Wasn’t it that God cast Lucifer down into Hell for asking too many questions?
And that Christianity rules over people with fear that they won’t get into Heaven if they don’t worship God correctly enough?
It makes sense that they’d lie about what Hell is like to lure you over to their side.
I bet Satan is actually a pretty chill dude and everyone just hangs out doing drugs, having crazy sex, and listening to metal all the time.
Sheep go to heaven.
Goats…go to hell.
I don’t wanna go to sunset strip, I don’t wanna feel the emptiness
Goats go to… HELL.
Something about being a jealous god is a huge red flag.
This is why they don’t want people reading. Literacy will have you picking apart common narratives and questioning interpretations of the bullshit those in power have spoon fed you your entire life.
The fact it was edited down to condone owning people is diabolical and should be a perfect reason to hate religion.
I never understood how in 2,000 years or whatever, after all the translations and obvious edits for personal gain, no one thought to change the name of the tree from “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.”
God forbidding (lol) Adam and Eve from seeking knowledge automatically puts him in the bad camp.
Real answer: It’s not that knowledge is itself evil. It’s that by obtaining the knowledge of good and evil, mankind was responsible for its actions.
The idea is that animals aren’t capable of being good or evil because they have no knowledge of the concept. Whereas humanity’s knowledge and understanding means we’re aware of the morality of our actions.
To put it in a more contemporary, non-religous context - you can’t blame or judge invasive Kudzu or Bark Beeltes for the environmental damage they cause because they aren’t aware of their impact. Humans are aware, and should be held to account for their actions.
A curious flaw in that story is that Adam and Eve were supposed to know in advance that disobeying and eating from the tree is wrong, before they had knowledge of what wrongness or disobedience is.
I like the evolutionary interpretation, that humans developed the capacity for social cooperation (including interpersonal ethics, moral good and evil) and then realized paradise (the natural world) was actually a bot of a quagmire, teeming with disease and parasites. They were less evicted as realized they could do better.
I like the evolutionary interpretation, that humans developed the capacity for social cooperation (including interpersonal ethics, moral good and evil) and then realized paradise (the natural world) was actually a bot of a quagmire, teeming with disease and parasites. They were less evicted as realized they could do better.
That’s not true. Before civilization, diseases were much rarer because people travelled together in small, consistent groups. Anthropological evidence suggests that the average person had better, more well rounded diets as well. Which isn’t really surprising, pre-civilization is literally the thing we had millions of years to adapt to.
Civilization brought about much higher rates of disease, and also came along side the introduction of class and slavery, which reduced the quality of life of the average person.
Slavery was not viable in hunter-gatherer societies, because slaves could not be sent out to forage or they’d just leave, and they can’t join hunts without being armed. With agriculture, you can sit on the porch with a bow and arrow and make other people do all the backbreaking labor, and with higher, more consistent yields, you can afford to hire an army of dedicated soldiers to go out and capture hunter-gatherer tribes to use as slaves, perpetuating the system.
It wasn’t that humanity just collectively decided to do cities instead of tribes, and it wasn’t like everyone in cities wanted to be there. But once cities were established, systemic forces caused them to expand and become dominant.
This is what the story of Eden is actually about. Once humanity became aware of agriculture and civilization, we no longer had the ability to remain in the state of nature that we were adapted to, where our brains were evolved to make us happy and satisfied, and faced with problems that our brains aren’t designed to handle or cope with.
Nowadays, yes, we have things like medicine and vaccines and basic hygiene, but those things were only developed in the past few hundred years. From the first cities until then, cities were perfect vectors for the disease, tons of people clumped together, just dumping waste on the streets.
The bible, as we know it, was canonized from the available religious scripts/scrolls of the time. The original work was a quilt of chosen stories designed to tell a narrative. No, no, that’s too Jewish, no, that’s too Muslim. I think there’s not enough wife beating in here, have you considerd…
Any changes in translation are still pale compared ot the section and organiztion of the source material that honestly wasn’t great to begin with. Even at that, whatever it says, preachers place their own spins on it. Whatever it take to get those donations…
And just because one religion didn’t there are other religions out there that are STILL coming up with more source content :)
is there a community that treats the bible as pure literature? like a character deconstruction, perhaps examining god’s motive, or things like that. with absolutely 0 literal or figurative interpretation, no bashing or deconstructing beliefs, just treating it like the odyssey or harry potter
Yes, communities that read the bible as mythology are plentiful, usually in academic circles. Biblical scholarship features a lot of this, comparing tropes in the text with other mythical tropes to get at what was going on.
