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I was watching Netflix's "Lucifer" last night. They just released the rest of season 5 after being on hold for a very long time. 👿
I like the show, but parts of it have often bothered me. Now, with "God" (who can only be Yahweh, the Jewish tribal god) as part of the cast, things have gotten weirder.
Full disclosure: I'm an atheist, meaning I'm not convinced by any of the arguments for the existence of any gods. And I find the descriptions of the christian god, Yahweh-Jesus-Holy-Spirit, to be so nonsensical, that I think all claims that this particular god exist can be easily dismissed. 🗑️
I can see this one. The popular notion of who Satan is and what his history is is much better that the biblical one, because the biblical one is kinda non-existent as far as I know. I know the "the satan" (a job title) shows up a few times in the Old Testament before morphing into "Satan" (an individual). And then I'm pretty sure there are lots of references to him in the New Testament, but I don't think there's much backstory there.
I think much of the popular understanding of this character and his backstory actually comes from Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, and various re-interpretations from the middle ages.
I don't spend my time worrying about the details of these stories, because they just aren't that important to me, but I think these parts of Satan's backstory are popular, but un-biblical:
This has been debunked quite well, as I recall. I think until some point in the middle ages, no one even thought "Lucifer" was a character in the Old Testament, much less, that he was Satan (or, "the satan").
From what I remember, Lucifer ("light-bringer" in Latin) was the name for the planet Venus, since it's one of the brightest things in the sky after the sun and moon. Venus is bright enough at times that (like the moon) it can be seen during the day, when the sun is visible. When you can see it like this, it used to get a special name: Morningstar. 🌟
TV Lucifer goes by the name Lucifer Morningstar.
So, he's the Greco-Roman goddess of love: Venus, right? ❤️ No. Somehow he's Satan. But why? How?
Yeah, I'm not 100% on the details here, but I seem to remember that there's a passage in the OT where some guy is described as being the Morningstar, and then whoever's talking goes on to say that he's going to have a mighty fall.
From the context, it's clear that this is about some king 👑 (of probably a non-Hebrew nation) and at first he's hyperbolically described as being this great shining thing (the Morningstar 🌟), just as a way to contrast his later "fall". This was, apparently a pretty common literary convention in the OT.
No one took this out of context and thought that this king was actually the planet Venus, or that this was a description of anyone else. Lucifer, has a nice sound and a nice meaning to it, so it was a fairly popular name. There was a bishop named Lucifer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer_of_Cagliari
Later on, Medieval Christians decided to ignore the clear context of the passage and to say that this was a reference to "Satan" and this had something to do with Satan's "Fall".
This "war against heaven" and "fall from grace" of a beautiful angel 😇, beloved by Yahweh, sounds like a much better story than anything I've read in the bible. And that's probably why It's become so popular. The only problem is: it's not in the bible. There is something similar. If you skip all the way to the very end; to the feverish acid flash-back "book" of "Revelation", you'll find a war in heaven against a seven-headed dragon (who throws stars to earth), who is at some point said to be "Satan".
Revelation, BTW is not part of all versions of the "bible", as some churches reject it.
At some point this dragon 🐲 is imprisoned in a bottomless pit for a thousand years. Then the dragon is later cast into the "lake of fire", but so is "death", so I guess no one dies anymore and then there's a new heaven and a new Earth. This is probably part of why some people view Revelation as describing **future** events; not past ones.
But either way, there's no connection with a Lucifer, or a beautiful angel who is the most beloved by Yahweh and then rebels for some reason, only to be turned into some hideous beast. That story is so much better that what's in the bible, that I totally understand why they went with it. They're trying to entertain; not educate, so they go with what people think they know about the story. It's understandable, but it always bothers me because it just perpetuates misconceptions. I have the same problem with versions of Hercules where Hades is "evil".
Likewise, for a very long time, no one thought the snake 🐍 in the Adam and Eve story was anything but a snake. Then, somebody was like, "Hey, it says here something about Satan being a serpent, and I'm going to interpret that literally instead of figuratively, and since there's also a serpent in this old creation story, then they must be the same!"
Presto: After thousands of years of having nothing to do with it, Satan is now the snake in the Adam and Eve story.
I don't remember if the show ever describes Lucifer as having been a snake in that story, but they certainly place him there when they introduce Eve as a character.
