Sympathy For 'The Devil'

When I tell people that I'm a Druid, it's mostly to test the waters and get reactions. Wow, everything from ‘that’s nice’ to ‘Oh my god, you’re a devil worshiper!’ I never thought I’d take such offense to that or that I’d be repulsed more and more by Christian ideology. My oldest has been walking around singing songs she learned at vacation Bible school and going on about God and how the devil can make you do bad things. It’s making me crazy. Not so much what she’s singing or saying but the gross one-sidedness of it. Bible school? Seems more like scare ‘em early and beat it into their head camp. She’s only 4! I don’t recall getting burdened with the ‘be good or burn’ stuff until I was at least 7 or 8.

I know the church is never going to say anything like “some people don’t believe this stuff and you should still be nice to them”. We all know they usually play the “you’re with us or you’re an a**hole” game and it’s sad to see a little kid starting to play it so early. I know I could just say no – she can’t go to church with my parents. I don’t want to do that. It took me all these years to make up my own mind. I don’t want to force anything on the kids. I’d rather let them read and talk and ask questions about whatever they want to without worry they’ll burn just for asking. I leave you with some excerpts from a dissertation I found online.

There is no scriptural source designating Lucifer as Satan, nonetheless the Church taught he was an angel cast out of heaven because he wanted to take over the throne of Jahova. However it would be religious popular fiction which would cement Lucifer as another face of Satan, the 'Divine Comedy' by Alighieri Dante [1265-1321] and 'Paradise Lost' by John Milton [1608-1675]. It was at this period Mephistopheles entered the lexicon of Hell's overlord, the name a play on Lucifer, meaning 'not loving the light'. It has no scriptural basis, it's a medieval literary creation in the Faust novella which became an accepted part of Christian mythology in the same way Dante's view of Hell or Milton's view of Satan came to define the church position

The word Devil is a popular blanket term for the Judeo-Christian Satan, however it has no theological foundation, it's derived from the ancient Greek 'Diabolos' meaning "adversary or prosecutor" with no particular religious connotation, introduced into Christology in the medieval period which was a time of great theological inventiveness. The widely believed home of these pseudo evil entities is Hell, the original concept of an abode of the dammed has Persian origins, but was a place where disobedient wives were dispatched. In the Judeo-Christian context Hell means different things to both groups, the ancient Hebrews adopted the concept from the ancient Greeks 'Hades' which means 'the unseen place' and 'underworld' where the spirits of the dead repose without any moral judgment. The Hebrews translated 'Hades' as 'Sheol', like the Greeks the Hebrews referred to Sheol as simply an abode of the dead, a place of waiting for final judgment. The popular image of Hell as being a place of horrendous eternal torment is a product of Christian mythology, the works of authors such as Dante and Milton whose imagery has no scriptural basis but is widely embraced nonetheless.