The Bible Dictionary declares: “Latter-day revelation confirms the biblical teaching that the devil is a reality and that he does strive to lead men and women from the work of God.“

In his preface to the 1961 edition of The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis wrote:

The commonest question is whether I “really believe in the Devil.”

Now, if by “the Devil” you mean a power opposite to God and, like God, self-existent from all eternity, the answer is certainly No. …God has no opposite. No being could attain a “perfect badness” opposite to the perfect goodness of God….

The proper question is whether I believe in devils. I do. That is to say, I believe in angels, and I believe that some of these, by the abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God and, as a corollary, to us. These we may call devils. They do not differ in nature from good angels, but their nature is depraved. Devil is the opposite of angel only as Bad Man is the opposite of Good Man. Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.

What is interesting here is that Lewis’s understanding of devils is so similar to LDS belief and at the same time so different.

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Last night I was able to watch Elder Oaks’ comments as they were broadcast live over the internet from the The Worlds of Joseph Smith International Academic Conference at the Library of Congress.

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Steve has an interesting post concerning the coats of skins given to Adam and Eve after they had transgressed the commandment by partaking of the fruit but before they had been thrust out of the garden.

Steve says

I can picture Jehovah making these coats of skins for the naked, humiliated Adam and Eve; they realize now that their time in Eden is over, and that their relationship with their Father will never be the same. I imagine that those first garments were made for them lovingly, made of sturdy stuff to face that lone, dreary world. Sure, there must have been an instruction to them about what these clothes meant, and I picture them listening, and wondering what it all meant…

Steve develops this idea further and I encourage you to comment on his thoughts over at his post. There is an aspect of the clothing of Adam and Eve that I would like to discuss here, however.

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Though I have never read Neal Stephenson’s book, Cryptonomicon, I ran across the following passage from the novel and found it intriguing from an LDS perspective:

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In response to Elder Richard G. Scott’s talk in conference on the Church’s new guide to missionary service, Preach My Gospel, my wife and I went to the distribution center on Saturday and bought a copy. I have been reading through large parts of it all weekend. This new program is a great improvement over the system we employed when I was a missionary 10 years ago. It also has some wonderful discussion of gospel principles. In fact, I am so impressed that I am considering adopting it as the principle study guide for my personal gospel study and my wife and I are discussing using it for our couple gospel study program.

I want to highlight some passages that stuck out to me. Some of them are doctrinal, some are explanations of policy, some relate to how missionary work is to be conducted, and others are related to recent discussions in the bloggernacle.

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