It's Dante's hell – we're just living in it

I had a former coworker (who sometimes is on this site, maybe he'll even see this comment and know I'm talking about him) who argued that Lucifer was essentially the same character as Prometheus in Greek mythology, which gives a bit of an alternative perspective to him. The idea was that both figures brought knowledge to humans against the wishes of the higher power(s) and were punished for it. If you view it through that lens, he's more of a tragic hero for humanity against an authority that presumed to know better than we did, which would explain why the narrative from the other perspective portrays him as reckless and full of hubris.

I don't particularly believe that either Satan or Prometheus existed as literal beings at any point, but I do find the idea of their stories being different perspectives of the same tale fascinating.

>That part has always bugged me. The Lucifer is always depicted from the Bible's point of view. There are no Gospels Of Hell that give Satan's viewpoint.

Satan, as a figure was created (and described) by Christians. So it can't be anything but what it says on the tin.

It's not a real person whose biography they could have lied about - it's a creation they made of words, and those particular words define him.

You could reject their whole teachings and universe, but you can't really say "but what if Satan is actually good?", while accepting he exists. If he was good he just wouldn't be Satan. So it makes as little sense as asking "what if Moby Dick was really a rabbit?" - when Moby Dick only existed as a literary whale Melville conjured.

Similarly, as much as Satan is anything, and is useful for anything, it's for embodying the specific character he was described to be with the specific backstory.

You could write an alternate Satan (like the gnostic gospels do or Milton does), but that's fan-fiction then. The rabbit version of Moby Dick, not the "true" Moby Dick.

I interpreted Lewis' statement as claiming Milton's Lucifer, within the story exists in a cloud of his own lies and propaganda. (As opposed to labeling Milton's work as lies and propaganda in the real world.)

Just for contrast, imagine a Lucifer-character that said: "Yeah, we didn't part on good terms, and I dispute a lot of what's said about me... But I've learned to accept things I can't change and I invite you to watch and judge me by my works."

There were plenty of Gnostic works during the early church. There were certainly some sub-sect or heresy that gave a positive depiction of the other side.

> The Lucifer is always depicted from the Bible's point of view.

To the best of my limited understanding, very little is said of Satan, at all, in either the OT or the NT. What little is said, doesn't actually plainly state that the Serpent from the Garden of Eden is Satan, or that this is the same entity as Lucifer (or any other angel, fallen or otherwise).

Satan, as in the Christian Devil, is very much a thing of the Judeo-Christian mythology, the stuff that didn't make it into any of the books. Not much written down about it (think of what it might mean to be caught with such books?), just stories passed down orally, maybe in whispers.

> And the Bible insists that only its words are true. You must not trust anything else

I'm an atheist myself, but this seems like a particularly asinine interpretation of anything you might find in the Christian Bible.

I think you're all missing a conundrum that has some similarities to those we find in computer science. If you have two or more invisible, incorporeal entities, one or more of which may lie and be the impostor of the other, how can you determine who is who? What if some or all have multiple names? Can you even determine if there are multiple entities, perhaps you are mistaken and there's only one? For instance, when Mormons or Muslims say they worship the same deity as Christians, why should their opinion be taken at face value (regardless of whether you are a believer or atheist)?

ChatGPT will give you the verses you need. ChatGPT is amazingly fluent in the Bible.

Circling back to partially-relatable depictions of devilry, Lewis' The Screwtape Letters has it's own mix in the eponymous author Screwtape.

I recommend it even to the non-religious since many of the human errors/temptations it discusses can still be understood through an agnostic lens. For example, one doesn't have to believe whispering devils are involved in order to believe in in/out-group thinking, inferiority complexes, procrastination, etc.

  > And they searched his grief
  > But could only find his prison
  > And they searched his prison
  > But could only see themselves in chains

The full poem's pretty great. One of the better finds in visiting Palestine a while ago. https://www.palestineposterproject.org/poster/earth-poem

see also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaC8nuso92c for 1980s hairspray theology.

I guess almost all (including Hindus, Buddhists, etc.; what about Taoists or Confucians?) would agree, with the exception of christian and muslim believers in predestination?

It's his married name, and would conventionally be hyphenated, but he decided not to (I think because he thought it would be funnier without the hyphen).

That's the opening line of Anna Karenina.

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1399/pg1399-images.html...

