bd-from-kg

jpbrooks:

When you said that the “claim” that it is possible Satan wrote the Bible assumes that the Bible “contains the truth about Satan” you apparently meant only that it assumes that the Bible depicts Satan’s character more or less accurately. Fair enough. This is indeed presupposed by the question; otherwise “Satan” is a name for an undefined entity. I thought you meant that the question assumes that the Bible tells the truth about what Satan did – for example, that he tempted Jesus in the wilderness, or that he did not write the Bible.

Of course. But the proposition up for debate is not that Satan did write the Bible, but that (on the presupposition that Satan exists) it is a reasonable possibility that he did. The fact that, if he did, all “evidence” from the Bible becomes problematic doesn’t seem to make this possibility significantly less likely.

We are presupposing that Satan is the evil liar depicted in the Bible, remember? So it he wrote the Bible, it must be presumed that his purposes were malevolent. I was proposing a possible motivation consistent with this presupposition. If you want to drop this presupposition, I can offer lots more reasons that Satan might have had for writing the Bible that would not be so malevolent.

To lead people astray (among many other possibilities).

Besides, since the point is to get people to believe the Bible, Satan would thereby be inducing people to believe the truth about himself. For all we know, he might be quite proud of being who he is, so this might please him greatly.

Not at all. It’s entirely possible that there can be no evidence whatever for a possibility, yet that possibility cannot be ruled out. In fact, this is fairly common.

For example, say that Phillips is murdered in circumstances such that only Smith or Jones had the opportunity to do it. What little evidence there is points to Smith, but it’s far from conclusive. Even though there is no evidence whatever that Jones did it and there is evidence that Smith did it, we are not entitled to conclude that Smith is the murderer, because the possibility that it was Jones cannot be ruled out with any high degree of confidence.

The belief that something is possible because there is no convincing evidence to the contrary does not involve “faith”. For example, if the Steelers and Rams played each other earlier today and I don’t know what the outcome was, I will believe that it’s possible that the Rams won, for the simple and sufficient reason that I have no convincing evidence that they didn’t.

But no one here actually believes that Satan wrote the Bible; they are asking you to give us convincing evidence that he didn’t. If there is no such evidence, there is no reason to believe that God wrote it (or that it was “inspired” by God).

No, that would be a reason for believing that these things are possible. You seem to be having trouble distinguishing between believing that a thing is possible and believing that it’s so. (But actually there are convincing reasons for believing that such things don’t exist. For example both elves and fairies, as I understand it, supposedly have properties and abilities that seem to be incompatible with natural laws.)

But they are mysterious enough that we cannot be expected to comprehend their motives for doing everything they do. For example, why did God send a plague killing 70,000 Israelites when David ordered a census? Why did he order the Amelekites to be massacred down to the last infant? Why did he send bears to kill some children who had teased an old man? Why did He cast thousands of demons into a herd of swine? The same goes for Satan. Why did he rebel against God in the first place, knowing that God is perfectly good and that rebellion was futile? Why did he tempt Jesus in the desert, given that he knew it was a waste of time since Jesus was God?

Don’t be silly. The Jews and the Moslems both claim that the fact that a man cannot be God is self-evident. Moslems say that to assert otherwise is unforgivable blasphemy, and Jews would probably still say the same (as they certainly did in Jesus’ time) if not for the well-grounded fear of persecution by Christians. Of all the people of the world, only Christians seem to think that the claim that a man was God is anything but childish nonsense or an outrageous insult to God. For God to insist only that you not mock Him by worshiping a man as God is really a pretty minimal requirement.

But perhaps those who would drag God down to the level of a mere mortal are the least innocent of all. The Bible says that the only unforgivable sin is to blaspheme the Holy Spirit. Since you claim to believe that, you can’t very well call the idea unreasonable; our only disagreement is over what constitutes blaspheming the Holy Spirit. At any rate, my hypothesis leaves the path to “salvation” wide open: you need merely refrain from worshiping a man as God.

Anyway, getting back to the original subject, why are you spending so much time “refuting” one possible motive for Satan’s writing the Bible? Given time I could think of hundreds of others, and there may be millions more that I’m not creative enough to imagine. If your best argument for why Satan’s authorship of the Bible is not a reasonable possibility is that he would have no motive for doing so, you have no argument at all.

bd-from-kg

Amos:

[Aside: Are you or jpbrooks familiar with the traditional practice of capitalizing proper names?]

