well what do you know.....no originated with Christians but with Jews....which were who......oh yea God's chosen people........again you know not what you speak....


The Early Jewish Apocryphal Writings
Rabbinic Literature gives two accounts for the origin of Satan. The first is that Satan was created on the sixth day at the same time as Eve. This ties in with the tradition that Satan played some part in the fall of man. The second and more prevalent tradition is that Satan is one of the fallen angels. Satan is identified with Sammael and his deeds.

In T.B. Baba Bathra (16a), Satan is identified with the Yetzer ha Ra, which is the 'evil impulse' in man. The Talmud distinguishes between the personified Satan outside man, and the Yetzer ha Ra that exists within man. It is this evil impulse within man that allows Satan the opportunity to work his will against man.

Rabbinic writings also foreshadow the destruction of Satan. T.B. Succah (52a) talks of the destruction of the evil angel, while the Yalkut Jesaj (359) implies that Satan will be overthrown at a future time by the Messiah, referring to Psalm 36:9.

The general belief is that there are a class of satans with a chief Satan. For example, in 1 Enoch, there are 5 Satans. The first and second are said to have been responsible for leading astray the angels and for bringing them down to earth, where they sinned with the daughters of men (69:4), while the third brought about the fall of Adam and Eve (69:6). The satans are allowed to access heaven in order to accuse men, but they are not confined to heaven.

That’s not the same thing...The rede implies do what you want if you hurt no one, nor yourself. I guess that might be a foreign concept to a fundie?

Hmmmm I think that is the most profound thing written today.......and maybe they can use my stripper pole...

Non-human intelligent life forms.... galaxy aliens.

Aliens, all of them.

JB

Obviously this was written by a Christian because Deb copied and pasted it as usual...However this is basically accurate and worth pointing out. Also, I have not researched intensively anything classified as "new age" and generally this term has a derogatory inference associated with it.


New Age movement

Participants in the New Age movement have widely varied views about Satan, the Devil, and so forth. In some forms of Esoteric Christianity Satan remains as a being of evil, or at least a metaphor for sin and materialism, but the most widespread tendency is to deny his existence altogether. Lucifer, on the other hand, in the original Roman sense of "light-bringer", occasionally appears in the literature of certain groups as a metaphorical figure quite distinct from Satan, and without any implications of evil. For example, Theosophy founder Madame Blavatsky named her journal Lucifer since she intended it to be a "bringer of light". Many New Age schools of thought follow a nondualistic philosophy that does not recognize a primal force for evil. Even when a dualistic model is followed, this is more often akin to the Chinese system of yin and yang, in which good and evil are explicitly not a complementary duality. Schools of thought that do stress a spiritual war between good and evil or light and darkness include the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, Agni Yoga, and the Church Universal and Triumphant.

and this

Neopaganism

Christian tradition has frequently identified pagan religions and witchcraft with the influence of Satan. In the Middle Ages, the Church accused alleged witches of consorting and conspiring with Satan. Several modern conservative Christian writers, such as Jack Chick and James Dobson, have depicted today's neopagan and witchcraft religions as explicitly Satanic.

Few neopagan reconstructionist traditions recognize Satan or the Devil outright. However, many neopagan groups worship some sort of Horned God, for example as a consort of the Great Goddess in Wicca. These gods usually reflect mythological figures such as Cernunnos or Pan, and any similarity they may have to the Christian Devil seems to date back only to the 19th century, when a Christian reaction to Pan's growing importance in literature and art resulted in his image being translated to that of the Devil.

Thanks Deb for helping me make my point.

Horned gods, with horns or antlers, appear in various cultures. The "Horned God" is a modern term for a syncretic god of late antiquity, the merging of Cernunnos, a horned god of the Celts, with the Greco-Roman Pan. This combination of gods produced a powerful deity, around which the pagani, those refusing to convert to Christianity, rallied. This deity provided the prototype for later Christian conceptions of the devil, and his worshippers were cast by the Church as witches. In Wicca, the Horned God and his counterpart the Triple Goddess are the main gods worshiped.

The "Horned God" is still worshipped by some modern Neopagans, particularly Wiccans, who have linked him with a wide variety of male nature gods from various mythologies, including the English Herne the Hunter, the Egyptian Ammon, the Hindu Pashupati and the Roman Faunus. All of these male deities are seen as having horns and an association with nature. A number of figures from British folklore, though normally depicted without horns, are nonetheless considered related: Puck, Robin Goodfellow and the Green Man.

The syncretic figure of a Horned God, central to a cult of witches, was first suggested by Jules Michelet in La Sorcière (1862); these ideas were expanded by Margaret Murray, in The Witch-cult in Western Europe (1921). Since then important aspects of Murray's thesis have been discredited, and the idea of a highly organised pagan underground resistance persisting into the early modern period is widely regarded as a fantasy. Despite widespread condemnation of her scholarship, certain intuitions of hers are now considered correct, and most witchcraft historians agree that beliefs and practices originating in paganism survived into the Early Modern Age, and that the conflict between these beliefs and Christianity helped precipitate the European witch-hunts.

No one said you had to buy into anything. You asked and I showed. There has clearly been a "rift” between the two but exactly how far back it extends is very open for debate.

And who told you about all that exactly? Let me guess, either a Christian who really had no experience with the spirituality and had an aversion to it for obvious reasons or someone else who had absolutely no experience with it.

Also, how many Christians from the time of Jesus do you know that are still alive and kicking? You can’t very well expect Pagans from that time period to exist either can you? There is plenty of documentation. However the difference here is we don’t carry any agendas or dogma. If you want to know, go look it up. Make your own decisions. If you ask for help, you will get help. End of story.

I’m not speaking of written records solely. I’m addressing actual archeological, cultural and anthropological and physical evidence. Show me your documentation to prove that Christianity has been the ONLY recorded religion of humankind and then we can go from there.

Oh, Mirror I HATE that avatar! You are bad!

I hope not. Because that would be hard for you to prove and require a great deal of time. Probably even more time than you currently spend online. I think an exercise in futility really. You are free to do whatever you like though.

I wasn't getting on your case about it. Gosh. Defensive.

Krim says "gosh" like Napoleon Dynamite and storms out of the room.