Director Roger Nygard traveled the world asking theologians, scientists, skeptics, and everyday people 85 tough questions to try to understand The Nature of Existence! Now that he’s asked the experts, it’s YOUR TURN! To offer your own insights on today’s question, “Who is the Devil?”, Leave a Reply below!
two thoughts on that one – we could explore what the Christians did to the Pagans leading to the evolution of what the Christian world , even beyond that, how most view that figure cross culturally now.
we could also explore the inner “satan”
You are.
I think the devil could be two things, a actual devil living in hell. OR all of your sins.
Us when compassion is absent.
The Devil mostly has to do with bias in nature. Being “Center of Attention” is biasing for one’s self. So if you are too concerned with creating an inequity through lies or common knowledge, that means you are a hierarchal devil. It means you can get away with hurting the innocent by virtue of what you believe and the support you get through your side or group status. If one is too biased then it seems like only “high bias” is important. No matter what form that might take. The devil is like a huge distraction to trying to make things go smoothly because wealth and status game icons become “all important”. At least on earth. Life has to maintain “integrity” but loses it through hierachal type biasing. An integrated hierarchal nature will try to overshadow truth knowledge with (truth corrosive) common knowledge with the goal of becoming “center of attention” with defining outfits and the ability to decide what inferiors believe while damning their ability to think for theirselves.
What does the devil look like? The devil looks like a person who likes status and money and the “authority” to “do you in” for not going along with the status quo and common knowledge or common taboos.
My father had a devil in him in terms of reality and reaction. He would blame people for stuff so that he could be super loud and dramatic while making false accusations. Since he was the father, that was legal, however too crazy to illicit anything but a hasty retreat from stupid carrying-ons. I’m sure other people do that too. But usually if a dog act like that it will likely have to be “put down”, But if it’s an “authority figure” then you have to respect that kind of “nuts”.
Most folks like the excitment of hanging with the devil. They like a hub bub.
Most folks seem to enjoy a higher bias xenophobic “death to outsiders and inferiors” kind diabolical religion. The thing is when you are being biased it is usually “for god” and you don’t see the biased diabolical nature of xenophobic beliefs. When people are diabolically biased, the only thing they can actually contend is that they are “sided biased” for God. Jesus and God are supposed to be “non biased” or enlightened creature, while the devil is suppose to be sided to the point of having a high level of malevolence. Bias is like a preference for non integrating reality that doesn’t understand, explain, or care much AKA hierarchal reality.
Actually it doesn’t matter whose side you say you are on when it comes to god. If you are on a side, then you are more biased and more diabolical.
If you are on the side of “God” or “good”, then you end up helping other people because they need it, and you can.
It is actually very odd how people seem to equate fame status, and common knowledge with god, when it is actually more diabolical in nature. Your are “crazy” if you don’t believe “the common knowledge” right? Common knowledge is usually base on bias and stop being useful to understanding as soon as it starts enforcing “what is OK to say”. The devil will speak in terms of common knowledge or common belief.
As people we try to associate ourselves with God, and disassociate ourselves with a negative image. When we really incorporate bias we see it as a right to be “critically important”, then we become or channel the devil or diablolical nature.
There’s no such being.
The “Devil” is often a metaphor for the (false) ego. This negative reality is real only in the sense that it can be experienced via the veiled mind, much in the same way that a dream is experienced… and is accepted as real UNTIL we Awaken.
The ego makes us THINK we are imperfect, finite, and separate from our Perfect Source. But, once Grace awakens us FULLY, destroys the ego and removes the veil of ignorance from our mind completely… the “Devil” ceases to exist as a reality. When we experience IIMPERFECTION it is our veiling (false) EGO or The “Devil” which allows that forgetting of our Perfect SELF.
Those who would claim that they ( and you ) are indeed imperfect and quite separate from God… it can be said that they are fully under the influence of the EGO / Devil, since they have forgotten their True and Perfect SELF, the indwelling ONE, the One TRUE Constant, where evil cannot enter.
ONE is Truth Absolute, Two is the falsehood. To say that “God” /Perfect Consciousness has an oppositional force is to be under the influence of the false ego… trapped in the dream of imperfection. Grace alone removes the veil and ALLOWS the mind to RECOGNIZE the perfection which has ALWAYS been there. It is ALL about recognition … that “God” alone exists. This is what Grace does.
The ONE death those such as Jesus reference is not physical death but the death of the ego. When we finally AWAKEN fully from the play of good vs evil we REALIZE that the ultimate reality is our own indwelling Divine Perfection.
The “Devil” can be a reality of the veiled mind but it can NEVER be a reality for the mind which is fully awakened by Grace, which sees “God” alone everywhere, in every person and in every situation.
~Peace~
“Daryl Frazetti” seems to be exploiting history (and Christianity, for that matter) in a negative light in an effort to make a point he wrongly considered poignant and resonating. Pagan repression in the late Roman Empire resulted from permanent socio-cultural shifts to Christianity and the admonishment of their old polytheistic beliefs. Of FAR greater importance in consideration of the mindset of Romans in late antiquity is to remember the more than three centuries of periodic yet often brutal persecutions instituted by the state against early adherents of Christianity. The religious beliefs of the Roman Empire echoed the primacy of the imperial (and earlier, republican) state. Christians were chastised for their belief in monotheism (early Christians were often decried as “atheists” in their refusal to adopt the state religion), and concepts such as a messiah and Holy Trinity were foreign to Romans. For three centuries Christians were persecuted in the Roman Empire, not as a constant “genocidal” hunt to stomp them out, but rather more like an ebb and flow, with intermittant periods of stability punctuated by regionally organized persecutions, with much depending on the mindset of local leaders and the emperior at the time. Christians were persecuted as early as Nero’s reign (receiving the blame for the Great Fire which devastated Rome in 64), as well as under many emperors, some being Domitian, Trajan, and Septimius Severus (for interesting stories relating to the persecutions, refer to the myriad of early Church martyrs, such as St. Cecilia, St. Sebastian, or the martyrs of Abitina). The worst of the persecutions were the Diocletianic Persecutions in the late 3rd century. Only a few years before Constantine would become emperor and convert to Christianity, the emperor Diocletian instituted the most severe of all the Christian persecutions, targeting Christians on an empire-wide scale and resulting in the death of thousands.
While there were hostilities initiated in Christian communities against pagans in late antiquity, it certainly was not without a clear chain of causation (with memories of persecutions by pagans often no more than a decade or so prior), distinguishing violent outbursts as backlashes and not instigations of violence against a population increasingly in the minority. Context is an irrevocably important aspect of the situation, absolving any party of an implicitly guilty burden.
It’s called history for a reason.
The devil is us when we don’t allow love in our lives. We have turned away FROM God, but we can never be turned away BY God.
The devil is a fiction created by religious persons in order to explain the presence of things humans don’t like, and as a handy way of separating out certain undesirable elements of society by suggesting that they are in league with the devil.
Beyond that, the devil is no more real than god.
The absence of the truth.
The Devil is the character that tried to bribe God, the owner of all the worlds, with a single grain of sand (Earth) that belonged to God!
The christian devil is an age old imaginary fire god that was believed in long before any bibles were written. Christians worship 4 gods. The father, son, holy ghost and satan.
The fear-club wielded by certain varieties of the god-virus to keep the faithful in line. Used to explain the existence of evil in an otherwise perfect world (though one must question why a deity would have created the devil in the first place).
people like Joseph Stalin are the devil! if i believed in hell, they would be going there