The Devil

[mistermack]

The lilith character reminds me of the Irish Banshee. It's a mythical creature that is familiar to everyone, but nobody actually believes. ( well, hardly anyone ).

I remember from my childhood one of the first films I ever saw, it was Walt Disney's "Derby O'Gill and the Little People". (which incidentally was the first film that Sean Connery had a leading role in).
There was a banshee in the film that gave me nightmares. (I was nine, and I don't think I'd seen many films before that).

The banshee is a ghost that wails at night, like the lilith. It's usually a fox or screech owl, but the adults scare the kids, telling them it's the banshee. And the legend is that if the banshee wails, it means someone is going to die.

[Feck]

The banshee is a ghost that wails at night, like the lilith. I think I dated one

[Brian Peacock]

The Devil is just an excuse the gullible need to tell themselves that they're not really responsible for the shitty things they say and do.

[Rum]

More like for the powerful in times past, to keep the gullible in their place.

[mistermack]

I still think, for an atheist site, the devil isn't a irrelevance by any means.

All morality comes down to right and wrong. Good and bad. Etc etc. Apart from explaining existence, it's what Christianity and lots of other religions are supposed to be about.

If the Jews have no devil, and the Christians have, that's a fucking big difference.
I'm interested in where it came from, since Christianity came straight out of Judaism.

Did Jesus declare one day, "there is a devil" ? If he did, it would have come as a major shock to the people around him, and would probably have branded him as superstitious.

I don't recall anything in the Bible saying, "from here on, we believe in a devil".
Maybe I ought to go on a bible site, or a Christian site, and ask them.
Anybody know any?

[Svartalf]

3gospel writers out of four mention that temptation in the desert, it ensues that a belief in devils is in the undertext of chretinity... and that's not mentioning all the demons he exorcised here and there, though I forget in what gospels those are told of.

[mistermack]

3gospel writers out of four mention that temptation in the desert, it ensues that a belief in devils is in the undertext of chretinity... and that's not mentioning all the demons he exorcised here and there, though I forget in what gospels those are told of.

That's true.
But the gospels that we have were written well after the first century ended.
In fact the oldest SCRAP of a gospel, that is currently accepted, is papyrus 52 which is from the year 150 approx.
It could well be that the gospels date from the year 85 onwards. But what we have are copies of copies of copies, dating from hundreds of years after the crucifixion.
So it's possible that ideas like the devil, and the temptation, were added hundreds of years after the supposed event.

I don't know much about possession by demons, and what the Jews thought of that.
It could be that it was in the realms of superstition, rather than official religious teaching.
But demons that cause mental illness don't really come into the same bracket as THE devil, the personal embodiment of evil.

After all, we still talk today about someone "battling with his demons", even though we don't actually believe in demons.

[Brian Peacock]

According to the doctrines of most Christian denominations "Sin" is that which does not conform to God's Will or Law and, as such, stands in opposition to God - and by extension opposes the faith tradition in general. The Devil, Satan, formerly angelic Lucifer, as the embodiment of all things bad, stands as both the repository of all sin, sinning, and sinfulness, and also as the root cause of whatever deviations are declared 'sinful' by Christian authority.

The Devil made me post this btw.

[Rum]

He became the personification of all things contrary to god and 'goodness'. This is one reason I hate Christianity so much. Things contrary to god are basic human emotions and qualities like sexual desire, jealousy, ambition, pride and the like. God, having made us what we are - broken - then demands we go against what comes naturally on pain of eternal fire.

..but you knew that.

[Hermit]

But the gospels that we have were written well after the first century ended.

That leaves the door wide open for deletions of texts, interpolations and outright forgeries. The first Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, being the Constantine's tool for shaping the kind of Christian doctrine he wanted to have when he decided to make it the official religion of the Eastern Roman Empire for political and social control, is considered as a hotbed for all three. Then you can add the difficulties in accurately translating (supposing that that was actually the intention, which I doubt) it from Hebrew and Aramaic to Greek and from there on to Latin. As if that was not enough, there is also the problem of what individual words actually meant at the time they were supposedly first written down? So, does "virgin" for example mean a woman who never had sex yet, or just a young woman, or were the two meanings at least partially synonymous? How was the word "brother" used? Genetically, or the way Aborigines use the word "cousin" when they greet each other?

The King James version has at least two verses in the Gospels where the word "devil" is actually used, and there are some more in the letters. All the problems cited above apply to it. Getting to the bottom of it all is an exercise in futility, so I propose we turn to something more useful. Let's discuss how many pairs of wings an angel must have to be classed as a seraph.

[Brian Peacock]

42.

[Hermit]

42.

That's the answer for everything, isn't it? I call that cheating.

[JimC]

I bet there have been many PhD theses written on the theological meaning and historical derivation of demonology...

[rainbow]

I bet there have been many PhD theses written on the theological meaning and historical derivation of demonology...

Absolutely, any number of peer-reviewed papers have been published.

[JimC]

I bet there have been many PhD theses written on the theological meaning and historical derivation of demonology...

Absolutely, any number of peer-reviewed papers have been published.

That's why I never published any research papers.

I am without peer.