As someone who was raised Catholic, but learned to think for myself I can tell you: there is no way Satan is PUNISHING bad people. If Satan wants to spread evil and chaos he would be REWARDING bad people NOT punishing them.
Bible does not describe or mention hell as we understand it. Our vision of hell is constructed upon drawings of Hieronymus Bosch, who drew inspiration from Visio Tnugdali, a 12th century manuscript describing a bad trip of a knight from Cork.
See you next time.
God flooded the zone
Also remember in the Bible Satan killed 10 people for coming into his house to kill him which is very understandable on the other hand. God killed over 2 million people for the crime of not believing in him makes you wonder who really is the bad guy…
Satan’s house is just a place you can go to?
Yea, you never been?…
Maybe if we knock and brought a bottle?
Proper etiquette.
Wasn’t it that God cast Lucifer down into Hell for asking too many questions?
And that Christianity rules over people with fear that they won’t get into Heaven if they don’t worship God correctly enough?
It makes sense that they’d lie about what Hell is like to lure you over to their side.
I bet Satan is actually a pretty chill dude and everyone just hangs out doing drugs, having crazy sex, and listening to metal all the time.
IIRC, current Catholic view is that Satan got upset that God treated humanity so nicely, to the point of giving us his only son to murder in order to redeem us. But earlier Christian views, and Judaism, has no war in Heaven. Satan was not cast out, is not in charge of, or trapped in, Hell. Satan was the Judaic version of Nemesis, the angel God sent to test mortals.
Also, Lucifer as a name for Satan is a mistranslation. A Hebrew prophet tried to warn the Babylonian king not to make the tower of Babel. He used an analogy the king would recognize, and compared him to a myth from the Babylonian pantheon. The pantheon was ruled by the two brightest celestial bodies, the sun and moon gods. The third brightest celestial body, Venus, tried to usurp them. His rebellion was put down, and he was forced to repeat his unsuccessful coup for eternity as punishment. This is a reference to the fact that the inner planets, Venus, and the as-yet undiscovered Mercury, never fully cross the sky. They rise, traverse, and then reverse and set the same direction they rose from. The whole of the myth wasn’t spelled out in the Bible, but enough was described that it did sound very similar to the war in Heaven, so a translator assumed Lucifer must be a name for Satan. They liked it so much they sprinkled it around in some other places top. Which is how Satan came to be known as Venus/Lucifer the evening/morning star.
No, wait, I thought it was all made up fairy tales intended to intimidate and control people.
I mean yeah, if we’re being real it’s all just a load of shit to give people something to fear so they have some reason to not rape and steal and murder so much.
God cast Lucifer down into Hell for asking too many questions?
I mean, it’s a mythology that changes based on who is telling the tale, so…
Yeah, sure, if that’s the story you want to tell.
But other reasons range:
- He tried to create stuff from nothing, a thing only God is capable of doing, and was cast out for this blasphemy
- He fucked God’s Wife (Lilith, the First Woman)
- He taught humanity to defy God by lying, which is the True Original Sin
- He was dispatched by God, deliberately, as a Loyal Opposition and all part of the Great Plan
- That shit ain’t even in the Bible, you’re a heretic for believing it
Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?
And she brought forth her hardcorest son, and wrapped him in denim and leather, and kicked him out to heaven; because there was no room for them in hell.
Fine, I will watch Belzeboss again. It’s been more than a week, anyway.
This is why they don’t want people reading. Literacy will have you picking apart common narratives and questioning interpretations of the bullshit those in power have spoon fed you your entire life.
The fact it was edited down to condone owning people is diabolical and should be a perfect reason to hate religion.
Gnosticism coded.
Something about being a jealous god is a huge red flag.
Sheep go to heaven.
Goats…go to hell.
I don’t wanna go to sunset strip, I don’t wanna feel the emptiness
Gold marquees with stupid band names. I don’t wanna go to sunset strip.
