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Also consistent with the idea that satan is constantly trying to tempt you and everyone else and is obviously winning with people who talk about things that God and the church hasn't seen fit to reveal to me. That's actually not a terribly unusual Christian position in general actually, almost all brands of Christianity tend to be of the view that the Church has all the info you need and it's all available to you, and it's good for you to learn it. Secrets are the domain of the devil and you shoudn't really want to know them and a desire to learn them will lead you astray. If you claim to know stuff the Church doesn't then what you know is obviously wrong because the Chruch gets its info direct from God. The main difference is the degree of aggression to which some people pursue that idea, and also the bit where it's less about Church doctrine and more about your own personal pastor's weird ideas. Most other Christian denominations don't consider everyone else to be agents of satan that you should probably shoot if you can get away with it, they just disagree with them.
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Jul 15, 2015 03:58
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Yea, thats why I was talking about it within the context of the Satanic Panic, which was less about actual doctrain and more about paranoia and the beliefs of individual members, and how Evangelicals can run roughshod over everyone in the exercise of their beliefs.
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Jul 15, 2015 04:07
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They believe that anything outside of the right church and the right beliefs is Satan's influence. Literally all of it. That's why "occult" is a code word for "Satanism." Think of it like a legal system. The U.S. operates on "everything not forbidden is permitted." If it isn't explicitly written down that [thing] is against the law it is legal. Another possible system, and this is the ones Evangelicals effectively run on and want to implement, is rather the opposite; "everything not permitted is forbidden." If it isn't explicitly permitted then it is forbidden. Everything that isn't explicitly labelled as good and Christian is the devil's influence.
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Jul 15, 2015 04:27
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Squaring something like prosperity gospel with "ban all temptations of Satan" seems like a tremendous exercise in doublethink. The overall gist of the prosperity gospel is FYGM and "don't help other people, God willed it to be thus." Conversely, if you believe reality is the Book of Job writ large and everything is God testing your faith, then Satan is in God's employ and doing his work. By trying to block access to "Satanic" things, you're loving with God's testing process. You're actively cheating the evaluation. (What could possibly be a bigger sin than subverting the supposed purpose of existence?) Judgment is almost always framed as a personal evaluation, not a community one. On the one hand they're advocating "never help anyone, ever," and on the other advocating "'help' other people, no matter what." It makes no sense at all logically. It must take some really craziness to not see that, but what's new? You can see that it's an entirely fear-driven religiosity: they're afraid of punishment and afraid of failing.
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Jul 15, 2015 09:25
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twistedmentat posted:The idea that there is a huge active cult still exists in Evangelical circles. They see a Cannibal Corpse album cover, or anything to do with LeVey Satanism (which is pretty much objectivitism with some mysticism and goatees added in) as proof of it.
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Jul 15, 2015 09:52
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Dux Supremus posted:On the one hand they're advocating "never help anyone, ever," and on the other advocating "'help' other people, no matter what." It makes no sense at all logically. It must take some really craziness to not see that, but what's new? You can see that it's an entirely fear-driven religiosity: they're afraid of punishment and afraid of failing. It's simple in the sense that they think Satan is testing everyone, if you succumb to temptation and fail it is a personal failing. You were weak and sinned (though if you're truly contrite God will forgive you, which you can express by being appropriately deferential to your pastor and local community). On the other hand they see it as their moral duty to help others resist or even minimise the risk of damnation. You can say that giving power to Satan means he's part of God's plan but equally Jesus came back and revealed his message so clearly God is putting salvation through knowledge and helping others just as much within his plan. Evangelicals see spreading the Good News as part of their holy duty, minimising access to the 'Bad News' of non-Christian beliefs can function quite easily for them as the flip side of this. Of course that's side stepping the overall doublethink required to deal with the fact that an omnipotent God created a world where there's an actual empowered force for pure evil running around causing problems. Having temptation and the possibility to sin through free will is one thing but God creating evil specifically to test and possibly condemn people isn't really consistent with an all good creator. Of course some Evangelicals are pretty influenced I think (without being aware of it) by the proto-Existentialism of Kierkegaard's theology. Faith in God supercedes moral right and wrong, acts which are evil but are committed in the name of Faith in God is a higher calling than being a good person. Of course they then simplify it by just insisting that moral and right and wrong is exactly what God says, keeping everything nice and white and black and makin Euthyphro's dilemma of whether Good things are Good because God commands them or God commands them because they're good a much shorter Dialogue. Also just to be clear, when we're talking of Church doctrine, etc. in this thread it's Evangelical churches right? Because I'm used to Church referring to established churches such as Roman Catholicism or the Church of England and neither of them outright condemn all non-Church teaching as occult knowledge or wrong. The Catholic Church has for a long time officially insisted (and always had a strong tradition within it) that worldly knowledge is perfectly legitimate way to gain further knowledge of God's creation.
