Does Satan Exist?

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
41

[quote]PGJ wrote:
I think humans spend too much time trying to find an answer to EVERYTHING. I believe there are things we are not meant to understand. I believe there are things beyond our comprehension, even if explained in detail. It’s like trying to explain quantum physics to a 1st grade class. No matter how much you explain it, they will not understand, so why even bother trying? God knows all, and everything happens for a reason according to his plan. He doesn’t need to explain his reasoning. A father isn’t required to tell his children “why”. In the end we will understand. The smartest human is like an infant compared to God. [/quote]

I think that is a tad bit of a sweeping generalization. God gave us brains to try and figure things out. to learn and to improve. While a case could be made for the finite can understand the infinite. You must be careful to not say why bother we can’t figure it out anyway.

42

[quote]haney1 wrote:
PGJ wrote:
dollarbill44 wrote:
lizard king wrote:
PGJ wrote:
I am a baptized Southern Baptist with a golden ticket to Heaven.

Come on, everyone knows you have to be Catholic to have one of those.

DB

I don’t remember writing that?

baptized only? I think there is something missing in the theology.
[/quote]

I agree, there is a great amount of information missing from theology.

43

I fail to see any religious relation to the heinous act mentioned in the original post. Those people are evil and disturbed plain and simple.

If blaming satan for what happened makes you sleep well at night, then so be it.

44

I just believe that it is foolish to read a book, and even open your heart to him, and say that you know the mind of God. With that being said, I wish we all lived by the Golden Rule.

45

[quote]lizard king wrote:
haney1 wrote:

שׂטן
śâṭân
saw-tawn’
From H7853; an opponent; especially (with the article prefixed) Satan, the arch enemy of good: - adversary, Satan, withstand.

As for his origins I would be interested to put your thoughts to the test.

Well the true test would be to travel back 3,000 years and ask them. Words are merely representations of thoughts, feelings, ideas and Satan mean simply adversary. What is an adversary? An opposing football team, the guy who wants the promotion as well as you, someone you are trying to wrest land from? So now killing your opponent is justified by your god because they are Satan, a giant embodiment of proclaimed evil and hurting them is therefore good. The word satan like sooo many other words, ideals, and practices changes to suit the speaker/writer’s needs. That is why one must be wary of words meanings and intents… never assume that what you believe is what was meant, especially when written in ancient times. After all, the Old Testament / Torah is a self written land deed.[/quote]

although an interesting interpretation. The Majority of references to Satan (15 different verses total) in the OT fall in the book of job. Which most certainly describe him as more an agent of God to test man kind rather than as an enemy.

One is attributed to provoking David to commit Sin.

Two are psalms

And the last one would be your best bet to make that case.

Zec 3:1

Although it is a description of a past tense conflict, that doesn’t even involve the person who is writing the description.

Although I do think you are on the right track to understanding the text from their perspective.

The real truth though is Satan played a very small role in Jewish culture, and it still does to this day.

46

[quote]lizard king wrote:
haney1 wrote:
PGJ wrote:
dollarbill44 wrote:
lizard king wrote:
PGJ wrote:
I am a baptized Southern Baptist with a golden ticket to Heaven.

Come on, everyone knows you have to be Catholic to have one of those.

DB

I don’t remember writing that?

baptized only? I think there is something missing in the theology.

I agree, there is a great amount of information missing from theology.

[/quote]

ehh. I wouldn think that our current generation has lost site of trying to understand the text the way it was meant. The problem is everyone is into feel good topical interpretations.

47

So is it Satan’s doing, or part of God’s plan?

48

[quote]ninearms wrote:
So is it Satan’s doing, or part of God’s plan?[/quote]

Depends on who you ask. I would say though all sides could agree it is due to depravity. The debate picks up from there and whats to define the extent.

IE.

are all men depraved or is it a genetic weakness in some.

is morality relative

what is truth

is it evil or social dogma

49

[quote]PGJ wrote:
dollarbill44 wrote:
lizard king wrote:
PGJ wrote:
I am a baptized Southern Baptist with a golden ticket to Heaven.

Come on, everyone knows you have to be Catholic to have one of those.

DB

I don’t remember writing that?

[/quote]

It was lizard king. Sorry, I failed to delete your name from the post.

DB

50

[quote]haney1 wrote:
lizard king wrote:
haney1 wrote:
PGJ wrote:
dollarbill44 wrote:
lizard king wrote:
PGJ wrote:
I am a baptized Southern Baptist with a golden ticket to Heaven.

Come on, everyone knows you have to be Catholic to have one of those.

DB

I don’t remember writing that?

baptized only? I think there is something missing in the theology.

