On the topic of Christianity: Angels and Lucifer

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I got to thinking about something today, especially after Easter mass. Part of me of course has wondered, of course, that for people who have faith in this kind of thing - how, if its this serious, they have such a hard time reconciling it to reality to where they almost seem to compartmentalize it - if doing better than just keeping it to church they still have a great struggle in looking at the world around them and really seeing both the world, as it is, science, natural laws, impulses, trials and tribulations of completely secular-seeming origin, etc., and seeing their religious lives as one in the same.

Part of the problem is that its always seemed hokey to me how many priests or preachers bring the topics up, I mean I've known a few who were very pragmatic, nuts & bolts about it, in a way that seems kind of fanciful and much more connected to the emotional sphere. I understand that a lot of people need that, but I think its really left up to everyone else who doesn't work that way to really fend for themselves which I think it somewhat unfortunate.

Angels and demons are one big example of where I think literalism may in fact leave the reservation. I think in looking at the world around us we can pretty easily decide what's literal, what isn't, and where both literal and nonliteral are congruent. One of the things especially when people talk about Lucifer and how he dragged down a third of the angels, the part that bothers me about the idea that he just rebelled and that it wasn't supposed to happen - we're working on the premise that God is perfect, knows all, and to say that something that major just happens - I have a hard time with that. Kabbalah at least seems to indicate that both good and evil are decisively of God's origin, that I can much more easily believe, just like he'd create Lucifer (though I think more metaphorically) as a counter force.

The theory that I'm really starting to play with: I really have to wonder that when we talk about angels and demons, its really the gnostic concepts - we can't see them, they're all around us, I would have to argue that they're something like Plato's forms; things that have existence but things that we'd have a hard time imagining as being sentient in and of themselves. The reason I'd especially have to look at demons or 'the devil' in this way is that its pretty obvious on one level, the greatest evils in this world are where animal instinct grabs us in the wrong ways. When the bible goes on and on about human nature and how pathetic it is, its our basic side that's being spoken to. That said one could argue that the demons/devil are really symbolisms of the forms, thoughts, energies, that make a person come up short just like the angels remaining would be all the things that draw us more into a transcendentalist kind of psychological/intellectual/emotional framework and especially closer to God.

In all of this I don't want to cut on anyone who would claim that they've seen an angel, I'm not even going to pretend to know how all of this works, but the possibility that their existence over all is much more like the Aeons of the Tripartite Tractate is something I'm curious in studying - just to see if that's in the realm of possibility. I know that there are a lot of people who know the bible here backward and forward, probably a lot better than I do, I'm curious as to what you think on this or where there may have been angelic involvement where it was made clear as not to be allegorical.

A lot of what we ''know' about angels has been centuries in the making. At one point, there were 7 classes of angels (all I remember are 'dominions', and 'thrones'). Paradise Lost is probably a large part of the lore...

I can neither prove nor disprove angels. Just hope there are some...

Yeah. I guess I'm just trying to figure out how it all really reconciles. The theodicy of it all in a literal sense really leaves a lot to be desired. I'd like to think that one can use common sense as a touch-stone in discerning what's meant to be taken at face value and what's meant to be read more allegorically.

We are in th 21st century. Talk of angels is utterly ludicrous.

ruveyn

i think angels are aliens. people back then just didnt know what to call them, it would be like if you showed someone way back when a modern stove, they would probably call it a dragon. i have no idea where demons come from, but theres only a couple of possibilities for me. theyre either the same alien at war with the "majority" or there a completley different race of aliens

That would extend further I'd imagine to entire religions if one takes that train of thought. If anything I just think its problematic in the 21st century to intellectually justify only taking it part of the way.

The continuous efforts of naive people to rationalize the childish half thought out concepts embedded in religions by fantasy driven primitives is vaguely amusing but not to be taken seriously.

Yeah, they might have looked something like this in that case :



I'm not sure I'm really sold on the alien visitor theory or even UFO's in general. I won't deny that is possible but I'd think that any race who'd travel in from thousands of light years away just to watch us - they've got issues.

Angels interact with reality as seen with an angel telling Mary about the virgin birth, and with angels present at the resurrection, with the angelic being guarding Eden. Angels in Revelations are conceived of as acting, as are the angels circling God and eternally praising him with their weird bodies. Angels can apparently leave heaven as the devil has angels. God creating evil has major theological problems as it undermines God's goodness, the only counter verse is in Isaiah, but it can be argued to not mean "evil". The issue of the angels rebelling also gets into the theological problem of Original Sin, as God should have also known that, and Original Sin is very important for the philosophy of the atonement as noted from Romans 5.

