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The Devil

fitz0

I'm writing a dissertation at the moment and the subject is comparable to the devil in the Judeo-Christian myths and it got me thinking about yet another of the inconsistencies of Christianity.

To be straight, Satan was the most powerful angel. He rebelled against God (I'm not sure of the nature of this rebellion) and was cast out. This is my understanding of it. It occurred to me, why was Satan given a promotion while simultaneously being "cast out"? By promotion I mean that he was given his own domain (Hell) and free reign to pervert God's rule.

So instead of being punished for his rebellion, he was pretty much rewarded and tolerated to continue his evil ways. Why would an all powerful being allow a rival to set up shop and share the spotlight with him when he has the power to just erase his mistake? Usually god and the devil are portrayed on a fairly equal footing, locked in an eternal battle. It just seems like unnecessary drama for drama's sake.

I realise that most here aren't bothered by this as there are so many more holes in the story but the ridiculousness of some like this just confuses me no end.

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GLaDOS

Surely by punishing "sinners" he is doing gods work? Maybe the patched things up.

Knasher

http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Satan
Pretty interesting page on the subject.

Delirium

Does Satan punish the wicked? I thought the punishment was that the wicked wouldn't be allowed to be in Gods presence (i.e. Heaven).

Are there any references to Satan actually punishing sinners? I certainly don't remember any priest making such a statement at any of the Masses I went to.

fitz0

Knasher wrote: »

http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Satan
Pretty interesting page on the subject.

That is a pretty interesting page. How do people not see through such blatant revisionism? I mean in fiction a bad retcon is instantly seen through so why do people not look at this and say "Hey, they clearly just made this up around then."

I really wonder sometimes.

GLaDOS

koth wrote: »

Does Satan punish the wicked? I thought the punishment was that the wicked wouldn't be allowed to be in Gods presence (i.e. Heaven).

Are there any references to Satan actually punishing sinners? I certainly don't remember any priest making such a statement at any of the Masses I went to.

You could be right, I've never looked into the matter in any great detail

Knasher

fitz0 wrote: »

That is a pretty interesting page. How do people not see through such blatant revisionism? I mean in fiction a bad retcon is instantly seen through so why do people not look at this and say "Hey, they clearly just made this up around then."

I really wonder sometimes.

Delirium

ScienceNerd wrote: »

You could be right, I've never looked into the matter in any great detail

me neither. It's just stuff I remember through osmosis due to being dragged to Mass every Sunday until I was 16 :P

Sonics2k

fitz0 wrote: »

That is a pretty interesting page. How do people not see through such blatant revisionism? I mean in fiction a bad retcon is instantly seen through so why do people not look at this and say "Hey, they clearly just made this up around then."

I really wonder sometimes.

Christianity is one giant ret-con.

They even removed Lilith from the Old Testament and a crap load more over the centuries.

On-topic. The basic jist of Satan is this (to my understanding).
Lucifer (meaning the Shining one) was the top Angel in the beginning, however, when God created Humans he grew to hate them, and be jealous of the love they received from God. After all, he had served God without question for all time. Some stories also claim he was angry than Humans were able to feel a wider range of feelings and even sexuality, something the Angels could not.

Lucifer wanted equality, raised up an army of others who agreed with him and fought against God to be basically treated as an equal to God.

Obviously he lost, and was cast down to Hell where he was set with the eternal task of torturing the damned and Scientologists.

Thats it in a nutshell really, I'd go into more detail but I'm sure someone else can expand a bit more

Logic wise, it did always bother me that Lucifer would get a "promotion" instead of being simply destroyed, but I guess running Heaven and Hell would be far to complicated for God.

Galvasean

Did God not still have some love for Lucifer, hence the not destroying him bit?

Hobbes

Comic book Lucifer series defined him as

gods conscience which he had removed so he could be a dick to others

. Although in that and Hellblazer series, Lucifer and the Devil were two separate entities.

Jin En Mok were scarier imho.

housetypeb

Something that always struck me as odd was the fact that god is meant to be this all powerful all knowing deity -and yet, one of his main angels was under the impression that he was beatable.

