- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
Community members in a Tennessee school district want to banish Satan from their children’s halls after the formation of a new club was announced.
The After School Satan Club (ASSC) wants to establish a branch in Chimneyrock elementary school in the Memphis-Shelby county schools (MSCS) district.
The ASSC is a federally recognized nonprofit organization and national after-school program with local chapters across the US. The club is associated with the Satanic Temple, though it claims it is secular and “promotes self-directed education by supporting the intellectual and creative interests of students”.
The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. Instead Satan is used as a symbol of free will, humanism and anti-authoritarianism.
The uproar is the point.
But somehow conservative Christians believe that there are huge swaths of people who agree that their religion is 100% correct but worship the weak bad guy character.
(Which is not to mention that there are actually multiple bad guys who got combined, Satan and Lucifer and The Snake were originally different people)
This is a long standing joke - what do you call someone who believes in Satan?
A Christian.
God is omniscient and thus knew exactly what Lucifer would do. Angels don’t have free will. Lucifer did exactly what God intended. God wanted Man to have free will. Free will requires the choice between good and evil. Man is the “bad guy” as well as the “good guy”.
If god is omniscient they would know exactly what everyone is going to choose, nullifying free will entirely
Yeah but if God knows every choice that’ll be made ahead of time, it doesn’t mean he’s taking the choice away from the person actually making the choice, they still go through the motion of making the actual choice, and hence, they have free will to make the choice. God just predicted it ahead of time.
We need better RNG, clearly. My D&D character should have died by now!
This is what happened when you don’t seed your RNG.
That argument would only make sense if god wasn’t the supposed creator of the universe and everything in it. If god created everything, is omnipotent and omniscient then at the moment of creation she would have known every single event and circumstance in that person’s life leading up to making a certain choice and she would have been able to create the universe differently so that a different choice would have been made.
If you set up all the dominoes, you cannot claim the 100,00th domino falling over wasn’t your doing because you only tipped over the first one.
This actually makes my point though.
God knowing everything doesn’t mean that God made you make that choice, God let you make that choice, but knew what that choice would be ahead of time.
You still had free will, you still were the one that had the neurons fire off in your brain, and you made the choice. God was able to predict that choice ahead of time with 100% accuracy.
On a side note, I love that you use ‘she’ for God.
If she intentionally chose those circumstances to happen so that the choice would be made that way, which she would have to have done being omniscient and omnipotent then that choice being made is 100% her responsibility.
If I put a child alone in a room with a powered on electric band saw, is it the child’s fault for getting their arm sawed off ? They had free will and could have chosen to not go near the saw. Or is it my fault for putting a child in that situation?
Why are you assuming she chose them, versus just letting them happen via free will, mapping them out ahead of time, precog style?
The childs.
Because she’s omniscient. That’s the problem with making up an all-powerful, all-knowing god. It comes with some inconvenient logical consequences. When she set up the initial state of the universe she already knew exactly how it would play out (because omniscient), she also could have chosen any other outcome (because omnipotent). It had to be a deliberate decision because as an omniscient being it’s simply not possible to claim ignorance of the outcome, and as an omnipotent being she could have chosen any outcome she desired.
Do you really believe this or are you being disingenuous because it doesn’t fit your argument?
This is a great example of why I don’t believe free will is a coherent concept outside of religion. It’s basically a perk that negates God’s omniscience as it applies to you, but if you don’t believe in God, it’s meaningless.
Free will is the ability to be belligerent until death.
Ah, but that is the point, until Man chose it hadn’t happened, it is the precognition paradox. Until the event occurs, what is known is all the possibilities.
That’s… just like your opinion man.
Then god isnt omnipotent, cause you know, it lacks the power of whats actually to come and is only good at knowing all the hypotheticals. Or may be lacks omnicience, but one could argue that knowing all the possibilities counts.
All that matters is that its lacking something, when it shouldnt
Spirituality is all opinion man.
But no, it not lacking anything.
Except all morality and empathy
How would an explanation of a religious concept have morality or empathy? Words don’t generally have Human emotions in my experience.