I guess my main irritation here is that the show never counteracts the popular belief that the snake "deceives", or "tricks" Eve.
📰 Newsflash: He doesn't.
In the story, as written, El (I believe it was El at the time), the highest god of the Elohim (ancient Canaanite pantheon), or some other god tells Adam not to eat from the tree of "Knowledge" because if he does, he'll die that way. Any reasonable person, not trying to twist the words to fit with some preconceived notions, will instantly understand this to mean that the fruit is poison.
El, in a soliloquy, explains his motivation to the other gods, saying that if they eat from the tree of "Knowledge", then they will be like gods. The clear implication being that El doesn't want that... not at all.
The snake's chatting up Eve one day and asks her why she doesn't eat from that one tree and she says its because that El guy told them it was poisonous. The snake immediately recognizes this for the lie it is and tells Eve that that's just bullshit; the fruit's fine and El just doesn't want her to know stuff like he does.
She eats the fruit and doesn't die that day because the fruit's not poisonous. Instead she lives like over six-hundred years or something.
So the snake was absolutely correct about everything he said, and El was the one who lied. El was the deceitful one; not the snake.
The show doesn't address this, unfortunately. I'd really like to have seen them do this. "Oh, you mean my old friend Mr. Snake? Yeah, that wasn't me. It's sad really... he was too honest for his own good."
Oh, and as for the "Knowledge", the only knowledge they seem to gain is the knowledge that they're naked. So I guess, it was really the Tree of Knowledge of Nudity, or something like that.
Before Adam and Eve can figure out that El has been watching them run around naked this whole time, like some kind of creepy old pervert, El quickly distracts them by kicking them out of the garden, setting up a flaming sword so they can't get back in, giving Eve painful child-birth (was it pleasant before?) and making Adam do agriculture or something. Oh, and he makes the snake crawl on its belly (didn't it already do that?) and eat dust (snakes don't eat dust). And he makes people and snakes dislike each other so that snakes bite our heels and we step on their heads. Or, you know... keep them as pets.
Again, El talks to the other gods and tells them that they have to keep people out of the garden or else they'll eat from fruit of the tree of life and live forever like gods (and we can't have that!). So that's why he sets op the flaming sword.
Since he never told them not to eat from the tree of life, It's unclear whether they never did, and that's why they remained mortal, or if you have to keep eating from that tree to stay immortal or something.
Anyway, if the story is true, there should still be a garden somewhere on Earth guarded by a magical flaming sword, but so far, we haven't discovered it.
99.999% of humanity recognizes this as one of those bullshit fairytales that's supposed to explain why things are the way they are, but has absolutely no basis in fact. The other 0.001% are the True Believers!
OK, back to the episode I watched last night.
There are a couple of times when characters in the show describe behavior as "godly", or "not-godly", and it lines up with exactly what you'd expect if you got their definitions from modern-day Christians who either haven't read the bible, or refuse to accept any of the "bad" parts as literal.
"Godly" means all nice and fuzzy and forgiving; "un-godly" is the opposite. I found his extremely annoying.
For example, there's a scene where Michael pisses off Lucifer, and Lucifer makes his eyes glow and looks all intimidating. In short, he expresses anger. But then he, or another angel describes that as "un-godly" behavior.
Wait, WHAT!?
Yahweh is supposed to have burned two cities to the ground just because he doesn't like gays. And he turned a woman into salt because she had the audacity to look at it. He drowned the entire earth to massacre nearly every man, woman, child, animal, and un-born fetus because he claimed that every single person (even newborn babies) was wicked. His favorite punishment in the OT is death. He had the satan kill all of Job's children just to try to win a bet. He repeatedly ordered the Hebrews to kill anyone who had the audacity to worship another god. Hell, I'm pretty sure he ordered them to kill whole towns of people if any ONE of them worshiped another god!
And getting a little pissed off is "un-godly"!?
Well, I guess so. I mean, I guess the "godly" thing to do would have been to rip the guy's entrails out as Yahweh commands Joseph to do to all the non Hebrews who had the misfortune of living in the area of Canaan, that Yahweh decided "belonged" to the Hebrews. Or maybe he'd send a couple of she-bears to slaughter the guy as Yahweh does to some kids who called one of his prophets "baldy".
Perpetuating this myth that Yahweh is benevolent is so annoying.
