I’ve been saying this for years. Satan is the good guy in the Bible.
“But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.”
― Mikhail Bakunin
Whenever I want to get entertained, I tend to read religion Lore. Islam tends to trump it all.
Coincidentally today read this; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aja'ib_al-Makhluqat
Read the part under Celestial Cosmography.
I thought Muslims weren’t supposed to depict humans in artwork? Or was that rule an extremism thing that arrived later?
“Genesis” is crap, start to finish.
Only in an age of no books could this religion flourish; only the Black Death broke their stranglehold of Europe.
Still tax free! So that’s nice.
Only in an age of no books could this religion flourish
I’d like to point out that Greece and Rome were absolutely packed with knowledge and curiosity… until monotheism showed up.
How did it get from that point to the “Dark Ages”, where peasants were kept in ignorance and only the priests could read?
I’m not arguing, honest question
Shortly? They were polytheists. Christians weren’t.
"The Paradox of Tolerance, articulated by philosopher Karl Popper, argues that unlimited tolerance leads to the disappearance of tolerance because if a tolerant society tolerates the intolerant, the intolerant will eventually destroy the tolerant, ending tolerance itself. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
The intolerance of narrow monotheism is written in letters of blood across the history of man from the time when first the tribes of Israel burst into the land of Canaan. The worshippers of the one jealous God are egged on to aggressive wars against people of alien [beliefs and cultures]. They invoke divine sanction for the cruelties inflicted on the conquered. The spirit of old Israel is inherited by Christianity and Islam, and it might not be unreasonable to suggest that it would have been better for Western civilization if Greece had moulded it on this question rather than Palestine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_monotheism#Associations_with_violence
I know mostly not my own word but should be plenty of explanation my hands are freezing ask more if you feel like it
Just as I thought it was going alright, I found out I’m wrong when I thought I was right. It’s always the same, it’s just a shame, that’s all.
Tangentially related, but specifically the religious people who are sure that you need religion to know good from evil and act morally genuinely scare me.
They’re just admitting they believe noone really tries to do the right thing for the right reasons. You know, like, these are the conventions we set so living in a society can even work. Some are coded in laws. Lots of them are implicitly agreed on.
But no, according to them instead we’re supposed to do it for fear of “bad afterlife” or of a spank from sky daddy.
That tells a lot more about what “moral” means to them than anything.
“What’s stopping you from murdering and raping if you don’t have religion?”
"Absolutely nothing. I rape and murder exactly as many people as I want to. The number just happens to be 0. "
They’re just admitting they believe noone really try to do the right thing for the right reasons. You know, like, these are the conventions we set so living in a society can even work.
Worse, it suggests they have no empathy.
Sure, that too. But empathy is a rather complex matter.
I just can’t trust someone who can’t see any other reason than “because divine retribution” to treat others well.
I’ve been saying this for years. If you are “being good” in order to appease a deity or to secure a comfortable afterlife, you aren’t a moral person. Goodness should be for its own sake. Do unto others isn’t about ensuring better treatment of yourself, its about treating people the way you wish to be treated yourself without the expectation of quid pro quo.
He’s a brave kid to turn his back to a Catholic priest
The gnostics figured out an explanation for this 2000 years ago.
According to them, the “God” who created the material world and is talked about in the Old Testament is an evil and/or ignorant lesser deity and that’s why the world sucks.
The “real” God rules over the immaterial (souls, knowledge, and the likes) and is called “the Invisible Spirit”.
Both the snake and later on Jesus were agents/emanations of this “Invisible Spirit” sent to bring knowledge (“gnosis” in Greek) to humanity in order to help them break free from the prison that is the material world.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t matter how logical and internally consistent your ideology is, the one who is more organized wins out in the end. This doesn’t have anything to do with any currently ongoing political situation. 🫠
You’re awesome. I came here to drop some Gnosis and here you’ve done all the heavy lifting.
Fuck Saklas!
Also, prior to the old testament being in the form it is today, the character that would become the one god was just a minor god within the Canaanite pantheon. A lot of the old testament makes more sense when read with that context.
Yep, Exodus 34:14 : “For thou shalt worship no other god; for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God”
This strongly implies that (in this theology) there are multiple gods if Jehovah/Elohim can be jealous.