Tolkien echoed the same thing in The Hobbit:

“Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.”

And we see it on HN itself, there are many "very good" stories that get posted that get a lot of upvotes but few comments because really all there is to say is 'very good'.

But stories about bad things happening get thousands of comments.

compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer#Premise

I had the impression over-eating and drug abuse was shortening one's life, on average. Is that wrong?

Could you expand on why you think living healthily doesn't increase your lifespan?

Untreated STDs can cause infertility, sexual dysfunction, cancer, brain damage, and death. No method of preventing them is 100% effective besides abstinence or having sex with a small amount of partners that you trust not to lie about being clean.

Drugs carry the risk of overdosing, and for those that even just use semi regularly they still reduce lifespan.

Eating excess calories makes you fat which hugely increases your risk of having a heart attack among other health issues. Even if you control your calories, eating processed food makes you more likely to die early or develop a debilitating disease.

This is all very common sense about how to live longer, if you think you've cracked the code and any of the above is wrong please explain.

"re-telling" -- sounds horrible, actually.

I appreciate your kindness. The brain dying might indeed put on some kind of show. Having had an out of body experience (i.e. electrocution), I'll confirm it does make people open to an afterlife. Then, I was quite opposed to religion later. Then, God's Word proved true, it claims these other things, and so I have to believe it over my personal opinion. Our faith is about objective truth after all.

Getting to the root, the Word can be confirmed by internal knowledge or outside evidence. Most come to faith by God drawing us in as we hear or read His Word with a humble, seeking attitude. His sheep hear His voice. I recommend starting in John for that while asking who Jesus is and what we must do.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+1&version=...

For external evidence, the Word was confirmed in more ways than most things people believe. It's more rational than many beliefs. I summarized that here:

https://www.gethisword.com/evidence.html

I've prayed that you find Him through any of these methods. That He also helps you better face anything in your life, too. I'm glad God has already shown you the goodness in what He does.

AlbertCory, I appreciate your frankness. I also doubt that any sensory or neural show could prove the existence of the supernatural; but I still believe in the supernatural, merely on the grounds that the natural exists, and I want to tell you why.

You know how the very consistency of the rules of the material world seem to outlive the world itself? The fact that 1 and 1 are 2 outlives the fact that a certain bottle of beer and another bottle of beer are two bottles of beer. Even if I found a single receptacle that could hold all the beer (mmm), 1 and 1 would remain 2, the fact altogether out of my reach to alter.

Similarly the pecking order in a chicken coop won't last longer than the chickens and the coop, and it can change besides—but 1 always comes before 2, and 2 before 3, and no other numbers will displace that order even if you shoved another chicken between two others near the front of the line every other second. You may destroy the line of chickens, but you'll never shake 6 off 5's tail.

The faculty by which you and I recognize these obvious truths—well, what kind of stuff is it? Do we "sense" the very number 1 in all its splendor with our mere ears or somehow conjure it up from a multiplicity of neurons? or do we merely suppose or opine, rather than know, that the numbers take a particular order? Of course not! Rather, we find out. We label the numbers arbitrarily to keep easy track of them, and then we count them: we see where they'll take us. We're along for the ride, passengers on someone else's train, one that can take you right outside the universe to the mysterious land of D'oh—a land, you might say, more real than our native one.

Now, the faculty by which we recognize that numbers are always prior to material nature—since nature plays by number's rules but never the other way round—what will we call it? I call it reason, anyway. It's notable among our faculties for comprehending eternal things like number, as naturally as anything else.

So commonly a human being will prefer pure numbers to any sloppy instantiation of them. Bees make hexagonal honeycombs out of natural habit because the shape of a hexagon works well; a human, however, contemplates the pure hexagon and tells its ratios and properties to other humans on HN because the numbers are just that cool, hang usefulness. This is one thing that divides humans from the mere animals.

From all this it seems to me more plain that the spiritual human soul (the part of the human that touches or is itself in eternity) exists than that Mumbai is a real city, or even that the earth is a geoid and not a perfect sphere (though I believe these things also). And anyway, I use mine every day. I should know.

There is of course the old rec.humour.funny posting, that was far earlier a humorous journal article from the 1970s, that demonstrates with Biblical references and basic chemistry and physics that Heaven is a lot hotter than Hell.