Dan McClellan bounces between sorting out more precise translations of the original Hebrew / Aramaic / Koine Greek, and then mythical deconstruction of biblical stories to get at the intentions of their original authors.
You should read paradise lost.
Paradise lost is largely pulled from Zoroastrianism influence on Christianity, not the bible. The Bible is largely devoid of depictions of satan or hell, traditionally describing evil as an absence of God. Zoroastrianism’s influence on Christianity introduced a lot of the dualistic themes of evil vs good and heaven vs hell that is so prominent in evangelical Christianity that we know today.
The post is about good and evil, which is why I brought up paradise lost, because of the themes revolving around good and evil. I wasn’t suggesting it because I believed it was influenced by the bible. At the start of the poem Satan is trying to reclaim heaven. He’s the underdog, which sort of makes him the hero. It sort of flips the script on good and evil by making Satan the underdog. When Satan gets to earth and decides to fuck with god’s creation, (man,) god is like, “OK chat, what are we going to do about this?” God’s only son is like, “I’ll sacrifice myself to save man, it’s ok though, because I’m just going to end up back in heaven anyway.” When I read those lines, my though process was like, is it even really a sacrifice if he just goes back to heaven anyway and knows that will be the outcome? If the only son wasn’t really sacrificing anything, was he really the good guy? Is holding back knowledge from your “children,” really a benign act?
That would be cool. I have the great displeasure of knowing too much about the bible.
It would be fun to discuss it in a place where its given the same level of believability (0%) that I carry for it.
How people interpret the Bible for their shitty actions for the past 2000 years makes it a really important book - whether you believe it or not. In that case alone knowing this book better is probably a good thing.
That really is how we should treat it tbh!
Satanic temple runs the after school satan project, which teaches kids science, critical thinking, and rationalism. Also, the Hellions Academy of Independent Learning (HAIL) project champions non-discrimination policies while offering secular-aligned values like empathy, compassion, inclusion, and justice without religious coercion. Sessions feature hands-on projects, STEAM activities, arts, games, community service, and local history tours.
The christians think its inappropriate and want it shut down.
Booooooo Epstein website
So? That user probably has nothing to do with it.
Can I get some context?
Epstein was obsessed with using 4chan to recruit and radicalize.
I didn’t know that, thank you. Time for another rabbit hole
I recommend the Behind the Bastards podcast episodes about it.
The Abrahamaic god is a wargod and god of destruction. It’s based on the gods of the Pantheon the people in the Levant worshipped before monotheism. And every god in that Pantheon has something to do with war, death or destruction.
I mean, Christianity is literally a poorly plagiarized version of Paganism.
The comment I also came here to make.
Yahweh thrives on death, sundering, and destruction. There’s a whole book that explains it without being shy about it.
Also, “Satan” as we know him is a fairly recent invention. Originally there were multiple “Satans” as the word itself means “the accuser” or “the adversary”. The serpent in the Adam and Eve story is never said to be Lucifer or even a specific being. That’s a retcon.
The notion that Lucifer as mentioned in Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14 is somehow a satan or even the Satan is also a later interpolation that’s highly questionable.
Yeah, iirc wasn’t the first Lucifer just a Babylonian king who was prophesied to fall from grace?
and if the serpent was satan how can he be resigned to hell, and also cursed to crawl limbless on the earth for all time?
Well, there is one way.
this IS the bad place!
There weren’t billions of people back then, even counting natural disaster losses.
Well the bible claims that human civilization “covered the whole earth” before the omnicide flood. If we’re dealing in alternate history anyways might as well call it billions of people, it’s believable enough within the narrative.
i mean he’s has killed people for much longer then just that flood that killed all living things except like 100 of them.
A lot of Christians believe there were billions of people killed in the flood because they believe that people lived hundreds of years, had dozens of children and populated the earth in a short time.
This guy, who calls himself bible science guy, estimates 10 trillion people with a straight face and thinks that number is low. https://biblescienceguy.wordpress.com/2014/06/18/4-population-growth-how-many-died-in-noahs-flood/
This guy claims 5 to 17 bullion and has fancy graphs https://www.ldolphin.org/pickett.html
This site claims 9 billion is conservative https://www.ldolphin.org/popul.html
This is all people who don’t know jack shit about population statistics practicing population statistics
I was forced to go to Sunday School when I was young, but I can’t remember ever being young enough to believe the flood story.
Some dude put two of each animal on a boat? Two of everything? Even the things that eat each-other? And how did these animals get to him? He lived in the middle east and had access to a breeding pair of polar bears? He had enough animal feed on his boat for 40 days and nights of feeding? What was he feeding the carnivores? Did he bring spares of some of the animals so they could be fed to the others? For the herbivores, he seriously had enough food for 2 of everything for a month? Do you know how much an elephant or hippo eats?