This argument has at least the merit of novelty. Unfortunately it is based on a somewhat idiosyncratic definition of “the Bible”. what I mean by “the Bible” is the book I have in front of me titled “The Holy Bible”. Or if you prefer, it’s the set of original manuscripts (now lost) on which this book is based. You apparently define “the Bible” as something like “the inspired word of God”. Only with this definition does it make sense to argue that Satan cold not have written the Bible because he is incapable by definition of writing “inspired passages” (i.e., passages inspired by God) or “divine comedies” (i.e., works whose author is divine). A conclusive argument, but it leaves open the question of whether the book I have in front of me is in any sense the Bible, or indeed of whether the Bible exists at all, or ever did, even in part.

Just so. And this is really the crux of the matter. Given that the Bible (as I define it) is a work (or collection of works) of unknown provenance, the only real evidence of its credibility or reliability is internal evidence. One examines it and concludes either that (1) it is a work that could have been produced only by God, or (2) it is a work that could not have been produced by God, or (3) it’s unclear whether it was produced by God. (Here by “God” I mean the hypothetical “omnimax” being who created and sustains the universe.) When I examine the Bible I am driven irresistibly to conclusion (2): it could not have been produced by God. In other words, I disbelieve the Bible because of what it says.

On the other hand, I see nothing in the Bible that would lead me to conclude that it could not have been produced by a malevolent being or beings, or by being(s) who are a complex mixture of good and bad (such as humans).

jpbrooks

bd=from-kg wrote:

When you said that the ?claim? that it is possible Satan wrote the Bible assumes that the Bible ?contains the truth about Satan? you apparently meant only that it assumes that the Bible depicts Satan?s character more or less accurately. Fair enough. This is indeed presupposed by the question; otherwise ?Satan? is a name for an undefined entity. I thought you meant that the question assumes that the Bible tells the truth about what Satan did ? for example, that he tempted Jesus in the wilderness, or that he did not write the Bible.

jpbrooks:

Yes, that is what I meant. The claim assumes that the bible provides truthful and reliable information about the character of Satan.
But it is important to note the way that the bible conveys that information. It is not satisfied with merely claiming that Satan is a liar, it provides examples of him in action. And that highlights the point that I was trying to convey. Under Satanic authorship, there would be no compelling reason to hold that any information provided by the bible is reliable.
But if that is the case then there is no reason to believe that the "Satan" that actually wrote the bible is the same one that the bible characterizes.
The whole problem rests on the fact that
the bible holds a "privileged" status as a reliable source of truth only because of its divine or "inspired" authorship. Once that authorship is thrown out or thrown into question, there remains no reason why it should retain its "privileged" status.
And the possibility that the book may actualy have been authored by an individual who, for one reason or another, is prone to lying, makes the book even less reliable than it would be if its author had no such character flaw.

quote:

My argument questions the reliability of the whole book under the possible authorship of Satan which includes everything that the bible does say about Satan. If the very description (and existence) of the biblical Satan is in question, due to the bible's questionable authorship, then any argument that applies to the biblical Satan becomes problematic.

bd-from-kg wrote:

Of course. But the proposition up for debate is not that Satan did write the Bible, but that (on the presupposition that Satan exists) ...

jpbrooks:

The only support for this presupposition comes from the bible. So its truth depends on the reliability of the bible as a source of truth which, in turn, depends on the truth of its claims about its authorship.
Again, if the bible's authorship is questionable, there is no reason to suppose that its claims and assumptions are inerrant.

bd-from-kg wrote:

it is a reasonable possibility that he did. The fact that, if he did, all ?evidence? from the Bible becomes problematic doesn?t seem to make this possibility significantly less likely.

jpbrooks:

Yes, it does.
It makes it less likely that the being that could have written the bible, (granting your assumption that it could have been written by someone other than it claims to have been written by), is a being that is described in the bible.


quote:

If the truth of the bible is precisely what is in question, on what basis could Satan's path be deemed "astray"?

bd-from-kg wrote:

We are presupposing that Satan is the evil liar depicted in the Bible, remember? So it he wrote the Bible, it must be presumed that his purposes were malevolent.

jpbrooks:

Why must we presume that? Why assume that what he wrote about himself in the bible, assuming that he was writing about himself, accurately describes him?

bd-from-kg wrote:

