A correspondence with a woman who loves me and wants to save my soul from Satan, but apparently cannot explain why he wants it.
If you were selling snake oil wouldn't you claim there were people likely to tell lies about your product? This Satan character you talk of, what motivates him? What is he trying to achieve and why? Why doesn't he get all the world who are not under the spell of the Bible to worship him, using his own name and image? Please ensure the answers to those questions make sense and do not contradict each other, or failing that make sure they make amusing reading. Is Satan the same as the serpent in the Garden of Eden? If so why did God make all serpents go on their bellies and why didn't he just introduce himself properly? “Hi, Eve, the name's Satan, while the omnipresent God is away for a while let's see what games we can play. Do you know any good fruit trees around here?” Don't bother with the taunt that atheism is a religion, I'm bored to tears with that one. If you want to debate let's stick to Satan. Why is he so useless? If I don't believe in God why can't your devilish Satan make me evil? Is that what he wants to do? What does he want to do, and why? Martin Willett http://mwillett.org/
“understand that Satan's goal is to manipulate, his purpose is to roam the Earth and do his best to keep all from eternal salvation.” Do you mean that as Understand, an imperative command? Are you asking that I should just take your word for it and accept it? I find this way of addressing people very aggressive. Or are you stating your opinion? Which is it, order to understand (and by implication believe) or offered opinion? I don’t understand on command. You have side-stepped the issue of Satan getting people to worship him in his own image. If all good comes from God and all evil comes from Satan what is to stop Satan getting everybody on the planet to worship him directly, by his own name, in his own right? If God only saves those who choose to love and believe him through Jesus Satan would surely have nothing to stop him. Your conception of Satan as a force that can take any form and can talk to people without any form at all, directly tempting them do certain things, why would he not simply walk into and take full possession of all the souls of humanity? What is stopping him? By your Christian rules as I understand them God will not take over and protect anybody unless they ask him to through Jesus. I haven’t done that. Where is Satan? I am not a perfect man, I do sometimes sin, as does every Christian, indeed they confess their sins and status as sinners all the time, but I am not a worse sinner than my Christian father or mother and I am quite sure I compare very well against the average of humanity The jails of the world are full of religious people. Murderers and thieves swear oaths on holy books and icons. Look at MTV, those men promoting whoring, pimping and dealing drugs are dripping with blingin’ crosses and crucifixes. Do I need to add what people expect to see if a newspaper headline begins “Catholic priest...” or “Televangelist...”? Plenty of religious people are criminal, mean, hypocritical and judgmental. Plenty of non religious people are kind, charitable, law abiding and honest. While lots of religious people try to live up to their principles only a tiny handful of people actively try to be bad, for its own sake or for the glory of their perverted demonic icons. The idea that a particular religious belief makes people good and lack of it makes people bad simply does not fit the evidence. If there is only one true god it follows that people who think they are worshipping other gods are wrong. Are they worshipping Satan? If they are, why doesn’t he just tell them how to spell his name right? I can’t understand this point, if there is one true god, God, and no others (even if he is jealous and talks of man becoming one of us) then where do the heathen gods come from? Satan would not be merely cunning he would have to be pathologically perverse to get people to worship a fixed number of false but often quite good-natured gods when he could surely get them to worship him by his own name or get people to worship tens of thousands of thoroughly evil and spiteful false gods. If this Satan was a character in a soap opera the writers would be fired. His nature is unfathomable, his motivations are perverse, illogical and inconsistent. Those are bad points by the way. Mystery is not a Good Thing, unless you make your living by taking a cut from the collection plate in which case mystery works for you as good as it does for Stephen King: baffle the flock, keep them needing constant guidance. You say God knows no evil. This cannot be true. Firstly it directly contradicts scripture.
