• Spacehooks@reddthat.com
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    10 hours ago

    I liked the jacaobs ladder view on demons.

    A soul trying to cling to its old life will feel haunted but one that is at peace Will see them as angels.

    Quoting top comment from youtube:

    14th-century Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart:

    “Eckhart saw Hell too. He said: ‘The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won’t let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they’re not punishing you’, he said. 'They’re freeing your soul. So, if you’re frightened of dying and … you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.”

    You don’t have to have a literal hell to know for yourself the truth of Eckhart’s insight! Tremendously deep movie.

  • flamingo_pinyata@sopuli.xyz
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    16 hours ago

    My favorite part of this post is people from different flavors of Christianity arguing completely different things using the same source.

  • StillAlive@piefed.world
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    19 hours ago

    Because that lore isn’t from The Bible, it’s from Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

    • Damage@feddit.it
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      1 hour ago

      It’s been a while since the Divina Commedia was inflicted on me, but as far as I recall, Lucifer doesn’t really rule hell, he’s called its emperor but he’s just its foremost prisoner. The only people he’s punishing are the three great sinners he’s chewing on, but that’s more of a fluke.

    • halcyoncmdr@piefed.social
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      15 hours ago

      The number of people that think things from Dante’s Inferno and Paradise Lost are from the Bible is shockingly large.

      Just goes to show how few actually read anything from the various flavors of Bible. So much effort to bring those words to a form the average person could read, instead of relying on Clergy to interpret for them… and no one does it.

        • Kalothar@lemmy.ca
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          1 hour ago

          I’m pretty sure Dante Alighieri was not writing fanfiction, but was in fact creating a satirical work, as he wrote this during his years of being Excommunicated. Which is also part of The reason it’s referred to as The Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia). He was excommunicated for false political crimes.

          Also Dante’s Inferno was also a proof of concept for what became the modern Italian language.

          ( though if you’re saying fan fiction sarcastically I do agree)

              • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
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                34 minutes ago

                @[email protected] i would like to read this harry potter smut what caused a new language please. alohomydrawersa

                Also i was using the term fanfiction very, very loosely. not so much sarcastically, but more in finger quotes. damn limitations of media with only a few types of emphasis.

                • Alwaysnownevernotme@lemmy.world
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                  14 minutes ago

                  I mean didn’t he literally write his political rivals into positions of suffering and misery and make them admit to culpability and guilt?

                  It’s honestly a little more sad than normal pottersmut, it would be like if you wrote about how your bosses son is a Hufflepuff and can’t get laid.

  • Proprietary_Blend@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    Satan just wants you to be yourself and be cool to everyone else.

    I One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.

    II The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.

    III One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.

    IV The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.

    V Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.

    VI People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.

    VII Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.

    • Courtney (she/her/they) @lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      23 hours ago

      I wore a shirt with the 7 tenets on the front, and my mother threw a massive fit when she saw it one day.

      I sent her plain text of the tenets, and said if she can point to a single thing wrong with anything it says, I’ll consider it. I got no response.

    • turtlesareneat@piefed.ca
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      19 hours ago

      God cast the souls He created but deemed “bad” out into nothingness, Satan created a refuge for them so they could at least exist, if in the cold uncaring shadow of a vengeful, loveless God.

    • halcyoncmdr@piefed.social
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      15 hours ago

      One interpretation is that the denizens of hell actually punish themselves. They know their actions were evil and sent them there, and that they deserve the punishment, so they receive the punishment they think they deserve.

      • cattywampas@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        Jason Lee’s character in Dogma brings this up. He said that initially Hell was just the absence of God (which in itself is said to be painful), but once humans got there they were so unable to forgive themselves and live without the divine presence that they turned it into a place of unimaginable pain and suffering.

        I don’t think that’s supported by the Bible and I’m not sure if that’s a position that was even put forth by later Christian thinkers, but it’s all mythology to me anyway and I find the different interpretations interesting.

        • Niberius@sopuli.xyz
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          5 hours ago

          I’m fairly sure it’s the interpretation Dante runs with in Inferno. I have no clue if it was the popular belief at the time, but it does show the idea has been around for at least 700 years or so.

  • obvs@lemmy.world
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    24 hours ago

    Christians frame things as “All of the Christians are sitting here in one group, and all of the non-Christians are sitting over there in a different group.”

    And that’s fine. It’s absolutely true.

    And if God exists and is the creator of the universe, that’s pretty good for the Christians, and pretty bad for everyone else.

    But if God doesn’t exist, then the Christians are just all together in a group that isn’t getting to enjoy their existence while the rest of the world is just trying to enjoy theirs, and the Christians are just trying to prevent those other people from enjoying their lives.

    Either way, I’m surprised that the creator of the universe would organize things so that it would look that way from the outside.

    • Spezi@feddit.org
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      21 hours ago

      The bible also says that god loves all creatures equally and since he created everything he should love every non-christian just as much as he loves christians. So why invest all the time if in the end, he loves you just the same?

