So, is it OK to name a kid Satan or Beelzebub?

This is rich: Apparently a mother from Newport, Tenn., which is not too far from where I live in East Tennessee, has been commanded, not by God on high, but by Child Support Magistrate Lu Ann Ballew, to change her child’s name from Messiah to Martin.

Here is Ballew’s statement in all her wisdom:

The word Messiah is a title, and it’s a title that has only been earned by one person and that one person is Jesus Christ.

Fortunately, the mother is appealing the case, and this judge’s verdict will never hold up in a serious court of law. In any case, Ballew has no business making any claims about Jesus as the Messiah in her capacity as a public servant. In her world, what other names would be off the table? There’s only one Satan. What about Lucifer or Jehovah? How about John the Baptist? That was a one of a kind title. Michael was the name of an apparently one of a kind, super important arch angel. Should we can that one too?

Witness the stupidity:

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Just when we thought Glenn Beck couldn’t get crazier …

Beck goes and makes a comparison between what appears to me to be an ill-cast Satan character in the History Channel series, “The Bible” and Barack Obama. Here’s a side-by-side:

Screenshot/AP

From Beck’s perspective, this was just another opportunity — he doesn’t really pass up any — to take a jab at Obama and vilify the president by any means necessary. In fact, this is a good summation of the general program of conservative right wing radio in general.

As for the Satan character, I always pictured Satan, were he to take human form, as a young and attractive alpha male kind of figure. Does the History Channel really want to go on record as casting the most evil being of all time as an old black man? The History Channel? Oh well. Looks like that die has been cast.

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The Bible says the darndest things: the devil

So, I spent, or rather wasted, a minute of my time following a link to a blog post provocatively titled, “Why Did God Make the Devil?” thinking to myself, “Hell, who wouldn’t want to read that?”

William Blake's illustration of Lucifer as presented in John Milton's Paradise Lost

So I hopped on over to A Heart of God Ministries website to learn, or rather re-visited, the story about how Satan and his followers supposedly rebelled from God to establish their own kingdom. It’s  right there in Isaiah 14:

12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! 13 For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: 14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.

The blogger says that God didn’t technically create Satan; he created the angel Lucifer, who then betrayed heaven and was subsequently cast down to perdition. Lucifer must have been an influential person — er, spirit — because, as the story goes, he took a third of God’s angels with him. Darn. God sure wasn’t winning the PR campaign, was he?

In any case, from the Christian perspective, this began an epic battle between light (God) and darkness (Satan), with each vying to win the hearts and minds of man. Huh. That’s a cause for pause in and of itself. The mighty forces of God and Satan vying to win man’s affection? That seems rather sophomoric and capricious from the perspective of divine, eternal, powerful beings.

Even on the details of the story Christians can’t agree. Here is a person named Jason A. who commented on the blog post:

Most OT scholars agree that Isaiah 14 is not about Satan. Many, though less than the last group dispute Ezekiel 28. Your interpretation of that in instrumental terms is pretty fanciful and refers better to the setting for jewels(it makes much more logical and exegetical sense). I believe in Satan because Jesus says explicit things about him. It’s dangerous to overhead these OT prophecies who were written about real people, Nebuchadnezzar(Isaiah 14) and the King of Tyre( Ezekiel28)

Whatever the interpretation, the problem with this tale is, as ever, God’s omniscience. Christians can claim that God did not and would not create an evil being like Satan in the beginning. For the story to make any sense whatsoever, Satan needed to rebel as an independent agent bent on wresting power away from the almighty. But here is the rub: if God is all-knowing, he would have known well before he created Lucifer or any of the minions which among them would eventually rebel. So, yes, Yahweh actually created Lucifer knowing in advance that he would try to usurp heaven, just as Yahweh created man with the full knowledge that he would succumb to temptation in the Garden, a temptation orchestrated by — who else? — Lucifer. And this unholy cycle is complete.

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Bad poetry redux

Since my responses were becoming a little long, I decided to make a new post to address a few of the comments I received on my criticism of “Twas’ 11 days before Christmas.”

Justin writes:

If you subscribe to the Catholic faith you will understand that sometimes, though it may be terrible, suffering and sacrifice are part of God‘s plan. God had to stand by while Lucifer unleashed his blasphemy and lies among heaven so that the true extent of his betrayal could be seen on its own merit rather than as a heavenly decree. Lucifer was basically calling God a tyrant and to quash the angelic upstart would have done nothing but subjectively prove him correct. Note also that God stood by while Lucifer made his accusations AND offered him numerous chances to repent and seek forgiveness.

… Personally I think temperance was the correct choice in criticizing the poem which is obviously a vehicle of comfort and reassurance to such a touching event. Is it religious proselytization? I don’t think so. Though the word proselytism originally referred to Early Christianity (and earlier Gentiles), it now refers to any religions’ or religious individuals’ attempts to convert people to their beliefs or even any attempt to convert people to another point of view, religious or not.