You can say that this is literalist, however, it seems as if the original meaning was actually that angels were acting beings. In fact, this is hard to avoid, you would almost do better just claiming that angels do not exist rather than reinterpreting them as forms. Reconceptualizing angels as Platonic forms is reinterpreting the scriptures through a lens foreign to them. This is possible, but Christianity is reinterpreted through so many lenses that it becomes absurd.

In any case, the issue with Christian scriptures is perhaps that the authors really did not understand what kind of God they were creating. After all, if you look into scripture, you also see that at multiple points in time God changes His mind, which also undercuts the transcendent being you refer to. You can say that God's transcendence is the real truth, and that these cases are anthropomorphisms of a God so holy that one cannot be in His presence. However, one can also justifiably argue the opposite, and that these things are real, while grander claims to foreknowledge are more deeply flawed, as the future is literally indeterminate, and thus cannot be known perfectly by man or God. The criticism of the former is that this is not the God of the Bible, but rather a creation of NeoPlatonic philosophy and Anselm, the criticism of the latter is that it is not the God of the Bible, but rather a creation of a liberal desire to have free will, Hartshornean philosophy, and undermines a Godly God.

In either case, you screw yourself out of some stuff, however, to get back to the point. I think that if you are rejecting the idea of angels as acting beings, then you should completely eliminate the concept of angels as anthropomorphisms. Unless you have a scriptural situation where describing an angel as a Platonic form would work, this would seem more correct than outright changing an angel to something that it is not.

In any case, I hope that I do not come across as too gruff or anything. I just do not see an exegetical basis for angels existing but not being literal.

Last edited by Awesomelyglorious on 12 Apr 2009, 9:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Care if I use that as my signature? I'll leave it anonymous if you'd prefer.

fair enough, i think the aliens despite being intellectually supirior to us are just like us. (emotionally) some of them im shure have huge attitudes

I certainly don’t buy into the whole alien abduction phenomenon, but the majority of the people claiming to have been abducted by aliens have said that the aliens were completely unemotional, cold, calculating, and only seemed to have been driven by scientific experimentation. Once again, I don’t really believe this, but this is always how I have heard aliens described when reading about it or seeing it on television.

AG, good response. I guess I'm just trying to figure out though how one can separate evil from just the fallout of the human condition. I probably am looking backward from my own observations enough to say that yeah, my outlook probably would not be scriptural.

And I know that you didn't bring this up, but addressing the thought that the concept of spirituality is fantasies of the weak (I guess posting this in general to everyone); I can't figure out why we'd still be here - logically I'd figure that to believe in nothing is to understand that there is absolutely no point, to enhance technology and expand into new worlds, create new civilizations in new galaxies - really a void and null pursuit when all it does is bring hundreds of billions more suckers to suffer death, disease, famine; if they scientifically solve today's problems more will likely keep coming down the pipeline as well as the ever-evolving dynamic of who are the 'fit' that deserve to thrive. In that sense, the greatest hero of history would be the person who found a way to wipe out the entire human race. I guess that's one of the reasons why I've had a problem pulling myself away from religion, I won't deny that there's possibility the other way but I'd be really baffled as to why people who embrace full atheism rather than agnosticism only seem to half-step through the math; that of course could be purely human and say nothing against it as truth but it frustrates me I think as much as I might frustrate them with threads like this.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 12 Apr 2009, 10:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Feel free. Unfortunately it may be taken as offensive by some but actually it is an attempt to present a personal view of people with a poor knowledge of physical forces to come to some comprehensive integration what they see happening around them in terms of what they knew. These "primitives" were not stupid, merely had a very anthropomorphic knowledge base.

those aliens are the ants, there are suposidly classes of aliens. theyre the ones that carry out all the tiedious chores. so maybe thats why there like that, anyways i think some alien abductions are real with the majority of them being fake or that can be explained

Here's the larger problem, and its what I mentioned in the last paragraph of my post above this - we're really not here for much. To take it as absolute knowledge (ie. hypothetically - we know for certain; there is absolutely no God, no spirit anything - just matter), it would mean that we're handling our race and its rights entirely the wrong way. For instance, anyone with a genetic disability, hereditary disease, IQ below 100, should be summarily sterilized - end of story. The very idea of human dignity past the point of what's deemed economically efficient even now has no other real defensible basis aside from vague religious threats. I'm not trying to broad brush atheists or atheism so much as just say that to really take the math all the way down that's the direction in which it should in fact go, or at least so I would think. To me, if there is no God, it actually is a bad thing that we're not practicing eugenics to a greater extent in our society or that we're keeping people with long term terminal illnesses who want to give their inheritence to their kids rather than the local hospital.

Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 12 Apr 2009, 10:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.