Wouldst thou like the taste of butter? A pretty dress? Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
Goats go to… HELL.
I never understood how in 2,000 years or whatever, after all the translations and obvious edits for personal gain, no one thought to change the name of the tree from “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.”
God forbidding (lol) Adam and Eve from seeking knowledge automatically puts him in the bad camp.
Real answer: It’s not that knowledge is itself evil. It’s that by obtaining the knowledge of good and evil, mankind was responsible for its actions.
The idea is that animals aren’t capable of being good or evil because they have no knowledge of the concept. Whereas humanity’s knowledge and understanding means we’re aware of the morality of our actions.
To put it in a more contemporary, non-religous context - you can’t blame or judge invasive Kudzu or Bark Beeltes for the environmental damage they cause because they aren’t aware of their impact. Humans are aware, and should be held to account for their actions.
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Love your response. I see people trying to dunk by just focusing on “knowledge” constantly.
Leaving out the extra words and details feels the same to me as a news outlet blowing up a stupid thing a politician says simply by ignoring a few words before and after the quote.
you can’t blame or judge invasive Kudzu or Bark Beeltes
maybe you can’t, dawg. godsdamned homalodisca vitripennis can suck my numerous buttholes.
A curious flaw in that story is that Adam and Eve were supposed to know in advance that disobeying and eating from the tree is wrong, before they had knowledge of what wrongness or disobedience is.
I like the evolutionary interpretation, that humans developed the capacity for social cooperation (including interpersonal ethics, moral good and evil) and then realized paradise (the natural world) was actually a bot of a quagmire, teeming with disease and parasites. They were less evicted as realized they could do better.
I like the evolutionary interpretation, that humans developed the capacity for social cooperation (including interpersonal ethics, moral good and evil) and then realized paradise (the natural world) was actually a bot of a quagmire, teeming with disease and parasites. They were less evicted as realized they could do better.
That’s not true. Before civilization, diseases were much rarer because people travelled together in small, consistent groups. Anthropological evidence suggests that the average person had better, more well rounded diets as well. Which isn’t really surprising, pre-civilization is literally the thing we had millions of years to adapt to.
Civilization brought about much higher rates of disease, and also came along side the introduction of class and slavery, which reduced the quality of life of the average person.
Slavery was not viable in hunter-gatherer societies, because slaves could not be sent out to forage or they’d just leave, and they can’t join hunts without being armed. With agriculture, you can sit on the porch with a bow and arrow and make other people do all the backbreaking labor, and with higher, more consistent yields, you can afford to hire an army of dedicated soldiers to go out and capture hunter-gatherer tribes to use as slaves, perpetuating the system.
It wasn’t that humanity just collectively decided to do cities instead of tribes, and it wasn’t like everyone in cities wanted to be there. But once cities were established, systemic forces caused them to expand and become dominant.
This is what the story of Eden is actually about. Once humanity became aware of agriculture and civilization, we no longer had the ability to remain in the state of nature that we were adapted to, where our brains were evolved to make us happy and satisfied, and faced with problems that our brains aren’t designed to handle or cope with.
Nowadays, yes, we have things like medicine and vaccines and basic hygiene, but those things were only developed in the past few hundred years. From the first cities until then, cities were perfect vectors for the disease, tons of people clumped together, just dumping waste on the streets.
I’m pretty sure there were still infectious diseases. Bacteria don’t have to exist inside a host, and viruses sometimes jump species. It also explains why our hindbrains want a small homogeneous community and start distrusting the Jews and Romani even in a village of only a thousand. Small tribes that don’t like each other much are less likely to communicate a pathogen between each other.
If infectious diease was not a concern in the bush ages, the capacity to organize larger groups would prevail over their xenophobic cousins, but in civilization we actively have to train kids tolerance of other races and creeds, since their hindbrains are super eager to faction up and wage war on the next block over.