I agree, there is a great amount of information missing from theology.

ehh. I wouldn think that our current generation has lost site of trying to understand the text the way it was meant. The problem is everyone is into feel good topical interpretations.
[/quote]

We can’t understand the text the way it was meant. Because we don’t HAVE the text the way it was meant. Men have made significant changes to the bible, both Testaments, over the eons. This is well-documented and easily confirmed through a rudimentary study of religious history. That’s why a literalist interpretation of the Bible is silly. It is not God’s word verbatim. What you see before you is not what people saw 1500 years ago.

In any case, many things that were considered just and proper at the time they were written are considered wrong and immoral today. Such as slavery AMONG many other things.

51

[quote]jsbrook wrote:

We can’t understand the text the way it was meant. Because we don’t HAVE the text the way it was meant. Men have made significant changes to the bible, both Testaments, over the eons. This is well-documented and easily confirmed through a rudimentary study of religious history.
[/quote]
Outside of copyist errors over small things like numbers, and certain locations the message of the text is pretty much in tact.
The OT using the dead sea scrolls appears almost unchanged.

As for the NT it is 99.5% accurate
Just ask Bruce Metzger.

Who is advocating a literal interpretation? Not I. I take it literal where it can be, and I take it as spiritual or descriptive where it has to be.

[quote]
In any case, many things that were considered just and proper at the time they were written are considered wrong and immoral today. Such as slavery AMONG many other things.[/quote]

And your point is? This last statement has nothing to do with theology, or our understanding of the text the way it was meant to be, or Satan.

52

[quote]AMIRisSQUAT wrote:
The cornerstone of atheism rears its big logical head again.

I’ve stopped blaming the devil - he’s as non-existent as god.

Now this may have nothing to do with Headhunters thread but to me it does - so fuck off if you dont like it.

I asked my friend Howard Bloom how he became an atheist and his response changed me as well - Enjoy.

I realized I was an atheist at thirteen years old and it wasn’t a choice, it just happened. But no benevolent God would be so cruel. No benevolent God would create a cosmos with such pain. Any God so vicious would be one that we, as humans, would be obliged to oppose with every muscle and every cell.

And, in fact, whether there is a god or not it is our obligation to oppose the outrages and pains of this planet. Here’s something I wrote a while back.

Since there is no god, it is our job to do His work. God is not a being, he is an aspiration, a gift, a vision, a goal to seek. O

urs is the responsibility of making a cruel universe turn just, of turning pains to understandings and new insights into joy, of creating ways to soar the skies for generations yet to come, of fashioning wings with which our children’s children shall overcome, of making worlds of fantasy materialize as reality, of mining and transforming our greatest gifts–our passions, our imaginings, our pains, our insecurities, and our lusts.

This is the work of deity, and deity is a power that resides in us. - Howard Bloom
[/quote]

Like howard was the first to come upon that line of thought. I have often thought about this. My conclusion has more to do with logic than faith, but faith is still involved. When you really think very profoundly not just about what was said in the post above as far good/evil/cruelty etc…I’m refering to how the universe operates…fundamentals that seems to be intrinsic to the universe but yet is not tangible. You will realize that all of this (the universe) did not occur by happenstance…so don’t go thinking because bad things happen God doesn’t exist. He does. Maybe its your perception of what God is needs to change. Simply dismissing his existence based on someonelse logic (a faulty one at that) to me is an easy way out of doing thinking on your own (without any outside influence)

53

I was not saying that you, personally, were advocating a literal interpretating. My general point that the bible, if inspired by God, is a man-made document and has been largely skewed. This makes interpretation difficult. I do not agree at all that it has changed minimally. But I don’t have the energy, desire, or time to get in an argument about it. I have a busy weekend coming up and I’ve been in internet feuds on T-Nation before. They take a tremendous amount of time. I’ll only recommend taking some religious history classes [not in a theology department] and general history classes, such as the ‘Making of Modern Europe’. At least where I took it, this class begins looking at the fall of the Roman Empire, the persecution of the Cult of Christianity, through it’s ascendency. Looks at the Council of Nicea, etc… It wasn’t all about religion, but there was heavy relgiious undertones. And it presented a clear picture of just how and how much the bible evolved and why.

54

[quote]ninearms wrote:
So is it Satan’s doing, or part of God’s plan?[/quote]

How about “C”, neither.

It was the doing of the guy who did the molesting.

Why do some people feel the need to blame other’s wrong doings on fictitious characters who were made up to scare and control people?

Some people have different things going on in their heads. Different areas working or not working, different feelings about what’s wrong or not wrong.

There’s no evil or good “force” controlling anything. We act and react based on how we were born, combined with what we experienced in life. THAT’S IT. No magic or mystical powers at work here.

We, as humans, can acknowledge at such an early age that we’re going to die one day, but why is it so hard for anyone to accept that there’s probably nothing after that?

We just live, then die; no different than a dog, or an ant, or a weed.

Oh, that’s just my opinion anyway. Nobody knows for sure, but it sure makes a good bedtime story to think we’ll be saved or damned after we die, depending on how we act while alive.

