I have the feeling that over the past years, we’ve started seeing more TV shows that are either sympathetic towards Hell and Satan, or somewhat negative towards Heaven. I just watched “Hazbin Hotel” today, which isn’t too theological, but clearly is fairly negative towards Heaven.
In “The Good Place”,
Spoilers for The Good Place
the people in The Bad Place end up pushing to improve the whole system, whereas The Good Place is happy to spend hundreds of year not letting people in.
“Little Demon” has Satan as a main character, and he’s more or less sympathetic.
“Ugly Americans” shows demons and Satan as relatively normal, and Hell doesn’t seem too bad.
I only watched the first episode of “Lucifer”, but it’s also more or less sympathetic towards Lucifer.
I have a few more examples (Billy Joel: “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints”, or the very funny German “Ein Münchner im Himmel”, where Heaven is portrayed as fantastically boring), but I won’t list them all here.
My question is: how modern is this? I’ve heard of “Paradise Lost”, and I’ve heard that it portrays Satan somewhat sympathetically, though I found it very difficult to read. And the idea of the snake in the Garden of Eden as having given free will and wisdom to humanity can’t be that modern of a thought, even if it would have been heretical.
Is this something that’s happened in the last 10 years? Are there older examples? Does anyone have a good source I could read?
Note that I don’t claim Satan is always portrayed positively, or Heaven always negatively :).
The idea of Satan as the embodiment of evil is arguably an early medieval borrowing from Zoroastrianism. In the Book of Job he works in conjunction with God as a tester of souls, and his roles in the garden of Eden and the temptation of Jesus aren’t inconsistent with that. And a lot of the popular folklore associated with him originates from morally-ambiguous trickster figures from other traditions that were absorbed into Christianity.
It should also be noted that the Gnostic scriptures, an alternate version of early Christianity, don’t actually mention Satan at all.
The Gnostics associated the Old Testament Jehovah with the Platonic concept of the Demiurge—an imperfect or misguided lesser deity who created the material world but botched it up and included evil as an unintended consequence—as opposed to the New Testament “God” who was the Platonic principle of transcendent Goodness or Unity. So the Gnostics didn’t need a separate Satan to explain evil, since Jehovah was already covering that role.
I would even argue that there is actually a distinction to be drawn from the old world ideas of good and evil, and the modern ideas which have almost become “good vs nuance.” No ancient religion goes as far as modern Christianity in terms of condemning people for mere non belief. This has led to a rise in literary themes around the idea that such moral absolutism is itself a form of evil, and that to the extent it implies demons are merely the stewards of nuance, that they must be more sympathetic than God.
The Epistle to the Romans and other Pauline epistles do seem to show that non-believers do generally go to hell.
Right but the classic Catholic interpretation of damnation is that there is a huge layer of purgatory between “hell” and “eternal torture” for those who are not wicked. It is only fairly recently that we’ve had this “straight to pitchforks and fire” concept of hell.
This is cobbled together from a potentially sketchy memory, but doesn’t Satan technically mean accuser? Like his whole role was to tell a whole bunch of goody goody saints in heaven what a piece of crap you are so that they would have something to compare and contrast the goodness that they see in everyone with?
But also going back to opie’s original question, I do remember that one of the reasons for so many Kurdish massacres is that the Kurds have a belief that Satan after the fall fell to Earth and cried such tears that they put out the flames of God’s wrath.
And so they occasionally have ceremonies where they pray on behalf of Satan that God would forgive him in hopes that if God can forgive Satan then God can forgive them for their sins as well.
The reason they are massacred is because the other people in the area have equated that concept with devil worship and so they are attempting to get holy +1 damage to their attacks buy first killing a bunch of devil worshipers and accruing the benefits of executing the wrath of God against sinners.
I do remember that one of the reasons for so many Kurdish massacres is that the Kurds have a belief that Satan after the fall fell to Earth and cried such tears that they put out the flames of God’s wrath.
You’re probably thinking of the Yazidis—a group that lives in Kurdistan and speaks Kurdish but is distinct from the Kurds proper (who are mostly Sunni Muslims). The Yazidis have a very syncretistic religion drawing on elements of practically everything that ever existed in the region—including religions that were seen as heretical/satanic by subsequent ones.