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Jul 15, 2015 11:03
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Dux Supremus posted:Judgment is almost always framed as a personal evaluation, not a community one. Bingo. Perhaps thanks in part to that whole anti-Communism thing, modern evangelical Christianity, at least the version of it I grew up in, is unbelievably self-centered. There are a lot of pre-written salvation speeches (which are a weird thing for another time), but most if not all will contain some variation on "Do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and savior?" Doctrinal emphases are on personal responsibility and individual unmerited grace. There are Bibles printed that replace every "you" commandment with Your Name Here. If group culpability ever comes up, it's in the context of "generational sin" (a notion of a demonic curse passed down through generations based on, as best as I can figure, a woeful interpretation of Exodus 20:5 - "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.") or maaaaybe a sermon on Pharisees. There's another big doctrinal thing at play here, and that's anti-Catholicism. Protestants, specifically the Pentecostal/evangelicals I grew up with, are rabidly opposed to anything resembling Catholic doctrine (except the sex stuff, obvs.). Catholic theology has always put a premium on the working of faith; that is, if you are a Christian, you need to go out and do good things to demonstrate that you believe what you say. This is taken by protestants to mean that you gain salvation through your actions, and they don't like this. The prevailing Protestant theology is salvation through grace, or the idea that God extends his mercy without condition to his Elect. Many modern evangelicals preach this up hard. "You can't earn salvation. Your righteousness is as filthy rags before the Lord. God loves you no matter what you do. What matters is what's in your heart, not your actions." It really isn't a wonder, then, that you see the Catholic church out doing a lot more charity work than protestants, who put their money into missionaries when they give it up at all. If pressed, they'll admit that people should help the poor, but they are so adamant that you can't MAKE people do it that really it just never gets done.
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Jul 15, 2015 17:51
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MrNemo posted:Also just to be clear, when we're talking of Church doctrine, etc. in this thread it's Evangelical churches right? Because I'm used to Church referring to established churches such as Roman Catholicism or the Church of England and neither of them outright condemn all non-Church teaching as occult knowledge or wrong. The Catholic Church has for a long time officially insisted (and always had a strong tradition within it) that worldly knowledge is perfectly legitimate way to gain further knowledge of God's creation. Most churches are fine with other knowledge as long as it doesn't directly disagree with the church, if you claim to know better than the church about something then they still do claim they're right and you're wrong. Evangelicals tend to just proclaim a monopoly on more things, presumably again because of the focus on loony cult leaders.
