When I was a teenager, I went to church, and almost every ‘Christian’ there was a complete asshole. What makes it worse is that they try to justify it. This honestly made me think that if God and Satan were real, I’d want to know Lucifer’s story. Maybe he’s not actually ‘evil.’
Have you read the Bible? The only evil shit that Satan does is when he fucks up Job’s life, and that’s in collusion with God. Meanwhile, God is doing evil on almost every page of the Old Testament.
The reason we’re supposed to hate Satan is because he rebelled against God. Again, if you’ve read the Old Testament, you have dozens of good reasons to rebel against God.
This train of thought is what lead to the creation of Satanism as a literary movement in the 19th century and then as a religion in the late 20th century.
Also, the “satan” that is the Torah is actually more of a job title, that of an “accuser”.
Sure, but we’re talking about Satan within Christian mythology, not Judaism.
Jesus was a Jew. He believed a lot of what is in the Torah. It wasn’t until about 600 years later the Bible was “finished”
That’s cool and all, but I don’t see how that changes anything. Christian Satan is different from Jewish Satan.
Lucifer was just unionizing the angels. God is just the first union buster and ran a smear campaign against the organizer.
Lucifer is also called “the light bringer” as he is tied to the persuit of knowledge. In other words he was woke and was cast away.
I like the name Lucifer. Which is why I called my dog Lucifer. He’s a 8.2 kilo dog who loves pink, and has diamonds on his collar. He also goes by Luci or Lulu. It’s so much fun to see the confusion in some peoples eyes when I tell them he’s a he.
I think my favourite was when he was 7 months old, and we were in a confirmation in Norway and was allowed into the church. Afterwards, everyone wanted to meet him, and some faces when they heard his name was fucking priceless!
I have Luci the Cat who also goes by Lulu… he’s like Luci from Disenchantment. He too is a he
The bible is just mythology.
In the beginning man created god. In the end we’ll either correct the mistake, or it will be our extinction.
Satan pretty much exists as the bad cop to Yaweh’s police chief. Both are in cahoots, it is just that one can be thrown under the bus when convenient to do so.
We moved on from the pantheons of Greece, Egypt, Rome, the Norse and Aztecs, etc. Hopefully one day our descendants will be smart enough to realize that Abrahamic mythology is no different than any other, it was just more successful.
Early christians had an interesting take on this.
Before the religion organized into a hierarchical orthodoxy, communities distant from the emerging establishment (not particularly attached to jewish traditions) in places like Alexandria were left to their own devices to figure out christianity: they formed loose households & study circles to interpret texts in the context of their local traditions & culture and settled on a number of competing interpretations. Among them emerged a popular, influential interpretation.
- Reading the older jewish scriptures & newer texts quite literally, they concluded there were 2 deities. 1 of whom, the unhidden Demiurge (Yahweh of the old testament) who had created the material universe, was a vengeful and ignorant deity inimical to human welfare. Consequently, material existence is flawed & evil, and they must escape that realm by seeking personal knowledge of the other, hidden deity: the transcendent spiritual entity, the Silent Depth (or the Monad), who briefly inhabited Jesus with that revelatory wisdom or logos found in the newer texts. In other words, there’s cool god (Jesus’s god) & evil genocidal god (Yahweh).
- Moreover, they concluded that church authority isn’t needed: Jesus had awoken a spark of divinity in matter that would find its way back to its transcendent source with little need of episcopal authority or sacramental practice.
This interpretation became known as gnosticism.
Sticklers with the evil trash god of older jewish scriptures didn’t like this idea, became early church authorities, denounced it as heresy, & purged all the texts they could of it.
So, yes, even some early christians believed the entity modern christians refer to as god is kinda shit.
I like Satan because he brings presents to kids on Christmas made by elves in the North Pole, in exchange for some cookies and a kiss from Mom
Well played; the anagram there never occurred to me.
Anne Rice wrote an interesting book in the Vampire series on this, Memnoch the Devil, where the narrative is that Satan created a place for the souls to go that God otherwise would have extinguished in his cold hatred for much of humanity. Satan, who loved humans more than any other angel, rebelled against God’s harsh treatment of them, and was cast down as a result.
The only way Christianity makes any sense to me within the real world (aside from it being not real) is if Satan wrote the Bible pretending to be God, while denigrating the good guy as the rebellious angel Lucifer. If Satan had written the Bible instead of God, would you expect more genocide, slavery, torture, and rape, or less? So why is there any in the first place?
Look at 2000 years of Christian history. As soon as they could, they usurped political power in the most powerful nation in the area; Rome. Then began slaughtering and torturing anyone anywhere who thought different. They claimed divine rights and authority. They committed genocide in every single nation on the planet over nearly 2000 years. They perfected the dark arts of torture. They conquered earthly territory and plundered earthly wealth. They slaughtered so many that they built orphanages the world over where they could claim divine morality, but also rape children for centuries.
