The Devil Made Me Do It

Aussie Thoughts

Aussie Thoughts

Just my 2 cents
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My dad blamed everything he didn't like on Satan's children. If someone misquoted scripture or committed a crime of some sort he'd say, "The sons of Cain done got to another one!" So my question to believers of all faiths is:

How much influence do you think Satan has on us today? Your personal view, what your faith says or both.
 
Hi Aussie –

Well dealing with Old Nick is always tricky, and as DA says claiming 'thedevilmademedoit' is unacceptable in the Christian Traditions as the devil can't make anyone do anything they don't want to do, which is what the statement implies.

We don't live in a vacuum, we're a product of our family, our culture, our times, and as the saying goes, 'there's nothing new under the sun', so you're dad's not wrong in the sense that the error (and misquoting Scripture? I've done that by accident and by design!) is not 'mine', it's just the same old that's found a place in me ... and I think that's a lot of what the talk is about.

The Christian Tradition holds Satan as a reality, although the topic is not much discussed these days. Pope Francis mentions him a lot, even though its unfashionable at the moment. St John-Paul II referred to Satan as the "saboteur of man's moral equilibrium".
 
Devils' Advocate said:
Well since I don't believe Satan exists I cannot answer your question directly
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That's probably why Aussie only asked the question of believers.:rolleyes:
Aussie Thoughts said:
So my question to believers of all faiths is: How much influence do you think Satan has on us today?
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Ok, let me answer the actual question rather than the headline. I would agree with Thomas in that Satan cannot directly make us do anything. Even though Satan's influence is just as great today as it ever was, it is still our choice whether or not to act on that influence. From a Christian standpoint we have complete control over Satan in Christ's name. Amen. That said, if you give Satan an inroad into your life, he'll eat your lunch and pop the bag! Borrowed that from an Evangelical Minister down south.;)
 
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According to Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Judaism, "the devil made me do it" would be as believable as an Australian blaming a fender bender on a rabbit as big as the largest kangaroo species (unfortunately I'm not as familiar with the different kangaroo/wallaby species as you are, so I hope that you can understand my analogy. :oops: )

Satan (ha-Satan in the Jewish religion) is just the celestial equivalent of the prosecuting attorney. Nothing more, nothing less.

Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine
 
Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine said:
According to Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Judaism, "the devil made me do it" would be as believable as an Australian blaming a fender bender on a rabbit as big as the largest kangaroo species (unfortunately I'm not as familiar with the different kangaroo/wallaby species as you are, so I hope that you can understand my analogy. :oops: )
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Let's hope you never run into "Big Buck" this devil child's over 6 foot!
Big Buck.jpg
 
Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine said:
According to Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Judaism, "the devil made me do it" would be as believable as an Australian blaming a fender bender on a rabbit as big as the largest kangaroo species (unfortunately I'm not as familiar with the different kangaroo/wallaby species as you are, so I hope that you can understand my analogy. :oops: )

Satan (ha-Satan in the Jewish religion) is just the celestial equivalent of the prosecuting attorney. Nothing more, nothing less.

Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine
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We got a bit side tracked there, but your analogy isn't lost to me. I actually like the Jewish perspective of Satan. I ran across a website that explains the difference in Jewish and Christian perspectives pretty well. Sounds a lot like something NJ was saying on another thread.

 
I just thought of another "the devil made me do it" pseudo-situation: the late Flip Wilson character Geraldine Jones and the line "The devil made me buy this dress."

Oh, and there's the BS/MS/PhD concerning the (former) Stanford swimming "star" and the recent brouhaha concerning his six-month sentence for three Class B felonies that he was found guilty of... I'm not saying that this is a pseudo-situation, just... *waves hands about, trying to find the correct words*

Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine
 
If you are about to get in trouble for anything.... blaming something that is unseeable, unprovable, and can't respond to the allegations is a great out eh?