Secondly you tell me that the snake in the Garden of Eden was Satan and yet God punished all snakes by making them go on their bellies (pulling their legs off?) that surely would be like throwing all clowns in prison because one bank robber wore a clown mask. That is either stupid or evil. If you take this mythical nonsense literally there aren’t any other options I can think of, except of course the blanket logical negation: God works in mysterious ways... Tell me about it! The Satan hypothesis is a terrible explanation for sin because it explains nothing. It does not explain why certain things are sins and why Satan has so much more success in making people commit some sins rather than others. As an example incest is a sin. Satan wants people to sin. So why is mother-son incest almost unheard of? Why does Satan have a lot of success in getting step fathers to “know” their step daughters but he cannot get more than a handful of equally weak willed men to want to sleep with their mothers? My explanation for why this pattern is the seen is a little bit more complicated than the Satan hypothesis but it does manage to explain it rather than just explain it away. The Satan hypothesis cannot explain why people who believe in false gods (a rather tautologous phrase) refrain from theft, murder and rape. When they do not know the Lord Jesus, they do not fear hellfire and nothing can protect them from Satan how can they manage to sin so little? And on a related matter why am I not sinning on an hourly basis? Why do I care for people’s feelings, look after the environment and refrain from theft, murder and adultery? My explanation is simple. I have a sense of morality, much of it is fairly common across humanity, and even if it is not actively observed there is the skeleton of morality there. All religions and many other totalitarian ideologies hijack human morality and try to make out that morality comes from their deity or ideology. This is a vicious slander against humanity. But of course the Bible is one long slander against humanity. Everything that is good is of God and everything evil is down to the sin of man or sometimes, depending on the preacher, to the Great Deceiver Satan. Do you really believe that before the Hebrews learned of the idea of a slightly lesser god of evil (Ahriman) from the Zoroastrians that this Satan was going around the world getting men around campfires to tell stories of false gods because he wanted souls to torment in hell? On the 1 to 10 credibility scale that puts Santa Claus at 5, the Tooth Fairy at 4 and “I didn’t inhale” at 3 I’d give that idea a 2. The snake was just a snake. When the Garden of Eden story was first told God wasn’t omnipresent and he wasn’t the only god, try reading the words that are actually there for a change. The Hebrews knew nothing of a specific source of evil in the universe until after the time some of them spent in Babylon. Myths from almost every human culture contain stories that cannot be accepted as being literally true by anybody who is not trying really hard to be gullible. Such myths often describe a god creating the world in various ways and have minor characters which are often talking animals. No explanation is usually offered as to why animals did things then that they don’t do now. Most people are smart enough to understand that myths are myths. I am sure you understand it too. It isn’t wrong to think that way, it is simply using your brain. Some people are not happy with “we don’t know” as an answer and that is why myths are created, to shut up enquiring children until somebody gets around to inventing science. The early books of the Bible also display no recognition of an idea of eternal life. The Bible was being made up as they went along. The concept of a god born of a virgin who died to save the world was not invented until around 500 BC. By the time it was rehashed again by Paul it was a very old and familiar idea across the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean, Persia and as far as India. The virgin birth on the 25th of December or 6th of January, execution on a cross, baptism with water, the sign of a cross, a sacred meal of bread and wine NONE of those ideas is new with Christianity. They have all appeared several times before in earlier myths. That is what the Bible is, myth. Nothing more. Just like Greek myth or Norse myth. A child of seven could detect that the Garden of Eden story was probably just a made up story. Why do you cling to the idea that Hebrew myths are true while other people’s myths (such as your own people, whoever they were) are just stories made up by storytellers who were popular in their day? The answer to that is that you have been brainwashed into accepting that good is God and God is good, that believing in one book of myths as if it was absolutely true actually makes you a better person. It doesn’t. Please take time to consider what I am saying. I am not a dupe of Satan, I am not evil. You are a dupe of an old book of myths. It has swallowed you whole. But you are not trapped, you can just walk away and be a good person on your own, without any help at all from anybody, real or imaginary. How does simply believing in a myth make anybody a better person? Think about it. If it was any other mythical belief except for the one you have been instructed to believe you would not spend more than two seconds before you dismissed the idea: of course believing in a myth doesn't make a person good, being and doing good makes a person good, not any rigid belief in myth. Martin Willett http://mwillett.org/ |
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