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11 KiB
Interesting Fact about Lucifer
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u/xamueljones:
I want to see a story based on this idea without it being *Paradise Lost*.-
u/EliezerYudkowsky:
Golden Compass et. al.- u/PeridexisErrant:
The trilogy is titled *His Dark Materials*, fwiw. Also interesting in that the closest character to the Lucifer archetype has been missing for billions of years, and the Rebellion is going just fine. It's much more about the less powerful characters and the system too; the great leaders on all sides are almost irrelevant when it comes down to it.
- u/PeridexisErrant:
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u/None:
Alternate Character Interpretations are one thing, but I often find myself *slightly* worried that our pop-literary canon spends so much time and effort finding ways to cast the [Lone Power](http://www.youngwizards.com/ErrantryWiki/index.php/Lone_Power) as heroic and [the One](http://www.youngwizards.com/ErrantryWiki/index.php/One%2C_the) as the *real* bad-guy. Like, one of these created the universe, and the other decided to muck it up by introducing evil. It should be remembered that Evil is not [a cool leather jacket or a short skirt](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvilIsSexy), or even [free will](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheEvilsOfFreeWill): Evil is cancer killing your mother tortuously over years. Evil is people having to live flea-bitten and psychotic in train tunnels because there are no care programs. On the other hand, said pop-literary canon seems to do so because priests need to justify their positions of authority, so Ultimate Good gets cast as [*having the right king in charge*](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RightfulKingReturns). (Sorry for ranting: these kinds of thoughts tend to come of reading Iain Banks books and David Brin's blog and sometimes just [the internet at large](http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/saul.html) and realizing that, welp, that whole Enlightenment thing we go on about was *really recent* and *hasn't actually fully won yet*, and still needs defense more than "interesting" subversion.)-
u/alexanderwales:
In Christian mythology, Lucifer is almost never the Lone Power. He was an angel who fell from Heaven after a failed rebellion; his primary sin was that he wanted to become higher than God. Further, Satan is usually subordinate to God and part of God's own ~~Path to Victory~~ divine plan (though that part varies heavily by denomination). So you can see where the alternate character interpretation comes from. Very few Christians believe that Satan was responsible for bringing death or sin into the world; he's mostly just a guy who really, really hates God and humanity. Those are both pretty sympathetic. Edit: I am sort of curious how the view of Lucifer in Christianity compares to the view of Lucifer in Judaism, if you have any insight.-
u/JackStargazer:
>Satan is usually subordinate to God and part of God's own Path to Victory divine plan (though that part varies heavily by denomination). This is the big one to me. In almost all cases, Lucifer is inherently understood as **less powerful than God**, and as God is omnipotent, any evil which Lucifer performs is inherently accepted by God simply because despite having the ability to, he has not prevented or reversed it. Then there's the fact the as God is omniscient, he knew exactly what Lucifer would do when (before?) he created him, and still chose to allow it to happen. So even if Lucifer created evil, God allowed and allows it to happen and so is equally or more complicit. Hell, under most modern legal systems between parental liability for damages caused by children and vicarious liability of employers from acts of employees, God would be responsible for all of it. Most sympathetic Devils are either Byronic Anti-Heroes fighting against a much more dangerous evil than themselves, people who have Become the Mask, or guys with the worst PR department in the world. Most of the time they are still assholes, but they are passionate and most importantly *human-seeming* assholes, usually fighting an alien or apathetic system or being. In almost all of those cases as well, they are not responsible for the creation of evil or death, though they may use it was a weapon or take advantage of it under Pay Evil unto Evil terms. -
u/None:
Judaism has no character representing Lucifer or the Lone Power. The "morning star" in Isaiah is a reference to a Babylonian god who was being insulted. "Satan" is taken to be, roughly, its literal translation: "accuser", God's prosecuting attorney. Judaism believes a Source of Evil would contradict monotheism. (Our God is more eldritch than yours ;-).)-
u/brandalizing:
Although there is the concept of the 'malach hamavet', or the Angel of Death. Not an exact satanic parallel, but an entity known to work counter to god - while, of course, still within His Plan.- u/None:
Wait, the Angel of Death works *counter* to God's Plan? News to me. But anyway, yeah, that guy: all made of eyes and with a sword on which there's a single drop of bile, which he throws into your throat as you die to make your soul come out.
- u/None:
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u/Ken_M_Imposter:
"You're wrong, Kyle. God is not a dick!"