Quite similar to saying "God wants me to go to Iraq and spend trillions to kill hundreds of thousands"

Oh Yay.

But as to the adversary... as Thomas indicated ....that is a choice.

As to the reference of asking for believers... belief in G!d? Or belief in the Devil? (they are not mutually exclusive)
 
How about a take on this from the 'Other' side?


Who the Hell is Satan?

Here's my understanding of this "Old Enemy" as the literary scholar Neil Forsyth coined.
The ideal of a Satan has always existed, only under other names and guises, Satan is a powerful and primordial archetype of man's psyche . . . a meme, or what some may now call a "Godform", I think the Magus of Chaos, Peter Carroll uses that term?

This archetype is the reflection of how we perceive ourselves in relation to what we call the "others". Satan is a social and cultural phenomenon as old as the mind of humanity itself. There has always and will always, be essentially two worldviews consisting of oppositions and they are "Us & Them" or "Me" and "the rest of you" . . . etc.

Sumerian and Akkadian tablets concur this worldview from the earliest known writings, the ancient Egyptian word for an Egyptian meant "human", which excluded all who were not Egyptian to be relegated to 'non-human', the Greek word for non-Greeks was "barbaroi" (barbarians). The Jewish Essenes called anyone not an Essene "ha satan" (the adversary), Zoroastrianism set forth the dualistic "good" (what we believe in) and "evil" (what they believe in).

"A society does not simply discover its others, it fabricates them, by selecting, isolating, and emphasizing as aspect of another people's life, and making it symbolize their difference"
- William Scott Green (Professor of the history of religion - ancient Judaism, biblical studies, and the theory of religion).
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So, who/what is this Satan? He simply is who you are not!
 
Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine said:
According to Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Judaism, "the devil made me do it" would be as believable as an Australian blaming a fender bender on a rabbit as big as the largest kangaroo species (unfortunately I'm not as familiar with the different kangaroo/wallaby species as you are, so I hope that you can understand my analogy. :oops: )

Satan (ha-Satan in the Jewish religion) is just the celestial equivalent of the prosecuting attorney. Nothing more, nothing less.

Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine
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This is not actually true. I'm an ultra-Orthodox Jew and we believe the satan is the evil inclination AND the prosecuting angel AND the executioner.
This is what it says in the Talmud:
Reish Lakish said, he is the satan [and] he is the evil inclination [and] he is the angel of death.
 
Devils' Advocate said:
Judge, jury and executioner. You mean to say? Can it be you mean? Judge Dredd!
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Well yeah, unless you see into the metaphor. Satan is the trickster, the joker, a vital aspect of the human psyche, but as everything has an up and down side, this behavior if taken too far is likely to be harmful and in the end lead to a halt in your growth, i.e. spiritual death.
 
Interesting you should say that as I have always believed Satan more as the trickster persona than the evil persona so many Christians believe today. It has long been my belief that the 'evil' gods of the various pantheons are the scapegoats for the darker side of our own humanity. They get the blame for our evils only because we give them too much weight, rather than balancing that side of ourselves with all the rest of who we are. The healthy human psyche is a balance of all the aspects at our psyche.

They don't call me The Devils' Advocate for nuthin!
 
Devils' Advocate said:
Interesting you should say that as I have always believed Satan more as the trickster persona than the evil persona so many Christians believe today. It has long been my belief that the 'evil' gods of the various pantheons are the scapegoats for the darker side of our own humanity. They get the blame for our evils only because we give them too much weight, rather than balancing that side of ourselves with all the rest of who we are. The healthy human psyche is a balance of all the aspects at our psyche.

They don't call me The Devils' Advocate for nuthin!
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When people began to take the texts literally, they lost the metaphor. Joseph Campbell often lamented this phenomena. It's too bad really, because if you begin to read the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Talmud, or the Holy Bible and understand the metaphor the spiritual riches these venerable texts contain are openly revealed. The great secret here is that there never was a secret.
 
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