Less facetiousally (although I did listen to the great Bo Diddley), I like this guy John Pavlovitz: The Woke, Liberal, Leftist Movement of Jesus:

https://johnpavlovitz.com/2022/12/13/th ... npavlovitz

losthighway wrote: Sun Aug 27, 2023 7:58 am The basic, vague sense of a centralized creative Satan however is patently absurd. If I have anything approaching faith in a religious conviction it's that the devil does not exist.

While I don’t believe in Satan, I disagree that he’s less believable than God. How much evidence is there in the world that there is a loving creator god? Meanwhile we are throat deep in millennia of cruelty, exploitation, violence and deceit on a globally organized, generally accepted scale, with selfishness and negativity being constantly rewarded and our most powerful leaders eating at the trough of atrocity and pernicious wealth. You’re telling me this is the world of a benevolent beardo? Nah man, if anything this is the world of a supernatural force for evil. Evil is power, concentrated and unstoppable, throbbing in lust for the destruction of all that is pure.

While there is a lot of suffering and cruelty in the world, I personally believe there's also a lot of goodness. Genesis said that God created the world such that it was "very good" originally. It still is ultimately good, but some humans contribute to the opposite. The Epistle of James says anyone who strives to become friends with the world makes himself an enemy of God. That means that worldly greed and striving for power are very real forces that we have to contend with. The Gospel of John says that Satan is the ruler of this world. But how can that be if God is supposed to be in ultimate control?

God lets this bad shit happen in order to draw good out of it. While there is pain, suffering and injustice, these are also the spur to providing more works of healing, redemption and righteousness. There's no dark without the light, and vice versa.

John 15:18:

18 “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. 19 If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you."

ChudFusk wrote: Sun Aug 27, 2023 12:38 pm
While I don’t believe in Satan, I disagree that he’s less believable than God. How much evidence is there in the world that there is a loving creator god? Meanwhile we are throat deep in millennia of cruelty, exploitation, violence and deceit on a globally organized, generally accepted scale, with selfishness and negativity being constantly rewarded and our most powerful leaders eating at the trough of atrocity and pernicious wealth. You’re telling me this is the world of a benevolent beardo? Nah man, if anything this is the world of a supernatural force for evil. Evil is power, concentrated and unstoppable, throbbing in lust for the destruction of all that is pure.

Well, I can't buy anything approaching an anthropomorphic deity either.

losthighway wrote: Sun Aug 27, 2023 7:58 amMost of the most agonizing religious pains could easily be rectified by an open minded trip to the planetarium.

I'm not so sure. The reasons I have had for being drawn to Christianity don't have much to do with the natural world but with the moral world.* As in, might we really be doomed to keep repeating all this shit? Looking at planets won't solve that agony.

This thought could equally well make you a buddhist of course. But I resonate with the dramatic and romantic quality of Christianity. The sense of encountering and embracing destiny.

* Incidentally, the Torah marks an interesting development on this point. Focus in the creation story is radically shifted from the earlier Mesopotamian and Canaanite religions, where the story indeed revolves around the emergence of the natural world, with humans coming in at the end as a mere footnote; to one where the creation of the world is a mere prologue, and the rest of the story is about humanity.

Satan however is patently absurd. If I have anything approaching faith in a religious conviction it's that the devil does not exist.

Disagree, I think he's extremely interesting, in ways that go beyond the bounds of Christian and Jewish religion. Satan is basically a composite of several different figures, not necessarily connected from the beginning (he also develops in pretty inconsistent and unpredictable ways throughout Christian history).

One side of him is obviously a kind of Prometheus (with YHVH playing the role of Zeus).

Another is as a wild spirit of nature and sexuality, like Pan or Dionysus. The former obv lends his looks to the popular depiction of the devil, and a Nordic synonym for the devil, Fan, is clearly a derivation.

Both of these have some relation to "trickster" figures, like Loki, but also in some respects Hermes. The common theme is someone who flaunts the rules or bends them to his own advantage and just for plain fun, and who cannot be contained. A transgressor of boundaries and limits, a figure in-between worlds. The depiction of the devil is a mix between different animals, sometimes half-angel half-beast, sometimes androgynous (I've seen Loki depicted as femme too).

Yet another figure is the angel of death. It is suggested that the Hebrew Satan is employed in the court of God as the one who administers punishment (God decides when someone should die, but the angel is the one who actually kills). Saturn/Khronos is that same kind of figure, being Time, the end and limit of things. Saturn wields a sickle, a farming tool, like the common depiction of Death wielding a scythe. Grain-vegetation was in the Greek and other Mediterranean cultures connected to mysteries of death and rebirth (you "kill" the plant when harvesting it, strew the seeds on the ground and it comes up again later). The Egyptian Osiris was identified with vegetation, and he was killed by Set (possible shared etymology?) who is said to have strewn his limbs on the ground, but through the work of Isis (earthly creative spirit) he was reborn.

Set is identified with war and storms, and with the arid desert of the south, the antithesis to the fertile Nile valley. He is also considered a sort of instance or iteration of Apophis, the chaos-serpent. That serpent you of course find in the Bible too (although more as a kind of prequel character), and the motif of creator god of law & order slaying serpent of chaos is paralleled in the Babylonian story. But you also find it in some Greek stories. There was the Python who guarded the oracle at Delphi, and who was defeated by Apollo. The Gorgons and Typhon possibly also have some connection.

This snake character is obviously "evil" only in relation to the culture telling the story. Some kind of ideological warfare against an overtaken culture perhaps, or a distancing from an earlier phase of their own culture?

In any case, from the Biblical point of view it would look like a personification of free will. A destructive force but also a liberating one. And one which no law can bind.

I've asked the mods to move this thread to God/Not God.

kokorodoko wrote: Sun Aug 27, 2023 2:51 pm
This thought could equally well make you a buddhist of course .

I'm philosophically a Buddhist, although in practice somewhat of a lapsed one.

kokorodoko wrote: Sun Aug 27, 2023 2:51 pm Disagree, I think he's extremely interesting, in ways that go beyond the bounds of Christian and Jewish religion. Satan is basically a composite of several different figures, not necessarily connected from the beginning (he also develops in pretty inconsistent and unpredictable ways throughout Christian history).

In a literary sense, or in a cultural/historic way I agree that Satan is fascinating. Like Milton, or even Jungian archetypes, horror films, that stuff is great. But as a real world concern, totally bogus. Not sure if that puts us in agreement.

losthighway wrote: Sun Aug 27, 2023 9:26 pmNot sure if that puts us in agreement.

It probably does!

What I don't understand about the mythology of Satan is why would God grant their erstwhile favored angels such immense and powerful powers after their initial fall from Heaven. Why wouldn't they just make them human with all of humanity's foibles and failings. Why grant to them the secrets of the Universe instead of lapsed and decrepit memories. When all is said and done they are still preternatural which to me seems like a pretty good gig.

apologies to fm losthighway for mucking-up the thread.

rsmurphy wrote: Mon Aug 28, 2023 9:50 am
apologies to fm losthighway for mucking-up the thread.

I don't know if one could expect anything less than tangents in a conversation about religion. I've been fascinated by all of them. It seems WTF is Satan? Is a question too rarely pondered by nonbelievers, because the implications of any answer are fascinating.


On a different topic: from Job, to the Devil to Jesus making a new deal there's been something at least metaphorical or archetypal I can sink my teeth into for all of them. But Noah's Ark is an elaborate, unbelievable circus that seems to fall into the category of "Old Testament Yahweh is a very disappointed and abusive daddy". Is there something I'm missing?