55

[quote]jsbrook wrote:
I was not saying that you, personally, were advocating a literal interpretating. My general point that the bible, if inspired by God, is a man-made document and has been largely skewed. This makes interpretation difficult. I do not agree at all that it has changed minimally. But I don’t have the energy, desire, or time to get in an argument about it. I have a busy weekend coming up and I’ve been in internet feuds on T-Nation before. They take a tremendous amount of time. I’ll only recommend taking some religious history classes [not in a theology department] and general history classes, such as the ‘Making of Modern Europe’. At least where I took it, this class begins looking at the fall of the Roman Empire, the persecution of the Cult of Christianity, through it’s ascendency. Looks at the Council of Nicea, etc… It wasn’t all about religion, but there was heavy relgiious undertones. And it presented a clear picture of just how and how much the bible evolved and why.[/quote]

I prefer to not trust theology on the accuracy of the text either. instead I look at the mss that we have. I also prefer to use Textual critics. I have studied at length many of the same topics you are talking about, and had numerous debates on this subject as well.

So I am no novice to the subject, I doubt a conversation between us would be fruitful either since you put your faith in your classes, and I put mine in textual critics.

56

[quote]haney1 wrote:
Outside of copyist errors over small things like numbers, and certain locations the message of the text is pretty much in tact.
The OT using the dead sea scrolls appears almost unchanged.

[/quote]

Sir, first of all, WHO decided what went into the Bible? There were many copies of the Gospels floating around. Some of them contradicting each other.

I am not talking about the Old Testament but the New Testament. On top of the fact that there were MANY versions of the various Gospels circulating, there is the fact that copying of the texts was in the early days done in some cases by people barely literate.

We know for a fact, for example, that the story of Jesus going to the rescue of Mary “let he who is without sin, cast the first stone” was a very late addition and does not appear in any of the earlier texts.

The truth is that we really dont know with certainty the teachings of Jesus…we only know what the Church decided to include in the Bible…of course, then there are the Gnostic Texts like the Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Mary, etc, that have no correlative text in the Bible.

57

[quote]haney1 wrote:
So I am no novice to the subject, I doubt a conversation between us would be fruitful either since you put your faith in your classes, and I put mine in textual critics.
[/quote]

I am not a novice, nor am I an expert. Like you, I put my faith in textual critics. I am especially indebted to the works of Bart Ehrman who, by the way, started off as a fundamentalist Christian, but after having studied the original texts and read the textual criticism had to honestly declare himself an agnostic in regards to the Bible.

I first started thinking about this matter years ago, when I was living in Italy. I decided to take a History of Christianity class, given by some order of Catholics. The first class, the Priest told us…to paraphrase, “we dont know by what wisdom, the Church was inspired to include certain texts and exclude others, but we have faith that they made the right decisions”…

Uhhhhh, wait a minute…I dont think so!

58

Satan greatest trick to make people believe he dosen’t exist.Just look at thre world in general man’s injustice to his fellow man is everywhere.Satan has blinded mankind to do whatever and nothing is wrong. since most people turn away from God Jehovah they are like lost lambs looking for whatever pleasure they can find. I encourge every to read the Bible and pray for guidance in these last days. For God will let himself be found.

59

[quote]haney1 wrote:
jsbrook wrote:
I was not saying that you, personally, were advocating a literal interpretating. My general point that the bible, if inspired by God, is a man-made document and has been largely skewed. This makes interpretation difficult. I do not agree at all that it has changed minimally. But I don’t have the energy, desire, or time to get in an argument about it. I have a busy weekend coming up and I’ve been in internet feuds on T-Nation before. They take a tremendous amount of time. I’ll only recommend taking some religious history classes [not in a theology department] and general history classes, such as the ‘Making of Modern Europe’. At least where I took it, this class begins looking at the fall of the Roman Empire, the persecution of the Cult of Christianity, through it’s ascendency. Looks at the Council of Nicea, etc… It wasn’t all about religion, but there was heavy relgiious undertones. And it presented a clear picture of just how and how much the bible evolved and why.

I prefer to not trust theology on the accuracy of the text either. instead I look at the mss that we have. I also prefer to use Textual critics. I have studied at length many of the same topics you are talking about, and had numerous debates on this subject as well.

So I am no novice to the subject, I doubt a conversation between us would be fruitful either since you put your faith in your classes, and I put mine in textual critics.
[/quote]

I actually put faith in primary sources. Which the class made excellent use of instead of secondary interpretations. But, let’s agree to disgaree.

60

[quote]entheogens wrote:

The truth is that we really dont know with certainty the teachings of Jesus…we only know what the Church decided to include in the Bible…of course, then there are the Gnostic Texts like the Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Mary, etc, that have no correlative text in the Bible.
[/quote]

This is a very good point.