re: Uproar as after-school Satan club forms at Tennessee elementary school

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Satan is both culturally and religiously the personification of evil, so if they aren’t worshiping evil then their name is just a dumb grasp for attention and uproar.

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Yes and no. Satan/Lucifer is essentially evil personified in Christianity and Islam. In Judaism, it’s significantly more complicated than that, mostly rejecting the personification completely. Then you have interesting cases like the Yazidi who are sometimes accused of being “devil worshipers” because of their reverence for the “peacock angel”.

Tangents about other religions aside, to return to Christianity as it is the dominant religion in the US, the Satan/Lucifer of the New Testament is considered evil personified because Yahweh is considered to be good personified. If Yahweh is perfectly good, then anyone or anything that opposes Yahweh in any way, shape, or form, is per se evil.

At which point someone takes the position that Yahweh isn’t perfectly good, then opposition to Yahweh ceases to be inherently evil. If Yahweh is the source of both good and evil, then a satan might be necessary. If Yahweh is malevolent, then a resistant satan could be construed as heroic.

This is ultimately all academic to me, as I don’t believe either exist, though I do find the cultural aspects of it to be interesting. With that said, I’m simply arguing that there are a litany of reasons someone could believe these entities do, or might, exist while not viewing Satan/Lucifer as evil personified.