Sonics2k

housetypeb wrote: »

Something that always struck me as odd was the fact that god is meant to be this all powerful all knowing deity -and yet, one of his main angels was under the impression that he was beatable.

This is why Satanists annoy me.

marienbad

I must be living in Old World -1 as I had never heard of ret-con until now , I looked it up in Wiki , what an absolutely brilliant concept is my first impression , but on second thoughts it is like modern movies than never really end just in case a sequel can be made.

I can see though how it really is a boon to our religious brethren.

Just going back to the original op. - Lucifer may have been the most powerful angel , but there are nine orders of angel of which angels are the lowest. They really are the street cleaners of the celestial universe.

There are three groups of three in the following order ( according to Thomas Aquinas if memory serves) Seraphim, Cherubim,Thrones-Dominions,virtues,Powers,-Principalities,Archangels,Angels.

So Lucifer was a the bottom of the totem and hell to him and the other fallen angels is to never see the face of God again.

How we see satan is coloured by Milton whereas a better representation is Dante where Lucifer is in the 9th circle of hell permanently encased in ice , as ugly as he once was beautiful , as bestial as he once was angelic.

jill_valentine

A lot of our ideas about Lucifer come from the Divine Comedy, rather than any religious text as such. The question of whether the Devil is powerful enough to actually defy God and run hell under his own steam, or whether he's operating under a kind of license from God, is an ongoing theological debate that's troubled scholars for a long, long time.

Galvasean

jill_valentine wrote: »

A lot of our ideas about Lucifer come from the Divine Comedy, rather than any religious text as such. The question of whether the Devil is powerful enough to actually defy God and run hell under his own steam, or whether he's operating under a kind of license from God, is an ongoing theological debate that's troubled scholars for a long, long time.

Love being atheist, don't have to be overly troubled by such shyte.

marienbad

jill_valentine wrote: »

A lot of our ideas about Lucifer come from the Divine Comedy, rather than any religious text as such. The question of whether the Devil is powerful enough to actually defy God and run hell under his own steam, or whether he's operating under a kind of license from God, is an ongoing theological debate that's troubled scholars for a long, long time.

And Dante virtually single handedly invented Purgatory !

''Midway through life's journey I found myself lost in a dark wood ''

What a poet, junk the bible and lets go with the Divine Comedy, no inconsistencies there and the earth was round !

JimiTime

fitz0 wrote: »

I'm writing a dissertation at the moment and the subject is comparable to the devil in the Judeo-Christian myths and it got me thinking about yet another of the inconsistencies of Christianity.

To be straight, Satan was the most powerful angel. He rebelled against God (I'm not sure of the nature of this rebellion) and was cast out. This is my understanding of it. It occurred to me, why was Satan given a promotion while simultaneously being "cast out"? By promotion I mean that he was given his own domain (Hell) and free reign to pervert God's rule.

So instead of being punished for his rebellion, he was pretty much rewarded and tolerated to continue his evil ways. Why would an all powerful being allow a rival to set up shop and share the spotlight with him when he has the power to just erase his mistake? Usually god and the devil are portrayed on a fairly equal footing, locked in an eternal battle. It just seems like unnecessary drama for drama's sake.

I realise that most here aren't bothered by this as there are so many more holes in the story but the ridiculousness of some like this just confuses me no end.

a) Hell is not the dominion of Satan, a common misconception.
b) Satan doesn't have the assignment of punishing the wicked. He will suffer the same fate as the unrepentant sinner. Another common misconception.
c) Firstly, there is no indication that Lucifer was 'the most powerful angel' and secondly, I don't think its written in stone that Lucifer is actually Satan.

Your confusion would be helped, if you sourced your info from theological sources rather than Hollywood etc;)

MisterEpicurus

JimiTime wrote: »

a) Hell is not the dominion of Satan, a common misconception.
b) Satan doesn't have the assignment of punishing the wicked. He will suffer the same fate as the unrepentant sinner. Another common misconception.
c) Firstly, there is no indication that Lucifer was 'the most powerful angel' and secondly, I don't think its written in stone that Lucifer is actually Satan.

