(January 10, 2017 at 4:38 pm)Godschild Wrote: Satan is not necessarily involved in these religions, he help these religions along and left the nature of men to grab ahold of them. Satan is not omnipresent so he can't effect the masses by dealing with people one at a time, ie. speaking to them. Satan takes on those who can influence the most people and keep himself hidden, if people understood he was involved they would stay away from such peoples. Satan is not omniscient, he is very clever as witnessed in the Garden of Eden. Satan can and would take the lives of all the lost at any given moment if God did not limit him, we know this from the book of Job. There are few religions that recognize Satan in their religion and if they did they would have ways to deal with him. If they knew of his influence in their religions they would run from it or accept the influence and become evil in their dealings with mankind. When one hears from God they need only to line up what they heard with the teachings of the Bible and know who they have heard from. Before you suggest that Satan could do this remember that Christ said, " a house divided against itself can't stand."
This means that Satan is limited in ways that God is not, and he should be far less influential-- God can speak to each of us directly in many ways, Satan must find less direct and less effective means of reaching people. If this is the case, then we would expect far more people to have found the same God and fewer people to be convinced by false ones. It doesn't make sense for Satan to be as successful as he has been.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould