Lord Satan: Imbecilic Plot Device

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One of the consequences of God's omnipotence is that his will takes jurisdiction over all that happens in the universe. One of the consequences of God being omniscient is that he is aware of all possible lines history might take before there is even an object to have a history. So if a thing happens we can safely say that it is because God has willed it thus-including the fall. Surely if he truly did not want us to eat the fruit, he is more than capable of seeing to it that we didn't. The story of Eden, for when considered in tandem with other Christian doctrine, is pure fiction, inconsistent and petty mythology.

If God wants a free willed people to follow Him then people MUST have the option of rebellion and God must provide it. i believe satan rebelled before the universe was created, i believe the universe was created because of satans rebellion. If God saw to it "that we didn't" rebel then could it ever be said that people followed Him willingly? When they had no other option?

So God creates the universe and gives satan a stage to demonstrate his right to be a God, of course God also uses the stage and demonstrates why He is justified to be the one and only God, He also gives satan enough rope to hang himself and to justify his eternal condemnation in the eternal lake of fire. We who are on the stage decide whom we shall accept and whom we reject as we put our free will into effect we either place ourselves within the zone of Gods grace or in the zone of eternal condemnation.

God is perfect God is right. When we choose to follow Him we choose what is perfect, what is right. God is the template, the true measure. If we fall, we fall because we embrace what is not perfect and not right.


All Praise The Ancient Of Days

 

[Tiassa]

Two titles

Two books worth considering:

• Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. New York: Vintage, 1994.
• Brust, Steven. To Reign In Hell. 1984. New York: Tor, 2000.​

The first is a serious study of the historical development of the concept of Satan. The second is a plain, ol' fashioned, tragicomedy about the fall of the Devil. Enjoy. Oh, those links: Pagels is a book review; Brust is an e-book download that I haven't proofread, but looks at first glance to be in pretty good shape.

 

[ScaryMonster]

So I was chatting it up with Satan last night-such a blabber mouth!- and He was telling me about how he landed his sweet gig as the Prince of Darkness, Lord of the Underworld. It went something like this:

Well, God created me along with the other angels, you know? Well after witnessing God, a being of who no greater thing can be conceived, it occurred to me that I could definitely be greater than God. So convinced was I and so vast my powers of rhetoric that I convinced my divine peers of my case to conquer an omnipotent being. So far so good: I have my legion, the big guy has his and we were about to engage in epic combat! Then God was all like "Oh dear, this is mighty lame of you Lucifer, tell you what, you are my arch enemy and shall be leaving heaven but I've accommodated you nicely with this place I just thought into existence."

In essence, Satan is a most heinous plot device. He is arguably the most pathetic imbecile imaginable. First he is able to find feelings of jealousy and superiority somewhere in a perfect heaven created by God himself. Then these ideas take root in his hebetudinous little mind and after experiencing God firsthand, these ideas take the form of a campaign to posit himself as superior to the being who is supremely perfect and who created him. This whole concept of a battle for God to overcome forgets the fact that He is omnipotent- all power that exists is concentrated within himself only. Thus anything that might present itself in opposition of God in any form, is a farce. The work of Satan is the work of God by proxy. This and other equally senseless and conceptually contradictory examples from the bible divulges this book as a blatant emotive tool for the enticing of the less skeptical minds. What are your thoughts on the matter? Am I wrong? Where? Thank you all.

Bible bashing aside, What do you think is the nature of evil? Is it an ominous supernatural force like in the Omen movies? Or is it a whole lot of small nasty qualities come together to cause a much greater wrong?
I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is, I’ve walked through the ruins of Auschwitz and felt an animal panic in my guts, but maybe that’s was psychological? My reactions to so called evil is intuitive and emotional I just had a sense that something is wrong there.

 

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You're in a room in Hell with Hitler, Stalin and a lawyer. Satan gives you a gun with two bullets and asks you to pick your roommate for eternity. What do you do?

