How do you feel about Satan?

[Kongde]

Satan is nothing more than another deterrent for the Powers to use to control people. The figurative demon that will punish anyone who dissents and doesn't worship the Abrahamic God.

The only evil to me is anything that deliberately or selfishly causes people to suffer with no good intent.

This is in line with my own views. I am unaffiliated religiously. I do not claim to know it all. However, as someone who used to be a religious Christian going weekly church, I have more than fair enough grounds to speak openly about my own feelings on the matter.

I believe Satan to be the good guy in the story of Christianity by the Bible. If you were the bad guy and you were writing a book on yourself, of course you would lie and slander the good guy and make yourself look like the good guy.

Bear with me now as I come full circle, what had the devil ever truly done to humanity that was wrong? It could be viewed that him convincing Eve to bite the apple as a snake was his wrongdoing. Perhaps. But another way to look at that was before, though supposedly in peace and bliss, they were ignorant of many things and knowledge was irrelevant. Satan only wanted humans to possess knowledge. while God wanted humans to remain in the dark. Perhaps that is a stretch, but the next statements I'm about to make are far from it.

God practically wiped out humanity during the flood. He murdered millions of people. Innocent people included. God had made nature, bears, attack and maul children, killing them. Satan killed nobody the entire story. God committed genocide with his own creation, despite being omniscient and knowing that would happen. Had he been perfect and all knowing. He surely could have created a better timeline in which mass genocide was not necessary, hell, where the apple was never eaten to begin with.

Furthermore, if this wasnt enough, God tells you that you must worship him and believe in him or go to Hell. God threatens you with eternal punishment for the slightest amount of disobeyment, unless you plead to forgive him. Surely, this God is so egotistical to require such things as to glorify him and cannot be truly good. Why? You may say we were blessed with life and should be grateful to him. To that I say. We did not ask for birth. It was given to us. We did not ask for creation. God made us for no other reason than he was bored and literally wanted people to worship him. Literally no other reason. It was not because he cared for us at the time. But because he was lonely, bored, and wanted people to love him. And then he tells you If you don't love him and believe him, you go to Hell. Humans are more compassionate than that. Satan never once demanded of humans to worship him, in fact, Satan embraces human nature as we are and how we were created to be. Satan does not ask you to kill people, though many people blame him for that.

When you consider all these facts, it can be easy to see why God can be seen as the actual bad guy and Satan, the good guy.

I am not praising satan as I do not even believe he exists. So do not get things twisted, I am unaffiliated.

[SunXia]

However, as someone who used to be a religious Christian going weekly church, I have more than fair enough grounds to speak openly about my own feelings on the matter.

Yeah I was raised Roman Catholic in Ireland (north part but still Ireland) and was made to go to church every week as well so I am quite familiar with it all myself. Sometimes, I feel so angry that I was brainwashed into believing something that had zero proof but then my parents were also brainwashed and their parents before them (etc) so I try to remember that.

I believe Satan to be the good guy in the story of Christianity by the Bible. If you were the bad guy and you were writing a book on yourself, of course you would lie and slander the good guy and make yourself look like the good guy.

Bear with me now as I come full circle, what had the devil ever truly done to humanity that was wrong? It could be viewed that him convincing Eve to bite the apple as a snake was his wrongdoing. Perhaps. But another way to look at that was before, though supposedly in peace and bliss, they were ignorant of many things and knowledge was irrelevant. Satan only wanted humans to possess knowledge. while God wanted humans to remain in the dark. Perhaps that is a stretch, but the next statements I'm about to make are far from it.

I do not believe in Satan but yes the story of the Garden of Eden is atrocious and downright misogynist. Firstly, woman was made from Adam's rib? No thank you. Then Eve was the one that dared eat from the tree of knowledge? Yeah, again no thank you. And this basically condemns every baby that is ever born with "original sin" despite the fact a sin is defined as an action one makes despite knowing it was wrong and babies, due to their infantile brains, cannot know anything let alone do anything in order to sin? Yeah no thanks. Then this is used for thousands of years to stop women becoming priests or leaders in the churches? Yeah no thanks.

So basically, humans need baptised forever because one woman decided to follow her curious nature, such a crime.

God practically wiped out humanity during the flood. He murdered millions of people. Innocent people included. God had made nature, bears, attack and maul children, killing them. Satan killed nobody the entire story. God committed genocide with his own creation, despite being omniscient and knowing that would happen. Had he been perfect and all knowing. He surely could have created a better timeline in which mass genocide was not necessary, hell, where the apple was never eaten to begin with.

So to be clear, because theists often (not all of course) try to claim Atheists are angry with God, I am not because I do not believe he exists.

