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“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.
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and
create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” (Isaiah 45:7)
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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