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Jul 15, 2015 17:54
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MrNemo posted:It's simple in the sense that they think Satan is testing everyone, if you succumb to temptation and fail it is a personal failing. You were weak and sinned (though if you're truly contrite God will forgive you, which you can express by being appropriately deferential to your pastor and local community). On the other hand they see it as their moral duty to help others resist or even minimise the risk of damnation. You can say that giving power to Satan means he's part of God's plan but equally Jesus came back and revealed his message so clearly God is putting salvation through knowledge and helping others just as much within his plan. Evangelicals see spreading the Good News as part of their holy duty, minimising access to the 'Bad News' of non-Christian beliefs can function quite easily for them as the flip side of this. A lot of that actually goes back to the Book of Job. They explain it away by saying that God would not have known if Job was truly righteous unless he was tested. Satan and evil is just God's way of making sure there are ways to test people. They also use this to explain away bad things happening to good people (he's just testing your faith!) and whatnot. That or "well you just have to endure all the bad poo poo in this life to get into heaven. I mean that's wroth it!" That's also how the prosperity gospel nonsense gets explained away. It doesn't matter if you're hell of poor. Go to church anyway, be faithful (to the right church, anyway), and God will let you into heaven and you'll be rich there. Taken together these are very convenient excuses to just throw the poor to the wolves and refuse to help them. "Well this is all part of God's plan that those people be poor and who am I to question that?"
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Jul 15, 2015 19:14
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The old testament its really clear Satan is in Gods employ, tempting and questioning faith to make sure that people are truly faithful and not just paying lip service. Job is a story where Satan actually seems like the better of the two, because he's just saying "Job is your most faithful because you gave him all this great stuff!" and then God destroys all that to prove his faith is true. If I remember the bible doesn't outright say that Satan is an opposite of God, that all evil springs from him. Doesn't the name even come from the Hebrew word for prosecutor? I think the best discription i've seen is Satan pretty much comes from biblical Fanfiction and from Biblical apocrypha.
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Jul 15, 2015 21:48
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twistedmentat posted:Doesn't the name even come from the Hebrew word for prosecutor? I think the best discription i've seen is Satan pretty much comes from biblical Fanfiction and from Biblical apocrypha. Adversary http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13219-satan
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Jul 15, 2015 21:57
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twistedmentat posted:If I remember the bible doesn't outright say that Satan is an opposite of God, that all evil springs from him. Doesn't the name even come from the Hebrew word for prosecutor? I think the best discription i've seen is Satan pretty much comes from biblical Fanfiction and from Biblical apocrypha. Adversary or opposition AFAIK, not prosecutor, but yeah.
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Jul 15, 2015 21:58
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Despite what Sola Scriptura folks would have you believe, there long traditions associated with Biblical interpretation and as a proselytizing tradition, Christianity has absorbed a lot of local folk traditions and is a "living tradition" that adapts to local situations and demands. Protestantism was initiated by a rising, urban and newly literate merchant class seeking to take authority away from the older property-owning noble class and their ties to the formerly exclusively literate religious estate (whose members were drawn from the noble class). In America, we eliminated the noble class the noble class earlier than in other parts of Christendom but all we really did was make the merchant class an anemic version of the noble class. This was particularly pronounced in the South, for a lot of different historical reasons (many of them relating to the Southern Institution of slavery) but you can also see it in Presidential Democracies, where the President is an term-limited elected monarch with checks on his Enlightenment Era powers as opposed to Parliamentary systems where power is a lot more muddled and the head of State is the head of the most powerful legislative coalition. A Manichaean "God vs the Devil" interpretation of Christianity within Christianity is as old as Christianity. Who cares if it has strict doctrinal support? The conservative, Sola Scriptura folks clearly don't, so why should anybody else aside from liberal Christians? If you are a liberal Christian, that kind of "got'cha" politics makes sense but given the secularization of American society, it seem to me like that is a losing argument to make.
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Jul 16, 2015 00:15
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Shbobdb posted:In America, we eliminated the noble class the noble class earlier than in other parts of Christendom but all we really did was make the merchant class an anemic version of the noble class. This was particularly pronounced in the South, for a lot of different historical reasons (many of them relating to the Southern Institution of slavery)
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Jul 16, 2015 00:23
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Sure, but the noble class in England was also quicker to get on board with Capitalism and associating with the merchant class (a big reason why English nobility has lasted as long as it has). The plantation class has very much identified itself with the merchant class which is part of why the language of "economic freedom" and "property rights" is so closely tied with ultra-reactionaries (another big part is how "economic freedom" and "property rights" involve owning people or restricting them).
