- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
Community members in a Tennessee school district want to banish Satan from their children’s halls after the formation of a new club was announced.
The After School Satan Club (ASSC) wants to establish a branch in Chimneyrock elementary school in the Memphis-Shelby county schools (MSCS) district.
The ASSC is a federally recognized nonprofit organization and national after-school program with local chapters across the US. The club is associated with the Satanic Temple, though it claims it is secular and “promotes self-directed education by supporting the intellectual and creative interests of students”.
The Satanic Temple makes it clear its members do not actually worship the devil or believe in the existence of Satan or the supernatural. Instead Satan is used as a symbol of free will, humanism and anti-authoritarianism.
That last part is intriguing. Do you have any more info that I could read about how/when their unholy trinity was combined into one evil deity?
I can’t comment on Lucifer and Satan but serpent reverence showed up in a lot of ancient matriarchal religions before they were displaced by modern patriarchal ones.
This doesn’t apply to only Abrahamic religions but shows up in Greek mythology too. Apollo slaying Gaia’s serpent messengers at the temple of Delphi for example.
Gnostic teachings, which are a form of Christianity, see the serpent as divine wisdom (Sophia) and the old testament God as the demiurge (Devil). Jesus as the good God. And Lucifer as the light of reason and not a villain.
But Gnosticism is basically a dead form of alternative Christian belief. So I have no idea what the modern church’s take is on these three entities.
It’s now thought the number of truly matriarchal beliefs in antiquity have been grossly overstated. Your comment belies a strong Judaeo-Christian ethos and historiography, which is all fine of course, but the feminists reinterpreting history isn’t divinely wise at all, but political.
I know that many of the modern misconceptions (according to Biblical canon anyway) about Hell came from Dante’s Inferno. So perhaps it’s also something like that?
Oh, it starts way before Dante. Hell is actually a sort of mismatch of different beliefs. Babylonian, Norse, Buddhist and Greco-Roman belief systems all had an underground afterlife with variable ideas of punishment for the wicked. The Bible just mentions “Gehenna” which was actually a real place on earth where trash was burned. Basically think of someone talking about the local dump. Thing about trash though is it doesn’t really burn eternally, it just burns away and it was likely being used as a metaphor. The usage of it also doesn’t really mention an eternity, links it with the devil or any of that. People really like rhe idea of someone getting their jist desserts after death so a idea of “bad people just stop existing” was probably kind of doomed to not be super popular. Basically that just leaves a door open for folk belief to stuff somebody else in the Hades/Hel/Ereshkigal role and carry on having a hell just like they did before.
All told Christianity and it’s family of belief systems is actually a fairly late adopter of the belief in something like a hell. It’s closest thematic relative is probably Buddhist Naraka which was first written about around the 400 BC but there’s not a lot of scriptural evidence that anything like that was intended for Christians. At best Judaism has an idea of an afterlife where one is consumed by shame but it sounds more like what happens when a kid is told their parent is disappointed in them and to go to their room.