Question from Kyle:
I was wondering if you agree with me that even if we knew Christianity were true, any moral person would be morally compelled to follow Lucifer not God.
– God kills at least millions, Lucifer killed less than a handful of people.
– 1/3 of all angels rebel with Lucifer to fight a war against an omnipotent being they know they can’t win.
– Lucifer is cast out of Heaven for refusing to worship God.
– Lucifer sees human slaves so he gives them knowledge.
– God decides to torture his most beloved creation, the devil, for all eternity.
List could go on forever.
Answer by SmartLX:
When you don’t believe in either of these two characters a discussion like this is moot, of course, but think how many discussions are had over who is the true hero of Star Wars or Game of Thrones. In that spirit, there is certainly a discussion to be had over which of them is more moral – when you don’t define God as the source and model of morality and therefore incapable by definition of doing anything immoral.
The question in my mind is whether one would actually be morally compelled to follow the more moral of the two. If God controls who goes to Heaven and Hell, you would want to know that following Lucifer was actually of any use to Lucifer before potentially consigning yourself to Hell for no good reason. In most of the relevant theologies there’s no reason to think that Hell stops being an eternal torment if Lucifer acknowledges your allegiance (remember, it’s a punishment even for him), though maybe there’s a Satanist text that says otherwise. And is Lucifer expected to try another insurgency anytime soon for which he’ll need anti-Christian soldiers, by anyone other than the fear-mongering kind of Christian?
5 thoughts on “Rooting For The Ultimate Underdog”
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I believe this question is below the level of thia site and so I don’t agree with SamartXL answering it.
On the other hand, I understand the push that SmartXL feels, into answering stupidities theists ask him here.
However, there are many other stupidities that I believe SmartXL would not lower himself to answer, thou I fully recognize the utmost significance that this very brand of stupidity (religion) has upon the society in general and thus I am coming back from the other side to my starting point, I had initially said that he should not answer stupidities like this one, only to conclude that he must.
But, does he really have to?
REALLY?!
Wow what a tall horse SmartLX has. I guess we’ll find out at the end how “stupid” religion is.
Funny you should say that James. My other choice of title for this article was “Backing The Dark Horse”.
No Niki, I don’t have to, but I like to. It’s a big world and there are people at every conceivable stage of examining their own faith, so some are currently looking into whether the premise makes sense internally, whether or not it’s true. Unconventional perspectives such as the Satanist view can challenge basic assumptions like “God is good” and provoke new thought in those who are in the right headspace.
Kyle, your question is an interesting one. I’ve had discussions on the general topic at other websites in the past. It is prudent for me to point out that I am not a believer in any supernatural agent, good or bad, but as a thought exercise I can certainly comment.
I think that the question of who gets to define what is “moral” in the supernatural realm is an important one to consider. Even if a god is the most supreme of creatures, it still has to choose between “right” and “wrong” when applying those labels to actions and ideas. Even if that god supposedly knows everything there is to know, the decision it makes is ultimately a subjective one in my opinion.
Not that morals are black and white anyway. If I kill someone, I am in the wrong. But if I kill them because they were trying to kill me, suddenly it is justified. Either way a person has died, and I have killed them. But the context matters when placing the subjective “good” or “bad” label on the action. So killing is not always “bad”or “wrong”, which means it doesn’t have an objective foundation even if Thou Shall Not Kill came from a god.
Not that the Bible god is the gold standard in objectivity anyway. Killing a newborn in a worldwide flood and saying that everyone besides Noah’s family was “evil” and had to die is a blatant contradiction. No one has ever been able to show me how a newborn baby could be “evil” at any level or understanding of the word, yet those babes were drowned as sure as everyone else. The Bible at least is a poor representation of objectivity when it comes to morals.
Which brings me to one of the main points that usually gets bandied around in conversations related to all this – The winner gets to write history. The god and the devil had a fight, and the devil lost. The god gets to write the history, to control what is known to history. What if the devil WAS the god, but lost to the original devil, and was called the “devil” by the winner? We’d certainly not know that, would we? The winner (the one we call the god now) has quite the PR machine in place these days. It never sends the tornado, but it always saves the trailer trash (the ones that don’t die anyway). The ones that do die were just “called home” or we are told that we “don’t understand the higher purpose in god’s actions” or something similar. How often do people die in some kind of horrible event and people are telling us how blessed their surviving relatives are? It’s a fantastic level of brain washing. People walk around assuming they were born with a sin even though they had nothing to do with it after all…
And this doesn’t mean the devil is really good, by the way. They could both be evil, but only one gets to control the PR machine, and that was the winner of the fight. The devil could act just the same way if it ever gets to control the PR machine.
There is a lot of detail one can get into about it, and it makes for a good mind stretching.