Your confusion would be helped, if you sourced your info from theological sources rather than Hollywood etc;)

Tut tut!

JimiTime

MisterEpicurus wrote: »

The irony.

*scratches head and wonders if MisterEpicurus knows what Irony is*

MisterEpicurus

JimiTime wrote: »

*scratches head and wonders if MisterEpicurus knows what Irony is*

True - looks like the hour is catching up with me. :rolleyes:

So yeah, I'd be curious if you would actually source...

JimiTime

MisterEpicurus wrote: »

True - looks like the hour is catching up with me. :rolleyes:

all been there:)

So yeah, I'd be curious if you would actually source...

As in, a source for what I said? Well, as these Christian 'myths' are contained in the good book, then best go there. You will see no reference to hell being Satans house, or that he will be punishing anyone there. You will however see references, especially in the book of Revelation, to Satan being cast into the pit of fire with every other wicked thing, rather than God building him a house there and declaring him landlord:)

As for the lucifer reference, Just google 'Is Lucifer Satan' and you'll see that there is not a common understanding that they are one in the same. The origin of this association IIRC, can be traced to the 2nd century AD. I would say that more often than not, Christian theologians (and Jewish ones too) would not associate an angel called lucifer with satan. In fact, there is a common opinion that 'lucifer' is not even a reference to an angel but rather an earthly ruler (probably Babylonian).

strobe

housetypeb wrote: »

Something that always struck me as odd was the fact that god is meant to be this all powerful all knowing deity -and yet, one of his main angels was under the impression that he was beatable.

That's because God was neither all knowing or all powerful. He wasn't omnipotent, just really really really potent. He didn't create Heaven, the dimension of the angels, no more than he created our own dimension. He simply invaded it from a dimension of his own before enslaving the beings he found there. He didn't accomplish this instantly, it took a long time, but once he had crowned himself the Lord of Heaven he intended to stay there, and he did, for a time so great it became all the angels knew or could remember. You see, like all good dictators he knew that the best way to keep the serfs under the boot is to create an air of invincibility, to make sure they really believe that any rebellion would be doomed before it began, that there was no hope. So he invested a great deal of time and influence on propaganda, on maintaining the myth of omnipotence.

However there is always a Collins, a Washington, a Bolivar, a Gandhi. Someone who despite the insurmountable odds believes, often seemingly on pure faith alone, that there has to be something better. That liberty can come to pass. In this case it was an up and coming young (for an angel) chap that went by the name of Lucifer. Now like everyone else He had also been convinced that the only picture of a future that an angel could imagine is a boot stamping on an angelic face, forever. That God controlled life, at all it's levels.

And so it would have remained. That was until God grew weary of the legions of angels he enslaved and decided to cast his net, so to speak. Using his considerable powers he managed to open a vortex into yet another dimension. In this dimension he eventually came upon a species of creatures which reminded him of the angels. Creatures who seemed to possess on some fundamental level a wish to rebel against authority.

So God again began the slow process he had started in Heaven all those eons ago. A process he had carried out in countless dimensions before Heaven. The process of utterly subjugating another form of being.

However God had not counted on something this time. He had not taken into consideration that a juvenile angel in Heaven had not been stripped of all hope and plunged into despair and obedience. One that had maintained a flicker of ethereality, of the desire for liberty.

So while most of God's attention was focused on humanity and the new dimension to conquer, Lucifer set to work. For what had seemed like an eternity he had been busy slowly building up a small network of like minded angels. An underground culture of revolution and hope. He knew that if he could just break the illusion of all powerfulness that God had managed to drape over himself then all the angels may rise.

Taking God on in Heaven would still have been too much of an undertaking. But if Lucifer could find a way to cross dimensions like God did, he knew he might stand a chance of resisting him on the planet the angels had come to call Earth, as God would be no where near his full power in the new dimension.

