Satan is ...

[Boojatta]

[Muttocracy]

1. Cheney? oh, wrong forum. nt

[saltpoint]

2. Satan is the unfed human shadow.

[Shine]

4. Nice. I like that.

:thumbsup:

[panader0]

8. How does one feed a shadow?

I like your answer. It sounds really creepy. Can I use it as a song lyric?

[saltpoint]

18. Hi, panader0. I was going for the part of the subconscious that

holds one's most private thoughts, often subversive thoughts, often referred to as "the shadow."

So it's an abstract notion. The conscious part of us shows up for work, ties our shoe laces, balances the checkbook, speaks civilly at the grocery store, etc.

The shadow aspect dreams at night of what Leonard Cohen called "having naked dances in the fire," a surrender to the wild impulses, the unapproved considerations, the Dionysean power of the imagination.

Apollo rules the sunlighted part of our natures. Dionysus the dark side. Art of all kinds is a play between these two parts of our psyches. This is the Beach Boys' sunny daytime party in the waves.

If you carry Order to its logical extreme point, you get Totalitarianism. If you carry Spontaneous Impulse to its logical extreme, you get chaos. Jim Morrison sings on this beach, at night, when most everyone else has gone home.

[Muttocracy]

3. a little part of every one of us. nt

[emilyg]

17. I like that.

[Silent3]

23. Which part?

And at least for some of us, it might not be so little. :evilgrin:

[SidneyCarton]

25. I don't wholly disagree with that.

Each of us has a monster within us, which we choose to keep chained or run free. It is a proof of character in the vigilance one uses to keep his own personal Beast in check. There's a little Devil in each of us.

[Fox Mulder]

5. Satan was made up.

The Catholic church made him up when people weren't going to church.

So my answer is he's fictional.

[panader0]

6. Satan is Santa spelled sideways

[BlooInBloo]

7. people. No Exit.

[Boojatta]

9. Satan and Soylent Green ... same thing?

[BlooInBloo]

11. Not unless I've radically misundestood Sartre....

Which is theoretically possible, I suppose. Although subtlety wasn't really his thing.

[xfundy]

10. A republican.

[msongs]

12. a concept used to get money from poor people to the rich churches? nt

[RaleighNCDUer]

13. an allegorical figure from Hebrew myth, meant to represent the

secular, ungodly world which the Greek and Roman pagans interpreted vaguely correctly but the barbarians who followed them took to be a real life bad guy.

Fucking Goths.

[baldguy]

14. A right winger

[westerebus]

15. God when he's drunk.

From a song by John Hammond that i think was written by Tom Waits.

[ZombieHorde]

16. No super awesome option? What's with that?

[Occam Bandage]

19. beside the point.

[HamdenRice]

20. There is no Satan. Only Zhul !

[beam me up scottie]

21. Robert DeNiro as Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart

[regularguy]

22. cause of and solution to all of my problems?

[SidneyCarton]

24. Satan is the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Ok, I admit to exaggeration, I would assume the Prince of Darkness and the Master of Hell to be slightly more competent than GWB.

Boojatta, you ask a lot of interesting questions, but you strike me as one who asks questions to which you already have an answer and therefore ask only to amuse yourself at the percieved foolishness of your peers.

Who do you think Satan is?

[Boojatta]

26. "questions to which you already have an answer"

No, I only have a few suspicions that could easily be blatant blunders.

[SidneyCarton]

27. So, what do you suspect?

Wrapping your suspicions in sophistry is no way to discuss an issue, I will be honest with you on my positions, but responding to one of your threads feels all to often like accepting across the river on a Crocodile's back, there is something disingenuous in the question.

[Boojatta]

28. Do you want me to pick one controversial suspicion?

It is incompatible with other suspicions that I have. However, you might find it more interesting than those other suspicions.

[SidneyCarton]

29. By all means, one suspicion is better fodder for discussion than endless sparring.

[Boojatta]

30. Hypothetical scenario:

There's less need to keep track of nested layers of suppositions if one keeps in mind that all the text in the box is part of one hypothetical scenario. That's why it's in a box: to encourage people to refrain from assuming that a given sentence is asserted. I refrain from asserting anything I wrote in the box.

Satan requested an important role in human history. God obliged because Satan fulfilled requirements and would remain bound by the terms of the agreement. God is able to enforce those terms.

Satan requested the opportunity to take human form and preach a message that was 95% true. However, perhaps God permitted him, in view of the 95% correctness, to structure the message so that it would a) be misleading to negligent people; and b) provide pretexts for malicious and dishonorable people. Satan has a particular dislike for people who care more about what other people think than about what God knows.

Satan specifically took the human form of Christ Jesus. Given that some Christian sects assign Christ Jesus a position as one person of the trinity and co-equal with God, Satan will have succeeded in appearing to be equal with God.

Evil committed on a large scale by self-classified Christians was a foreseeable consequence of Satan's utterances and performance of miracles for human spectators. This supplies an argument that we have seen right here in the DU Religion/Theology forum against Christianity. However, under this scenario, it remains possible that Christian doctrine is 95% true. Needless to say, no lake of fire awaits Satan any more than a lake of fire awaits Christ Jesus. How could it if they are the same angel/man? Perhaps Satan did go to the lake of fire, but only temporarily and prior to his resurrection.

Those who loudly proclaim that Jesus is the (spiritual) light of the world might be telling the truth, but their statement is equivalent to the statement that Lucifer is the light of the world. The morning star is the evening star.

[SidneyCarton]

31. Interesting scenario, you are not the first I've heard it from.

It can neither be proven nor dis-proven, and while I cannot say I agree, I can see how it can be argued.

I see Satan as essentially a malignant nihilist. He made a play for power and glory prior to the creation of the world, rejecting the plan of God and suggesting his own system in its place. Upon his rejection, he attempted to enforce his way through rebellion and was hence cast out. His problem was pride, an unwillingness to accept the possibility of his being wrong.

Satan's motivation here and now is self-serving. Being unable to attain his original objectives, and being equally unable to strike against the true object of his hatred, God, he strikes against the only targets within his grasp, God's creations. His only pleasure comes from making others as miserable as he, so he sets out to make as many as miserable as possible.

Bizarrely enough, this very behavior makes Satan an integral part of the plan, because in order for Humanity to progress, there must be opposition and contrast in life, roles that Satan fills admirably. Indeed, he does it far better than if he were merely assigned a role, or playing a part, for he has actual skin in the game, he has something to gain from all this, even if it is only a signal revenge against a God he can no longer strike at directly.

As to the lake of fire, such descriptions are purely symbolic, Hell is knowing, without the benefit of denial or delusion, that you could have done better and chose not to. That is Satan's misery, and misery loves company.