Is that true. Could he know what we will do but what we do is still our choice without influencw
God is supposedly all powerful and all knowing. God created the universe and everything in it. He did so with the full knowledge of everything that would happen in advance. He chose to do it anyway, despite knowing all the suffering it would cause. And then he chose to create a realm of eternal suffering (either by literal fire and brimstone, or by ‘absence of God’, it doesn’t really matter) for those fleetingly finite-lived humans that he created knowing they would screw up. Less than a hundred years of life in exchange for billions of years of torment. And he created them in a way that is fully capable of realizing how horrible a way to treat someone this is. It’s nothing but cruelty of an unimaginable scale. Part of the reason I don’t believe the Christian God exists is because I can’t accept something that evil. It’s too horrifying.
Most people that believe or even don’t believe don’t usually follow it to its logical conclusion like that, but I concur. The opening lines of Richard Dawkin’s God Delusion says something similarly.
If god existed, my driving force would be to kill them
Like the Klingons. Lol
True, if somebody comes from the future and knows what you’re going to eat tomorrow morning, that doesn’t make it suddenly not your choice. But to add to the other comment, an important point is that he made us all as well. Because if a god creates you according to his grand plan—knowing full well every single decision you will ever make—it is no longer a choice. Every one of your decisions were predetermined from the start.
Something I like to think about is that it is impossible to go against the Christian god’s plan. If such a thing were possible, then this god would not be omnipotent nor omniscient. As such, everybody that has ever gone to hell did so because god designed them to.
How is that a choice. If they know exactly what’s going to happen I don’t have the power to do anything except for what is going to happen. If you only have an apple at home, you can’t get any other kind of food and your gonna die if you don’t eat the apple, did you really choose to eat the apple?
My knowing what you shall do in no way invalidates your free will. That is invalidated by the futility of your choices. Totally man made and not to be confused with determinism.
I think its still possible that I could freely choose my actions and you knowing what they would be would not invalidate that it was an action I choose based on my own free will.
The funny thing about the free will argument is that theoretically if you could build a galaxy powered “super” computer, you could potentially track every single movement of every single particle in the entirety of the universe, so that level or scientific inquiry nullifies free will.
That’s where it gets interesting though! A set of all numbers cannot contain itself! It’s out of control! Call the alphabots!
That last part is intriguing. Do you have any more info that I could read about how/when their unholy trinity was combined into one evil deity?
I can’t comment on Lucifer and Satan but serpent reverence showed up in a lot of ancient matriarchal religions before they were displaced by modern patriarchal ones.
This doesn’t apply to only Abrahamic religions but shows up in Greek mythology too. Apollo slaying Gaia’s serpent messengers at the temple of Delphi for example.
Gnostic teachings, which are a form of Christianity, see the serpent as divine wisdom (Sophia) and the old testament God as the demiurge (Devil). Jesus as the good God. And Lucifer as the light of reason and not a villain.
But Gnosticism is basically a dead form of alternative Christian belief. So I have no idea what the modern church’s take is on these three entities.
It’s now thought the number of truly matriarchal beliefs in antiquity have been grossly overstated. Your comment belies a strong Judaeo-Christian ethos and historiography, which is all fine of course, but the feminists reinterpreting history isn’t divinely wise at all, but political.
Got sources for this? Not that I don’t believe you I’m just interested in reading up on exactly what you’re referring to.
Short of it is that the concept of Satan didn’t exist at the time Genesis was written.
https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/how-the-serpent-in-the-garden-became-satan/
From a more literary perspective, there’s nothing that directly connects the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the interlocutor in Job, and the later mentions of Satan in the Hebrew and Greek scriptures (and there’s not a lot of direct mentions in the Hebrew scriptures). You can kinda make it work if you read between the lines, but fundamentalists will be the first to say you’re not supposed to read between the lines of the bible. To them, you take the word as it is written and nothing else.
Naturally, this rigid reading of the bible doesn’t work out so well for their beliefs.
To take the Answers in Genesis article on the subject (just because they’re a prominent fundamentalist organization), their reasoning is that the bible shows that Satan can enter into a physical being and control them. Notice that they leave out any reasoning showing that Satan did so in that particular case. He could have, and therefore, he did.
So if Satan wanted to, for example, make it so everyone would fail to meet the entry requirements for heaven laid out in the old testament, and end up on hell… could he, theoretically of course, pretend to be the son of God and “change the rules” so that sin is totally ok as long as you say sorry before you die?
Asking for a friend.
“Well, they are Satanists. They are just lying.”