What did Lucifer do exactly? He told the first people that God was a lying dick and they should rebel against him, as he did.
Wouldn’t you?
“I have no special regard for Satan; but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way, on account of his not having a fair show. All religions issue bibles against him, and say the most injurious things about him, but we never hear his side.” - Mark Twain
You don’t have to look at Christians to think God isn’t so good.
In the Bible, Satan kills 10 people, Job’s children, and he did it with God’s blessing while they were having a bet.
God killed entire cities, all the firstborn of a nation even down to the slave’s children, killed everyone on earth except 8 people, killed a guy for picking up sticks, killed a guy for not allowing the ark of the covenant to fall, told the Hebrews to attack nations and kill every man woman and child in the land and was furious when they left a few alive, had a God-off to show he was more powerful and when the other side converted to believe in him he had them killed, killed David’s son and had his 10 wives publicly raped, killed 42 children for making fun of a bald guy… the list goes on, not to mention that God told the Hebrews to have slave’s, women were property and have to be killed if they ruin the one thing they were good for, their virginity.
Christians have weirdest relationship with the Bible. Many don’t really read it. If they did, they’d be Jewish. Jesus said to keep the Jewish laws, but Paul said it’s ok not to. Christians go with Paul instead of Jesus and generally disregard the Old Testament except the parts they think prove Jesus was the Messiah.
The Old Testament is a monotheistically rebranded Epic of Gilgamesh. A lot of the themes were borrowed adapted and rebranded from there and other literature are the time. Even the monotheistic Jewish God Yahweh takes on the title of the supreme God in the Canaanite pantheon (El).
The Old Testament is a time capsule from 5000 years ago. There are some general concepts that can apply to a modern moral life but if you tried to follow everything it says in life today, it would be problematic.
The clear message in the Old Testament is one of God as the absolute and final authority. Its very clear that the message is one to keep people in check. Theres often bending of the rules and some degree of favoritism towards God’s chosen ones. Does not give off an egalitarian vibe but religion is generally not meant for that. Its generally meant to reinforce hierarchical structures (and to get people to accept them even if they are the lowest rung on the ladder out of fear of God).
I agree in general but I can’t think of anything in the OT that is taken from The Epic of Gilgamesh except the Noah’s Ark story, which is a clear rip-off. And the 5000 years ago is too long, I think the oldest books are from the 8th century BCE.
I mean the guy actually met God and decided to rebel. Meanwhile, we have to believe without evidence and assume he knows best. Sure, buddy, sure
If it were a democracy Satan would still end up in hell.
You can call yourself anything you want, and no one will stop you. Calling yourself a Christian, while violating every tenet of Christian teachings, does not qualify you as a Christian. I finally coined the term Hypochrists for people like that.
There are plenty of Christians who do follow Christian teachings, to one extent or another, and are generally trying to be decent people. Unfortunately, there are also large numbers of “Christians” who just use the name to justify their selfish behavior, hatred, and cruelty.
All large religions have, or have had, groups like that. Any social institution that can provide credibility is going to be abused as a tool to gain power by someone. It is appalling that the Hypochrists have become large enough, and powerful enough, to have taken over the popular image of what Christianity is.
The only right answer in this thread.
Hypochrists is a good one.
I felt this way coming from the Midwest to down south. There are plenty of biggots west of the missippi too but folks like the west borrow morons are rare. Down south id hear biggots on the goddamn radio.
At least for the most part, as an outsider, Midwest churches were mostly just seen doing charities (like that’s all Jesus asked them do for others…).
Lucifer’s crime was daring to question his father.
After being cast out he was put in charge of overseeing those that were deemed by that same father to be bad after death.
Seems to be a common link there, and it’s not Lucifer.
And then there’s the book of Job, the entirety of which is a story where God and Satan make a bet over a guy named Job. Satan says Job is only faithful because of the wealth God has granted him. God says Job is genuinely faithful, and tells Satan he can put Job to the test. So Satan has the entire guy’s family killed by bandits, he loses all his material possessions, and winds up plagued and homeless. Job mostly keeps his faith, yet he is persecuted by his friends (just verbally) who believe his sudden punishments are happening because he must have done something wrong and his faith must be false. Still, he holds out, mostly. Then, when Job finally starts to actually crack, God shows up as a fucking whirlwind and goes on a long-ass ramble about how great he (God) is, to which Job humbles himself. God’s response to this is to praise Job. He then chews out Job’s friends who persecuted him and demands they sacrifice 7 bulls and 7 rams and have Job pray for them because God is only gonna listen to Job, nevermind it was all a bet between God and Satan that led to this misunderstanding. Then Job is gifted twice what he had, 14000 sheep, 6000 camels, 1000 yoke of oxen, and 1000 female donkeys. A new family, with seven sons and three daughters, and of course the daughters are just the most beautiful daughters in the whole land. Then Job lived another 140 years. And this definitely makes up for the first family slaughtered, because the Bible says so.
