Comments by "ncwordman" (@ncwordman) on "Christian Right Yelling "SATAN" Puts Us All In Danger" video.

  1. First, satan is the Hebrew word for "adversary." It applied to any adversary at all. That's why Jesus referred to Peter as satan (Matt. 16:23). It's not a proper noun: not an actual name. There was no arch-nemesis to Jehovah anywhere in the Old Testament. A satan shows up at the beginning of Job, but since Hebrew has no case in it's letters, there was/is no way to tell if it was capitalized or not. It wasn't. A satan, then, is anyone who is against what you're doing. Secondly, in the Old Testament, there is only one god. And that one god is responsible for everything: "See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand" (Deut. 32:39.) This idea of an anti-Jehovah began when Babylon enslaved the Jews. The Babylonians had "the sons of light" pitched in an eternal battle with "the sons of darkness." Some Jews absorbed this idea into their culture. But it wasn't until 'round about the 13th century that certain Christian bishops decided Christianity needed a mythology. Before then it was just a collection of sayings by Yeshua (the English spelling of the Aramaic form of Jesus), kind of like Confucius. They took the trash heap outside of Jerusalem, which was always burning and stinking, and which the Jews had named Gehenna, and turned Gehenna into Hell. They transformed the improper noun "satan" into an actual entity named Satan, and put Satan in Hell to rule over the dead who had done evil things in life. There was no afterlife of heaven/hell in the Old or New Testaments. Jesus said, "No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man" (John 3:13.) If you take the Revelation text literally, then the dead stay dead until they're risen up on the last day, and judged. So where is Jehovah/God during all this? "...Jesus replied, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, / nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:20-21.) The King James (which is the most literal interpretation of the ancient texts has it: "...the kingdom of God is within you." Before the bishops messed with everything, there was no Jesus story: no virgin birth, no crucifixion, no risen on the third day. It was just lessons on how to live a good life, how what was best for you was to do good to others, as doing bad things actually hurts you. But the bishops thought the common man needed a story. So they invented it. And in this story all the things that Jehovah had done that were thought to be bad, were credited to Satan. They didn't want the "god of love" to do anything wrong. But Jehovah is everything, and that includes all that we think as good or bad, fragrant or stinking, everything.
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