How intelligent do you think the devil is? Could he come up with a religion fortified with miracles and scientific facts proven many centuries later? How wary are you of the devil's abilities or do you tend to dismiss him because you either think he is not real or your faith in God is so great?
Just some late-night musing on my part. What do you think?
9 comments:
I think he's very intelligent and I don't just dismiss him at all. Satan has power. He's cunning and he has plans to kill, steal, AND destroy.
While he may have power, my God has all authority AND power. :D I rest in that.
Thats a hard one to answer briefly. I think that Satan has power, and that he can even have miracles, such as those of the Egyptian sorcerers in the Joseph story. I think that there are ways of discerning the real miracles from the counterfeit, but I'm not really that good at it myself. May God protect us all from his Satan's evil plans
The Bible says something about Satan having signs and lying wonders. Those who don't know God can be deceived. But greater is He who is in us than he that is in the world.
How intelligent? Very. And sure, why not. The best lies are the ones that have a core of truth to them. Take actual happenings, scientific facts, which the devil, being an angel, would know, seed them through a religion that you're creating, and then as people discover these facts down the road, it just lends credence to the false religion.
As for how wary I am? I don't really know...I don't think about it all that often, to be honest. :)
Thank you all for your wonderful comments. I was curious after reading a book about a certain religion that spoke of scientific facts only recently discovered, prophecies, miracles and such things.
I appreciate your replies.
Devil is intelligent, definitely but I do seriously believe that all religions are man-made.
Look at the three major, Abrahamic religions: Moses didn't create Judaism. Moses wasn’t a Jew. He believed in one God and preached that, but his followers named their religion Judaism. Same is with Jesus. Jesus never called himself a Christian. He never set out to create a new religion, but it was formed by his disciples and named Christianity. Interestingly Muhammad, right from start, created a new religion. He gave his religion the name, Tazaqqa, and later changed it to Islam.
So in essence all three as religions (not Message) are man-made.
And the Devil has the ability to influence human beings. He can predict future events, and create illusions.
As far as scientific miracles are concerned, these too are professed by adherents of every faith.
Opponents of every religion have skillfully taken apart every religious book and shown deficiencies, contradictions, false predictions and bad science.
I have read commentaries on both the Bible and the Quran by their opponents and both parties do a good job of showing contradictions in both books.
There is bad science in the Bible too - bats are claimed to be birds! As far as the scientific miracles of the Quran are concerned, there are several errors there (one being the claim that the Earth is flat which even the Bible claims and which Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz still believes in!). I just finished reading an excellent source on Embryology and the Quran and it basically just shreds the claim that Quran knows everything about human embryology to pieces.
Achelois, thank you for your interesting comment! So if all holy books have errors AND all religions are man-made, how do we know what to do? I always love hearing from you because I know you research things and read a lot. Thank you for your comment. :)
Be a Universalist :D
No really, even when I thought I was a strict Muslim I was actually a Universalist. I believe that any path that leads one to do good and pray to one God is the right path - for him/her. I don't believe in a single, rigid way to God.
A Sufi, Hussein ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, wrote, “I thought about various beliefs, passionately wishing to understand them, and understood that they are similar to many branches of one tree. Do not force a man to prefer one belief to another because it will distract him from the trunk. In fact the trunk itself searches for the person and shows him its greatness and all its secret values for him to comprehend them.”
Now that trunk may come as Islam to one, as Christianity to another and Buddhism to yet another. One just has to have the eagerness to find Truth.
There are many Sufis who pray five times a day like Muslims but who follow Jesus as their role model! They are neither accepted by Christians nor by Muslims. But they are content and at peace with themselves.
Why should everyone believe in one religion? Insisting that there is one Right Path to God is in fact giving in to the whispers of the Devil who wants to Divide and Rule.
Why should there be one religion when there are so many different people? When God didn't make us all alike then I doubt He has one monolithic path for all of us to follow.
That is what Universalists hold sacred (most are Unitarian Christians, though).
Achelois, thank you for the additional comments. I found them highly interesting. Hmmm, a Universalist, huh? Why does that not surprise me. :) Thank you for explaining more about that as it relates to Sufism. Enjoyed that!
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