Satan is very much evil in the Book of Job. He literally kills the dude’s entire family and ruins his life.
Displaying nuance in “hell” as pushback against the binary concept of good and evil is arguably one of the oldest tropes in fiction. Both ancient Greek and Norse mythology very specifically depict the underworld as a place of ambiguity or even normality, with “heaven” holding a far more exalted status.
Even in Abrahamic mythology the idea of hell being some kind of default punishment for sinners is a fairly modern idea, arguably stemming from Dante, who absolutely works a good amount of sympathy for sinners into the story. It really only is the most recent take on the concept by evangelical Christians which holds that an otherwise innocent person will be tortured for eternity over a mere lack of faith, and that form of absurd extremism certaintly plays a large role in the modern backlash against the concept.
The Bible does portray hell as the default, such as saying all have sinned and have fallen short of the Glory of God, Jesus saying He is the only way to The Father and saying that you’re saved by grace alone and not by works
Not going to heaven doesn’t mean you automatically go to hell. Do you think the Jews thought all the gentiles were going to hell?
There were different sects. Sheoul was a thing that was mentioned several times as well. Revelation also makes it clear:
Revelation 20:12-15
And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
Milton’s Paradise Lost doesn’t paint Hell as pleasant, but Satan is absolutely the protagonist of the story. That’s 1667.
I have friends who are still religious and it seems like they’ve pivoted from “lake of fire” to a more “hell is the absence of God” vibes
I live in a crunchy granola area so I just assume that’s how the church here operates to keep patrons.
Historically hell has often been depicted as a rather cold place, away from the warmth of god’s love or what have you.
Anecdotally, 20 or so years ago, that’s what I remember being taught in CCD class when my parents were still making me go.
Dante’s Inferno (c. 1321) for example, depicts the 9th and deepest circle of hell as a large frozen lake. And many of the damned he encountered throughout the different circles are at least somewhat sympathetic, especially at the first level of where the inhabitants are by and large good people who just to not be Christians. (And to be clear, Dante often found himself at odds with the church, so his works don’t necessarily reflect official doctrine and were absolutely written to reflect his own agenda, that said a lot of our modern ideas about hell owe a lot to Dante’s depiction, and any actual mention of hell in the Bible is scarce to non-existent depending on how you interpret certain passages, so his version is just as valid as any other in my opinion)
What the, uh, crunchy hell is a “Crunchy Granola Area”? Or did you just fired the queen of all autocorrect ever & I’m being too obtuse to detect it?
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/crunchy-granola#
- characterized by or defining oneself by ecological awareness, liberal political views, and support or use of natural products and health foods.
My wife often goes “I’m looking like a granola girl today but fuck it”
It means an area where cosplaying as an environmentally conscious hippie as you drive your SUV to your mid level job in an exploitative corporate/tech/finance firm is in vogue.
EDIT: Oh sorry, I forgot to mention that they will also moralize and dietarily advise you about how you really shouldn’t eat any fast food or meat or eggs that aren’t fairtrade and humane, whilst stopping at Starbucks to pick up their Pumpkin Spice Latte Coffee Themed Hot Milkshake.
The type of place where people describe themselves as spiritual but not religious.
Religion is pretty hard to believe if it wasn’t the one you were raised into. And it’s often times pretty hard to get out of the one you were raised into.
But outside of religion, a pretty common fictional view is that heaven is the extreme end of order, and hell is the extreme end of chaos. Neither one can harbor any middle ground, and thus they would both suck to be stuck in.
Inside religion, whatever your religion’s version of heaven is, usually depends on what “your people(local and as a whole)” would want it to be. It changes over time and distance to better fit. But never bring up that it has changed, as it has always been this one and true correct way of depicting it, to question that is some kind of sin… and hell of course is similarly fluid despite having always been “this” way.
In truth, they have both been depicted every which way imaginable.
It’s funny that you bring the evolution/interpretation thing because Hell didn’t even really exist for centuries
Yeah, that’s just one of the ways it has changed over time for some cultures, hehe. There were plenty of millenia before hell was even thought of the first time, we probably will never know what the first written use of it was, let alone the first time it was used in oral storytelling. But with what little evidence we do have from thousands of years ago, we can see that the idea of hell was never consistent since.