Shoot the lawyer twice

LOL.

Reminds me of the joke about the fence between heaven and hell.

God was walking along the fence that divides heaven from hell one day and notices holes have been cut into it from the other side. Upon investigation He finds out that during the night people from hell are sneaking into heaven and partying and having fun then sneaking back into hell before sunrise. God is furious and demands satan come to the fence and fix it up. Satan refuses to fix the holes. God booms that He will take satan to court and sue satan for the repairs. satan sniggers and says;

Yeah?? Where are you going to find a Lawyer?????




All Praise The Ancient Of Days

 

[Sin]

If God wants a free willed people to follow Him then people MUST have the option of rebellion and God must provide it. i believe satan rebelled before the universe was created, i believe the universe was created because of satans rebellion. If God saw to it "that we didn't" rebel then could it ever be said that people followed Him willingly? When they had no other option?

You presume free will to be your panacea? This just wont do! Unless you care to radically reinterpret these verses:

Romans 8:20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it...

Romans 8:28-30 28And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, whohave been called according to his purpose. 29For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

Romans 9:11-16 Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad—in order that God's purpose in election might stand: 12not by works but by him who calls—she was told, "The older will serve the younger." 13Just as it is written: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated."14What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! 15For he says to Moses,"I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." 16It does not, therefore, depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy.

(What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Absolutely! For I hate people who have done nothing to merit it but have compassion for those who also have done nothing to merit it! That is the definition of injustice! What a queer verse!)

Romans 11:7-8 7What then? What Israel sought so earnestly it did not obtain, but the elect did. The others were hardened, 8as it is written:
"God gave them a spirit of stupor,
eyes so that they could not see
and ears so that they could not hear,
to this very day."

Romans 11:32 For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.

Ephesians 1:5, 11 he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will....In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will...

Still care to defend free will?

 

[Sin]

Bible bashing aside, What do you think is the nature of evil? Is it an ominous supernatural force like in the Omen movies? Or is it a whole lot of small nasty qualities come together to cause a much greater wrong?
I can’t put my finger on exactly what it is, I’ve walked through the ruins of Auschwitz and felt an animal panic in my guts, but maybe that’s was psychological? My reactions to so called evil is intuitive and emotional I just had a sense that something is wrong there.

Hey Scary Monster,

Evil, I think, cannot exist in an of itself. It is not its own entity. Evil is also not a concrete concept but evolves with time and varies by culture. Think of the evil of slavery today and its being acceptable in the ancient world. In all, it describes a very particular set of relations between a sentient being and some other being(s). Now because it exists only in the interstices of interaction, it ought to have experiential precedence because all actions are the result of past experiences and genetic inclination. Because genes are insentient and therefore morally neutral, we are left with experiences as the source of anything we might label as evil. Since experience is necessary, we can also conclude that no one person is inherently evil-everyone was a child once, relatively innocent, used to laugh about simple things, swing in trees, kiss kittens and love everything but vegetables-I remember these things when I hear of the hardened carapace of a killer they sometimes grow up to be...There are a plethora of reasons for developing a policy of personal evil interaction but the response is almost always the same from the majority-revulsion and a strong, unified desire to curb all future damage to human dignity. I assume this would hold true for your experience with Auschwitz- a supremely heinous testament to cowardly obedience, torturous eugenic logic, and moral turpitude, I've seen a virtual tour of that place-profound sadness. What evil is done in the name of progress? What evil has been done in the name of liberty even? Of religion? Where has the love gone to?

 

[Sin]

Two books worth considering:

• Pagels, Elaine. The Origin of Satan. New York: Vintage, 1994.
• Brust, Steven. To Reign In Hell. 1984. New York: Tor, 2000.​

The first is a serious study of the historical development of the concept of Satan. The second is a plain, ol' fashioned, tragicomedy about the fall of the Devil. Enjoy. Oh, those links: Pagels is a book review; Brust is an e-book download that I haven't proofread, but looks at first glance to be in pretty good shape.