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Jul 16, 2015 00:42
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America also tends to derive more or less all power from money, whereas historically the nobility are nobles because of association, not merely money, and money cannot buy you complete access to the nobility. We still have that somewhat nowadays in the UK. Historic noble connections might be why powerful Americans got their money but it isn't why they keep power.
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Jul 16, 2015 02:21
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twistedmentat posted:Something that facinates, and also terrifies me, about Evangelicals is their ability to read Satanism and occultism into everything. This runs from being silly in stuff like Deception of a Generation and Turmoil in the Toybox, to the Satanic Ritual Abuse cases of the 80s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hnjdq32u-MU
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Jul 16, 2015 02:51
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Cardboard Box A posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POcrePsnDyw Yep, exactly what I was talking about. I love how the 2 guys in Not Just Fun and Games look pretty much the same, and the guys in Deception of a Generation look like a late 70s porn star and someone who would get arrested sneaking off from his family to have anonymous gay sex.
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Jul 16, 2015 03:07
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twistedmentat posted:Yep, exactly what I was talking about. I love how the 2 guys in Not Just Fun and Games look pretty much the same, and the guys in Deception of a Generation look like a late 70s porn star and someone who would get arrested sneaking off from his family to have anonymous gay sex. You should see what he looks like now.  I'm sure he does, Phil. 
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Jul 16, 2015 03:18
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OwlFancier posted:You should see what he looks like now. jesus did he take a poo poo ton of botox treatments? Cardboard Box A posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POcrePsnDyw I always wonder if the honestly believe poo poo like this. like this fat gently caress for example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvYQh5xwO4I he talks about star wars, pokemon and all kinds of poo poo. But one think he talks about is how he was raised by satanists and shiva showed up at one of ceremonies. and one of the ladies talks about how the used a oujii board once when she was pregnant and the baby came out deformed because God or satan punished her. So do these people just lie about poo poo "for the greater good" or are alot of them just stupid or con-men.
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Jul 16, 2015 03:51
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twistedmentat posted:The old testament its really clear Satan is in Gods employ, tempting and questioning faith to make sure that people are truly faithful and not just paying lip service. Job is a story where Satan actually seems like the better of the two, because he's just saying "Job is your most faithful because you gave him all this great stuff!" and then God destroys all that to prove his faith is true. The Bible actually doesn't really say much about what or who the devil actually is. The imagery of an insidious horned demon always lurking in the shadows is a more recent invention. Generally though what I was taught was that before Earth was created there was a huge battle among the angels. Some of them questioned God's authority and started a big fight. This was led by an angel/archangel named Lucifer. They lost and were cast out which created Hell. Lucifer eventually became Satan and God forgave him even though he was still a huge jerk because God is just that nice but told him that if he wanted to keep being a jerk he could only do it against those that were not faithful or those that God wanted to test. The not faithful thing is the big part; they taught that if you are truly faithful and righteous than the devil can't get to you. This is used to justify all sorts of things, the main part of which is the idea that those that are not faithful (i.e, those that believe the wrong things or go to the wrong church) are being influenced by the devil. And yes that is where "Catholicism is secretly Baal worship" comes from. Some people believe that the Catholic Church has been infiltrated by the devil and the Pope is his emissary on Earth. The Catholic Church talking about going out and doing good works is just them trying to tempt people in by giving them nice things. This is also why welfare is bad, by the way. Dapper_Swindler posted:or are alot of them just stupid or con-men. A lot of them are just con men. While there are some true believers one of the issues is that some people realize that this sort of thing lets them have power over others and they find that very attractive. I think that's one of the reasons theocracy polls so well among them and I certainly remember some people that loved nothing more than using the threat of Hell to control the behavior of others. They also use shame a lot.
