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

[punishermax]

But that's fucking moronic on a million levels.

I'm Catholic so I know a lil bit, enough that Satan won't illegally take my shit.

So basically, Satan's just a pissed off angel who thought taking heaven over'd be cool, got his ass stomped by an Archangel and is now doomed to be the Lord of Dickheads. He never kills people, he never fucking TOUCHES PEOPLE. He lies, he sneaks, he tries to tempt you. SATAN NEVER ACTUALLY HURTS PEOPLE.

This pisses me off because it's so fucking basic, it's so basic in Christianity in general that you can't fuck it up. The Devil doesn't get his hands dirty,

[karunya]

If he or his ebil minions were to tempt somebody with something that will end up killing them: jackass stunts (does that need a (TM) next to it nowadays?), addiction, etc., it's really the same difference I think. For some reason, I'm a target for road rage. Since I refuse to admit that I'm a stereotypical lousy Pennsylvania German driver wearing trifocals, I just assume that the ol' Devil is influencing the drivers around me!

[punishermax]

The difference is that if the Devil just out and out murdered you then you have no hope. There has to be free will of some kind, you ha ve to be able to say either "I did not fall to temptation" or "I failed to be strong enough" if Satan could just pop up, slice off your head and boom you in hell, then the fuck is the point to anything he does?

Satan is more of a idea really, and should be presented as such. I'm not saying him having a name is bad but if you look at Inferno by Dante you get, in my opinion, the best representation of him. Satan is tortured for all time. He fucked up biiiig time and now suffers worse then ANYONE. His sole sort of happiness in a sense is trying to get people to join him. He can't kill you, he can tempt someone but that person is acting of their own will.

[karunya]

This question really strikes at the heart of the difference between the generic Catholic and Protestant worldviews (needless to say, in the real world people hav ea million different interpretations). To a Protestant, for whom salvation is dependant upon God's grace appropriated through repentence and belief in Christ alone, the Devil can't cause a Christian to go to hell. The question is already settled, and past/future sins have no bearing on one's destination.

If one posits the necessity for good works (as does the Roman Catholic Church and certain Protestant sects, blessedly not including mine because I'm lousy at doing good), then the "I fell/did not fall to temptation" question is critical.

I agree that pop culture's view of "the Devil made me do it" is neither accurately Catholic nor Protestant, but a strange and (IMHO) rather useless amalgamation thereof.

Revelation suggests that Satan isn't in the lake of fire yet (assuming, as many Protestants do and Catholics mostly don't) that Revelation is not an allegory but an artistic depiction of future events. And that he's still the default ruler of the unregenerate members of the human race.

My personal opinion: God is way more loving than the Bible suggests, but I'll preach the Gospel to you anyways because faith is a good deal all around, not just in the afterlife but for psychological reasons every day. If God is real, being His friend is a good way to survive the hassles of daily life with imparted strength, wisdom, and tranquility.

As always, just my $0.02. Believe me, as a nursing home chaplain dealing with the elderly and dying, this ain't my first time around the eschatological barnyard, babe. Your mileage may differ. At this point in my own adventures, the Protestant worldview is a lens that makes sense of the world around me.

[halialkers]

And when one factors in Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy the mess gets higher and deeper. I don't know very much about Oriental Orthodoxy but at least in Eastern Orthodoxy Satan is much less a bugaboo than he is in Western Catholicism and Protestantism, and he only becomes a proto-Morgoth in some of the more radical strands of Protestantism.

[karunya]

Tis true. I thank God for the person who invented the statement "This is something about which good Christians may disagree." I like to include people in, and not exclude them out, to make myself perfectly redundant.

[halialkers]

Yup.

[halialkers]

See the thing is that Biblically, the only time Satan appears as such in the Old Testament is as his Jewish version, the Heavenly version of a Divine Prosecuting attorney and Adversary of the Jewish people in Heaven (in the sense that he is the one responsible for subjecting them to trials). In the New Testament he appears once in the Gospels to tempt Christ in the desert, and once in Revelation to fight and lose a war in Heaven.

The modern take on Satan owes a lot more to John Milton than it does to the actual text, and the original Medieval Satan was a King of Demons who was an outright thuggish buffoon. The idea of Satan the refined man of wealth and taste is very much a more modern take on the Devil. And the mythological Satan is more of a cheap knock-off of Zoroastrianism's Angra Mainyu than an entity that is inherently Abrahamic.

For that matter in Islam Shaitan is actually condemned for following God's commands to the letter and will ultimately enter Paradise same with everyone else in the Muslim cosmology. Christianity has several levels of harshness about it that Judaism and Islam both lack. It's one reason I consider it the outlier of the three.