Post by jjcassidy on Sept 17, 2008 5:53:14 GMT
I unabashedly assert #1. Although I have no qualms about discussing #2-#3. I really don't care how much Satan "looks like" myth, or dualism.
Basically, the ideas that take away from Satan as a personality would often be used to argue that God is not a personality, because he doesn't really need to be, and we don't unequivocably experience him to be. Rfmoo (I think correctly) likens it to Feuerbach's product.
So what usually accompanies it is the "I don't understand why God would..." type of argument. For example, I don't know why God would allow such a powerful opponent to actively work against him and thwart his will.
But properly identified, that is a statement of ignorance. We either can accept that ignorance is a default state of being ( i.e. "What is Satan?") without any definite or guaranteed remedy in all cases, or we must start to ape the atheists and believe that we have no good reason for believing something if it can't be resolved into knowns (or at least think-we-know-its).
It is definitely true that having a easier scheme aids us in apologetics. Then we can speak as though something makes "perfect sense" and expect that we should not be abused for it, and that it is inevitable that our opponent see the truth of it. But in my exploration of skepticism, I have found that the innate faith that I must have, is the thing that makes faith in God--and a God who urges us to "faith"--most unexceptionable.
Embracing the idea of faith is the only antidote that I have found to the presumption that I'm not heavily invested into modes of thought, as I assumed when I was an agnostic. And why did I assume this? It was a scheme that made "progress" entirely possible. I could "see clearly" and the method of my "seeing clearly" served as a illustrator or the road out. But that heavily invested me in certain definitions of "progress" which I had to believe in prior.
What I see behind trying to make Jesus' temptation something else than as it is represented is an attempt to say that there is a better explanation of it. And that says that a proper explanation of it would yield certain principles which, I only have to guess, are better for us to use as a model.
Let's take the proposition that Satan is enough like a personality to warrant being addressed in this way. Perhaps "he" is like the dark side of human nature, but there exists some x-factor, like low-level psychic powers (??) that creates a virtual being. Then saying that it is only "the dark side" irregardless of this x-factor might not be as close as modeling it to the nearest functional model: a separate will. It's not really something like what we think as a linear projection of "some nature in all of us" (distributed) but it is also not exactly a "being" either.
As I am a rather Satan-lite Christian, the key is not to just throw ambiguous quasi-atheistic models at people but to simply weight scripture against itself. There's almost no reason to believe in Satan as an entity were the Bible, in some way, not authoritative--even if only of how Jesus. The Bible is only useful in telling us what Christians--who may have believed in the person of Satan--also believed. Thus, the rampaging Villain Satan is not everything, as Paul clearly points out that the lusts of the flesh and desires of the heart cause a great number of ills.
So were flesh == Satan (in a way mostly under our control, or with more help from the outside "powers of the air") it backs that idea up. But were Satan distinct from the flesh, it also backs up the idea that it's not all about the Cosmic Bogeyman.
Basically, the ideas that take away from Satan as a personality would often be used to argue that God is not a personality, because he doesn't really need to be, and we don't unequivocably experience him to be. Rfmoo (I think correctly) likens it to Feuerbach's product.
So what usually accompanies it is the "I don't understand why God would..." type of argument. For example, I don't know why God would allow such a powerful opponent to actively work against him and thwart his will.
But properly identified, that is a statement of ignorance. We either can accept that ignorance is a default state of being ( i.e. "What is Satan?") without any definite or guaranteed remedy in all cases, or we must start to ape the atheists and believe that we have no good reason for believing something if it can't be resolved into knowns (or at least think-we-know-its).
It is definitely true that having a easier scheme aids us in apologetics. Then we can speak as though something makes "perfect sense" and expect that we should not be abused for it, and that it is inevitable that our opponent see the truth of it. But in my exploration of skepticism, I have found that the innate faith that I must have, is the thing that makes faith in God--and a God who urges us to "faith"--most unexceptionable.
Embracing the idea of faith is the only antidote that I have found to the presumption that I'm not heavily invested into modes of thought, as I assumed when I was an agnostic. And why did I assume this? It was a scheme that made "progress" entirely possible. I could "see clearly" and the method of my "seeing clearly" served as a illustrator or the road out. But that heavily invested me in certain definitions of "progress" which I had to believe in prior.
What I see behind trying to make Jesus' temptation something else than as it is represented is an attempt to say that there is a better explanation of it. And that says that a proper explanation of it would yield certain principles which, I only have to guess, are better for us to use as a model.
Let's take the proposition that Satan is enough like a personality to warrant being addressed in this way. Perhaps "he" is like the dark side of human nature, but there exists some x-factor, like low-level psychic powers (??) that creates a virtual being. Then saying that it is only "the dark side" irregardless of this x-factor might not be as close as modeling it to the nearest functional model: a separate will. It's not really something like what we think as a linear projection of "some nature in all of us" (distributed) but it is also not exactly a "being" either.
As I am a rather Satan-lite Christian, the key is not to just throw ambiguous quasi-atheistic models at people but to simply weight scripture against itself. There's almost no reason to believe in Satan as an entity were the Bible, in some way, not authoritative--even if only of how Jesus. The Bible is only useful in telling us what Christians--who may have believed in the person of Satan--also believed. Thus, the rampaging Villain Satan is not everything, as Paul clearly points out that the lusts of the flesh and desires of the heart cause a great number of ills.
So were flesh == Satan (in a way mostly under our control, or with more help from the outside "powers of the air") it backs that idea up. But were Satan distinct from the flesh, it also backs up the idea that it's not all about the Cosmic Bogeyman.