Thanks for writing. Sorry I was little late getting back to you. I guess the real problem I have with the poem — maybe I didn’t express it fully before — is that it cheapens the memory of the children, and it cheapens life, as does any religion with a notion of an afterlife. That’s the real disservice of the poem. These believers have been commenting on how it’s such a touching poem that’s meant to give comfort to the families, but I see it as exactly the opposite, and toward the end, it even does so at the expense of making a political point about religion in schools. Further, kids die in places like the Middle East and Africa every day, and where are their memorials? But let 20 American kids die, and Jesus is supposed to be spring into action and comfort the families. If he actually exists, I hope he is as much of a Johnny on the spot in Pakistan and Libya as he is claimed to be here in the United States.

As for the point about God having to allow Lucifer to rebel against heaven to let the world see his true colors, God didn’t have to do anything. This, again, speaks against the accepted nature of Yahweh. We are supposed to believe Yahweh is omniscient as well as all-loving, yet this all-loving God consciously allowed Satan into the Garden, knowing before he decided to create man in the first place that he was going to ultimately sin and fall from grace. He knew this before he created the world. He knew the immense suffering that would not only befall the people who didn’t choose to believe in Jesus (eternal fire), but he knew the immense amount of suffering that would befall some of his own followers (bone cancer, acts of violence, etc). Yet he created us anyway. To me, that’s about like deciding to have child knowing beforehand with 100 percent certainty that he would develop leukemia and suffer incredibly in childhood before dying as a teenager. In God’s case, it’s worse because, if you take the story at face value, he created people on a mass scale with the full knowledge that original sin would doom us in the end, with the best case being that only a fraction of all human beings ever born would actually believe in Jesus at all.

Teresa Beyerle writes:

… The bible says that we have a free will, so God wont force himself on anyone. If he wanted to he could make us all fall on out faces before him, but he doesn’t. The mass murders and killings result from Adam and Eve in The Garden of Eden. After they ate the forbidden fruit sin was unleashed into the world. You dont see christians going around criticizing your beliefs. Why do you have to criticize ours? I feel especially bad for you, because you have nothing to look to. So whats the point of living. Your just going to die and go in a whole (sic). Is that what you believe, because you didn’t specify.

Believe in Jesus or suffer eternal fire is not freewill, it’s extortion. It’s forced coercion. Real freewill would look like this: Jesus gives us a choice to either believe in him and get to live forever as a reward. Or, perhaps he would allow us to exercise our built in sense of reason and logic and conclude that we simply can’t believe in him based on, perhaps, the lack of evidence or credibility from the Bible. Jesus would honor our decision and allow us to simply lose consciousness when our mortal lives are over, nothing more. But no, Christianity says that you must believe or burn forever. If you want to avoid hellfire, there is no choice and thus, no freewill.

I criticize religion, not just Christianity, because of the continued damage that it does to mankind and for the false hope that it provides, not just in adults but in children. It teaches people not to just accept life on its own terms but to hope, on no evidence whatsoever, that we are going to receive a new body in heaven. It makes weak people even weaker. It’s propagates a grand delusion. It makes humans mere pawns in some ethereal war between heaven and hell. Religion devalues this life, the only one we are absolutely guaranteed. Because of religion, the main goal of life becomes not necessarily to help people and leave the world a better place than you found it. All that is secondary to wasting time and money in church, winning converts and making it to heaven.

The totality of music, art, science, poetry, beauty and the universe contains enough majesty to leave us with a lifetime of wonder independent of the fading desire to cling to the relic of religion. What’s the point of living? Why does there need to be a point? The point is to live.

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Question for believers on Satan

Rosa Rubicondior poses this compelling question to believers:

Why doesn’t Satan compete with God to make a paradise we would all be dying to go to?

Clearly, this makes a lot of assumptions, and Rosa outlines a lot of them in the post. First, it assumes that God and Satan are actually real.

Second, it assumes that Satan is able to act as his own agent and that he has freewill. According to Christian teaching, he presumably does have freewill since he disobeyed God and revolted against him. Third, it assumes that God is either unwilling or unable to squash his great nemesis. Finally, the question assumes that Satan is an able creator in his own right. For instance, he can create false gods to lure humans away from Yahweh, he can create false impressions in people’s minds and he can create feelings of hate and contempt in the hearts of potential believers in an attempt to draw them away from the fold.

