Scarier than clowns: Chick tracts

[galateus]

And now, a holiday classic, showing the true face of that eeevil heathen holiday called Halloween, or as Chick tracts call it...

Satan's birthday!

Comments

[halialkers]

This is why I'm always WTF at some of the craziest shit the Protestant side of Christianity comes up with. Proto-Catholico-Orthodoxy created All Saint's Day to remember the dead. It certainly had nothing to do with the remnants of pre-Christian Celtic practices, as the Roman nobles that formed the Christian calendar inherited pre-Christian Rome's denunciations of the pre-Christian celts as trouser-wearing barbarians.

As far as I remember, human sacrifice was also a practice of Germanic and not Celtic religion and pretty much was dead (hurr hurr) by the time the Christian Roman Empire was converting the Germanic tribes by the sword. For that matter, the whole concept of the Christian Satan is to me a cheap rip-off of the creature Angra Mainyu of Zoroastrian mythology.

[psychopathicus_rex]

And the imagery came from Pan, and the name, if I recall correctly, comes from a Babylonian demon... Basically, Christianity never had an original idea in its life; virtually everything in it is cobbled together from other religions, and they snitched all the holy days, too.

[halialkers]

The imagery did come from Pan, however Ha-Satan is a Jewish term that does appear in the book of Job. But the Jewish Satan is more a Heavenly Lawyer than he is a Dark Lord clad in ice and fire and with eyes that make angels wet themselves in fear. The Christian version of Satan is essentially an Abrahamicized version of Angra Mainyu, who owes his origins ironically to the pre-Islamic and pre-Christian religion of guess where? Iran. Essentially Iran invented Satan.

[psychopathicus_rex]

That sounds convincing enough, all right. I'm pretty sure, though, that there was some sort of pre-Christian Babylonian demon with a name like that - Shaitan, or something.

[halialkers]

Actually the term really *did* originate with Biblical Judaism. The concept iof evil in cultures prior to the rise of the monotheistic Empires like the Roman Empire and the Caliphate was a bit more complex than the Morgoth v. Illuvatar-type setting a lot of the odder wings of Protestantism turn it into.

Even in the 1,000 year span of the Age of Warlords (300-1300) the take on Satan was a bit more complicated than his being the first evil overlord.

[psychopathicus_rex]

Well, OK, you clearly know more about the subject than I do. (I've never even HEARD of Morgoth and Illuvatar.) Personally, I've always kinda gotten the impression that if Satan DOES exist, he's just a low-level con-man type who is consistently bewildered that everyone thinks he's the Lord of Darkness. I mean, how bad can someone who's based on Pan really be?

LOL:

[halialkers]

Morgoth's the first bad guy in the Tolkien-verse and is essentially a physical Satan. He's also a lot more like the Satan of modern mythology than the original one of the myth does. IMHO any being that would qualify as prince of demons, which in all mythologies are nasty not-nice supernatural beings *would* have to be a jackass for the same reasons that the bigger the regime, usually the nastier the human government. Given that rulers of gods are also nasty not-nice, it's fair to say that anything sufficiently powerful enough to cow demons would have to be evil as the default.

Such a being would probably be a supernatural Genghis Khan in terms of evil more than a supernatural Mao.

Re: LOL:

[psychopathicus_rex]

Ah. No wonder I haven't heard of him - I'm not a big Tolkien fan. 'The Hobbit' is great stuff, but I've yet to make my way through the first 'Rings' book.
I just always got mixed messages from the traditional portrayal of the Devil. On one hand, yeah, logic would seem to dictate that he would have to be this awe-inspiringly evil figure. On the other, he's supposed to be a masterful musician and fiddler, which is not a traditionally evil attribute, there are all sorts of folktales about him being duped fairly easily (my favorite would have to be the one about the farmer who gets him to do something on the condition that his soul will be his 'once this candle burns down', then blows it out and shoves it inside a bible, which the Devil can't touch), he gets 'that old rascal' sorts of nicknames like 'Old Scratch' and the like, and I've read at least one story that actually has him being fairly nice, when he's in a good mood.