I was proposing a possible motivation consistent with this presupposition. If you want to drop this presupposition, I can offer lots more reasons that Satan might have had for writing the Bible that would not be so malevolent.

jpbrooks:

And of course, I agree. But how would that support your position?

quote:

But if there is no way for anyone else to know that Satan is telling the truth about himself (as a joke), why write?

bd-from-kg wrote:

To lead people astray (among many other possibilities).
Besides, since the point is to get people to believe the Bible,

jpbrooks:

Again, how do we know that this would be "Satan's" motivation? From the bible, perhaps?

bd=from-kg wrote:

Satan would thereby be inducing people to believe the truth about himself. For all we know, he might be quite proud of being who he is, so this might please him greatly.

jpbrooks:

And the way he goes about inducing people to believe the truth about himself is by weaving fantastic tales involving his activities, that we are assuming, never actually occurred. Correct?

quote:

And questions about where the evidence that Satan wrote the bible could come from are relevant to whether that possibility can be ruled out.

bd-from-kg wrote:

Not at all. It?s entirely possible that there can be no evidence whatever for a possibility, yet that possibility cannot be ruled out. In fact, this is fairly common.
For example, say that Phillips is murdered in circumstances such that only Smith or Jones had the opportunity to do it. What little evidence there is points to Smith, but it?s far from conclusive. Even though there is no evidence whatever that Jones did it and there is evidence that Smith did it, we are not entitled to conclude that Smith is the murderer, because the possibility that it was Jones cannot be ruled out with any high degree of confidence.

jpbrooks:

We can't rule Jones out because he is not assumed, in this example, to be simply some (possibly fictional) character that we know about only through Smith's testimony.

quote:

By "faith", I meant belief without evidence.

bd-from-kg wrote:

The belief that something is possible because there is no convincing evidence to the contrary does not involve ?faith?. For example, if the Steelers and Rams played each other earlier today and I don?t know what the outcome was, I will believe that it?s possible that the Rams won, for the simple and sufficient reason that I have no convincing evidence that they didn?t.

jpbrooks:

Again, (as before), this example assumes that the existence and characteristics of each team can be confirmed on a basis that is not assumed to be questionable at the outset.

quote:

Believing something merely because there is no convincing evidence to the contrary seems strange.

bd-from-kg wrote:

But no one here actually believes that Satan wrote the Bible; they are asking you to give us convincing evidence that he didn?t.

jpbrooks:

And I'm asking you to give me convincing evidence that he could really exist on grounds that are independent from a "divinely inspired" source.

bd-from-kg wrote:

If there is no such evidence, there is no reason to believe that God wrote it (or that it was ?inspired? by God).

jpbrooks:

And if there is no such independent evidence for Satan (as the bible characterizes him), there is equally no reason to believe that he wrote it.
Mere possibilities with no support can't rule out alternative possibilities.
You seem to acknowledge that as true when you are arguing in favor of Satanic authorship of the bible, but you don't seem so willing to allow that same kind of argument to be (reflexively) applied against Satan.

quote:

There is no convincing evidence to the contrary, for example, for the existence of elves and fairies in solar systems outside of our own. So, (according to your reasoning), there is (therefore), apparently, a basis for believing in their existence.

bd-from-kg wrote:

No, that would be a reason for believing that these things are possible. You seem to be having trouble distinguishing between believing that a thing is possible and believing that it?s so. (But actually there are convincing reasons for believing that such things don?t exist. For example both elves and fairies, as I understand it, supposedly have properties and abilities that seem to be incompatible with natural laws.)

jpbrooks:

Granted. But perhaps the elves and fairies abide by natural laws only when they are in this universe. That is probably why we normally observe no interruptions in the natural laws. There is simply no evidence to support the contrary.

quote:

God, Satan, etc., were never meant to be total mysteries.

bd-from-kg wrote:

But they are mysterious enough that we cannot be expected to comprehend their motives for doing everything they do. For example, why did God send a plague killing 70,000 Israelites when David ordered a census? Why did he order the Amelekites to be massacred down to the last infant? Why did he send bears to kill some children who had teased an old man? Why did He cast thousands of demons into a herd of swine? The same goes for Satan. Why did he rebel against God in the first place, knowing that God is perfectly good and that rebellion was futile? Why did he tempt Jesus in the desert, given that he knew it was a waste of time since Jesus was God?

jpbrooks:

I'm not arguing that we have answers to those kinds of questions that are convincing for everyone or for even most people. But you seem to be ruling out the possibilility of convincing answers to these questions altogether.