The only part of the flood story I think is interesting is that apparently they’ve found some catastrophic floods that might have been passed down in stories and used for inspiration for that bible story. Like, there is evidence that at one point part of the middle east was below sea level, and erosion caused some barrier to break, and vast amounts of water flooded in. To anybody who experienced that, it must have seemed like the work of a god.
people tend to overlook the fact that Old Testament God is quite a colorful character. Dude had no chill.
Catharism says that the Old Testament “God” is Satan and Jesus was the real God who entered Satan’s Earth and said, "Don’t listen to this shit. This is fake. Just ignore it and love everyone.
“I will return after this world has turned to shit, and I will save those who understand the real point, and leave the rest of you to reality, giving you eternal life. Then I will return again and kick the fuck out of Satan after you have had a thousand years under his hellscape and then decide to either forgive you and bring you home, or simply destroy you, because you still didn’t learn your lesson.”
I am irreligious, but just saying what the Cathars believed, which actually does match the story of the Bible.
Or it is all aliens. Maybe it’s aliens. Maybe. It is definitely aliens.
Next on the History Channel: did velociraptors work along side Hitler to plan for a fourth reich in Antartica? Maybe. But it was probably aliens.
Laser Raptors aren’t unheard of in Kung Führer’s universe.
This is also the general gnostic view. Yaldabaoth the deciever.
That was “Satan’s” unspeakable name. We shortened it to YHWH.
Satan just means adversary. Baal simply means Lord and as it was translated, some references to Baal were switched to God and others to Satan.
Now, some views separate YHWH and Satan: one example of contention is the story of Job, however, it could be argued that the demiurge was arguing with himself to test the limits of his creations’ loyalty.
Or we are genetically engineered great apes by the Annunaki. Depends on if you prefer spiritual or sci-fi.
Actual Bible study is fucking fun! God would smite people from a flaming flying craft with “pillars of light”… you mean lasers? And angels would come down from this ball of fire and talk to the humans. I am not saying it was aliens, but it was definitely aliens.
that does make some sense to me
Also, Lucifer his wings were ripped off and he was banned to the underworld forever because he was asking God to give humans another chance and to have some trust in the human ability to learn from their mistakes (after Adam and Eve ate from the apple). God wouldn’t have it. Humans made a single mistake and they shall be punished forever. Such a nice guy.
If I had to choose between God and Jeffrey Dahmer, I choose Dahmer. Dahmer doesn’t give children leukemia.
Dahmer became Christian in prison so he’s in heaven now living in a mansion and walking on streets of gold, while you are going straight to hell to be punished for eternity for, like, saying curse words or something.
Yeah but at the festivals I go, there are Christians handing out flyers saying it’s the devil’s music. So at least they have good music in hell. And it’s nice and warm with loads of nice people.
In heaven are Karens, loads of unvaccinated babies and pedophile priests. I sure have a preference, and it isn’t heaven.
Almost. God forced humanity into making that mistake. He deliberately withheld the ability to develop morality, so they literally could not know it was wrong. The omniscient creator of all things must have known he could have set things up differently and how it would have played out. The omnipotent creator of the universe could have made things any other way. Humanity’s fall, according to Christian mythology, was an act of ultimate deliberation.
What a fucking psychopath.
Where can I find info about this? Not in the bible right?
No he’s in there, pretty much all the way through.
Like all things with the Bible, the OP of this post and most of these comments are fairly inaccurate, as are descriptions painting Satan and/or the various antagonists who may be the same or different characters throughout the bible as beings of pure malevolence- as it depends on certain translations and interpretations of a mystical and obtuse text that has been changed and recontextualized by society over thousands of years.
For example - do you know whether harvest gleaning is morally good or bad without looking it up? What about whether someone who grows figs is considered higher in society or lower than someone who grows grapes? These would be second nature no Brainers to someone in the 1st century Levant.
Yup, in the Bible. But there are loads of contradicting stories. It also states homosexuality is a sin, but also says it’s not. And it says you should be stoned to death if you eat pork. And God told a guy to murder his son. There’s so much weird shit in there, you can just pick whatever you like and force it down other’s throats while neglecting the rest you don’t like, like so many terror Christian loonies do. But the Bible changed over the years as it used to be copied by hand by monks and there’s the old and new testament. So it’s all just sadistic bullshit to be used to scare people into submission.
Did this many of you seriously manage to read that without getting unreasonably annoyed and distract by the “dirt” on your screens? Like damn… I even took all my meds today and still couldn’t get past that.
The other angels be like:
