christ-on-a-stick

spurly,

I don't have time to repeat (again) each of my questions that you haven't answered straightforwardly, maybe later, so here's just ONE:

If in the beginning there was only God, and God created everything including Satan, and at first even Satan was good -

where did Satan's "pride" come from?

spurly

Satan, at some time in the ancient past, was offered a choice. He, probably along with all the angels, was given a choice - you can serve and love God, or you can choose not to do that. Satan took advantage of this opportunity to lead a rebellion and try to take over the kingdom of God.

Where did the pride of Satan come from? From a perversion of the good God created. Satan looked at himself and thought he was good enough to be God, and he began to believe it.

God gives us a choice whether or not to serve him - Satan and a host of angels chose not to, based on their pride, and that choice sealed their doom.

Kevin

christ-on-a-stick

But spurly, ... where did his DESIRE to do this come from? From where did his "proclivity" to make the wrong choice come?

If a being is perfectly good, would they not make the perfect choice?

Bumble Bee Tuna

So, instead of letting Satan corrupt us... and then "working hard to bring us back", why didn't God just eternally punish Satan in Hell, where he could never influence us? He doesn't spare us from punishment and let us influence the world once we die- he sends us to hell. So why can't Satan face the same fate? God is basically doing the equivalent of taking a murderer and letting him roam free, killing others at will.

-B

ex-xian

I'd still like a response to:

the_cave

Lobostrity--I like the way you're going with this. I'd say that if we ever discover any intelligent life (or even if they just exist somewhere) they'd be wrestling with the same problems of existence that we do. So I suspect that even if they didn't have religion in the same way we'd do, they'd have patterns of thought that resembled it close enough that we would recognize both as being sides of the same thing. It might be humbing for us, but in itself it wouldn't diminish the value of what we do. I agree that human-centrism would end up being a mistake--but I also think that a lot of what we call "human" (emotions, experiences, and the like) is just a part & parcel of being a sentient being. But we might never actually know whether this is true until we find out. Anyway, I'd just like to agree that religion could use more thought in this direction--good post.