I remember from my anthropology class it was livestock that served as a catalyst for both the propagation of infectious disease and community resistance, usually after a sequence of outbreaks and die offs. But that’s not to say plagues weren’t a problem prior to agriculture.
Of course diseases still existed in hunter-gatherer societies, they just didn’t have the capacity to spread as far. If, for example, during COVID, everyone had formed groups of say 100 people and those 100 people only ever interacted with each other, that would have made it very difficult for the virus to spread. Obviously, that’s impossible today because we are too interconnected, but that was more or less how hunter-gatherer tribes tended to function.
Disease wasn’t a significant limiting factor in the size of those groups because there were other limiting factors. One is resource availability. Without agriculture, what the land naturally produces is what’s available, and larger groups would require more resources. Another factor is social dynamics. The larger a group is, the less likely you are to personally know everyone in the group. Informal collective decision making also gets harder as you scale up, with smaller groups, it’s possible for everyone’s concerns to be heard and accommodated.
The extent to which xenophobia is a product of nature rather than nurture is debatable. I would argue that racist attitudes are taught and passed down, usually informally, rather than being innate. Growing up, I learned one set of stereotypes about Japanese people and another set of stereotypes about Chinese people. The origins of those stereotypes can be traced historically, and it’s not as though everyone comes up with stereotypes on their own and they just happened to arrive at the same ones.
I would say the thing that is more evolutionarily ingrained in us is “Dunbar’s Number,”, which limits the size of our direct social in-group to around 150 people, likely consistent with the size of hunter-gatherer tribes. Modern ideas of race or nationality obviously present an in-group that goes far beyond that number, which suggests that those ideas are learned rather than innate. There is a degree that we have to be taught how to function in a world with regular interactions with strangers in general, but I would argue that treating people differently based on race or other characteristics is learned behavior. Though of course, everyone starts in a state of ignorance and ignorance of someone’s culture can lead to accidental offenses and misunderstandings.
The bible, as we know it, was canonized from the available religious scripts/scrolls of the time. The original work was a quilt of chosen stories designed to tell a narrative. No, no, that’s too Jewish, no, that’s too Muslim. I think there’s not enough wife beating in here, have you considerd…
Any changes in translation are still pale compared ot the section and organiztion of the source material that honestly wasn’t great to begin with. Even at that, whatever it says, preachers place their own spins on it. Whatever it take to get those donations…
And just because one religion didn’t there are other religions out there that are STILL coming up with more source content :)
Satanic temple runs the after school satan project, which teaches kids science, critical thinking, and rationalism. Also, the Hellions Academy of Independent Learning (HAIL) project champions non-discrimination policies while offering secular-aligned values like empathy, compassion, inclusion, and justice without religious coercion. Sessions feature hands-on projects, STEAM activities, arts, games, community service, and local history tours.
The christians think its inappropriate and want it shut down.
Whether you believe in God or not, I think it’s a mistake to worship them or proclaim them a perfect being
Imagine that we’re ants, and God is a 10 year old kid at a playground. Sure a kid might be overall good and try to genuinely help us ants, but a pair of giant hands can only cause destruction even when they try to help
We can recognize that a god is more wise and more intelligent, while also recognizing that their judgement is fundamentally flawed and not always the best for us
If religious people want a reason for why bad things happen and God does not intervene, then maybe God coming to a conclusion similar to mine above could be their reason why
You have encountered Gnostic thought (and related heresies!) The Gnostics believed that the God of the Christian Old Testament was actually Satan all along. It is an interesting rabbit hole to fall down into.
It’s interesting to think of the world religions that could have been, had the scales of power tipped in different directions. Gnosticism is an interesting take on Abrahamic religions, almost like a blend of Christianity and Buddhism.
There were even literal Greek Buddhists before there were Greek Christians. Heck, Christianity as we know it might not have survived without the original Greek drafts of the New Testament. There’s another universe out there where the eastern Greco-Romans were way too busy with the karmic cycle and achieving enlightenment to worry about the execution of some random guy with daddy issues in the desert.
