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So why does Satan run Hell as a place of suffering?

  
 
Sax
10:06 / 24.03.06
I probably need to read a little more deeply on this subject, but in the meantime I wondered if the Good Folk of the Temple might have opinions.

So Satan is cast out of Heaven and winds up in Hell. He is now king of the underworld, and gets to decorating as he sees fit, with lakes of fire and such-like.

Hell is a necessary counterpoint to Heaven, yes? Those who have lived virtuous, lovely lives get to go up the big white escalator to an eternity of cream cheese and white linen. Those who have been naughty puddy cats must have their ears pulled by demons until the cows come home.

But... why would Satan do this? As a rebel and an outcast, why should he run Hell according to God's design? Rather than being the big revolutionary, isn't Lucifer simply an office manager, making sure Hell is a nasty place for all the sinners? Why not, if he's in defiance of God, make Hell a Wonka-style paradise, in order to get more willing traffic?

Tell me.
 
 
---
12:44 / 24.03.06
Why not, if he's in defiance of God, make Hell a Wonka-style paradise, in order to get more willing traffic?

For starters, I think that Lucifer is part of a mistranslation, so I'll use Satan mostly instead.

Maybe because everything has an opposite, to an extent. It could be possible that if Satan made a Hell that was a good place for souls, then the bad souls would go off and make thier own of suffering all over again, because they need that place to be there, to remind them of what happens when they get addicted to imbalance, or evil, or whatever you want to call it. Besides, if God is all knowing, how could Satan be in defiance? It must be part of a lesson that has to be learned if that's the case.

With the instability of where we are, Hell could also be a state of mind that's part of the spirits route back to completion, where it loses it's soul, and then in coming back out merges with the universal soul....or a ton of other ways of looking at it. Like the beings that go into Hell need that so that they know what not do do, whereas some beings grasp it intuitively, and go through less self (willed as a necessary stage toward completion/remembering/it's own path) torture on their way to whatever the goal is. Heaven, Nirvana, and all the other names it has.

I googled 'Lucifer bright light roman god', and found this at a Satanists site, and am adding it as another perspective :

"Lucifer is enlightenment here and now on Earth, in Man. Christ, salvation and redemption; the self-love that enables a creative and emotional life are all within Lucifer. Lucifer has stolen 'God's' power and reveals it to us as a new truth: That your consciousness is the light of your life.

If you bring forth what is within you,
what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you,
what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

Jesus Christ
Gnostic Gospel of Thomas"

So he's just like Prometheus if you look at it that way.

Further down the page it has details of a possible mistranslation of the word Lucifer aswell, that's also been researched by a lot of others. Googling 'Lucifer mistranslation' takes you to a load more of them.

It could be that Lucifer, or Satan, or whoever then, is Christ on the other side of the spectrum, that they're both guardians on either side. S/he could be watching over the souls and stopping them from spilling out into the other areas of the afterlife, or as some would believe, the most trapped and deluded one there is.

Maybe hell is where we go when we refuse to 'bring it forth', and we have to be destroyed to be remade again. Like our choice in bringing it forth isn't really there at all, and we simply have to do it at some stage. Or it could be that free will isn't really there when it comes to enlightenment, and we'll all be dragged kicking and screaming into the light. Or it could true that we need both the light and the darkness to be complete.

Or in a Taoist way : There is one thing: above, it supports Heaven, below, it upholds Earth.

The above and below being the Christ and Lucifer/Satan principles, possibly. Obviously you could go on all day with different explanations, but I thought I'd try and give a few ideas.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
12:52 / 24.03.06
Sax: a good thing to remember is that the whole concept of what hell, heaven and whatnot actually look like is a big, multi-layered burger, with lots of different sources.

It doesn't all come from the bible, obviously; even at first base you've got some pagan ideas floating in there, and then a ton of different authors from Dante to Milton and loads of people before and after adding in new details. The end result of which is that there's quite a lot of contradictions.

As far as I know, Satan/Lucifer didn't build hell, he was just the first person to get sent there.
 
 
---
13:09 / 24.03.06
"the student who has obtained satori goes to hell as straight as an arrow"

If he made a Wonka style factory, it'd possibly be like this in a way. They'd like it so much that they'd shoot up into bliss, and then they'd have to go back down into the real Hell because they wouldn't be 'good' enough to deserve the bliss.