To cut a long story short, Lucifer managed to convince the initial humans God was working on breaking to disobey him. Thus showing the angels that God was not in fact all powerful and had only grown to be so powerful back in Heaven due to angel appeasement and capitulation.
God abandoned the Earth dimension and came back to Heaven and his full power to deal with Lucifer. But the veil had lifted and one third of all the angels in Heaven rose up at Lucifer's side to help him. Many other angels however, those who still feared God or those who had benefited greatly at the expense of their race under God fought against Lucifer's rebellion.

Eventually the battle was fought to a stalemate which showed no sign of breaking. Lucifer made the difficult decision to withdraw, taking those who would come with him through to another dimension, and sealing it behind himself.

...and to this day the battle continues but in a different form. Now it is the battle for humanity. God in Heaven trying to tempt humans into a state of utter submission, so that he can weaken their souls enough to draw them into Heaven, so that he can replace the one third of the angels that Lucifer managed to save and eventually attack Hell and re-enslave them. In Hell, Lucifer, trying to keep human souls free from God's grasp, in the hope that many who do remain free will join the armies of Hell, so that they may defeat God and that one day all the beings of Heaven, Hell and Earth will be free.

That's what I heard in anyways. Sounds legit...

Peregrinus

Sonics2k wrote: »

Christianity is one giant ret-con.

They even removed Lilith from the Old Testament and a crap load more over the centuries.

There's a certain irony here. Lilith was never in the Old Testament, apart from one debatable reference at Isaiah 34:13-15, which is still there. The claim that she was in the OT and got remved by Christians is a "giant ret-con" - or, to speak more plainly, a lie.

Satan isn't "given his own domain" in the myth. He's cast out from the presence of god, and "hell" is the condition of being permanently cast out from god. That's not to say that it isn't later imaged as a sulphurous place of fire and torment, but that's a metaphor for the misery and degradation of being cast out from God. And, even when hell is imagined as a place, Satan doesn't necessarily "rule over it".

What we think of as the "classical" hell is actually pretty modern. It was invented in the seventeenth century by John Milton in Paradise Lost. A completely different Hell is presented in Dante's Divine Comedy. For one thing it's cold, not warm. And far from ruling over it, Satan is imprisoned within it, eternally trapped in a frozen lake formed from his own tears, which he freezes still more deeply by the winds generated by beating his wings in a vain attempt at escape.

You may not like the mythology, but it's a ripping yarn!

Peregrinus

JimiTime wrote: »

Your confusion would be helped, if you sourced your info from theological sources rather than Hollywood etc;)

Actually, no, sourcing from "Hollywood" is fine.

The figure of Satan, and the concept of hell, have religious roots, but the myth as we have it now comes largely from literary and artistic invention - Milton, Dante, Durer.

And, lest we forget, the concept of "devil" or "demon" in not particularly Judeo-Christian. So to the extent that they myth is religious, it's only partly Judeo-Christian. Jews and Christians borrowed from preceding and contemporary myths, and were in turn borrowed from themselves to create the myth we now have - which, undoubtedly, has not yet stopped evolving.

Fitz0 tells us that he is writing a dissertation, and that the subject "is comparable to the devil in the Judeo-Christian myths". I'd be interested to hear more. Does he mean that the subject is comparable to the devil as imaged by specifically religious thinkers like, e.g., Aquinas? Or does he mean that the subject is comparable to the devil in the current popular myth, which has Judeo-Christian influences?

Or, to put it another way, what is the subject of Fitz0's thesis, and in what respect does he think it is comparable to the devil?

Over to you, Fitz0!

Goduznt Xzst

The way I've understood the whole God/Satan sexual tension-o-rama. (Just do it already guys!) is like this.

God is Just.
God gave Satan too much power, he rebelled.
Satan becomes "The Accuser"
Satan proves that a perfect human with free will could be tempted to become unfaithful to God (Adam and Eve)
Due to Satans posit and proof humans are cursed with imperfection and denied ever attaining it in heaven.
Jesus proves that a perfect human with free will can remain faithful whilst being tested.
Job proves that an imperfect human with free will can remain faithfull whilst being tested.
These proofs reopen the possibility for imperfect humans to once again attain perfection in heaven by being like Job and remaining faithful whilst mortal.