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u/Vebeltast:
A thought: Alternate Character Interpretations for $DIETY are often pretty similar to what you'd see from a close-but-not-quite UFAI. Hell: someone decided that their SAI should punish wrongdoing. "Chosen People": someone decided to avoid walking all over everybody by setting to defend their family, followers, or countrymen. Various bigotry: someone decided to hard-code their beliefs. That said, I agree. Many of the alternate character interpretations for the Lone Power bugged me and I think you hit the nail on the head: there's a trap where they end up being death worship wrapped up in nice words and arguments. -
u/protagnostic:
> Evil is cancer killing your mother tortuously over years ITT: Times Diane Duane made me cry.-
u/None:
The second example was from *To Visit the Queen*.-
u/protagnostic:
Ah, I haven't read the Feline Wizards books. The Wizard's Dilemma hit me right in the feels, though. -
u/nerdguy1138:
Is the third Feline Wizards book available in ebook yet? The only thing I could find was apparently $22, and while I have deeply enjoyed her other books, I spent $35 buying almost the entire rest of her catalog from her own site, so that much to complete it just seems excessive.- u/None:
God, I have no idea. When I found out it wasn't officially out back in 2011, I emailed Duane's site manager, and was allowed to "subscribe" and get the ebook at a decent price. Since then there have been no updates whatsoever, even though it's basically a finished book, and a really good one.
- u/None:
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u/ajuc:
> Like, one of these created the universe, and the other decided to muck it up by introducing evil. Sorry for nitpicking, but in standard Christian theology that's not what happend. God created Satan. If you think Satan introduced evil, and not the people that do the evil, then Satan isn't responsible either - God is, because God created Satan (and did so while being almighty and omniscient - he knew the consequences and had the possibility to do it better). There's whole theology branch trying to justify existence of evil, and AFAIK the best argument is "there's no evil as such, evil is just lack of goodness, like shadow is a lack of light, so God didn't created evil - it was always a possibility". I find this argument wonky (it sugests evil-good scale is like Kelvin scale of temperature - there is ultimately evil act, and everything else is better, and also you can take evil deed, scale it enough times and it becomes good). Also it makes it hard to distinguish evil and neutral actions. Anything suboptimal and better than ultimate evil is similar in kind. But if you don't accept this argument - the alternative is to accept that God introduced evil, through Satan, which in turn did it through people. Also regarding the speific example of cancer - Bible says openly God did this when he expulsed people from Eden "you will no longer live forever - you will bear kids in pain and die of sickness". This (together with the "I'm jealous God", "don't conspire with foreign gods", "the tree of knowledge is dangerous because people could become gods", "tower of babel - I'll destroy that") makes it very easy to read it as totalitarian system propaganda made into mythology. There's fundmaental tension between God being so obviously more powerful than anything else in his universe that there can be no doubts who wins, and him being so scared of people and other spirits. It just begs for this interpretation. -
u/Jiro_T:
>Evil is cancer killing your mother tortuously over years. I know which of God and Satan is supposed to have introduced cancer into the world, and it's not Satan. (At least unless you buy into certain religious ideas about the Fall metaphysically changing everything else in the universe, and even then, God arranged it so the Fall could do that.)
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u/PlaneOfInfiniteCats:
Are you OK with it being Japanese adult game? If you are, you can try playing [Tears to Tiara](http://nicoblog.org/pc-games/tears-to-tiara-english-patched/). (NSFW, eroge, you have been warned, proceed at your own risk, there is Lucifer fighting for equal rights. He is not really satanic, though.)
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u/ArgentStonecutter:
[Stephen Brust, _To Reign in Hell_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Reign_in_Hell)-
u/embrodski:
My main problem with this book is that the entire tragedy could have been avoided if God and Satan had just sat down and had an actual five-minute discussion, rather than the comedy-of-errors that relying on an unreliable messenger caused. I found it annoying rather than tragic.- u/ArgentStonecutter:
That bothered me, too, but I also realized that none of these people had the experience of thousands of years of cohabitation with millions of others. They were all, of necessity, naive.
- u/ArgentStonecutter:
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u/Tholo:
And Terry Pratchett was the first to write Equal Rites.- u/Schlessel:
RIP sir Pratchett
- u/Schlessel:
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u/None:
So, by this logic, when someone demands equal rights, you should deny them their existing rights and exile them. Frankly, if this church was right about God, I'd have to question who was really Evil.