Besides, if Lucifer is working for God, then Heaven would be the Wonka factory, but without the madness, so he wouldn't need to make it because it'd already be there. Or....Earth is the Wonka factory in parts, and those parts are where you get enticed into Hell. He might not want to make it good there because he wants it to be suffering, so he uses Earth as the factory.
 
 
grant
13:22 / 24.03.06
But... why would Satan do this? As a rebel and an outcast, why should he run Hell according to God's design? Rather than being the big revolutionary, isn't Lucifer simply an office manager, making sure Hell is a nasty place for all the sinners? Why not, if he's in defiance of God, make Hell a Wonka-style paradise, in order to get more willing traffic?


Speaking, uh, ex catechism, the reason why Hell is a place of suffering is because it is a removal from the abode of God; one of the very few descriptions of Hell in the Bible (one of the Lazarus stories, I think in Luke) has the dead soul of the Rich Man in Hell looking up at the dead soul of Lazarus the Beggar in Heaven, being embraced by the prophets. Since this is a parable, it's difficult to say how literally this picture of Hell should be taken, but throughout scripture it's described as being unpleasantly hot -- possibly because of Old Testament descriptions of the-place-where-sinners-go in terms of Sheol, the big dump where the city's trash was burned.

Personally, I think the Bible portrays Satan not as a rebel but as a prosecuting attorney -- the name literally means "Opposer," and he's essentially the angel whose job it is to oppose (test) humankind to see if we're worthy.

Many popular (mis)conceptions of Satan and Hell come from Revelation, where the visionary John describes a Beast rising up and eventually being cast into a Lake of Fire. Since the whole book is (in my opinion, and the opinion of the Catholic Church and quite a few other theologians besides) an allegory, I don't think you can read too much into those descriptions. Actually, in the book itself, John of Patmos says this is a dream and a few times explains what various objects or creatures symbolize (seven hills for seven churches, and so on).

The idea of Satan as a rebel I think comes from a vexed reading of a line in Isaiah, describing lightning and the King of Babylon.

You can read a pretty standard debate on this stuff here, with a more concise statement about the Isaiah passage here.
 
 
---
13:25 / 24.03.06
As far as I know, Satan/Lucifer didn't build hell, he was just the first person to get sent there.

....and then you have the people saying that 'Hell' is also a mistranslation of the Greek word Gehenna, that Jesus was supposed to have been referring to when he spoke of the valley of Hinnom. I've read stuff about 'Hell' being hardly in the earlier translations at all, and that it got added in more and more as a means of inducing fear, etc.

Here's one of probably thousands of links on that :

http://www.godoftheages.com/site/1351515/page/686549
 
 
---
13:30 / 24.03.06
Sheol, the big dump where the city's trash was burned.

Yeah, I think that's the valley of Hinnom aswell. A dump where perpetual fires burnt, etc. So you have the constant flames, fires of 'Hell' referring back to a waste dump in that case.....
 
 
Seth
15:26 / 24.03.06
I was always taught growing up in church that Satan wasn't cast out of Heaven into Hell, but onto Earth. Hell was the place of final judgement for Satan, for now he's the Prince of this World. Can't recall the Christian scriptural basis for this now.
 
 
akira
15:42 / 24.03.06
Hell is gods love denied.
 
 
LVX23
15:54 / 24.03.06
i think hell & heaven are just ways of saying that the quality of your actions in the current life will be returned to you in the afterlife. act like a jerk here and you'll be treated like one for eternity upon death. we could debate the validity of this but at the very least it's a powerful social regulator, especially when you add the governing morality of the church. any behavior that is deemed unholy or amoral by the church/state is now tied to an eternity of damnation (eg drug use, homosexuality, voting democrat, etc...).
 
 
assayudin
20:42 / 24.03.06
The short answer would be that he has no choice. Angels (which Satan is) have no free will. All of thier actions are pre-ordained by G-d. Satan in the Old Tetament was in fact G-d's tool. The Adversary, very much the prosecuting attorney mentioned above. In the book of Job G-d allows Satan to do things to Job, but he cannot act without the consent of G-d. The story of the fall I believe comes from The Book of Enoch and is not part of the standard Canon, except in Ethiopia. And in the New Testament he takes on the "King of This World" persona when he offers Christ the world during his days of solitude.

The idea of G-d having an opposite would be heretical to Church doctrine, a Manichean heresy of dualism.

As a Gnostic Christian I see the creator god of the Old Tetament mainly as a malevolent (sort of) being and contend that we inhabit "hell' here on Earth. Satan or Lucifer may represent a benevolent being ie the Serpent in the Garden offering the fruit from the tree of Wisdom, msy be seen as an act of compassion, delivering us from our ignorance.
 
