"Satan" and the "God" of Christian dominionists

[diane_vera]

In the Dark Christianity LiveJournal community, in a thread titled They're at it again, begun by roseross, there was a comment by underlankers referring to dominionist Christianity as "de facto Satanism." Naturally, I questioned that.

Comments

[underlankers]

In my view you're looking at this in a somewhat-different way. Such an entity *itself* does not have to be evil, its vision of the future of the human race simply has to be what *humans* would consider evil. Its motivations, even, may have nothing to do with evil in the Sauron-style spiky armor and World Domination viewpoint but be more akin to say, human trawlers that regularly cause the death of countless dolphins.

Most pre-Christian Gods and even the God of the Bible come across as evil to modern readers. An entity that has none of the pretense of concern for a specific culture/ethnicity that the older ones did but the same wildness and power of its predecessors would be the epitome of evil from human perspectives but perhaps it itself is not.

[diane_vera]

I agree that the God of the Bible comes across as evil -- in an everyday, practical sense of "evil" -- to most modern readers. Ditto the God of dominionists.

Still, I object to equating even the God of dominionists with a cartoon Devil. Historically, Devil belief has nearly always served the function of stoking irrational fears, with resulting paranoia and hatred.

Even more so, I object to equating dominionists with Satanists. As I pointed out here, Satanism is fundamentally all about facing down irrational fears and resisting tyranny. Alas, too many Satanists replace one set of irrational hatreds with another set of irrational hatreds, but such Satanists cannot be effective political organizers. As far as I am aware, the only majorly successful political organizer who ever publicly identified himself as a Satanist/Luciferian (at least jokingly -- it's hard to tell how serious he was about it) was Saul D. Alinsky, a progressive.

[underlankers]

I wasn't referring to the cartoon Satan. I was referring to something more like the Derleth version of Nyarlathotep. Any realistic such leader of demons would by virtue of the inherent nature of demons as antigods (when as noted the Gods themselves are unpleasant enough creatures themselves) and by virtue of ruling a large number of such beings *have* to be a vicious thing.

Hell, *human* rulers often tend to be jerkasses in their own right, a ruler of other such powerful beings like the mythological Satan would have to be rather more jerkassish as the things required to unite millions of demons are somewhat different than that human rulers would use, as any pair of human individuals are equal, while demons would have full-fledged phenomenal cosmic power.

[diane_vera]

I have not read Derleth's stories about Nyarlathotep.

Anyhow, I hesitate to draw any conclusions whatsoever about how the gods or other nonhuman spirits deal with each other, given that they are beyond human comprehension to begin with. Instead, I prefer to focus on the here-and-now consequences of a religious movement and its symbolism. (See The here-and-now principle in theology.)

The here-and-now consequence of belief in a cosmic Evil figure is that it leads inevitably to paranoia and irrational blanket hatreds. This includes not only those Christians and Muslims who believe strongly in a Devil, but also those theistic Satanists who believe in what I call Christian-based duotheism, for whom the Christian God becomes their cosmic Evil figure. (Such paranoia on the part of Satanists is unlikely to lead to any successful political implementation, unlike its Christian counterpart. And it is, in my opinion, an unfortunate short-circuiting of the questioning-of-demonization impulse that is an important part of what leads people to