RE: Satan. Justice delayed is justice denied. Why does God wait?
December 21, 2011 at 6:08 pm
(This post was last modified: December 21, 2011 at 6:17 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
Late to the party, however. The whole Satan thing has been used as an explanation for whatever evils or ills the world is or has been or will suffer for a long time. He's a sort of cosmic patsy. In the same way that Jesus is supposed to be a scapegoat for man, Satan appears to be a scapegoat for god with regards to the world around us. There's always a divider propped up between the divine and the natural. Always something between us and our surroundings and the gods ( and them us, similarly).
With a scapegoat you can project all of your frustration, all responsibility, all inequity onto a third party and then remove it somehow by removing that third party. Ritualized sympathetic magic. The third party is punished in place of yourself, the third party suffers in place of yourself. This is meant to remove impurities that are believed to seperate you from the object of your worship or devotion. In the narrative of christianity you see Jesus assuming this role for man specifically. His blood instead of ours to fulfill a debt, he suffers in our place. But what of the evil inflicted upon the godly or the saved by the heartless forces of nature? What of the fire that destroys gods temple, or the wolves that eat the flocks of his flocks? Well, we have Satan for that. For god to rule here, for his kingdom to be established (so the thought goes) all of this evil must be removed. The final act of the narrative being the defeat of Satan, the end of disasters and calamity. Not only are men made pure, but the world around them as well. Now, one might ask "why then has the scapegoat for man already been sacrificed and the scapegoat for the rest left for some future time? That's the question asked in the OP. There's a fairly simple answer for that. One would be unable to explain why disasters and calamity struck the faithful if the source, the engine for these things had already been defeated. If the ritual had already been completed, and these forces remained, and the kingdom had not come..then the faithful would have a serious problem on their hands. This battle was supposed to take place shortly after the ritual sacrifice of christ and atonement of man. The people who thought this narrative up definitely felt that they would be incapable of defeating those forces of nature (and ourselves) which Satan represented (and they had great reasons to believe that, IMO...lol), and so they left this final part of the ritual to god, in the not so distant future (their own lifetimes, so that's a little disappointing). We would purify ourselves, god would purify the land, and then you get the whole "peace forever amen" bit. Christianity is very much a failed doomsday cult. We don't appear to have been saved from anything at all, and the forces that Satan personified then are still with us now, thousands of years later. In this case justice has not been delayed, there is none to be had.
To stick with my usual sarcasm....You don't finger the patsy until you've completed the caper.
With a scapegoat you can project all of your frustration, all responsibility, all inequity onto a third party and then remove it somehow by removing that third party. Ritualized sympathetic magic. The third party is punished in place of yourself, the third party suffers in place of yourself. This is meant to remove impurities that are believed to seperate you from the object of your worship or devotion. In the narrative of christianity you see Jesus assuming this role for man specifically. His blood instead of ours to fulfill a debt, he suffers in our place. But what of the evil inflicted upon the godly or the saved by the heartless forces of nature? What of the fire that destroys gods temple, or the wolves that eat the flocks of his flocks? Well, we have Satan for that. For god to rule here, for his kingdom to be established (so the thought goes) all of this evil must be removed. The final act of the narrative being the defeat of Satan, the end of disasters and calamity. Not only are men made pure, but the world around them as well. Now, one might ask "why then has the scapegoat for man already been sacrificed and the scapegoat for the rest left for some future time? That's the question asked in the OP. There's a fairly simple answer for that. One would be unable to explain why disasters and calamity struck the faithful if the source, the engine for these things had already been defeated. If the ritual had already been completed, and these forces remained, and the kingdom had not come..then the faithful would have a serious problem on their hands. This battle was supposed to take place shortly after the ritual sacrifice of christ and atonement of man. The people who thought this narrative up definitely felt that they would be incapable of defeating those forces of nature (and ourselves) which Satan represented (and they had great reasons to believe that, IMO...lol), and so they left this final part of the ritual to god, in the not so distant future (their own lifetimes, so that's a little disappointing). We would purify ourselves, god would purify the land, and then you get the whole "peace forever amen" bit. Christianity is very much a failed doomsday cult. We don't appear to have been saved from anything at all, and the forces that Satan personified then are still with us now, thousands of years later. In this case justice has not been delayed, there is none to be had.
To stick with my usual sarcasm....You don't finger the patsy until you've completed the caper.
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