 
Charlie's Horse
23:13 / 24.03.06
I think akira put it fairly well, or at least in a manner similiar to how I think of it. I always liked Milton's explanation of this from Paradise Lost. In that, Hell was a physical place - where the fallen angels finally stopped falling - but it was an internal state as well. Satan walks out of Hell to go tempt Adam and Eve, but he's not any happier for being in Eden, away from the black fire and whatnot. Because Hell is the absence of God. It's not so much that Satan 'runs' Hell, or makes it what it is - anyone there is in a constant state of suffering by default, because God is completely absent. And even if you leave, it goes with you. In Eden, in Earthly Paradise, Satan is still pretty bummed, like any good tragic hero. Because he brought a drop of Hell along.

One for the road.
 
 
grant
01:20 / 25.03.06
The Fall isn't in Enoch, it's in the first part of Genesis. Enoch tells a different story; how Noah's dad got taken up bodily into Heaven and transformed into an angel after witnessing misbehaving angels making babies with the daughters of Eve. The Book of Enoch implies this was the reason why God sent the Flood; to wipe out the progeny of the fallen/corrupt half-angels. Which is a Fall, I suppose, but not the Original Sin/expulsion from Eden one.

Satan, by the way, doesn't show up in Genesis as such. It's just a serpent (or The Serpent) who turns up and does some tempting. He's never named as Satan, although that's pretty obviously who this figure is meant to represent.

Later in Genesis, there's also an angel who wrestles with Jacob (who becomes Israel, father of the nation). The angel may or may not be God Himself -- or, given the role as a figure contending with humanity, could equally be the Old Testament Satan. Interesting that both things are possible.
 
 
matthew.
03:12 / 25.03.06
[sort of off-topic]

For some laughs and for some decent prose, read the long long long Jeremiad in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man in which the priest delivers a days-long lecture on Hell. Super funny how much detail the priest/Joyce puts into this.

Here is an online, hypertextual, concordance-text.

[/sort of off-topic]
 
 
nyarlathotep's shoe horn
07:39 / 25.03.06
there's the religious vision(s) of hell,

and there's the popular one: the red, horned, pointy-tailed, cloven-hoofed, pitchfork-weilding, facial hair-sporting style devil, with the contracts at the crossroads and so on.

If our popular mythology about the underworld/afterworld/hell is anything, its a traffic jam of ideas all struggling for cohesion in a shifting matrix of belief. Between christian demonisation of pagan fertility symbols, to Roman iconography to folk-tales, the Devil and Hell have a rather elaborate history.

which in itself is a type of hell.

I like Neil Gaiman's rendition. particularly the kicking out of the dead and the demons, locking the gate and throwing away the key (more or less).

both heaven and hell are without time.

I have been looking for a source on the Rebel Angels story, and haven't found much beyond Milton.

anyone have any suggestions?

ta
--not jack
 
 
Sax
07:46 / 30.10.06
Just a note to say that I'm nearing the end of the project that I was asking all these questions about, and your input has proved amazingly useful. Thanks a lot, Temple. You do, indeed, rock.
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
10:20 / 30.10.06
As a Gnostic Christian I see the creator god of the Old Tetament mainly as a malevolent (sort of) being and contend that we inhabit "hell' here on Earth. Satan or Lucifer may represent a benevolent being ie the Serpent in the Garden offering the fruit from the tree of Wisdom, msy be seen as an act of compassion, delivering us from our ignorance.

Surprised nobody has mentioned the other Gnostic view, where the God of the Old Testament is in "fact" the Satan of the New (hence explaining the general cruelty, nastiness and prevention-of-humans-from-independently-gaining-wisdom of OT "God", as weell as the NT references to Satan/Lucifer (not certain offhand which name was used, i know some ppl don't think they're the same) as "God of this world")...

this is of course a theory which has been used for a justification of Christian anti-Semitism, casting Torah-believing but Jesus-rejecting Jews as devil-worshippers, and thus (IIRC) was popular among the early gentile Christians, but has also more recently been stripped of its anti-Semitism and used in a vaguely feminist context (with the objects of vilification being less Jews than conservative Christians)...

there's also the other anti-authoritarian view (which i think, if i actually believed any of this stuff as more than a powerful mythology, i would subscribe to) which is that Satan/Lucifer has sort-of, superficially rebelled against God, but fundamentally they are both on the same "side", which is basically an anti-human and anti-free-will "side" (kind of like a God : Satan :: US govt : Al-Quaida sort of thing, for those who accept that analysis)...