quote:

That would mean that God is either a "monster" who "saves" people only if they are fortunate enough to figure out how to get "saved" ...

bd-from-kg wrote:

Don?t be silly. The Jews and the Moslems both claim that the fact that a man cannot be God is self-evident. Moslems say that to assert otherwise is unforgivable blasphemy, and Jews would probably still say the same (as they certainly did in Jesus? time) if not for the well-grounded fear of persecution by Christians. Of all the people of the world, only Christians seem to think that the claim that a man was God is anything but childish nonsense or an outrageous insult to God. For God to insist only that you not mock Him by worshiping a man as God is really a pretty minimal requirement.

jpbrooks:

So what?
All that is established by such ranting is that Judaism and Islam don't presuppose a God who can also be human, which is, in itself, hardly surprising since they are non-Christian belief systems, and that you seem to favor the views of those religions on the issue of salvation, over that of Christianity.
The Christian way of salvation is simply not an option for the other forms of theism because they, (and you as well apparently), rule it out, a priori, as a possibility.

quote:

...or else offers no way of salvation at all, leaving open the question why a just God would condemn innocent people ...

bd-from-kg wrote:

But perhaps those who would drag God down to the level of a mere mortal are the least innocent of all. The Bible says that the only unforgivable sin is to blaspheme the Holy Spirit. Since you claim to believe that, you can?t very well call the idea unreasonable; our only disagreement is over what constitutes blaspheming the Holy Spirit. At any rate, my hypothesis leaves the path to ?salvation? wide open: you need merely refrain from worshiping a man as God.

jpbrooks:

AFAIK (I'm still relatively new to Christianity), the whole issue surrounding the "unforgivable sin" of blasphemy may be subject to misinterpretation. The "unforgivability" of the sin may be due to the character of the individual who blasphemes the HS and not to the nature of the sin itself. The individual who blasphemes to the point of "unforgivablity" simply does not desire to be saved. I doubt that it means that God has no desire or power to save such an individual if that indivdual later desires to be saved.

But the problem with your "way" of salvation is that, while it may avoid condemnation for the "unforgivable sin", it provides no assurance that you won't be condemned for some other sin, (or for some other reason unrelated to sin, depending on how you are interpreting God).

bd-from-kg wrote:

Anyway, getting back to the original subject, why are you spending so much time ?refuting? one possible motive for Satan?s writing the Bible? Given time I could think of hundreds of others, and there may be millions more that I?m not creative enough to imagine. If your best argument for why Satan?s authorship of the Bible is not a reasonable possibility is that he would have no motive for doing so, you have no argument at all.

jpbrooks:

If we are assuming that Satan could have written the bible, wouldn't his possible motives for doing so be relevant? After all, if he is assumed to have written the bible on pure whim, for example, that doesn't seem to provide much support for the idea that the bible was intended as a malevolent work of deception.

Nevertheless, I think the strongest argument against Satan's authorship of the bible is (as I pointed out above) a lack of support (that is independent from "divine revelation") for the existence of the biblical Satan.

[ December 22, 2001: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

Amos

[QUOTE]Originally posted by bd-from-kg:
[QB]Amos:

So what you are saying is that you cannot be the judge and must accept the word of others that the bible is indeed inspired. This also means that you cannot be the judge of your own translation nor of the inspiration of others to translate and interpret the bible.

You have a problem and now must be careful to follow the a leader who must be inspired or "the blind would be leading the blind."

To gain confidence in your choice you are now forced to look at the track record of various religions and see who wrote the Divine Comedies in history and at whom were the Senecan tragedies aimed. Hint, Coriolanus is a Divine Comedy that takes place in Rome and Macbeth is a Senecan tragedy that takes place in England. There are many more such examples.

Amos

Laurentius

AVE

I actually presented this problem to a Christian missionary.
He found this problem interesting and argued this way, after mentioning that he can only talk about God and Satan as shown in the Holy Bible:

1. The Bible cannot be the work of mortals because it predicts historical events and describes wonders witnessed by many people, something that human being are not capable of without God's intervention. (He added that the Bible appears contradictory only to those that are not patient enough to understand it as a whole, and then added that a simple law such as gravity, and its consequences, would also seem nonsensical to, let’s say, an illiterate member of an Australian or African tribe – not that it would be their fault, of course).
2. God must be the author of the Bible, because only he is almighty enough to do it, that is predict events, announce wonders and perform them through his designated people (actually, the man described God’s perfection in detail).
3. Satan cannot be the author because he is inferior to God in all respects, and for God it is very easy to intervene and make people understand that they have been deceived (in fact, the man says, God has often done that, warning about false prophets, idols, etc., which are actually Satan’s ideological hooks, the same as his words that made Eve sin and brought sin into the world, and the same as this forum, where people deny God’s authorship).

Well, the Christian missionary told me a lot more than that, because I had the patience to listen to him till the end, so that he could no longer blame people with secular views of impatient dismissal of the “truth”.

Cichli Suite

Laurentius

Highly debateable

Goddidit... Bad arguement

Goddidit...

Laurentius

AVE

Diligently posted by Cichli Suite:
So the missionary might have actually been right about seculars' impatient dismissal of christians' arguments.

RyanS2

Hmm... well, for starters, most of the Biblical "prophecies" are so obscure that you can transliterate them to mean anything. To prove this case, Saddam Hussein declared that the Gulf War was going to be the Armaggedeon War and certainly all the "players" were there to meet the stage, but sure enough, it wasn't Armaggedeon. Likewise, the Bible tells us nothing advanced that would be helpful, (for instance, how to cure cancer), nor really worthwhile. Let's also not forget the earliest copies of the Bible we possess are from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which certainly weren't written at the time of the purported events. Thus, we are left upon the word of the author alone for any accounts of divine sanctification of the events.

Now, back to the original question, could Satan have written the Bible? Depends. The Gnostics thought the God of the Old Testament was the Iadolboth, an evil God who enjoyed torture. Certainly they have enough scriptural references to back this assertion up. The Luciferians believed that as well. The full story?

Thedore Reik states in "Pagan Rites in Judaism" that the early Jews were henotheistic, or polytheistic in nature. The Jewish tribal god Yahweh had female consorts, reflecting Israelite polytheism. "Eve," or Adamah, as the earth goddess was called by Semites, was the same as the "Great Mother-Goddess," also known as Ishtar, Isis, Cybele, Aphrodite and Venus. Reik further says:

After the liquidation of the kingdom of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar, the Jewish refugees in Egypt associated Yaweh with two goddesses. The name of the Lord was blended with that of the goddess as Anath Yahu.

Concerning Jewish polytheistic astrotheology, Reik also states:

The moon was the emblem of Israel in Talmudic literature and in Hebrew tradition. The mythical ancestors of the Hebrews lived in Ur and Harran, the centers of the Semitic moon-cult.

Now, likewise the cults of Mary in the days after the Middle Ages were somewhat important as well. One example was the account of Diana Lucifera, the Morning Star Goddess, who had two sons, Jesus and Lucifer. Lucifer was the good God, who had a gamble against his brother and father, and failed. Church critics declared this to be blasphemous, so the Luciferians asked how a lesser being could, or would, oppose a God? The Churchmen didn't have an answer. Later on, Lucifer was added to the myth, though no mention is made of Lucifer, (the planet venus) in either the Hebraic Bible or in the Greek Bible. (Closest is "Heylol".)

So, from a historical context, there were people who had believed that an evil God, call him/her/it Satan if you will, had written the Bible.

Laurentius

AVE

Posted by RyanS2

Okay, we all know this.
We know the scriptures consist of texts of different ages and different orientations. We know they represent oral traditions that are way prior to time they were recorded at. We know that these records and traditions have been reinterpreted, corrected and edited throughout many centuries and under different circumstances. We know.

But for the Christian nowadays, history starts with Abraham (who shows up in the Bible after the first eleven chapters of Genesis). For the Christian, that’s the real history. He trusts what the Bible says, and the events in it make up his reality and code of values. Now, if you try to pull him/her into the secular’s reality and dismiss his beliefs as lame naiveties you will waste your time. First, the question “How can you prove the Bible hasn’t been written by Satan?” is not addressed particularly to an atheist, because for the atheist there is no Satan. Second, if you try to prove a Christian’s belief wrong, you’d better listen to how the Christian argues, or else no communication will take place.

Laurentius

AVE

This is the original question posted by Pug846:

Having talked with a Christian, I posted this:

Now, what do you make of the guy's opinion? Ignore him? Then what's the use of the question? <img src="confused.gif" border="0">

[ January 03, 2002: Message edited by: Laurentius ]</p>