It’s almost as if the priest is suggesting that God wants us uneducated to be better subservient to him, and that seeking knowledge is punishable (by death technically).
Kinda the point of Satanism.
Monotheistic religion formed in a dialectical relationship with the state. Obedience to God reinforces obedience to the King. No gods no masters is quite literal. Monotheistuc religion is a superstructure created by the material conditions of nascent monarchical statehood that reinforces the conditions that created it.
I’ve heard many an atheist suggest God is bad for not making us uneducated and subservient to Him and giving us free will in the first place.
It’s not free will if he knows what will happen.
Atheist here, interestingly he doesn’t!
God is bound by linear time apparently since he regretted making man as revealed to Noah before the flood.
You can’t regret things if you knew it would happen and you’re all knowing.
So he is demonstrably not all knowing and not all powerful.
But this does mean free will exists under christian logic. Which you can also just completely ignore since its not real anyways.
God can act. That doesn’t mean he’s ignorant. The book is written from the perspective of humans and we’re gullible.
Does free will exist in heaven?
Depends how you define it. You’d have free will but the temptation to sin is gone. The temptation to sin comes from Satan.
That’s blame shifting. God as the creator of everything is responsible for everything. He could have created humanity in such a manner that they weren’t prone to sin. He could have created Satan in a manner that he wouldn’t fall and tempt people to sin.
Without darkness you can never notice light
This is not true according to the Bible.
It says we are “born in sin” and unworthy of God, only by accepting baby Jesus do we become pure enough for God to tolerate us.
Also, God created Satan, with full knowledge of what he would be, so even if you were right, God would be the source of Satan (and sin).
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” ~Isaiah 45:7
That’s the King James Version, an old translation, the meaning of “evil” has changed. A better translation of it would be “calamity” or “disaster” which God does do to punish sin.
Sure, God had knowledge Satan would turn against Him, but you could also give birth to a child with knowledge that it’ll have a disability. That’s not the same as giving it a disability.
The King James version was good enough for God for millennia, so it’s good enough for me.
You could say the “disaster/calamity” of the Great Flood (for example) is different from “evil” if you’d like. That amuses me, go on
The King James version isn’t even 500 years old…
The difference being that parents don’t literally create every aspect of their child with the perfect knowledge of exactly what it will do. God does. To imply God didn’t intend for Satan to do what he did means you have to throw away either all-knowing or all-powerful for your idea of God.
Here’s the thing that doesn’t often get noted with this story - the Serpent tells the truth. God lies. And, again, the Serpent is the bad guy?
Most people won’t go beyond the “sepernt = bad” logic ingrained in human brain.
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The apple was just sex-ed. They just over-euphemized it to make sure kids could read it, and now everyone gets confused. The apple probably wasn’t an apple originally, it was probably a pomegranate, a fruit known for dripping red all over you like blood, and the woman was the one who ate it. So to remove some of the whitewashing of the story, imagine a fully naked Eve with pomegranate juice dripping all over her body, kinda paints a different picture, right?
In text its just a “fruit” specifically the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The need some people have to identify it with a specific fruit is very strange to me.
That’s very insightful.
So in other words the pomegranate dripping blood is allegory for her getting her starting her menstrual cycle, hence becoming a woman and being sexualized from now on?
I can see that. I had learned that most of Genesis shouldn’t be taken literally anyway. They’re mostly allegories or parables.
See I always thought of the apple as being like Pandora’s box, to mix theologies. People were innocent and ignorant before it, living very simple, short, worry-free lives. Eve taking the apple is what opened the possibility for humanity to grow and ascribe meaning to our lives, to form societies and create great works, enabling the best of us to make and do so much more for the world but also enabling the worst of us to do far more terrible things. That’s the way I always interpreted that tale, as an expansion of humanity’s potential and responsibility
The bible taken literally is madness. Even new testament. If I were to be religious, I would assume everything is a metaphor.
Gonna come at this from kind of a scholarly angle here… Yes. Yes absolutely.
And just for fun, I’ll use the Bible to argue in your favor.
You raise the point that even the New Testament (the half that pivots from “follow these rules” to “don’t be a douche”) shouldn’t be taken literally. Some might argue that that’s the only part that should be taken literally, but let’s take a look at how Jesus chooses to illustrate that message: by doing miracles and relating parables. He’s not regaling crowds with true tales of history, he’s telling them made-up stories to convey a point about morals.