So "God", which isn't his name, but whatever... he decides to retire (as if he isn't already retired) and hand off "God" duties to one of the angels. Lucifer seems to want the position, but then the show brings in his mother, another god; the one that actually created everything. And Lucifer's mom talks about how Dear old Dad (Yahweh) was always so "busy" being "God" and all, that it ruined their marriage.
They drive this home a few more times with references to how "busy" God is all the frikin' time so that Lucifer can be oblivious to it, and his love interest can worry about it, and hence, we get dramatic tension.
But this whole time, I'm like... too busy!? WTF! Too "busy" with what!?
The universe runs itself according to the laws of physics, and there's zero evidence that prayers are ever granted even in this fictional TV universe. What exactly is this "God" so busy doing? Ignoring prayers? How much time does that take!?
And even if he is doing a crap-load of stuff, isn't he omnipotent? So he's omnipotent, meaning he can do absolutely anything, yet he can't do whatever he needs to do while also attending to his marriage? "Omnipotent"... I do not think you know the meaning of that word.
And hey, isn't he omnipresent too? Doesn't that mean that he was actually with his wife the whole time? Doesn't it actually mean that he's been on the show the whole time?
So annoying... these words get thrown out there, but people don't seem to give any thought to what they mean.
At some point in the series, we finally visit Hell, and we find out that Hell is a place where you re-live whatever moment you regret the most over and over again.
For eternity.
Oh, wait. You don't. No, Hell isn't the ridiculous overkill of infinite torment for finite crimes. Nope. You're just there until you get over your guilt.
Oh, and it's your guilty feelings that send you to Hell because deep down you feel like you deserve it. Yes, it's the old apologist crap about you sending yourself to eternal torture. We get to absolve "God" for this monstrosity because it's not *his* fault, it's *yours* even though being omniscient, he knew this would happen to you AND exactly how to prevent it from happening. And by being omnipotent, he could have effortlessly done whatever was needed to prevent you from ending up in a state of eternal torture.
Oh, if only he were *omnibenevolent* too. Wait...
Not only do we absolve "God" from guilt, we absolve Satan and the demons too. Yes, neither Satan, nor any of the "demons" actually do any brutal torture. No burning people alive, or sticking red-hot pokers in their urethras; just psychological torture that you actually inflict on yourself. The demons just dress up like people you knew in life so that you can torture yourself with them.
Later on in the season, it's revealed that even if you have the powers of "God", you couldn't "force" a soul to go to Hell if it didn't feel guilty, and, you know... send itself.
Huh...
So not only is Yahweh not guilty for sending pretty much everyone to eternal torment, it's not even eternal, and he doesn't even have the power to just arbitrarily send you there. Wow. Some omnipotent deity he is!
He's just a poor helpless victim in all this, just trying to do the best he can. Just forget that he created the whole system in the first place. Or *did* he?
According to the show, creating everything seems to have been the Goddess's thing. But when she shows up on the scene, she seems to have little if any interest in people. I guess that makes sense, since she created the universe so that practically every last inch of it is instantly lethal to human life. Creating rules for humanity and setting up a special afterlife just don't seem to even be on her radar.
Yahweh, however; that's a different story. That stuff is right up his alley.
There's a "death" on the show. Actually, it's a cop show, so there are deaths pretty frequently, but this time it's a **main character**, so everybody's really sad... including Satan and his angel brother.
Wait, why?
Yeah, it's hard to give these guys much motivation since they're used to seeing and talking to "dead" people all the time and know full well that people are actually immortal and live on in one of the two afterlives. Both of these guys can just fly off to Heaven or Hell and visit their "dead" buddy at any time.
And there doesn't seem to be anything preventing them from bringing him back to Earth if they want to. I think people being released from Hell and coming back to Earth was actually the plot of one of the earlier episodes.
In a theology where everyone is an "immortal soul", everyone is immortal. I know you're used to hearing that stated more like, "everyone **has** an immortal soul", but this isn't what Christians seem to believe.
If a "soul" is just something you have, then you don't live on after death. You die and Mr. Soul continues... not you. It's clear from the way Christians talk about this stuff, that that's not what they believe. You **are** the "soul" in Christian dogma; your body is the "thing" that you **have**.