But, if the Bible is true yes, for all the Genocide committed in the Bible by the being we are taught is "loving" yeah if even someone could prove beyond reasonable doubt that the deity in the Bible existed, I would never worship someone who carried out such acts. I have already spent the entirety of my adult life in agony so whats a couple eternities to boot??

The deity in Bible created everything, then he must have created Hell. Hell is used as a "obey me or go to hell" or "worship me or got to hell" or "let me into your soul or go to hell" and yeah that's what abusive partners do too ie punish their victims for not obeying them and then blame them for not obeying in the first place.

I was taught "God" was loving but the Great Flood is not loving, painting all homosexual men as rapists is not loving like in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, turning a woman into a pillar of salt for daring to look over her shoulder as she fled, is not loving. I was taught I was loved "unconditionally" which is hardly true is it given getting into heaven or hell is dependent on the condition that I worship the deity who is telling me he loves me unconditionally. How unethical.

When you consider all these facts, it can be easy to see why God can be seen as the actual bad guy and Satan, the good guy.

I am not praising satan as I do not even believe he exists. So do not get things twisted, I am unaffiliated.

Don't worry, I think we can discus characters in the Bible in the same way we can discuss Herakles or Horus, as discussing and critiquing the mythology does not mean we automatically believe in it.

But yes I see your point as well. I see, "do what I tell you or burn in the Hell I created" to be abusive. Like a gun being held to your head. There's no "Free Will" there as naturally we do not want to suffer for all eternity.

Your second sentence is one that I think many people could get behind, but the question becomes, who gets to define what "good intent" means?

The same people that have always determined what it means, us, humanity.

Morality evolved from early humans realising that by working together and helping each other increased the chances of the group surviving. Harming each other causes conflict, which lessens the likelihood of the group surviving.

Morality did not come from the Bible, otherwise we wouldn't have thousands of years of historical civilisations that existed before the Bible was a twinkle in anyone's eye. When people wonder how do we know, we know because these civilisations had laws to maintain order. These laws would be based on a form of morality, otherwise we would all still be hunter gatherers protecting our own small families and tribes.

Morality is going to change from one person to the next. The USA is a country where murder is wrong and yet there is now talk of going to war with Iran over Oil fields. I have no problem if someone is actively trying to kill you and you defend yourself and the attacker ends up dead as a result, but wars cost lives and oil is not a justifiable reason to go to war and, inevitably, hurt and kill innocent civilians getting on with their lives. So, to me, that would be wrong but, obviously to Trump and Bojo, its something to discuss?? Learning nothing from history.

Ultimately, we decide what is right and wrong and sadly many say that killing is wrong but then dress their xenophobia up as "patriotism" to justify certain types of killing. In my personal opinion, humanism is the way to go but that's my personal opinion and would not force anyone to obey me.

[Liu Yuante]

Coming back to predestination - God, being outside time, knows already how each of us uses her free will to respond to the expressions of his will through Christ. But God does not unconditionally, which is to say arbitrarily, predestine any man or woman either to glory or to doom. A proper understanding of predestination is that God knows us intimately, and thus whether we are willing to let ourselves be healed and freed by Christ's sacrifice from the power of death.

I have no idea if WWD will ever come back or respond to this, but reading through some of these older posts I have to say that I find this argument - which is not unfamiliar to me, having studied the early church to some degree - to be highly uncompelling. Some physicists have speculated that time may not be something that even exists, that in fact all events are happening concurrently and that the linear order in which the human brain arranges them is simply how we make sense of things. If this were true, then free will would be an illusion as all of the events of our lives would in fact be occurring simultaneously.

If God exists outside of space and time then that suggests that, whether we accept the speculation of the above physicists or not, God at least experiences time in this way, in other words not at all. All events are occurring at the same time; this by its very nature means we cannot be acting freely. If God knows how we are going to use our free will, then it isn't free will because somewhere, somewhen, in some reality, it has already happened. It's like time travel - if I travel into the future and see that I'm going to choose to perform some action in the future, then unless we include the possibility that I can, having acquired that knowledge, decide to change it and so "change the future", then that act is predestined. No matter what I do, it will occur.

And if we say that I can change it, then that also implies that I can decide to utilize my free will in a way that is different from the existing sequence of events that comprise what we call time - the sequence of events that is happening concurrently "outside of space and time", where God is - and therefore do something different from what God knows or is expecting.

As anyone reading this may guess, I'm not a big fan of Augustine, John Chrysostom and a number of the early Church Fathers. But then, I also think the various non-Trinitarian sects got a raw deal.