Disclaimer: I am an Atheist with Wikipedia, I could say anything! No promises on getting all of the details right, either.
Apparently some people think that LGBT (well, possibly just LGB) people are caused by Satan. Does anybody else think that these people are blaming the wrong mythological deity here?
First, a bit about Satan. I figure I’ll talk about Old Testament Satan, since sequels are never as good as the original. Satan is subservient to God, and his main role is to test people as a method of proving their faith. So wouldn’t the works of Satan also be the will of God?
I feel a better deity to blame would be Pan, the Greek god of nature and sexuality. Creating both straight AND LGB people would fall under Pan’s domain. Now, I can see where people could get confused here. The modern depiction of Satan takes the form of a Satyr, but this originated in the 1800s due to Pan’s popularity. Christians merely adopted the half-man, half-goat image of Satan as a way to scare people into converting.
Of course, there are problems with trying to place the blame on either deity. Both Pan and Satan are characters out of mythology, so they don’t actually exist. Instead, they provide people with a convenient scapegoat (pun intended) that could be used to discriminate against those who are different. Fortunately religion is on the decline, so with any luck these “arguments” will disappear in the near future.
Comments
3 responses to “Let’s Blame Satan!”
God does not interfere with free will. Beware, there are forces of evil which prey upon the blind and naive where only God will give you strength to endure.
To quote Albert Einstein: “In 1930, Einstein composed a kind of creed entitled “What I Believe,” at the conclusion of which he wrote: “To sense that behind everything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense…I am a devoutly religious man.” In response to a young girl who had asked him whether he believed in God, he wrote: “everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe—a Spirit vastly superior to that of man.” And during a talk at Union Theological Seminary on the relationship between religion and science, Einstein declared: “the situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
I don’t know what you are trying to say with the first part of your comment. Einstein lived almost 100 years ago, and people’s thoughts have evolved since then. Most scientists these days identify as either atheist or agnostic. Are you trying to convince me to believe because “that’s what all the cool 135-year-old scientists do”? Peer pressuring me into having faith won’t work, my parents raised me better than that :).
Another “Star Wars” battle between you and me. To be continued ….