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Jul 16, 2015 04:49
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The Bible actually doesn't really say much about what or who the devil actually is. The imagery of an insidious horned demon always lurking in the shadows is a more recent invention. Generally though what I was taught was that before Earth was created there was a huge battle among the angels. Some of them questioned God's authority and started a big fight. This was led by an angel/archangel named Lucifer. They lost and were cast out which created Hell. Lucifer eventually became Satan and God forgave him even though he was still a huge jerk because God is just that nice but told him that if he wanted to keep being a jerk he could only do it against those that were not faithful or those that God wanted to test. Isn't that the plot of Paradise Lost?
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Jul 16, 2015 04:55
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OwlFancier posted:Isn't that the plot of Paradise Lost? Beats me I never read it.
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Jul 16, 2015 05:00
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Beats me I never read it. It almost literally is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost#Satan Though Milton's Satan is a little bit more of a bishie byronic antihero than I imagine most evangelicals would think of him.
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Jul 16, 2015 05:02
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I was listening to some obscure Christian Station, and it was just bizarre how angry this one preacher was about how Christians viewed basic things now-a-days. He got angry that he felt Church Services had become like "MOTIVATIONAL SPEECHES". He cited poll numbers about how Christians viewed sex outside of Marriage, and got really angry over it. He then proceeded to get angry at the Methodist and Episcopa1l faiths for being accepting of Homosexuals amongst other things. Getting angry at things ranging from Homosexuals getting a scholarship to attend the seminary, to a lesbian being ordained as a priest. My question is, will we begin to see more of a split between Protestantism if this is the direction that evangelicals want to go? it was really bizarre to me see how someone was so against another form of their faith and brand it as no longer being the same. Isn't the very basic ideology of Christianity literally "DO YOU BELIEVE CHRIST DIED FOR YOURS AND HUMANITY'S SALVATION? YES? GOOD. GO ACT MORE LIKE HIM".? If so, doesn't that not exactly make someone with a different view on the faith the same? FuzzySkinner fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Jul 16, 2015 |
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Jul 16, 2015 05:33
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FuzzySkinner posted:My question is, will we begin to see more of a split between Protestantism if this is the direction that evangelicals want to go? it was really bizarre to me see how someone was so against another form of their faith and brand it as no longer being the same. Isn't the very basic idealogy of Christianity literally "DO YOU BELIEVE CHRIST DIED FOR YOURS AND HUMANITY'S SALVATION? YES? GOOD. GO ACT MORE LIKE HIM".? If so, doesn't that not exactly make someone with a different view on the faith the same? The bajillion schisms in the entire history of Christianity arose from issues exactly like that. This is how religions actually tend to split. One group decides the mainstream religion is wrong and the mainstream religion won't change so they take their ball and go home. The difference now of course being that you can't just exterminate people that believe different things than you in most of the world. Christianity in particular hasn't been punishing heresy for several centuries so of course you're going to see more and more schisms. Even in ancient Christianity you have of course the Catholics, Orthodoxy, the Miaphysites, and Nestorianism. Protestantism is not a new concept at all, really. Christianity has been fracturing almost as long as it's existed. Of course some denominations use that as proof that the end times or coming or that humanity has lost its way. It's why you get extremely insular, tiny evangelical congregations that believe they're the only ones that have it right and absolutely nobody else gets into heaven. But yes that's supposedly the basis of Christianity. Worship God, follow Jesus. Repent your sins, apologize to God when you do inevitably gently caress up and try to mend your awful ways. The issue is that some people decided other things are more important or just pay lip service to Jesus. It also gets into bizarre internal logic like the belief that helping the poor actually hurts them so the real way to help them is to tear them off the government teat and force them to care for themselves. Granted people also tend to be extremely possessive about it. Tangential sure but I've run into people that have gotten genuinely angry at me for studying the teachings of Jesus even though I'm not a Christian. I consider Jesus a boddhisatva and believe there is wisdom in what he taught. ToxicSlurpee fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Jul 16, 2015 |
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Jul 16, 2015 05:41
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Beats me I never read it. It is totally taken from Milton and kind of hilarious that an epic poem designed, in part, to make the devil sympathetic has firmly taken root in the consciousness of evangelical Christians as some sort of scriptural element. The original title of Satan was indeed adversary and was meant to be a kind of court station rather than an individual. Basically it was what we'd now refer to as playing Devil's Advocate, arguing against someone or something in order to establish a stronger position and make sure assumptions weren't being made. In the story of Job Satan is an angel serving God by raisining the question of whether Job is faithful because he's a faithful man or whether he's simply worshipping because that has so far brought him success. This figure has then been conflated with pretty much every other god, demon or mythological figure mentioned in the Bible (along with a host of non-biblical sources such as Milton and Dante) to create the modern idea of the devil. It's doubly hilarious that biblical literalists are the ones that most strongly buy into an idea of Satan that has little to no Biblical foundation. Also Protestantism is somewhat different from early Christian heresies in that it's an explicit rejection of the Church as a source of authority. Nearly all earlier heresies included some idea of a bishop or church structure, Protestantism as it evolved into something specifically opposed to the authority of the Roman Catholic church also struck a hard line (in many sects) of the relationship with God as being a thoroughly individual one with everyone having, potentially, the same access to God and his authority as any other person.
