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.’
I feel like many Christians in America are completely disconnected from actual values espoused by Jesus in the Bible. Republican (many of the Christians) policy is diametrically opposed to Matthew 25:31. No one quotes John 13:34 because they rather quote Old Testament BS about what’s an abomination. Why not focus on the love for others, including enemies? Why not focus on helping the poor, the sick, the homeless? Why not help the immigrant? The Bible specifically calls this out as a marker of getting into heaven.
Most of these people don’t even read the book. They like the sense of community at a church, but it feels like it’s formed into a total in:out group mentality. We can’t be a Christian nation as long as there are poor & people struggling.
Then the Utah governor says something like, “We can’t have people camping wherever they want.” my emphasis. Bud, they don’t WANT to be homeless. The lack of empathy is so apparent.
I see those kinds of Christians as revisionist Christians. US evangelical Christianity is like it’s own religion that does not follow the teachings of the Bible or Christ. Their religion is guided by their political dogma, not the other way around.
Yeah, totally different than Cathlocism which never did that kind of thing. Or any of the other sects of Christianity which never did that kind of thing.
Stupid people are dangerous in groups, like the most scary dangerous thing on the planet in the Holocene.
I never said others were good.
also where the rapture came from, evangelicals.
You’re correct.
Check out “The Separation of Church and Hate” by John Fugelsang. It’s an almost comprehensive teardown of Christofascist ideology using the words of Jesus directly. No extras and no oulled punches. It’s excellent. The author is a comedian and while the content is serious and presented well it’s dressed up as an easier read than I expected.
I grew up Christian in the American South. I left religion in college and faith generally a few years later. I was initially compelled to leave organized Christianity exactly because it demanded exercising cruelties which Jesus clearly opposed.
Fugelsang’s book gathers all of the major contradictions between Jesus and modern right-wing Christianity then dismantles any justification for each one just by quoting Jesus. I’m recommending this book to every reasonable person I know as required reading for the present moment. Not just in the US but the world over.
Fascism respects nothing and if it takes root in a land with the means to export then no shore is necessarily safe harbor.
they get thier fill from evangelical/televangelist pastors.
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.
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 everybody you
meetmake is an asshole…If you have come to understand lucifer as good and god as bad aren’t you just… ermm… nvm.
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.
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
Being Christian or going to church doesn’t make you a good person any more than a speed limit sign prevents people from speeding.
Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason
When we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my own part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest every thing that is cruel.
- Examination of the Old Testament
Isn’t this the theme of WICKED? The “good” people are wicked and the “wicked” people are good. Of course, anyone who has done DMT knows that the insectoid creatures, machine elves, aliens, angels, clowns, snakes and green lady are all good which does make you wonder if we have it all backward.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 !
Heinlein wrote about this very topic in “Job: A Comedy of Justice”.
Fuck I read that as a kid but didn’t realize it was Heinlein. Weirdly enough it was one of my very catholic father’s books
Written by Larry David
The concept of good and evil is actually very limiting and tends to raise people with twisted worldviews. Most intelligent people learn that morality is complex, reality is not black and white, and to wish harm upon others to ensure personal bliss is rather sociopathic and fucked up.
Christianity faces a major foundational dissonance. Early tribalist (in group, out group thinking) values that have to coexist with radical empathic universalism. They usually ignore the development of Jewish traditions, and it took priests centuries of dissertation to mesh both views together. But they are incompatible. To believe in clearcut good and evil, and also things like a reward heaven (an idea also eradicated in most Jewish tradition). One must learn to suspend empathy for the fellow human being. To be happy while knowing others are harshly suffering (aka “they deserve it”). To think that one’s own cruelty will be forgiven just by saying a magical incantation is also fucked up.
Now, the solution given to it is not widely accepted, and is the source of schisms in different Christian cults. Jesus’s message is that of universal forgiveness with radical empathy. The abolition of heaven and hell. But many intermediate concepts had to be inserted to make it make sense with organized religion. Like sin forgivenes through repentance, second coming prophecies to delay the forgivines, apocalyptic prophecies to delay the abolition of hell and other exceptionalist interpretations.
Anyways, I started rambling, but Christianity is incapable to be internally consistent as it is. And some dogmatic views require people to be actively assholes by definition.
I think if a being like lucifer exist and is truly evil then it has tricked these ‘christians’ in to worshiping it instead of the god.
I will choose the path that’s clear.
Such a lovely poem to that one, and it is perhaps more important now than ever before.
Since he’s the one driving them, you can’t wonder too much
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.
You might be interested in Dr. Ammon Hillman, his doctorate is in classical philology and he has a masters in immunology as well, he’s been reading and translating Ancient Greek for 35 years, including a lot of neglected medical texts. He asserts that both the Old and New testaments of the Bible were originally written in Greek, within a couple hundred years of each other. He has a lot of praise for Satan and the figure’s apparent origins in Greek culture (Diana Lucifera and other mentions), and talks about Satan predating both Judaism and Christianity.
Hes also got plenty of scorn for Jesus, who according to his seemingly rigorous translation of the Greek bible was on a lot of drugs throughout his life and during his death, and was sexually exploiting and trafficking minors (the Apostles apparently ranged in age from 10-19)
He did some decent interviews on the Danny Jones show and on Hamilton Morris’s podcast, and Ammon hosts a live stream a couple times a week at Lady Babylon on youtube. The name of his channel comes from Medea, a “sorceress” from Scythia who became queen of Babylon at one point. She was Hecate’s daughter and sister to Circe from the Odyssey, and apparently was the first named person in history referred to as a “Christ”, a term that he has showed at length refers to the use of drugs in antiquity. We get the word “medicine” from Medea.
Pretty outlandish if you’re not familiar with him but despite his sometimes abrasive and eccentric presentation style I feel like the picture he paints of the ancient Greek world during the few centuries around the time of Jesus makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate that his channel is non-monetized and he doesnt accept donations for what he does sharing what he’s found in half a lifetime of studying Greek source texts.
10-19… I guess he’d really fit in with his followers.
Hey they crucified him for being arrested in the Garden of Gesthemane (Mark 14:51-52) in the middle of the night with a naked ~12 year old boy with a bandage on his junk (some drugs and eunuchs shit) - somehow Christians miss this crucial plot point of his big act. All the other apostles were at that time, out cold on the drugs he had given them.
Crucified between two other traffickers too, lestes in the Greek, same sort of people who held Julius Caesar for ransom - after Caesar got free he instituted crucifixion as the standard punishment for traffickers.
They mistranslate it as thieves and say Jesus was marked as a political rebel or something but the mob of people and heavily armed soldiers that came for him were very justified in their anger.
Also, in Dr. Hillman’s book Original Sin: Child Rape and the Church he outlines how medieval and earlier rape of children by church leaders led directly out of Jesus’ pederasty, something the priests wrote at length about using Jesus’ actions as justification.
His other book The Chemical Muse was instrumental in getting academia to admit the widespread use of recreational drugs in antiquity.
Dr. Hillman doesnt get any money from the purchase of these books and he encourages you to pirate them.
“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.
