Re: Salinger turns to the Dark Side

Jim Rovira (jrovira@juno.com)
Thu, 01 Jul 1999 06:32:04 -0400 

See, gods, demigods, etc., are all part of a Greek heirarchy in which God
alone is pure spirit and everything else is slightly less so, and you
have a number of degrees of impurity all the way down to the most base
possible stuff -- matter.  And these gods and demigods are intermediaries
between God and matter.  The word describing matter in Greek originates,
I think, from a word describing the crap that settles to the bottom of a
water jug.  

This whole scheme is foreign to the Biblical writers, so they don't
believe in "gods" in that sense.  A person who believed in many gods
would naturally see Satan as being a god of sorts, but a person operating
within a Biblical framework would say, "That's just not quite right."

If you want to talk about degrees of power, that's another issue.  I'd
say Michael and Satan are about on a par if you read accounts in Daniel
and Revelation.  But we can't really view the issue in terms of brute
force or power in that sense.  It's probably more accurate to view it in
terms of authority.  And authority is delegated.  Authority is probably
best understood as "right to act."  Human sin gives Satan authority to
act, because it is human beings who have dominion over the earth.

That's why Satan has to raise up a human counterpart to the human Christ
(the Antichrist) to rule this planet.  He needs a human being to do it
through.

As we get more and more into this we get farther and farther from the
nature of the Greek gods, don't we?  They kinda move around and do what
they want regardless of our presence.  

There's a lot more overlap between Biblical angels and Greek gods than
I've described here, but I'm trying to emphasize the differences.

Jim      

On Thu, 01 Jul 1999 01:48:58 -0700 (PDT) Thor Cameron
<my_colours@hotmail.com> writes:
>OK, but I'm still stuck with the question, in what way, besides name, 
>is 
>Satan NOT a God?  He has powers & influence not assigned to any other 
>creature in the Bible.  He is able to war against, and throw 
>temptation at 
>God Himself.  Satan is not an angel; he's THE bad-boy angel.  Not 
>equal to 
>God, but it seems clear that the power chart goes: God - Satan - 
>Archangel,..... etc.  If not a God, at least a Demigod, at the VERY 
>least.
>Thor

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