What is your understanding of Satan?
- Thread starter Stacmon
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(I spent more than a year studying in Augsburg).
Bozo Erectus
Master Baker
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MRM, they must have great commercials:
1. Lifes just better with Satan
2. Satan and you, perfect together
3. Doesnt your family deserve Satan?
1. Lifes just better with Satan
2. Satan and you, perfect together
3. Doesnt your family deserve Satan?
Talkie_Toaster
I toast, therefore I am
A creature of mythology, later adapted by priests to keep the peasants in line, i.e. tithes etc.
So I guess I'm for the third option.
So I guess I'm for the third option.
Gladi
The ignored thread killer
Tykinruoka
Unlimited power
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Satan is a interesting character, but I see him just as a tool for frightening little children.
Satan seems to be the Intelligent Design of Islam, then. All the things Satan does would have happened anyway, making Satan's input into events non-existent; poor guy.
Islam's roll for Satan seems strange, though, because Islam lumps him in with the sinners and disbelievers. Sinners are like Satan; knowingly rejecting God's instructions. Disbelievers are an entirely different moral category, because they're not willingly rejecting God's instructions, because they do not perceive the instructions as being from God. (and seemingly are predestined to be that way)
I don't get Satan's roll, then. If I think the Qur'an is not divine and I point to the prostate evolving eons before humans as one reason: did Satan design the prostate? Did Satan point out the information to me? Did Satan create the argument I'm using and I'm predestined to believe it?
And who possessed Emily Rose, then, if she was really possessed? Who did Jesus (pbuh) cast out of the demon-ridden man?
I don't believe in Satan. I don't think any entity was made out of fire any more than I think that people were made out of clay.
Islam's roll for Satan seems strange, though, because Islam lumps him in with the sinners and disbelievers. Sinners are like Satan; knowingly rejecting God's instructions. Disbelievers are an entirely different moral category, because they're not willingly rejecting God's instructions, because they do not perceive the instructions as being from God. (and seemingly are predestined to be that way)
I don't get Satan's roll, then. If I think the Qur'an is not divine and I point to the prostate evolving eons before humans as one reason: did Satan design the prostate? Did Satan point out the information to me? Did Satan create the argument I'm using and I'm predestined to believe it?
And who possessed Emily Rose, then, if she was really possessed? Who did Jesus (pbuh) cast out of the demon-ridden man?
I don't believe in Satan. I don't think any entity was made out of fire any more than I think that people were made out of clay.
Xanikk999
History junkie
What i understand about satan was that he was made to compel people into not sinning and follow religious laws in the early days of christianity and judaism.
But then again i dont think satan was in original judiasm was he? Must be a creation of christianity otherwise.
But then again i dont think satan was in original judiasm was he? Must be a creation of christianity otherwise.
CartesianFart
Deity
Not to say something akin to Milton's satan but i have to say that satan is merely a allegorical interpretation of what makes mankind as something ideologically natural.
Stacmon
Explorer
Well he does have some impact, however, the point is that whoever he impacts would have done wrong with or without his "support". For example, a Muslim that is too lazy or feels it's unnecessary to pray 5 times a day in the West might be getting "additional prodding" from Satan to shirk his obligations and so forth. However, this person would be shirking and committing sin whether or not Satan was in the bleachers cheering.
Think about this example. A person chooses to kill a man and is intent on doing it. Satan then hands him (figuratively) a rusty saw that will undoubtedly cause extreme suffering to the victim. The person was going to transgress the limits of his religion anyway, willing to do this with or without Satan's influence. However, Satan's influence makes a bad deed even worse and amplifies the transgression.
The way I see it (though my understanding may be limited), the same way God promises to multiply good deeds in the Qur'an, Satan makes bad things even worse and encourages even more.
Sinners and disbelievers are more similar than you suggest. Another example of Satan's impact might be to strengthen the disbelief of people and cause them to go even further astray. There are different sources of disbelief.
For example, a person could be faced with the Qur'an, the Sunnah and the signs that Islam and God provide, and simply decide not to believe them. They come to this decision not because the religion was poorly explained to them but because they would rather hold on to the religion of their families/ancestors or prefer to believe in a religion that demands less of them. In this case, these people are held accountable for their disbelief according to the religion.
However, Muslims believe that those who are truly ignorant of Islam, whether because it was misrepresented to them (ie: a Christian preacher telling his flock that Muslims worship a "Moon God" or "Satan") or they have never heard of it, (ie: think about some very small, rural village in some isolated corner of the world) will not be punished for it. They will be held to account for their deeds and how faithfully they followed the religion that they did have (ie: Judaism, Christianity).
Now the above applies more in the past, when communications and global interconnectedness were not at the astounding point we seem them today. Nowadays there is less and less of an excuse to claim ignorance, and information about Islam is available everywhere. Translations of the meaning of the Qur'an are also available in most major languages, where as several hundred years ago, they were not. Furthermore, these translations are easily accessible to anyone with computer/internet access and copies of the Qur'an (with translations) are handed out free by the Embassies of Muslim countries (ie: the Saudi Embassy), and other Muslim organizations.