"Death" just means your body stops working, but that's not you. No, "you" are some intangible "thing" that is immortal. Oh, and it's totally tangible in the show because when people go to Hell, or deal with escaped souls from Hell, they definitely interact physically.
This clearly creates a problem for the writers of the show. How do you make the angels really sad about this guy doing what to them is basically the equivalent of moving to another country. Yeah, sure, you won't see him around as much, but you can still visit him from time to time if you want.
Yep, it's a problem. So they have him go to hell, because, of course, he feels guilty about something. You have to send yourself to Hell because the show doesn't want to make Satan a monster, and can't afford to portray Yahweh as one (even though he created the whole system). Problem solved. Now Satan, Angel-Brother, and Demon-Sidekick can feel really sad because their buddy is going to be psychologically tortured until he changes his own mind about it.
Apparently no human on the show actually believes any of this afterlife stuff, because they all act like it's the saddest thing imaginable. No one seems comforted in the slightest by any afterlife beliefs.
And that's how it seems in real life too. Not that I've been to a whole lot of funerals, but I've been to a few. Religious people seem to me to react as if they think the dead person is permanently gone. Yes, they may use phrases like, "he's in a better place now", to comfort themselves, but it doesn't seem to work that well.
If you actually believe that everyone is really some sort of immortal *soul*, and that your loved one is actually in a *better place* right now, then why are you so sad? Why do you *act* as if you don't believe your own words?
Is it possible, that somehow, deep down, most religious people don't actually believe their own material?
It used to be that people just couldn't believe that the mind was a function of the brain. So, there must be a little magic person inside you. That's the mind. Your mind is really a magic thing called a "soul". Actually, since you are your mind, and not your body, that means you **are** the "soul". And now we can act like we understand everything and be unbearably smug and condescending. We have the answers! And we do so love having the answers, don't we?
Then then along comes science and the discovery of neurons. We study this guy named Phineas Cage, who survived having a railroad spike stuck in his brain after an explosion. We see how his personality is radically altered by damage to his brain. We start severing the corpus collosum of some people and discover that the two hemispheres of the brain can have different "personalities", beliefs, and interests.
We see firsthand how wiring together simple transistors can create logic circuits, which can be chained together to create highly complex "behavior". From simple neuron-like devices, emerges staggering complexity.
By now, no reasonable person doubts that the mind is a product of the physical organ we call the brain. There is no little invisible magical "thing" doing the thinking.
This view of the mind is so accepted now that thinking, feeling, emoting beings such as Demon-Sidekick, can have all the qualities of a person with a functioning mind, even if they don't have a "soul" (according to the show).
The "soul" doesn't explain the mind for most Christians, but they still won't let it go. Angel and Spike on the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" franchise lost theirs when they became vampires, but both got one back through magic. Demon-Sidekick ("Maze") on Lucifer doesn't have one, but now she thinks she's growing one.
What exactly are these "souls" supposed to do? Well, as far as I can tell, both shows use "soul" as a magical explanation for "conscience".
Well that's stupid.
I mean, don't we know from studying psychopaths that this is a brain function? Don't we already know that that, far from being a magical "thing" separate from the brain, this function of the brain is affected by physical trauma, neurotransmitter levels, or you know, something as simple as hunger? Psychological tests have shown that how "compassionately" people play during competitive games changes when you do something as simple as change the posters in the waiting room!
Don't we know that our "conscience", is intimately related to social mores we acquire through the culture we're raised in? Jews might fell guilty for eating pork, but Christians won't. Christians might feel guilty about premarital sex, but the ancient Polynesians would have laughed at the very concept. It would have been like "pre-bowel-movement photography" or something...
"How is 'premarital' sex even a thing!?", they might have asked, "those two things aren't even related!"
I wish the show would admit that "mind" and "soul" are the same thing. If you have one, you have both.
Now, they just have the problem of explaining how the "mind" lives on without a brain to create it. How does the operating system run after you blast a hole in the CPU!? The reasonable answer is, it doesn't. But that won't work for a show that relies on an afterlife. You need the mind to live on, or the whole premise of the show collapses.
Well, isn't that what magic is for? To explain away all problems that you can't *really* explain?
"Yes, well detective, that's correct. The mind IS a product of the brain. But when you die, the programming of the mind is transferred to either the magic cloud server, or the underground Beowulf cluster, of which I'm the admin", said Lucifer.
See how easy that was?