You are a saint Tiassa, thank you.

 

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Still care to defend free will?

Sure it is indeed an honour for me to do so.

You presume free will to be your panacea? This just wont do! Unless you care to radically reinterpret these verses:

No. It’s just a case of interpreting them with the Help of the Holy Spirit. Others have interpreted them to mean other things. I'd say you would hold to a calvanistic interpretation? That would explain your hate. But that interpretation is misguided.

Romans 8:20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it...

That’s true we had no choice about coming into existence. But this scripture has nothing to do about the existence of free will or otherwise. The above verse does not say anything about free will in general. It states that in relation to being created we had no choice.

Romans 8:28-30 28And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, whohave been called according to his purpose. 29For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. 30And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

"foreknew" See this is the word that you and calvanists just cannot get their minds around. If the above scripture was to support the position that free will does not exists then the word foreknew would not be needed in this scripture. Now it is a belief that runs strong that there are no idle words in scripture. For the scripture above to support no free will then the word foreknew must be idle. But it is there and must be incorporated as part of the understanding of the scripture.

"foreknew" is placed before predestined for a reason. That reason being that God foreknows all mankind even before they life their lives. He foreknows my motivations and He foreknows your motivations and it is From that foreknowledge he predestines some to be conformed to the likeness of His Son Jesus.

Yes those who predestined he also called. But this scripture does not say He did not call others. Other places in the bible state:

Matthew 20
16 So the last will be first, and the first last. For many are called, but few chosen.”

Romans 9:11-16 Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad—in order that God's purpose in election might stand: 12not by works but by him who calls—she was told, "The older will serve the younger." 13Just as it is written: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated."

And How did God come to love one and hate the other before they where even born? Easy. He had foreknowledge of their entire lives. He foreknew their motivations, he knew their attitudes even before they where born

Romans 9
14What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! 15For he says to Moses,"I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion." 16It does not, therefore, depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy.

Yes he will have compassion on whom He wills to have compassion and He will intervene in their lives and give them the Way to salvation. The last verse here talks of Salvation and as i know it does not depend on my desire to be saved or my efforts at being righteous to earn salvation, but it is God's decision to have mercy on me that saves me.

(What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Absolutely! For I hate people who have done nothing to merit it but have compassion for those who also have done nothing to merit it! That is the definition of injustice! What a queer verse!)

Merit has no place in our Salvation. That’s what makes the grace of God Amazing

Romans 11:7-8 7What then? What Israel sought so earnestly it did not obtain, but the elect did. The others were hardened, 8as it is written:
"God gave them a spirit of stupor,
eyes so that they could not see
and ears so that they could not hear,
to this very day."


Why?
Proverbs 1
24 Because I have called and you refused,
I have stretched out my hand and no one regarded,
25 Because you disdained all my counsel,
And would have none of my rebuke,
26 I also will laugh at your calamity;
I will mock when your terror comes,
27 When your terror comes like a storm,
And your destruction comes like a whirlwind,
When distress and anguish come upon you.
28 “ Then they will call on me, but I will not answer;
They will seek me diligently, but they will not find me.
29 Because they hated knowledge
And did not choose the fear of the LORD,
30 They would have none of my counsel
And despised my every rebuke.
31 Therefore they shall eat the fruit of their own way,
And be filled to the full with their own fancies.

Romans 11:32 For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.

Yes but we still have the free will to love that disobedience or hate it don't we. We still have the freedom to accept conviction or turn around and try to justify disobedience. That’s free will in action.

Ephesians 1:5, 11 he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will....In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will...

Same as the scripture you quoted in Romans 8 at the start. This scripture must be interpreted in relation to that scripture. And both must be interpreted in relation to the entire message of the Bible.

2 Peter 3
9 The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.

Thanks for asking the question Sin.

All Praise The Ancient Of Days