Hell is a slightly different matter. I've heard a Christian view that Hell is simply separation from God, and thus by default is the state that Satan/Lucifer [if seen as rebel-against-God] is in, as well as that which humans who reject Christ/God are in, and also a Christian view (not necessarily incompatible with the first) that Heaven and Hell are basically the same "place", that of full revelation of God/Reality/Everything, which will be infinite unity and infinite joy to those who accept God, but infinite separation and infinite sorrow to those who reject "him"...

slightly related to the latter is the idea of "hellfire" as actually being just one perception of the "all-consuming fire" of God (i think that's a New Testament reference, but not sure... it's kind of linked to the vaguely-Hindu (and maybe also Taoist?) idea of God as infinitely dynamic equilibrium of the universe, constantly destroying thru creation and creating thru destruction), which can "burn away" all "impure" or "sinful" aspects of a being, but would presumably utterly destroy a wholly "sinful/evil" being (as some would percieve Satan/The Enemy to be, tho that's more Zoroastrian than Judaic/Christian IMO), hence kind of merging Hell with Purgatory (and explaining the Book of Revelation "beast being cast into the lake of fire" thing)...

IMO the generally popular Christian idea of Satan is a slightly incoherent mishmash of the Zoroastrian dualist/Enemy-of-God idea, the rebel-angel (qua Milton) idea and the God's-appointed-adversary one, with most popular fiction dealing with the subject (eg "The Omen" etc) actually tending closest to the former...
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
10:34 / 30.10.06
Note that i'm actually not sure (sorce-wise) where i "know" any of this stuff from... it's mostly from conversations with friends and random crap i've read on the internet, so it could all be misinterpreted/wrong...

[hope it was an appropriately Temple-y tone to that post...]
 
 
grant
15:32 / 30.10.06
Just a note to say that I'm nearing the end of the project that I was asking all these questions about, and your input has proved amazingly useful. Thanks a lot, Temple. You do, indeed, rock.

Do we get review copies??
 
 
Sax
10:20 / 01.11.06
Well, there is the rather small step of getting it published first. I don't see why Barbelith shouldn't get a namecheck in the acknowledgements, though...
 
 
Haloquin
11:40 / 01.11.06
"Because Hell is the absence of God."
I've started to wonder how this idea of Hell can fit in with the concept of an omnipresent god. Surely, if God is everywhere, there can be no place where God is not. Therefore, there can be no Hell.
Although I guess this could be countered with the "Hell is when you reject/ignore/can't feel God" interpretation of "where God isn't".
Just a thought.
 
 
Unconditional Love
13:39 / 01.11.06
Wondered that myself haloquin in regards to hell and the devil, i think perhaps its a way to create dualism and seperation so that people dont recognise there own divinity, and instead turn to those that teach them that they are seperate in the first place for salvation. (Your acceptence as divine lays in my judgement types)

Simple con trick really convince a person they are ill/notright in some way and that only you have the medicine, everything is suffering, you are sinful, i have the answer, now listen to me or your illness will attract bogey man a or b (one for each nostril) or you will go to
a place where all is suffering etc etc, you wont even experience those little joys we allow you.

Perhaps easier to recognise that nature is divine and all processes are spiritual, Laying symbolic abstractions over the top and then convincing people that those conscious systems are more real than self awareness is where the real trickery comes in, no hell is real, i have pictures, it exsists as a word, i have photographs, we make films about it , write books, i can see it inside me, at least my own version, oh that must be hell, yeah right.

Representations as reality rather than direct experience.

Another simple con trick of course is to teach people they are already divine and then show them a way to find it, through a special method that only you have, buried treasure. Look at all my pictures my evidence, of course you have buried treasure. Your not really a sinner, i can see the light in you, you never were a sinner those people are conning you, believe my lies rather than theres.

I seem to come back to direct experience each and everytime and just wonder about the rest of it, fairy tales for adults, but i like a good story, even if its beginning to feel like repeats, i need to talk to the director about that, maybe get some better edits a few slow dissolves to ease the day.

Apologies in advance for the rot.
 
 
grant
15:03 / 01.11.06
Actually, I think the Bible's pretty clear that God isn't omnipresent. Omniscient, sure, but knowledge and presence aren't the same thing.

The whole bit with the Ark of the Tabernacle and the Temple of Solomon is tied in with the idea of God's presence.
 
  
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