But perhaps worst of all, I can't vent my frustration about it with my wife, who watches this with me. I mean, I could, but that might start an argument or something as she has this delusion where she thinks she talks to Yahweh, or Jesus or whatever, so she thinks they're real, and she'll pretty much accept any lame apologetics argument as long as it supports what she wants to believe.
On a larger level, this spousal relationship sort of mirrors the relationship I have with the population at large, who mostly believes some version of this fairy-tale. I can get along with them fine as long as I don't bring these issues up. Then, when I do, it's always the same pathetic apologist arguments that these people wouldn't accept from any other religion. So I generally keep my mouth shut. I imagine a lot of atheists have a similar experience.
Shows like Lucifer have to be careful to never offend the vast quasi-religious majority in the US, who don't want their warm and fuzzy folk-theology, to be challenged. So "God" is always benevolent on these shows even if he's identified as the blood-thirsty Yahweh, and he always has some greater plan that we just don't understand. We can't delve into problems like the fact that omnipotence means you can do *anything* regardless of how much time you have, and being *timeless* (which some Christians claim Yahweh is), means time isn't even an issue for you.
And of course, shows have to skirt around the *omnibenevolence* issue, so even though this being can do absolutely anything and has no limitations at all, he allows pain and suffering despite being able to effortlessly prevent it. How is that benevolent? Oh, well, mysterious ways... it's totally benevolent in some way that you don't, no... **can't** understand and therefore the show doesn't have to explain. Just have the "God" character give a wink and a nod, and we can all feel good about sick children being slowly eaten alive by parasites. It's all part of the plan!
Sometimes Hollywood makes a movie where some regular person becomes *God*. I haven't seen all of these movies, but I think I can probably sum them all up based on what I've seen:
Guy becomes a god, plays with power in funny ways for 30 minutes of runtime until he starts trying to change the way the world at large works and discovers that nothing he tries works the way he expected it to, so he gratefully returns all power to the original god after realizing that the job is really really hard, and continues to live his mortal life a wiser, humbler person.
How'd I do? Are there any that don't fit this mold? This is the "safe" route. Only the nut-bag evangelicals and young-Earthers might give you a hard time about this kind of movie, but that's just free publicity.
Let me pitch you another movie. This one is something Hollywood wouldn't touch in a million years:
Yahweh brags about how great his "plan" is to anyone who'll listen. Fed up with his boasting, Satan tells him that he could take any, "and I mean ANY," adult human from Earth, give him the powers of a god, and he'd do a better job.
Thinking he's going to win the bet, Yahweh, chooses a hardened death-row convict and does the whole, "Now you're 'God'" thing. Right away, the guy makes a single change: no more pedophilia.
"Ha!", says Satan, "He could stop right there and do nothing else, and he'd still be a better god than you!"
"Yeah, I've done enough," says the convict, "Everyone can go fuck themselves now, I'm outta here." And with that, he leaves the Earth alone, travels to a distant corner of the universe and creates an awesome planet of big-breasted women who love this guy's dick.
Satan laughs at Yahweh for losing the bet. Yahweh is furious. He keeps muttering about how the guy was supposed to try doing lots of stuff on Earth so that Yahweh could sabotage it and win the bet. He gets himself really worked up and then travels to this new planet to beat the crap out of this guy.
He gets there and starts yelling at the guy and throwing punches. They fight for a while, and then the guy's like, "Ah, fuck this". Suddenly Yahweh just doesn't exist anymore.
"Holy shit! That idiot gave you full god powers!?", says Satan, appearing out of nowhere. "I thought he'd just give you like, demi-god powers or something."
"Yeah, I can't believe that worked. What a fucking idiot!", says the guy.
[Montage of Satan and the new "God" (call me "Rick") becoming best buds]
"Oh yeah, there's a favor I've been meaning to ask," says Satan.
"Oh crap. I can't believe I didn't think of that!", Rick says, reading Satan's mind. "Let's make it retro-active. ALL the way back..." Then Hell disappears along with everyone in it. "Now when you die, you just die. Everyone who ever died was just gone. No one was was ever 'tortured for eternity'".
"Thank you," says Satan.
"Yeah, man, no problem. I mean, torturing people forever!? That's some fucked up shit."
"Yeah, some fucked up shit..."
The End
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✍️ Last Updated: 2021-11-18