OK, with those assumptions on the table, since Satan has all this power, why doesn’t he create a place that rivals heaven as a great postmortem destination? Why doesn’t Satan create a hell that can compete in the afterlife free market of ideas. It could be the Key West of the afterlife; heaven without all the groveling and singing. Instead of all the weeping and woe and fire and brimstone that has given hell a bad rap for hundreds of years, Satan could create a hell that’s actually better than heaven, with waterfalls, mermaids, no illness or loss of life, sex without the threat of pregnancy or AIDS, endless buffets, wine and beer on tap 24-7 and perfect weather.

That would make one hell of a spiritual travel brochure.

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Satan and/or God’s wrath behind [insert tragedy here]

Another tragedy, more crazy talk to boot. Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee recently said America’s “sin problem” was behind the Aurora movie theater shooting, while Rep. Louie Gohmert has said the nation was no longer under God’s “protective hand.”

Dwight Longenecker, a Catholic priest in my native South Carolina said recently on his blog that Satan could be behind James Holmes’ recent rampage in the Aurora movie theater shooting. Longenecker wrote:

… Was he demon possessed? Maybe. It happens.

Medieval engraving of holy men casting out demons.

Demonic infestation is a rare, strange and terrible psycho-spiritual affliction. In simple terms, a malevolent, separate intelligence infests the mind and spirit of a person. It takes over the rational faculties and dominates the personality. The phenomenon is real, but anyone who has ever dealt with the problem realizes that the demonic realm is complex. The human person is an intricate organism in which the physical, mental and spiritual aspects are totally interwoven. Therefore, in most cases, trying to diagnose the possibility of demonic influence is extremely difficult.

This is because, in theory, demonic influence in a personality can exist on several different levels. Experts disagree about the terminology and extent of the diabolical influence, and in this arcane discipline, for reasons that will become clear, there are few set rules or guidelines. However, some levels of demonic involvement can be observed.

Longenecker goes on to identify four “levels” of demonic influence, which begin at temptation and then devolve into obsession with a certain “sin.” The third level is “infestation.” At this level, the demon becomes entangled — or whatever —  inside the spirit of the host:

When the signs of preternatural strength are seen, horrible alien voices come from the person, vile blasphemies are heard and perverted and violent actions are witnessed, one can be fairly sure that a demonic infestation is happening. However, many of these symptoms may also be signs of a deep mental or spiritual illness which is not demonic in origin.

Of course, we aren’t told how we are to determine the difference between “demonic infestation” and mere mental illness. The final level is possession, in which the spirit “hides within the personality rather like a parasite.” The actual exorcist at this point is in a kind of no-man’s-land between reality and the spiritual knife edge, as Longenecker describes it:

In analyzing these levels of demonic influence, one must remember that each level builds on the former and there may be no sequence, predictability or diagnostic tests. In dealing with the interface between the paranormal realm and the complexities of the human person, the exorcist often feels like he is walking blindfolded through a minefield set in quicksand. He is wrestling with a pool of oily octopuses. He is on the edge of chaos where there is no foothold.

Here, Longenecker, possibly realizing that not even he believes his own hot garbage, softens his tone and begins using the more typical and blanket term, “evil,” to describe what Holmes may or may not have experienced:

Is James Holmes demon possessed? It is impossible to say without a detailed diagnosis. Even then, it is a slippery question. We are dealing with a reality that is rubbery. In many ways this is the wrong question. Better to ask, “Was James Holmes taken over by Evil?”

“Evil” is capitalized here, of course, because Longenecker wants people think that he is still talking about the concept as the personification of the devil or demonic spirits, and again, we are given no explanation as to what this “detailed diagnosis” involves, other than to reference a friend whom he said was an exorcist:

A friend of mine who is an exorcist says this is why the ministry of exorcism is so exhausting and grueling—because the demons constantly lie. Whenever evil is manifested, it wears a mask. The evil ones squirm and hide. They flatter one moment and hiss with rage the next. They are one moment obsequious and aggressive the next. Because they are liars, reason and trust can find no grasp. Pure Evil is random, violent and unpredictable.

Longenecker then notes that “Evil” is “mindless” and that all we helpless humans can do is gaze on it with “fascinated horror.”  Now, if “evil” is mindless, then how is there a demon behind this dark cloak? I thought Satan was a cagey, intelligent creature, as presumably are his minions as well if they have been smart enough to somehow outfox Yahweh all these thousands of years. Further, for all the “horror” that the Aurora shooting does represent, I find it hard to view the deaths of 12 people as anything but fascinating, no matter if some “spiritual” force was behind it or not.

Longenecker ends with some rather lame truisms about love (He capitalizes it, again personifying a wholly secular feeling) conquers darkness and that love (“Love”) was the force that drove three people to shield their loves ones in the shooting, saying nothing of selflessness or courage. Well, I hate to break it to Longenecker, but if God is “Love,” as Christianity teaches, then God himself failed where those three heroic humans did not.

