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
That really is how we should treat it tbh!
Satan does a lot more and God too both are shit perceptions to me.
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.
There weren’t billions of people back then, even counting natural disaster losses.
i mean he’s has killed people for much longer then just that flood that killed all living things except like 100 of them.
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.
This is also the general gnostic view. Yaldabaoth the deciever.
that does make some sense to me
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.
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.
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?
people tend to overlook the fact that Old Testament God is quite a colorful character. Dude had no chill.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Hey now, how can someone who tortured Job for shit and giggles not be a good guy :)
The crazy part about the book of Job is that it made the final cut. Like, with all the things cut from the Bible, the book that makes God look the most like a petulant asshole stays in? What’s up with that?
I think that’s my favorite story. God killed Job’s family to win a bet and then just gave him a new wife and children. Because women and children are perfectly interchangeable. As long as you ended up with the same number no harm was done. And his wife and children themselves suffering and dying? Don’t worry about it.
Yep, men are the only main characters. Everything else is just their possessions.
I recently watched a 20 minute video (the title was like “After watching this you cannot deny that god exists”) and the guy used this story to justify that human suffering exists and is not an argument against the existence of god. So much bullshit and wasted time but oh well…
clearly the suffering is proof of the benevolent God :D
The only account we have of Satan is in the Bible. Not exactly an unbiased source.
I swear, the drama with these two!
If you think of God as just a collective narcissistic projection of human dysfunction, authoritarianism, and self-preservation, then it makes a lot more sense as to why God’s “love” seems so abusive.
You have encountered Gnostic thought (and related heresies!) The Gnostics believed that the God of the Christian Old Testament was actually Satan all along. It is an interesting rabbit hole to fall down into.
It’s interesting to think of the world religions that could have been, had the scales of power dipped in different directions. Gnosticism is an interesting take on Abrahamic religions, almost like a blend of Christianity and Buddhism.
There were even literal Greek Buddhists before there were Greek Christians. Heck, Christianity as we know it might not have survived without the original Greek drafts of the New Testament. There’s another universe out there where the eastern Greco-Romans were way too busy with the karmic cycle and achieving enlightenment to worry about the execution of some random guy with daddy issues in the desert.
Some say Jesus was actually influenced a lot by Buddhist philosophy or even has been to India
Yeah I’m pretty sure the giant Buddha statue that the Taliban blew up in Afghanistan several years ago was Greek work.
There are also plenty of accounts from (I think) the Abassid empire where Greeks and Buddhists were both present in Baghdad at the same time. I forget why that ended, maybe because of the Seljuks or the Mongols, can’t remember.
And of course, there’s an account in the Buddhist canon of a philosophical debate between a buddhist monk (Nagasena) and a Greek king named Menander (Milinda in Pali), which took place in the first or second century BC.
But damn… thinking about a world where Greco-Buddhism became the religion of the West… what could’ve been, eh?
God that sounds like such a better world.
Who says that was a different universe? You should understand by now how history frequently forgets such peaceful people in favor of the authoritarian de jure.
Turns out, humanity and its ilk hell bent on insisting they’re so important are just cancer. Pure and simple. Terminal cancer we’re all watching take hold.
What ilk? Like chimps?
🤪
Well, I’m not not gnostic. Or aagnostic, if you will.
Austrian Agricultural Nostic?
ty for reminding me to crosspost
Ok, so now I’m wondering if Milton read the Gnostic texts. I’m still amazed that the church approved the publication of Paradise Lost, much less Paradise Regained.
That would explain a lot of historical (and recent) behaviour by many Christians.