      • PapaStevesy@lemmy.world
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        17 minutes ago

        He loves all people but hates sin. So if you’re a sinner, he’s not capable of loving you. Or something like that, idk, I stopped calling myself a Christian a long time ago for exactly these reasons. The god I was taught to worship would never even allow Hell to exist, much less send the majority of humanity there to suffer in never-ending torture.

      • wieson@feddit.org
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        17 hours ago

        That’s because it’s neither a points system, nor a corporate ladder, nor an auction, nor an investment account. It is a relationship. I spend time with whom I love.

    • Zozano@aussie.zone
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      22 hours ago

      Let’s break this down further because the Garden of Eden is fucking weird.

      So God has these two people he keeps as naked pets in a garden. He watches them every second of every day.

      God tells these people “eat as much fruit as you want, but don’t eat the fruit from that tree, or you’ll die.”

      One day a snake tells Eve “God is lying to you, the fruit will make you smart; God wants you to be unquestioning and stupid.”

      So Eve eats, and realises she’s part of some weird nudity cult where she was lied to and taught that the truth is dangerous.

      She makes Adam eat and God, (who can see the future by the way) says “you failed my test, despite creating the conditions in which I knew would cause you to fail. Why couldn’t you just have just accepted my lies and remained idiots? This is your fault”

      • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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        20 hours ago

        Only atheists and fundamentalist Christians take the Bible literally.

        We are sentient now (some more than others) but our ancestors were not sentient. There was nothing that was artificial before we were sentient and everything was nature. There was no good and evil, there was just finding food eating the food and surviving another day.

        At some point humans became sentient. Aware there is more going on than just eating and pooping. If a monkey kills another monkey it’s just doing what it has to do to survive. If a human kills another human, that’s murder. There is no good and evil without sentience. There was no sin in the Garden of Eden before humans had knowledge. Being sentient means you’re aware of evil, and you have free will. You don’t have to follow God’s will.

        Maybe we’d be better off if we remained monkeys living in trees? All of the other lifeforms on the planet would certainly be better off if we had. There’s a pretty good argument that humans becoming sentient wasn’t a good thing to happen to the world.

        But it is what it is, we are sentient. Can’t change that. We can’t go back to the Garden of Eden. After you’ve eaten something you shouldn’t have, you can’t undo it. Once you have knowledge, you can’t just unknow things. Ignorance is bliss and knowledge can be a curse.

        • Zozano@aussie.zone
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          19 hours ago

          I can accept metaphorical truths, but I’d argue that any resemblance of them is coincidental.

          There is so much redundant or unnecessary nonsense in the bible, that some of it is bound to line up with some fundamental truth farther down the path of knowledge.

          Obviously, whoever wrote genesis was not aware of evolution, and I’m not implying that you are proposing this insinuation as an explanation (it’s just an example of what I mean).

          Regardless of being unable to un-knowledge ourselves, one of the things I was pointing at was the absurdity of free-will as a concept.

          God is supposedly omniscient, he knows the test will fail.

          If you want to get metaphorical on that, you could probably spin it in some pretty weird ways.

          Regardless, Christians cannot reconcile the literal claim that God is all-knowing from the notion of free-will.

    • village604@adultswim.fan
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      18 hours ago

      The reason he was cast out is because he tried to overthrow God by starting a rebellion.

      And the serpent wasn’t originally identified as Satan. He was called one in Revelations, but in Genesis it was just a cunning snake.

      Regardless, humans couldn’t have eaten the fruit without free will, so the serpent wasn’t involved in them having it

      • radiofreebc@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        Um, you might want to double check that. The apple in the Garden of Eden is literally the free will metaphor expressed.

        • cattywampas@lemmy.world
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          22 hours ago

          The fruit (not an apple) is the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God tells Adam and Eve not to eat from it or they will die.

          The serpent (who is not Satan, simply a snake) convinces Eve and subsequently Adam to eat the fruit, basically telling them that God is lying to them and keeping secrets from them.

          God subsequently expels them from the Garden of Eden for disobeying him.

          Adam and Eve had free will all along, it wasn’t given to them by the forbidden fruit.

  • Dale@lemmy.world
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    24 hours ago

    Uh oh Deep, if you put more than five seconds of thought into your religion you might lose it. Remember any doubts you have about Christianity were planted in your mind by the devil to lead you away from God. They are definitely not your own rational thoughts!

    • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      within good is the capacity for evil. within evil is the capacity for good. we have both within us. we are at peace when they are balanced.

      that’s literally what this means

    • Natanox@discuss.tchncs.de
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      23 hours ago

      Every individual is capable of good and evil, it doesn’t require a specific person for it. In fact believing it does (and therefore usually believing it isn’t you or your social group, but others) is a shortcut to inadvertently do evil shit without noticing any of it.

      “You don’t have to be evil to kill someone. You just have to think you are right.” - Yoko Taro

      • boredsquirrel (he)@slrpnk.net
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        12 hours ago

        Yes agree. But that makes a person not universally good. One could say evil.

        So “god” being all good would not be able to do this because it is a human response to a human misdeed.