Well, first off you're taking the theory of evolution as undisputed fact. I've done a lot of reading that has made me exceedingly skeptical of evolution, whereas before I accepted it unquestioningly. That's a discussion for another day though
. If you're referring to accounts of Jesus that come from the New Testament, recall that Muslims though believing in Jesus, do not believe in the New Testament the same way that Christians do. Instead, Muslims believe that Jesus was given revelation from God, but that this revelation hasn't survived in any preserved form (like the Old Testament has). Recall that the New Testament was written by people that never personally knew Jesus, often long after his death.
Forgetting for a moment that this could be metaphorical, who is to say what God could choose to base His designs on. If He decided to take a clump of clay and turn it into a man, or take fire and turn it into a Jinn, surely nothing is beyond His abilities, if He is All-Powerful.
RubricousMidget
Warlord
My view on Satan is as a metaphor for a certain part of the human psyche, part of a full explanation made some few thousand years ago. However, somebody took it a bit too literally.
Bozo Erectus
Master Baker
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He likes to be called Stan. Thats why he trips up the fingers of sinners and causes the common typo.
You'll have a hard time convincing me of that. Most disbelievers are disbelievers because they have not been given sufficient cause to believe, from their personal standpoint. It might be a choice to disbelieve (it's also a function of brain state), but we tend to believe something based on the evidence. It's not the person's fault that they've been given insufficient evidence about something as ephemeral as the divinity of a scripture; especially when the evidence given to them is parcelled out by another agent.
I mean, I've been given sufficient evidence to believe that gravity pulls me down; I'm not entirely opposed to the idea of believing something with sufficient evidence. Sadly, the Creator was more concerned about convincing me that gravity sucks than the Qur'an is divine ...
It's entirely a different moral category than a sinner.
A loose parallel would be the contempt we feel for someone who knowingly engages in actions that hurt others and then compare that to how we feel about someone who engages in actions and has no idea regarding the damage to their peers (and has no real way of knowing or guessing). They're in very different moral categories.
The translations are useless, it seems, unless one is predisposed towards believing something that's unclear. In fact, there is more of an excuse in the modern world to disbelieve, because there's no way to confirm (personally) that Mohammed had any divine knowledge that people claim.
It's just one example of a reason to disbelieve the Qur'an. There are dozens. I just plucked that one out because the thread was talking about Satan. I'm just wondering who designed the prostate, if it was designed first and stimulating it (in a certain way) is such an abomination. It doesn't really require a specific answer, because it's an example of a much larger set of questions. I could also wonder who created a system where there is an opportunity cost on charity, and an economic system that (by definition) is based on scarcity.Well, first off you're taking the theory of evolution as undisputed fact. I've done a lot of reading that has made me exceedingly skeptical of evolution, whereas before I accepted it unquestioningly. That's a discussion for another day though
Broadly, it seems the designer intentionally f'ed up the creation, making it impossible for humans to behave in purely moral ways. But still f'ed up enough that humans have a myriad of ways to be immoral. The Satanic agent certainly came about before Satan. Islam thinks Satan encourages disbelief? How about the god that hides, seemingly intentionally?
Okay, the dude never cast out devils as far as Islam is concerned. That's cool. It's a tidbit to know.
I guess one could point out that Allah is all powerful by pointing out that He created an invisible and unprovable Jinn out of fire. Of course, an All-Powerful being could have created a text which disproves the theory of evolution sufficiently to convince someone who speaks English. Colour me less than impressed. Funnily enough, I still believe that gravity sucks.
Swedishguy
Deity
Satan is everyone that believes in Satan.
It doesn't necessarily have to be that that would prefer to have a different religion. It can extremely easily be the fact that they would find some laws to be immoral - and that's rather trivial to do.
Rather trivial to do, considering the fact that mainstream Islam has rejected secular philosophy. (This is by far, my major objection to the religion) The fact that Islam finds rejects rationality to justify morality doesn't change the fact that western civilization - more importantly, academia, which isn't necessarily western - disagrees.
[wiki]Al-Ghazali[/wiki] should be condemned, not celebrated, because this had become dogma.
It also doesn't change the fact that the vast vast majority of people in the world who consciously choose a religion, choose the religion that appeals to them and find it true because of this appeal, rather than an issue of evidence. It's irrelevant to whether the religion is true or not, of course, but you seriously can't expect someone to believe in something that both has no decisive evidence to convince them, (or is irrelevant to the matter) *and* doesn't appeal to what they consider moral. Since when has any monotheistic religion claimed that God is evil?
Eukaryote
Deity
So since we all sin, the Islamic god believes we are all evil and was surprised by it?
Anyway, here's my belief of Satan:
A fallen angel who misleads and tempts people so we do evil. Can only do what god let's him. The mistery surrounding satan is what his motavation is.
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