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Jul 16, 2015 05:59
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The Satanic Panic involving D&D was a lot of hucksterism too. Not the Occult aspects, but the straight up "It's literally teaching children spells to summon demons that inhabit their friends who make them curse and swear and not want to go to church, do chores and obey their parents". There was a number of cases where kids committed crimes, including murders, and there was a belief that a demon summoned during a D&D game inhabiting them. I think the woman who started Mothers against D&D son was acused of this. Of course no one actually took the time to look beyond the lurid fantasy artwork on the covers of the books, which if anyone knows old D&D stuff, the first edition artwork is awesomely bad. MonsterTalk has a great episode all about this http://www.skeptic.com/podcasts/monstertalk/15/03/04/
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Jul 16, 2015 06:20
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OwlFancier posted:America also tends to derive more or less all power from money, whereas historically the nobility are nobles because of association, not merely money, and money cannot buy you complete access to the nobility. We still have that somewhat nowadays in the UK. Historic noble connections might be why powerful Americans got their money but it isn't why they keep power. 
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Jul 16, 2015 13:35
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Yeah, I grew up in a evangelical megachurch thingy. After getting out of that, I still have a hard time understanding how folks rationalize such judgment and hatred, and yet profess such love and acceptance. Oh hey FL... http://www.rawstory.com/2015/07/florida-church-sends-1000-collection-notice-to-single-mother-because-she-didnt-tithe/ didnt see you over there...
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Jul 16, 2015 14:10
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MrNemo posted:It is totally taken from Milton and kind of hilarious that an epic poem designed, in part, to make the devil sympathetic has firmly taken root in the consciousness of evangelical Christians as some sort of scriptural element.
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Jul 16, 2015 16:54
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They hate the UN because they hate all organizations composed of sober adults telling them to stop being idiot bigots
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Jul 16, 2015 16:57
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'sober adults' http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/nyregion/diplomat-calls-for-end-to-drunkenness-at-un.html
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Jul 16, 2015 17:00
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Dux Supremus posted:It's funny but not that surprising; hasn't there been a lot of widespread incorporation of the Left Behind series as to how Revelation will unfold? I'm pretty sure that's where the weird evangelical hatred for the United Nations comes from. (Which then brings their views into convergence with the people who think the UN is the Illuminati or NWO or Reptoid High Command or whatever...) See I was going to make a comparison to accepting Paradise Lost as biblical canon being just as sensible as accepting Left Behind as biblical canon (with infinite apologies to John Milton, of course) but then you go and tell me people are actually doing that 
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Jul 16, 2015 17:03
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re: Satanists. I've posed this before, but is it safe to say that a lot of "EX-SATANISTS TURNED CHRISTIANS" are full of poo poo on a lot of things? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpGRrS7p68s Take Kenny Powers here. I'm just really doubting he knows a loving thing about Poke Mon, yet seems to just mark it as being satanist.