Hm… Made-up stories to convey a point about morals…
Stories, perhaps, like someone turning into a pillar of salt because they chose to dwell on the past instead of moving on? Or about the value of perseverance and solidarity in the face of continued adversity? Not giving up hope, even when you’ve lost everything? How murder is just straight up bad?
Lot’s Wife, Moses & the Pharaoh, the entire book of Job, Cain & Abel; all from the Old Testament, and all far less believable than the Good Samaritan… But somehow, those stories are to be taken as truth, while a story about a nice guy existing in Samaria is an allegory for the goodness in all of us? It’s all parables, all the way down. The New Testament is just parable-ception - it’s a made-up (or at least, very heavily embellished) story about a nice guy who tells stories about nice guys.
The Bible literally says it should be taken literally.
That’s what makes it so funny.
Even the name says “take me literally”.
Back in the day, a man would take an oath on his testicles, “I swear on my balls it is true”
Old and New Testament means “Old and New I swear on my balls this is true”
Im not religious at all.
But if I were, I would believe these were written by flawed humans that were inspired by god, but absolutely filling in blanks with their personal beliefs and stories.
Well that’s why you’re not religious though. You have that thought. If you were actually religious you would believe that these were literally the words of God spoken through the mouths and pens of the people who wrote them. Cuz that’s what religious people actually believe. The fact that most of it’s contradictory and impossible logically and none of it lines up is completely ignored by actual religious people. If you can’t turn that part of your brain off, or if you never had it I suppose, you aren’t going to be “their kind of religious.”
All religions are mental illness adjacent.
Depends how literally you take it. Ironically, generally the people who take Genesis the most literally take Jesus saying “this is my body” and “this is my blood” the least literally
Imagine believing the earth is 6000 years old but that transubstantiation is bullshit.
Its a lot easier to tell that the bread didn’t magically become flesh than to tell how old the earth is tho
The implication is that GOD CREATED THE UNIVERSE
So a guy imbueing a cracker with the spiritual energy of Christ feels a lot less impressive in terms of “magic we’re willing to accept”
Idk man, they both believe god created the universe. But one of them is holding a piece of bread and insisting it is in actual substance human flesh.
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That bonus panel has layers
I got the punchline about God having no morals and maybe needing a bite of the apple himself, but the bonus panel left me scratching. Care to explain to a slowpoke?
Lightning up the ass->penetration being a punishment for sins->priests having a very long history of paedophilia
Also the priest implying its a sin to even hear these questions, and that he would receive divine punishment too.
Edit: Right, and its a reference to the fact priests dont believe anyone should question things, just keep their head down like a good little lamb
to the slaughterhouseOh, I think “up the ass” is just general expression in this case. The fear of asking out of fear of retribution from an amoral tyrant as well as to preserve dogma is a good one though
Squint real hard and take the beginning of Genesis as a tale of solar/planetary formation followed by evolution, closest origin myth I know of.
“Let there be light.” Solar ignition. Let’s go!
They got the order of life mixed here and there, but at least it started in the sea. Adam and Eve’s curse is by far the most interesting bit.
They eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Let’s say they were apes before that event and look at the curses laid down.
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Now we know good from evil. Bit hard to argue animals are terribly moral, having a concept of good and evil. Other mammals are close, especially emotionally, but nothing like humans.
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Now our heads are swole with brains, painful childbirth follows. Don’t know of any mammals that have such painful, risky births.
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We’re cursed to labor all our days to bring food forth from the ground, when before we were swinging from trees, eating fruit and the occasional howler monkey baby. The invention of agriculture anyone?
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Cast out of the Garden, we can never get any of the above back.
I find it fascinating how many factual points they hit without resorting to, “Big god spooged on mountains and giants came forth and so on and so on.” (Yes, I’m aware of how nuts Genesis gets down the road. I’ve read it a time or two.)
If you really want to confound Christians, point out there’s a second creation myth 3 or 4 pages later, which disagrees with the first.
The seven day creation myth usually gets folded with the Adam and Eve myth in most tellings. Christian preachers can get away with it because nobody reads the Bible.
Not sure what you mean. We talking about the two slightly different creation myths?
Pretty hilarious reading along and the book just starts repeating as if the first couple of chapters didn’t happen. 😁
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