You may ask then, why not just destroy Satan in the first place. Well the reasoning behind this is that as a Just God he has to answer these challenges from Satan. Merely ignoring them leaves those questions unanswered for his audience.

Why not just destroy the audience? Again, God is bound to be Just, his hands are tied.

So here we are, on Gods stage, supposedly running the gauntlet set down by Satans challenges and Gods obligation to allow them. Will we prove Satan right in his posit that free will inevitably leads to unfaithfullness, or will we prove him wrong and attain the perfection that Jesus restored for us?

Armageddon is the conclusion of these trials on humanity. After which Satans challenges regarding the faithfulness of perfect and imperfect humans will be answered and he can be Justly locked away in the abyss.

There is an addendum to this that I'm a little hazy on. In Revelation he is only locked up for 1000 years. I'm unsure what exactly is supposed to happen to him after the 1000 years. I know he is released to tempt humans again, but are humans now in heaven? Or on Earth?

Whatever, as a work of fiction it's actually pretty interesting when you get into it.

Peregrinus

Goduznt Xzst wrote: »

The way I've understood the whole God/Satan sexual tension-o-rama. (Just do it already guys!) is like this.

God is Just.
God gave Satan too much power, he rebelled.
Satan becomes "The Accuser"
Satan proves that a perfect human with free will could be tempted to become unfaithful to God (Adam and Eve) . . .

OK, this is good stuff, but we have to stop here for a second.

While this is a myth about Satan, it’s not the Judeo-Christian myth.

In Genesis, Eve is tempted by a serpent. Later - much later - Christian thinkers have identified the serpent with Satan, though the scriptural text itself makes no such identification. More to the point, neither does the Jewish tradition. In the Jewish tradition, the serpent is just a serpent.

Goduznt Xzst wrote: »

Due to Satans posit and proof humans are cursed with imperfection and denied ever attaining it in heaven.
Jesus proves that a perfect human with free will can remain faithful whilst being tested.
Job proves that an imperfect human with free will can remain faithfull whilst being tested.
These proofs reopen the possibility for imperfect humans to once again attain perfection in heaven by being like Job and remaining faithful whilst mortal.

OK, pause again. This is neither Christian nor Jewish.

The Jews, obviously, would reject any parallel between Job and Jesus. And so would the Christians; a Christian would, I think, indignantly reject your suggested bracketing of Job with Jesus as demonstrating the perfectibility of humanity. In the mainstream Christian tradition Jesus is very much a historical figure who very much achieved something, while Job is very much a literary figure who was conceived in order to make a philosophical point (which is not about the perfectibility of humanity). Even a biblical literalist who insisted on the historicity of Job would deny that he “reopens the possibility for imperfect humans to once again attain perfection”.

None of this is to deny the interest or utility of the interpretation that you offer. I;m just pointing out that it’s one that both Jews and Christians would reject, and fitz0 is talking about the devil in “Judeo-Christian myths”.

I think we have to accept that either “Judeo-Christian myths” means something quite narrow, and most of what we know about the devil in popular culture is not part of it, or alternatively it means something extremely broad, incorporating virtually everything we know or think or have heard about the devil, including a wide variety of irreconcilable notions. Which begs the question, in what respect is the subject of fitz0’s thesis comparable to the devil in Judeo-Christian myths?

MrPudding

strobe wrote: »

That's because God was neither all knowing or all powerful. He wasn't omnipotent, just really really really potent. He didn't create Heaven, the dimension of the angels, no more than he created our own dimension. He simply invaded it from a dimension of his own before enslaving the beings he found there. He didn't accomplish this instantly, it took a long time, but once he had crowned himself the Lord of Heaven he intended to stay there, and he did, for a time so great it became all the angels knew or could remember. You see, like all good dictators he knew that the best way to keep the serfs under the boot is to create an air of invincibility, to make sure they really believe that any rebellion would be doomed before it began, that there was no hope. So he invested a great deal of time and influence on propaganda, on maintaining the myth of omnipotence.