Re the subject. On HN, we often discuss the article, other content related to the article, and peripheral points. Many often prefer the original source over adaptations, too. In this case, I referenced “God’s Word” to make peripheral points about the original source material instead of Dante’s own work.

So, you’re certainly right. I went to a factual source with evidence I linked elsewhere instead of the fictional work. That source said you and I would be in Hell if we didn’t take steps to avoid it. A critical topic that gets no attention here. So, I’m covering it.

We can know it will be fire, not ice, since the God who created Hell talked about it so much during His time here:

https://www.crossway.org/articles/jesus-said-more-about-hell...

It’s not some consequence of our thoughts or feelings or symbolism. It’s an actual place… an objective punishment…. justice and wrath… our sovereign ruler pours out on His enemies. It has a number of descriptions that make us wonder how literal or symbolic they are. While none are ice, many talk about flame, lake of fire, and smoke in quite a literal way.

Far as Satan, God’s Word says he goes into the lake of fire at the appointed time for his defeat. Revelation 20 captures much of the judgement of Satan and people without Christ’s forgiveness:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Rev.+20&version...

One other thing. God’s wrath is described as a consuming fire. The book of Nahum is all about how horrifying it is. Ice, or deadly cold, makes your body slow down until you nod off dead. Fire wakes you up to fully alert as you scream running away from it. If your nerves and organs were indestructible, then you’d be stuck with that maximum moment of pain every second of your life. Hell might be eternal fire because it’s more horrifying that way.

There's a whole lot more direct link between the appeasement of Russia at the 2008 NATO summit to the invasions of Georgia (2008) and Ukraine (2014), but I suppose Iraq and Afghanistan are distantly relevant.

The did an enormous amount of nation-building. Billions and billions and billions of dollars over multiple decades. It was just a complete and utter failire.

The book “The Afghanistan Papers” covers the US’s misguided efforts there well.

> It's not like NATO did any major nation building in Afghanistan or Iraq, at least nowhere near close to post-WW2 Germany... so in that point he did keep his promise.

What? So he carried out nation building in 2 countries rather than 1 and that means he kept his 'no nation building' promise? What kind of logic is that?

> The entire world lost out as a result of that - there is a direct link from the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq to the Russian invasion into Ukraine.

I don't think most of the world cares one bit if europe burns or not. Heck if we had a vote, most of the world would vote for europe buring given europe's monstrous treatment of 'most of the world'.

The Vietnam war, or at least the fighting that us Americans refer to by that name, was started by the sovereign state of North Vietnam invading the sovereign state of South Vietnam and ended when America (and allies) stopped defending the state of South Vietnam and North Vietnam conquered it.

You can make all sorts of arguments as to whether or not it was moral to partition the original state of Vietnam into two separate states or whether it was moral for America to be involved at any point, but I'd make the general argument that the state starting a war with a literal invasion is rarely the moral party in such situations.

As much heat as Neville gets for his policy of appeasement (deserved or otherwise), I'm not sure Britain was in a position to stop Germany by force anyway. American neutrality is certainly open to criticism, and I think America's performative neutrality is why American companies like IBM ended up in such pivotal roles during the Holocaust.

That said, I am referring specifically to the "this Hitler guy probably isn't so bad" phenomenon that happened inside Germany and Austria. It was a dramatic failure to take a stand against Nazism, by middle class people whose neutrality on the persecution of untermenschen was motivated by a fear of losing their economic position (and the perceived economic opportunity of seizing the persecuted's assets. That is where the "socialism" in national socialism comes from, by the way), which overrode their ability to see all the violence and hatred that the Nazis wore on their sleeves. Its very similar to the neutrality of the Swiss during the same period of time.

WW2 wasn’t a war about morals/a moral war, it was a war of hunger and greed vs self preservation. Just like most.

If it wasn’t that way, Dresden and Tokyo would never have been firebombed. No one thought those missions were moral or good. they were in the service of annihilating the enemy for survival.

The truth is often close to one side or the other. Believing that is never the case is radical centrism, and leads to the absurdity where one can't decide between siding with the Jews or with the Nazis. I'd hope everyone sides with the Jews in that particular conflict, which isn't the same as saying they have to agree with every single thing every Jewish person ever does.

There was also concern about ethnic and cultural genocide of ethnic Russians in the eastern Ukraine regions. Promises broken.

And yet your comment is downvoted..

I feel utterly appealed at the HN users who support Russian genocidal state.