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.’
You ever read the three little pigs, from the perspective of the wolf?
The Bible is one side of a story.
Cognito ergo Diablo
As a man who works in retail, Lucifer was an employee who thought he deserved a raise, and maybe even take over as manager one day, but the current manager didn’t like that so he sent Lucy to burn at the customer service desk (hell) for eternity.
Well, there’s also Lucifer’s questionable scheme to genocide and enslave all the customers, though that part is debated.
You mean the god that prioritizes fealty and “love” for him alone over virtue, righteousness and good works? One who will give entrance to heaven to a life long sadistic, violent, and self-centered man who repents in his death bed, but will eternally condemn a man who has fed and clothed millions, who saved lives, who reformed bigots and criminals but questioned the existence of God or worshipped another. Compared to Satan, an angel that wished to overthrow this selfish god. Who values knowledge and choice in humanity. Who rewards ambition and creative joy. Who is stuck in hell with the rest of those condemned by the Almighty. I mean, is really no wonder many Christians are how they are.
If you haven’t, read Horns by Joe Hill (skip the movie, it’s not the same). It plays a lot with this dynamic. The protagonist isn’t a hero, isn’t “the good guy”, but has a righteous cause and when God fails him, the Devil steps up.
My interpretation of Book of Job is God and Satan are in a toxic relationship where they egg each other on to fuck with people so you shouldn’t trust either of them.
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
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.
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.
I got really stoned one time as teenager and thought I had come to the very real and imminent discovery that Christianity is and was always the work of deep evil to silence and quell all other true religions. The crusades, the burning of the library at Alexandria, Pope John Paul III sitting on his throne of pure gold, It all made perfect sense. Don’t question it, just have faith.
I more or less fell headlong into atheism of a sort shortly thereafter, so part of me must really believe that on some level I guess?
Seth Ian gnosticism. You beheld the demiurge and stopped short before seeing the light of the pleroma. You’re not wrong, but there’s a few more steps on the path yet.
You’re getting downvoted but I believe you’re principally correct. Except it’s Sethian.
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.
I mean, Lucifer is an angel who questioned the system. We know that statistically, there is a chance he is right and everyone else is wrong. Based on my observations of humanity, the chance of the minority being right is higher.
Honestly to me the whole concept of Lucifer as written in the bible to me, makes me question the whole thing.
like 5 year old me was like “OK wait so how is this guy so stupid that he thinks that he went to battle against god, is he really stupid, everyone knows god is 100% perfectly all powerful”, then you think further and realize literally lucifer was supposedly like the closest angel to god, if anyone has a solid view on gods power, it’s him. Which honestly points to the idea that god… isn’t immortal, isn’t all powerful etc… he just uses that lie as a crux to prevent people from threatening him.
Honestly the story of the tower of babel cements that even more. Now first of all if you’ve heard this story from christians… get rid of the pre-conception because usually preachers etc remove a lot of what is actually in the text, and add things that aren’t there. The story is not about stupid men trying to build a stairway to heaven.
The story as written, in short, man was amazingly unified, world peace was achieved. They were building the tower as an enormous landmark so basically people could see their city from wherever they were, as well as just a testament to what they could accomplish when they worked together.
God looks down at it and says "wow, look at these humans, when they work together, they can accomplish anything they set their mind to. They keep this up and they would be as powerful as gods. To which, god saw that as a credible threat, and so he smashed the tower, spread them all out, and made them speak different languages. Ensuring that they would be too busy fighting eachother rather then becoming a potential threat to him later.
In short, the old testiment is kind of littered with actions that only make sense, if you conclude god, actually has weaknesses and can be beaten.
“can be” vs. “should be”. But yes, the god of the Torah is a jealous god. I mean, he flat-out says, “you shall have no other gods before me”. Not, “no other gods exist”, or “you can’t respect other gods”. Just, none before him. Which says that while he might be omniscient and omnipotent, he’s not the only god who is so.
Much like how the president is lying about Chicago and Portland being crime filled dens of sin to keep people from finding out how cool of a city they are.
Portland seems so cool, based on all the live videos they have shared.
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.
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.
Look into Gnosticism. Eventually what got me interested in Luciferianism.
I wish I’d started with the parent religion, but aspects of gnosticism and hermeticism actually prepared me to begin to understand it, lol. It’s a new journey.
Satan was the good guy.
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
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