However there is always a Collins, a Washington, a Bolivar, a Gandhi. Someone who despite the insurmountable odds believes, often seemingly on pure faith alone, that there has to be something better. That liberty can come to pass. In this case it was an up and coming young (for an angel) chap that went by the name of Lucifer. Now like everyone else He had also been convinced that the only picture of a future that an angel could imagine is a boot stamping on an angelic face, forever. That God controlled life, at all it's levels.

And so it would have remained. That was until God grew weary of the legions of angels he enslaved and decided to cast his net, so to speak. Using his considerable powers he managed to open a vortex into yet another dimension. In this dimension he eventually came upon a species of creatures which reminded him of the angels. Creatures who seemed to possess on some fundamental level a wish rebel against authority.

So God again began the slow process he had started in Heaven all those eons ago. A process he had carried out in countless dimensions before Heaven. The process of utterly subjugating another form of being.

However God had not counted on something this time. He had not taken into consideration that a juvenile angel in Heaven had not been stripped of all hope and plunged into despair and obedience. One that had maintained a flicker of ethereality, of the desire for liberty.

So while most of God's attention was focused on humanity and the new dimension to conquer, Lucifer set to work. For what had seemed like an eternity he has been busy slowly building up a small network of like minded angels. An underground culture of revolution and hope. He knew that if he could just break the illusion of all powerfulness that God had managed to drape over himself then all the angels may rise.

Taking God on in Heaven would still have been to much of an undertaking. But if Lucifer could find a way to cross dimensions like God did, he knew he might stand a chance of resisting him on the planet the angels had come to call Earth, as God would be no where near his full power in the new dimension.

To cut a long story short, Lucifer managed to convince the initial humans God was working on breaking to disobey him. Thus showing the angels that God was not in fact all powerful and had only grown to be so powerful back in Heaven due to angel appeasement and capitulation.
God abandoned the Earth dimension and came back to Heaven and his full power to deal with Lucifer. But the veil had lifted and one third of all the angels in Heaven rose up at Lucifer's side to help him. Many other angels however, those who still feared God or those who had benefited greatly at the expense of their race under God fought against Lucifer's rebellion.

Eventually the battle was fought to a stalemate which showed no sign of breaking. Lucifer made the difficult decision to withdraw, taking those who would come with him through to another dimension, and sealing it behind himself.

...and to this day the battle continues but in a different form. Now it is the battle for humanity. God in Heaven trying to tempt humans into a state of utter submission so that he can weaken their souls enough to draw them into Heaven, so that he can replace the one third of the angels that Lucifer managed to save and eventually attack Hell and re-enslave them. In Hell, Lucifer, trying to keep human souls free from God's grasp in the hope that many who do will join the armies of Hell so that they may defeat God and that one day all the beings of Heaven, Hell and Earth will be free.

That's what I heard in anyways. Sounds legit...

True story.

MrP

Ellis Dee

I long ago gave up trying to figure out how religious believers think. Go to YouTube and look up "George Carlin" and his delightful analysis "Religion is Bullsh1t".

Mark Hamill

Peregrinus wrote: »

There's a certain irony here. Lilith was never in the Old Testament, apart from one debatable reference at Isaiah 34:13-15, which is still there. The claim that she was in the OT and got remved by Christians is a "giant ret-con" - or, to speak more plainly, a lie.

I thought that the "Lilith was retconned by christians" comes from the notion that Lilith is present in jewish scripture (and quite a few other pre christian religions) and christianity is considered (by outsiders, at least) a retcon of jewish scripture.

Peregrinus wrote: »

Satan isn't "given his own domain" in the myth. He's cast out from the presence of god, and "hell" is the condition of being permanently cast out from god. That's not to say that it isn't later imaged as a sulphurous place of fire and torment, but that's a metaphor for the misery and degradation of being cast out from God. And, even when hell is imagined as a place, Satan doesn't necessarily "rule over it".

Are satan, Lucifer and the devil the same thing in the bible? Are they even the same as the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve? And if they aren't the same thing which one tried to tempt Jesus in the desert?

This was all covered pretty well in a BBC doc called "Andy Hamilton's Search for Satan"

There are 2 more broadcasts mid Dec on BBC4 (see here)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBlPWb_BK1I