Biblical deconstruction III: Cain and Abel

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where [is] Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: [Am] I my brother’s keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now [art] thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. — Genesis 4:9-12

***

Before I continue, let me address a comment that was made to the last entry in this series.

George writes that the points presented in the post about the garden

attempts to play both sides of the fence. Most of what you have here is caricature, and not sound argument.

For instance, the whole bit about how “unethical” God is in the situation relies on one of two foundations – that the Creation story pictured in Genesis 2 is historical fact or allegory – neither of which is required or expected of the story once properly deconstructed.

I probably should have made the distinction before beginning this series, but I thought it would have been taken for granted. When making arguments, especially ones about religion, one sometimes has to speak as if something in question actually exists or that the opposing argument is sound. This is done in order to explore the consequences of those realities.

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Was God hoodwinked?

I realize that I need to continue with my first listening of Radiohead’s new album, “The King of Limbs,” and hope to continue this weekend. I have yet to listen to any but just the first two songs so as to be true to my original intent.

But something else is on my mind tonight. As I had to take a long drive out west tonight (When I say, “west,” I mean about 2 1/2 hours across the state of Georgia to Dalton). It’s almost in Alabama. On the trip, I re-listened to passages from “The Portable Atheist,” which is a collection of essays and writings from noted nonbelievers through history from [[Christopher Hitchens]].

I wanted to briefly take up a passage from [[John Stuart Mill]], who, like his father, was a nonbeliever and who denied belief as much on the evidence (or lack thereof) as on moral grounds. In his autobiography is a chapter about his father, James, and how the elder influenced the younger philosophically and morally. In the chapter titled, “Moral Influences in Early Youth. My Father’s Character and Opinions,” he examines the paradoxical notion that the god of Christianity is both all-powerful yet all-loving, and even so, the admitted creator of both heaven and hell. Here is a passage I found particularly stunning for its lucidity on this topic:

Think (he [Mill’s father]used to say) of a being who would make a Hell—who would create the human race with the infallible foreknowledge, and therefore with the intention, that the great majority of them were to be consigned to horrible and everlasting torment. The time, I believe, is drawing near when this dreadful conception of an object of worship will be no longer identified with Christianity; and when all persons, with any sense of moral good and evil, will look upon it with the same indignation with which my father regarded it. My father was as well aware as anyone that Christians do not, in general, undergo the demoralizing consequences which seem inherent in such a creed, in the manner or to the extent which might have been expected from it. The same slovenliness of thought, and subjection of the reason to fears, wishes, and affections, which enable them to accept a theory involving a contradiction in terms, prevents them from perceiving the logical consequences of the theory. Such is the facility with which mankind believe at one and the same time things inconsistent with one another, and so few are those who draw from what they receive as truths, any consequences but those recommended to them by their feelings, that multitudes have held the undoubting belief in an Omnipotent Author of Hell, and have nevertheless identified that being with the best conception they were able to form of perfect goodness.

Although Mill is unrepentant in his assertion that God created Hell, he doesn’t really explain why he thinks in such a way. Perhaps, he thinks it’s self-evident that the only all-powerful creator of the universe must have, likewise, created Hell. But I will attempt to spell it out more clearly.

Most Christians, I don’t think, give much thought to the idea of whether God actually created hell, but presumably he must have been its author unless he endowed other creatures, like angels, with creating powers. I hardly think angels such a Lucifer would have been given world-rendering power. As this site notes, in Matthew 25:41, we read that hell was, indeed, created for Lucifer and his minions when Lucifer chose to rebel against God (This is, of course, on the assumption that Matthew 25 was even part of the original text and not one of the many embellished passages in the Gospels).

But so much for God’s foreknowledge. Did he, in his omniscience, not see that whole angel rebellion thing coming? So much for it again when in Genesis, his “good” creation exercised its God-given freewill and ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, a tree which was placed in the garden for reasons unknown. To purposefully tempt Adam and Eve? To purposefully put them through a trial by fire period as God would later mercilessly do with Abraham and Job? And if the latter is the case, we can only deduct that God himself is responsible for man’s fall since he put the tree there knowing full well beforehand, again, in his omniscience, that man would fail the test. Even to call it a “test” sounds sinister coming from a supposed all-loving god.

I think this touches a bit, not only on the illogical aspects of the entire God-sin-salvation tale, but on the abject immorality present within the pages of the Bible. This god is supposed to be the perfect example of love and gentleness, yet in many other instances in the same pages, he’s a brutal dictator, a judge, a persecutor, a mass murderer and trier of men’s souls (None more so than Job). Painted in that light, one can possibly see how such a deity might have thought it within his fractured moral compass to create hell knowing perfectly well that he would later to condemn most of mankind to it for the crime of unbelief based on scant evidence. A loving father, however, would never throw his sons or daughters into such a gauntlet, and then, when they inevitably fail, cast them down to perdition.