This board is so conveeeenient!
So do you believe he's real or do you think he
was just created to explain the evil in the world?
Real.
We don't need him. If he existed we could teach him the true meaning of cruelty. (Would you rather be in Dante's hell or a concentration camp? Humans can be worse than any devils.)
True, we don't need him to explain evil. But that does not mean he's not real.
Does Occam need a shave in religion too?
Stalin and company were not bad men. The devil made them do it.
Dante's hell is fictional.
In the first ring Sheriff Bufford Mephistopheles hang the black skinned souls after they drink from the wrong fountain after a hard day sharecropping.
But death does not end it. The body is placed on a train and wakes up at Comrade Beelzebub's gulag. When he works to "death" in the cold they put his "body" on a train.
A train to Herr Lucifer's concentration camp.
Or they could be set on fire.
I don't want to be issuing any challenges, but you have to admit we humans can create great evil on our own.
Satan is redundant.
If God created Satan, would he waste resources on redunancy like that?
God didn't create "Satan" -- "the adversary." He created Lucifer the "bright angel." Lucifer later rebelled and becames the Great Satan. Satan is not the source of human evil, though he does encourage it.
Compare it to Melkor/Morgoth in the Silmarillion, which is a direct "borrowing of the Satan myth.
God allows evil partly because without the possibility of choosing evil, there is no free will, and partly because He can take circumstances caused by the evil and bring about a positive result that provides more spiritual growth than would have happened otherwise.
TomM,
True. I can't disprove his existence. I can say if he exists he'd be irrelevant.
However, I'd use Occam's razor and say the simplest answer is humans have a capacity for evil, not some nearly omnipotent being temps us to evil despite our best intensions.
(Note: Occam's razor proves nothing and never can.)
I THINK (and feel free to correct my theological interpretations) that Satan did and does not create humans' capacity for evil, but merely amplifies it and leads us into it. So we cannot say "the Devil made me do it"--it is our own choice.
MikeC,
I THINK... - MikeC
No one can ever corrrect you reporting what YOU think. (No, MikeC, you don't think that!)
I would agree with both the idea that Satan is
real and that we also give him too much credit
for the Evils that we ourseleves perpetuate.
What is interesting if you read the book of
Job it seems to suggest that Satan can't do
a thing without permission from God.
That then leads to the question of why God
allows Evil to happen in the first place,a
question that is never really answered anywhere
in the Bible(the only answer Job gets is to
shut up and realize that God is God).
Satan did not make Elvis. Elvis's roots were in Gospel. Though in his later year he was quite libertine (especially with grilled peanut butter and banana sandwiches and painkillers) he brought great joy as a singer.
Oh, you said evils. Never mind.
My point is that we give too much credit to the
devil for our own sins and evils.
Scott McClenny,
Emily Littella (sp?) was a recurring character on Saturday Night Live's Weekend update who misheard something got all worked up about, say, violence in the symphony. When she was told that was violins her catch phrase was "never mind."
I agreed with you but the Elvis bit was too obvious to resist. Like who thinks Santa is a religious figure. Oh, it is Satan, never mind.
http://www.galactanet.com/comic/56.htm
There was a little old lady in the church who would never say anything bad about anybody, ever. Knowing this the pastor one day asked her, "What do you think about the devil?" thinking that surely she would have to say something negative in this case. She replied, "He's very good at what he does."
ps. I'm known as cubmon in other parts of the board, but that didn't seem appropriate here. I may continue to alternate between these two names in the future.
Today in 2009, God loves the Jewish people, because today the Jews are still God's chosen people, and Jesus Christ, was and IS Jewish
It is SATAN the Devil who hates the Jews and wants to Murder Jews..
Anti-Semitism in all it's forms are of the Devil
I would agree that God loves the Jewish people- and all people- still today.
Anti-semitism, like all racism, is surely 'of the devil'- but we oughtn't discount the darker aspects of human nature in it, either... I don't think there's a child born that doesn't at some point look at someone of another skin color or culture and say "Hey... they're different than I am. That's probably bad. I want to go play with the people that are like me!" at some point in their life. The Devil may be the 'Father of Lies'- but far too often it's not him that deserves the blame for our misdeeds.
Don't bother, Zarm, the guy's known to be a troll here.