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Jul 16, 2015 17:25
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w/r/t Pokemon I feel like "satanist" is a translation of "slanteyed gook poo poo"
icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Jul 16, 2015 |
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Jul 16, 2015 17:41
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Dux Supremus posted:It's funny but not that surprising; hasn't there been a lot of widespread incorporation of the Left Behind series as to how Revelation will unfold? I'm pretty sure that's where the weird evangelical hatred for the United Nations comes from. (Which then brings their views into convergence with the people who think the UN is the Illuminati or NWO or Reptoid High Command or whatever...) Left Behind carries on the tradition of Hal Lindsey, author of The Late, Great Planet Earth. Lindsey as far as I know doesn't go on about the U.N., but sees the European Economic Community (precursor to the EU) as a fulfilled prophecy of The Beast From The Sea (Rev. 13:1 - And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name.) Ten crowns = 10 countries and that's how many were in the EEC at the time, good enough for Lindsey. Unfortunately, by the time Left Behind was written, the EU had formed and there were 12 members. In 1995, when the first book came out, there were 15 and the prophecy was broken. Tim LaHaye, one of the authors, is also a Bircher, so the Venn diagram for him between evangelicals and the U.N.=Illuminati people is a circle. It's not a surprise he shoehorns the U.N. into the position even if it doesn't really fit (hint: the beast is Rome and John of Patmos was writing to his contemporaries). FuzzySkinner posted:re: Satanists. The story of Mike Warnke is really the beginning and end of what you need to know about "ex-Satanists." Fred Clark over at Patheos returns to this well over and over (and no doubt will have reason to over and over again forever). C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity sums up the appeal of the outrage: Lewis posted:The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
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Jul 16, 2015 17:49
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FuzzySkinner posted:re: Satanists. ftfy. Malmesbury Monster already brought up Mike Warnke, but I think that "Dr." "Rebecca Brown" was much weirder. She was a psychologist who decided to get in on the satanist infiltration game by having a mentally ill patient move in with her and drugging her up, leading to the revocation of her medical license and the book "He Came to Set The Captives Free" where she describes how her patient was in charge of all witches in the United States witch conspiracy, literally had sex with Satan, and was literally attacked by werewolves and vampires. Apparently they also went on Geraldo.  It's not limited to Satanism, though. This is basically something that happens whenever a pop-culture boogeyman pops up. The more wicked and depraved your conversion story, the easier it is to get material benefits (speaking money, prestigious positions at Christian universities, etc.) Satanists are not the current flavor, so now you end up getting a lot of over the top fake "ex-Jihadists" like Ergun Caner. Dux Supremus posted:It's funny but not that surprising; hasn't there been a lot of widespread incorporation of the Left Behind series as to how Revelation will unfold? I'm pretty sure that's where the weird evangelical hatred for the United Nations comes from. (Which then brings their views into convergence with the people who think the UN is the Illuminati or NWO or Reptoid High Command or whatever...) Pat Robertson wrote "New World Order," warning people about the Illuminati in 1991.
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Jul 16, 2015 19:07
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MrNemo posted:It is totally taken from Milton and kind of hilarious that an epic poem designed, in part, to make the devil sympathetic has firmly taken root in the consciousness of evangelical Christians as some sort of scriptural element. Revelations makes a few hints at a big fight in heaven before Earth came around but doesn't really say much in detail. In any event I've been told that story basically as proof that God is all powerful and can't be beaten ever so you should submit to God's will (i.e, my church's will) totally. The teaching is that it's arrogant to defy God's will in any way at all. Which is part of why there is so much argument over what exactly God's will is.
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Jul 16, 2015 21:26
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FuzzySkinner posted:re: Satanists. Very full of poo poo. No credible evidence exists for any of this poo poo. But selling stories of Satanic conspiracies is a GREAT way to sell books and speeches to people with no real effort.
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Jul 16, 2015 21:30
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