Satan's lover

[joel]

…Trying to wrap my head around why we seem to think we can find ways to justify killing as a moral punishment for crime.

I blame it on a general acceptance and approval of hating Satan from the people honestly trying to be good Christians (and since I'm one of them, I'll claim the right to talk smack about them). But if it's ok to hate Satan, then bad people just have to be identified as Satan's spawn/Satan worshipers/etc in order to be morally justified for righteous hatred.

And the ‘religious right’ [total insert of my favorite bumper sticker: 'the religious right is neither'] seems to have no trouble identifying satanism in everything it doesn't like—so hate is not only an acceptable, but the appropriate, response for all that Satan stuff against God.

But if a person is to love God with the whole heart/mind/soul/strength...where is there room for any hate? Wouldn't a total love of God require love for everything else—including the old accuser? Love your enemy, right?

So what do you do when you wake up one day and realize that your faith in God somehow led you to fall in love for Satan? Are they viable theses: "a true lover of God is a lover of Satan; a true worshiper of God is not a worshiper of Satan"?

So then if to love God forces a love for Satan, hating Satan loses its justification. And if Satan-hatin’ isn’t justified, what room is left for any hate?

To tie back to my original problem, where is there any room (and I’m addressing this from a specifically Christian hermeneutic) for moral justification in capital punishment when:
1) total love of God means no room for anything else, including hate?
2) lacking room for hate due to love of God removes possible justification for Satan-hatin’?
3) only having room for love of God means only approach to Satan is one of love (and that a divine-focus love)?
4) loving God = loving Satan = loving everything in between = loving all humanity?
5) (and here’s the new issue I guess: is this true?) it cannot be ‘loving’ to kill someone?

[tinkerjack]

I think we need to give that mighty smighty G-d of the Jews a rest. Lets not think about personalities when we speak of G-d, I think that is monkey brains at work, connecting word dots. I have one foot on the Jesus road, I can never go back. But I got one foot on the Bodhi road too. I have the faith of a heretic.



on a personal note I can not call myself a Christian, i sound so glib when I do. I was a Jew, I was a Quaker, and now I am a heretic.

nice work joel, food for thought

Right now I am thinking of James, a double minded man is unstable in all his ways. So be it, sometimes I think there is a little too much stability going around in our Christian president's brain. He is our president of good and evil, fighting the good fight against "Dark Forces" he says.

When I was down and out in Music City and living at the Union Gospel mission down on lower broadway, a preacher told us that the devil can quote scripture

[joel]

Where I understand G-d (in both Hebrew and Christian scriptures), there is such dynamism of personality that the best response does seem to be a 'negative theology'--understand G-d by what we know G-d is not. I think that means we can only know G-d at all through some level of heresy; we cannot know in perfect.

G B Shaw wrote: Every genuinely religious person is a heretic, and therefore a revolutionist.

Revolution is about turning. Lord, to whom do we turn?

[tinkerjack]

We turn within
No bell, book, or candle can tell us what we already know.
I love my KJV, I seek the spirit not the word, I have never read the bible cover to cover. One of those books I pick up from time to time. As the spirit leads me.

I turn to trashy country and western songs

Lord help me Jesus, I know what I am

"I'm the only hell my mama ever raised"

Mama could never understand how Lucifer could lead a man to the pumpkin center barn dance

I turn to a poet:

God is not mocked, except by believers.

I turn to a Friend

The Humor of Christ

I turn to a Buddha

Be a lamp unto yourselves

quoted from memory

I turn to you.

We shake hands with the devil

and resist not evil

We turn it away with an ironic word

Joel I am not one for theology. Tell you the truth it bores me. Just how many dog gone angels can sit on Lucifers @$$

I dont know nothing about Buddhism, but what I picked up from friends here and on litkicks. This personality of G-d thing is a snare and a delusion if you ask me.

[MrGuilty]

"Better not take someone else’s religion, plenty wisdom in your own."] The Dalai Lama said at another juncture, as if talking to himself, that religion was not for every day; religion was for times of pain. As I recall, his exact words were, "Religion something like medicine, when no pain no need medicine; same thing religion

[Michael]

Since this thread does reference Christianity and I was raised within possibly the absolute worse Christian society, Catholicism, I can speak from that perspective.

There was recently a smorgasbord of letters to the editor in my home town newspaper that spoke to Capital Punishment.

The Bible was used by letter writers to oppose the death penalty. It was also used by letters writers quoting chapter and verse to support the death penalty.

I remember one writer saying that the original Greek (or Hebrew, I forget) translates the sixth commandment literally as “thou shalt not murder", obviously making the death penalty OK.

Aren’t there various occasions in The Bible in which god, having done it all wrong yet another time, corrects everything by killing people and starting over?

There is a site that I love for obvious reasons called Wasteland of Wonders. The web master is a lad named Adrian Barnett.

Barnett writes an essay entitled ”A familiar story, told from a different perspective”. Theist, non-theist, it doesn’t matter. Some of Barnett’s writing is thought provoking and I can honestly say that he attempts to be as inoffensive and as sensitive to believers as possible. The story referred to above is powerful, however.

I’ve been chastised for my “heathenism” before. When I asked questions “from a human perspective” that could not be logically answered, the retort was “How dare you presume to have the right to know why God does what He does!”

I presume to have that right because, if there was such a being, it/she/he, according to most Christian doctrine, knows how I was created and what I understand. It knows what I would view as illogical and it knows that I would search for answers in the only way I know how, through human logic.

My question would be, if there indeed exists such a being, what pleasure from a human point of view, would that being get out of "keeping secrets" from human beings as well as the suffering and torture that’s been carried out in its name? It knows we can’t think of anything outside the boundaries of our own human capacity. Why would it allow things to happen, why would it aggrandize death, war, torture, slavery in its “good book” on the one hand and promote peace, love and brotherhood (humanhood would be more pc) on the other.

If a human being had the ability to confuse, destroy, rebuild, kill, sacrifice human beings at the rate that god did according to The Bible, we’d say that was one sick mother fucker. Yet, our biblical know-it-all does it and it’s accepted.

Not only is it accepted, but it’s imitated or, at least, used as a justification for atrocities.

Maybe this is a different take on the subject here, but I can not understand why such a paradoxical philosophy can still have a hold on logical, clear thinking human beings.

To friendship,
Michael

“The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.” - Thomas Jefferson

The Mind Of Michael
Speak Your Mind And Read Mine

[Marksman45]

As far as the death penalty, the fact is, this is a predatory universe.

Now, as allegedly "civilised" humans, we are supposed to agree on rules as far as predating on other humans. Based on the early Western ideals of Natural Rights, the rule would be that it's Never okay to predate on other humans. But nobody plays that way these days. Besides war, violent crime, and execution, we have theft, false advertising, embezzlement, exorbitant medical prices, et cetera, et cetera. All of that is predatory behavior.

We need to re-assess the situation from the ground up and make a rational agreement as to what the rule is gonna be. Religion can't figure into it; too many people have different religions. That's why we invented logic, to be able to tie things down to a common reality despite differences between people.