exam–you can take care of those things yourself.

7. God doesn’t communicate directly with man. Well, if you’re not getting the message then that’s fine, you can pray all you want, but the things is that God isn’t going to respond, at least not directly. He’s not actually going to give you answers to questions. After all, you’ve got the scriptures, what else do you need? Isn’t the Bible as clear as day? Nobody ever argues about what the Bible is saying.

8. You shouldn’t speak casually to God. The last thing Satan wants is for you to have the type of relationship with God that you might have with a good friend that you call up and talk to every day. That would be disastrous for Satan’s objectives. So he’ll try to make God seem like someone formal, austere, frightening, inhuman, unfeeling, angry, vengeful, and unfamiliar rather than like what he really is–our father who loves us dearly, who wants us to talk to him, and who wants to talk to us.

It is ok to talk directly to God as though he were our closest friend. It is ok to pray to him whenever and wherever you want to. You don’t need someone else to do it for you, you don’t have to go through someone else, you don’t have to use flowery or memorized words, you can just say what’s in your heart the same way you would say things to that close friend of yours. You can pray about the smallest thing as well as the big things. God has plenty of time. He likes to hear from you, even if it’s just casual conversation. And he does respond. He sends us comfort, he gives us intelligence and wisdom to make correct choices, and when we are doing what’s right or seeking an answer to a question he can send us a feeling of peace–a feeling which Satan cannot duplicate nor counterfeit.

Jackson says that today’s Christian churches are “apostate” Christian churches that do not have the right God, “But God is not at its head, making that church—following the appearance in it of Satan—no longer the church of God.” Jackson clarifies, “To say that Satan sits in the place of God in Christianity after the time of the Apostles is not to say that all that is in it is satanic.” However, he provides no idea about how a church of worship can have Satan as its God and not be satanic.

My purpose is to answer the last sentence, although I should first mention that Jackson is a professor at a church-owned school, and not a leader of the LDS Church nor authorized to make doctrinal statements on his own. But that said, I don’t see anything he is saying that doesn’t jive with what I’ve heard from church leaders.

Mormons use the word “satanic” to mean different things in different contexts. In one sense, something is satanic if it is of the devil and pure evil. In another sense, something is satanic if it leads somebody away from the truth. Jackson is using the word here in its second sense, while Matt is interpreting it as being in the first sense.

Mormons do not believe that other churches are satanic in the sense that they are pure evil or that they are run by Satan himself, unless you’re talking about actual Satan worshipers. Mormons do believe that other churches possess only a portion of the truth that is available in the LDS Church, and that therefore these churches may lead people away from the greater truth. However, on the other side of things, these churches may lead people away from evil to a higher state than they were previously in. In other words, something could be “satanic” and “godly” in the same moment, depending on their influence.

Mormons believe the true church of Christ in the ancient world was lost, and that the Christian religion that took hold under Constantine was therefore “satanic” in the sense that it taught only a portion of Christ’s truths, along with many falsehoods. But if you examine the history of that church which became the Catholic church and led to Protestantism, you can clearly see that were it not for this church that Christianity would be virtually non-existent today, and in my mind the Christianity that exists in the world, even if it doesn’t have the whole truth, is better than no Christianity at all. It is this “apostate” Christianity that led to the founding of the United States, and without traditional Christianity it’s hard to see how the groundwork could have been laid that led to the environment in which the LDS Church could be founded, survive, and finally thrive.

Of course whenever someone hears their religion referred to as “satanic,” regardless the intended meaning of the word, it sounds terribly offensive, and I don’t really expect that my explanation will make you feel much better, although I do hope you can at least see that Mormons don’t mean ill by it. We’re not saying that anybody is a Satan-worshiper and evil, we’re just saying that other churches don’t possess the complete truth, which is no more than what any other church might accuse us of based on the differences in our theologies.

The problem was that we would make mistakes (sins) while here, and if we weren’t pure then we couldn’t return to God and be like him, so there had to be a way to allow us to make these mistakes, and then get cleaned up, so to speak. Enter a Savior, or Jesus Christ. Christ would be born, live a perfect life, and then sacrifice himself to pay for all our sins. Don’t ask me how it works. With some difficulty I can imagine somebody suffering the pain of all our sins, but I don’t get how that gets rid of our sins. That’s one of things I accept as “I guess I’ll understand some day.” However, just because we could be saved didn’t mean everyone would be. Some would choose to reject Christ’s sacrifice, and therefore wouldn’t be able to return to God or become like him.

Lucifer presented a different plan. His plan was that God would give him, Lucifer, God’s power, and Lucifer would come down on earth and make sure that no one could sin, that nobody would make any mistakes, nobody would suffer, and so there would be no need for a Savior and everyone could return to live with God. I’m not sure how he planned on doing this, but it kind of sounds like socialism.

God said no, that’s not the plan. Lucifer rebelled against God, and convinced a third of everyone else who was there to rebel as well, and so Lucifer was kicked out of Heaven along with however many billions of people wanted to follow him. Where was he kicked out to? The earth, where we are. And now he and his friends go around as “the devil” and “demons” (which we don’t believe have horns or pointy tails) trying to make us do bad things so that we’ll end up miserable like they are. How do Lucifer/Satan and his buddies do this? I don’t know. The scriptures say that Satan “whispers in our ears”. Maybe when your wife is out of town and you’re driving by the grocery store and in your mind you think “I could sure go for five or six pints of Ben and Jerry’s right now” and then something says “No, you really shouldn’t do that, it’s a bad idea” and then you think “But when am I going to have this chance again?”…well, maybe that’s Satan somehow putting those thoughts of a hedonistic, ice cream-filled lifestyle in your head.

So yes, we believe that Jesus and Satan/Lucifer were both spirit children of God, as we believe we all are.