Yeah I’m pretty sure the giant Buddha statue that the Taliban blew up in Afghanistan several years ago was Greek work.
There are also plenty of accounts from (I think) the Abassid empire where Greeks and Buddhists were both present in Baghdad at the same time. I forget why that ended, maybe because of the Seljuks or the Mongols, can’t remember.
And of course, there’s an account in the Buddhist canon of a philosophical debate between a buddhist monk (Nagasena) and a Greek king named Menander (Milinda in Pali), which took place in the first or second century BC.
But damn… thinking about a world where Greco-Buddhism became the religion of the West… what could’ve been, eh?
God that sounds like such a better world.
Some say Jesus was actually influenced a lot by Buddhist philosophy or even has been to India
Who says that was a different universe? You should understand by now how history frequently forgets such peaceful people in favor of the authoritarian de jure.
Turns out, humanity and its ilk hell bent on insisting they’re so important are just cancer. Pure and simple. Terminal cancer we’re all watching take hold.
What ilk? Like chimps?
🤪
Ok, so now I’m wondering if Milton read the Gnostic texts. I’m still amazed that the church approved the publication of Paradise Lost, much less Paradise Regained.
That would explain a lot of historical (and recent) behaviour by many Christians.
ty for reminding me to crosspost
I think if there is a god, a devil, a dirty, etc. none of them are the good guys. I think the greeks and romans had it right. If there are gods they are as fickle as humans.
is there a community that treats the bible as pure literature? like a character deconstruction, perhaps examining god’s motive, or things like that. with absolutely 0 literal or figurative interpretation, no bashing or deconstructing beliefs, just treating it like the odyssey or harry potter
You should read paradise lost.
Paradise lost is largely pulled from Zoroastrianism influence on Christianity, not the bible. The Bible is largely devoid of depictions of satan or hell, traditionally describing evil as an absence of God. Zoroastrianism’s influence on Christianity introduced a lot of the dualistic themes of evil vs good and heaven vs hell that is so prominent in evangelical Christianity that we know today.
The post is about good and evil, which is why I brought up paradise lost, because of the themes revolving around good and evil. I wasn’t suggesting it because I believed it was influenced by the bible. At the start of the poem Satan is trying to reclaim heaven. He’s the underdog, which sort of makes him the hero. It sort of flips the script on good and evil by making Satan the underdog. When Satan gets to earth and decides to fuck with god’s creation, (man,) god is like, “OK chat, what are we going to do about this?” God’s only son is like, “I’ll sacrifice myself to save man, it’s ok though, because I’m just going to end up back in heaven anyway.” When I read those lines, my though process was like, is it even really a sacrifice if he just goes back to heaven anyway and knows that will be the outcome? If the only son wasn’t really sacrificing anything, was he really the good guy? Is holding back knowledge from your “children,” really a benign act?
The post is about good and evil
I thought you were responding to the person who asked if there was a good literary deconstruction of the Bible?
My point was that Paradise lost is a good literary deconstruction of how people interpret the duality of good and evil, but that duality is largely not found in the actual Bible.
That would be cool. I have the great displeasure of knowing too much about the bible.
It would be fun to discuss it in a place where its given the same level of believability (0%) that I carry for it.
How people interpret the Bible for their shitty actions for the past 2000 years makes it a really important book - whether you believe it or not. In that case alone knowing this book better is probably a good thing.
Yes, communities that read the bible as mythology are plentiful, usually in academic circles. Biblical scholarship features a lot of this, comparing tropes in the text with other mythical tropes to get at what was going on.
Dan McClellan bounces between sorting out more precise translations of the original Hebrew / Aramaic / Koine Greek, and then mythical deconstruction of biblical stories to get at the intentions of their original authors.
That really is how we should treat it tbh!