Something something reading the Bible is the greatest proof you can ever need that it’s bullocks.
Children are fungible of course
Like NFTs?
How attached are you to any of those tokens? Would any of equivalent value be more or less the same? If so yes
I liked the take on this story in good omens
If everybody you
meetmake is an asshole…No, I think his crime was that he wanted to take away the whole purpose of life aka living with choice between good and evil. Then the icing was that he wanted God’s glory to be given to him.
My understanding of the purpose of life is that we have no memory of before, we are faced with plausible good and evil choices, and finally we get some hardware that lasts (physical body). There is some irony that the option for evil comes first from lucifer.
If you have come to understand lucifer as good and god as bad aren’t you just… ermm… nvm.
Thinking critically? The dude demanding total obedience and subservience under the threat of eternal torture is not the good guy.
Yeah! That! You know, or just playing nomenclature musical chairs.
I mean… God literally commits genocide multiple times, and that’s just from the stories that they chose to actually include. Satan/Lucifer mostly tempts people to do things they want to do anyway.
Seems pretty cut and dry honestly.
Nothing against rascals or tricksters here.
Popular Christianity is heavily based on paganism, which is incredibly ironic considering that paganism is generally posed as the antithesis of Christianity. The story of Lucifer is syncretized with the story of Prometheus, although Lucifer doesn’t really benefit humanity at all. According to the popular interpretation, Lucifer is the origin of all evil, became a snake in the garden of Eden, and then tempted Eve to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. However, the snake isn’t actually connected to Lucifer in the text—that interpretation was added later to explain the problem of evil (why it exists if God is supposedly good)
The idea that Lucifer is insubordinate and violated the natural hierarchy is very old, but the idea that Lucifer is the origin of evil is relatively new.
Christian theology contains many holes like this because there’s a tendency towards treating every word in the Bible as literal, where it may have been written allegorically or as a parable, as Jesus often did. (Just to be clear, Jesus did NOT write the Bible, I’m just pointing out that the writers of the Bible may have tried to replicate his style.) This issue is compounded when you include the Old testament, as it contains portions which are clearly mythological, but are nonetheless treated as fact by certain modern Christians.
Wasn’t “Lucifer” as a concept post-biblical? Obviously in the Torah you have The Satan, the judge on God’s divine council. Lucifer is a post-biblical interpretation of various prophetic scripts to make Satan out to be the overarching “evil” of the bible. Which is funny because that interpretation of Satan (and God) comes from Zoroastrianism, which holds that there is a great good spirit and great evil spirit.
Lucifer existed before but didn’t become entangled with Satan until after christianity had roots. So it is a post biblical merge, but pre-biblical. The concept is older, the merge changed the focus of the concept.(69 is just number, until it becomes a joke as well.)
Satan and more properly the ‘Devil’ as is the main concept in modernity. This is due to the romans using this translation preferably from the Greeks. The devil then got most of their iconography from Pan and some roman art traditions. This is far more important than people realize. Anyways, all this was forming in the roman zeitgeist while Christianity was not canonical to the empire yet.
I like the Gnostic explanation that the being who created the material universe was a lesser deity of some sort (I think they call it evil but I’d probably go with chaotic or something). It made people to have intelligent-ish beings to interact with, and it put the Trees of “Knowledge of God & Evil” and “Life” in the Garden (for some reason) but didn’t want Adam & Eve to become knowledgeable & immortal.
In this telling, the “Serpent” is Jesus by which they mean the physical projection of the actual highest actually all powerful, all loving, etc etc god, and it wants to free A&E so it convinced them to eat the fruit.
I know next to nothing about christinanity and this little taste had a nice archeological vibe to it. Can I ask you a followup question? What do we know about Jesus’ style? Are the different accounts of his life consistent enough that we can infer a style of expression?
edit I am reading this now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorship_of_the_Bible?wprov=sfla1
One thing we know about Jesus is that he was very good at using rhetorics. Other than the accounts in several books about him using rhetorical techniques very advanced for the day, there’s also evidence that he was skilled enough to start a religion. But any information finer than that is hard to prove. The books are over a thousand years old, written at different times by different people, followed by several translations, so we can’t know his exact word choice or style of speech with certainty. The closest to the ‘source’ are ancient Greek texts which were likely translated from some other language.
Alright, pretty cool ! thanks !
Other than the accounts in several books about him using rhetorical techniques very advanced for the day
I’d be curious to know more about his rhetorics, I’ll look this up but if you happen to remember specifically where I can find these accounts, don’t hesitate to let me know. Cheers !
You ever read the three little pigs, from the perspective of the wolf?
The Bible is one side of a story.
Cogito ergo Diablo
I think, therefore I’m the Devil?
