Sandbox / The Bible WMG

For various writers' Wild Mass Guesses about the nature of three of the main characters in actual works, see God Is Evil, Satan Is Good, and Jesus Was Crazy. For those exclusively available on this very Wiki, see WMG.God, WMG.Jesus and WMG.Satan.

The Church is right.

The major divisions of Historical Christianity are correct and have a self-consistent belief that simultaneously describes the world accurately.

• These divisions being Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Pentecostals, and Evangelicals. "Historical" is the term used because they all believes taught all the way back to the Apostles.

The reason for Jesus is we are all currently living in Self-Inflicted Hell.

Think about it. Why the need for salvation? Because life is already punishing us for sins we barely understand, with stuff like full-time work that sucks, crappy relationships, and other stress. This would also explain why after Jesus's death, so many false religions/cults pop up. Someone down there doesn't want those prisoners escaping...

The Book of Revelation was never prophetic. Revelation is a letter of encouragement to believers suffering under the cruel reign of the Imperium Roma, and is largely symbolic

The Beast is The Empire, the Seven Heads are the Seven Hills where the centre of Roman government is located. The heads are inscribed with blasphemous names, reflecting the titles given to Roman emperors ("God-Emperor of Mankind", "Lord and Saviour", etc), considered to be blasphemies in the eyes of Christians. The Second Beast aka the Antichrist is The God-Emperor Himself. There has been a theory that the number 666 has having symbolic correlation to the Emperor Nero, whose Greek name transliterated into Hebrew has the numeric value of 666, whereas his Latin name written into Hebrew is 616. Nero was the madman who started the trend of Christian persecutions, and therefore, the "Anti-Christ". The quote "And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name" represents Roman currency inscribed with the symbols of the Empire and pictures of the Emperor. You cannot buy or sell without using the Imperial Currency marked with the Emperor. Crimson and scarlet are colours representative of Rome's red colour scheme. The "Whore of Babylon" symbolizes Rome as the new Babylonian Empire that conquered Israel in the past, and organized persecutions against the Jews, similar to how the Romans treated Christians. Most anti-Roman propaganda were disguised as apocalyptic literature during that time. Unfortunately, this book has turned into a Tome of Eldritch Lore that has spread deadly amounts of panic and insanity, and resulted in crazy nonbiblical bullshit such as the Rapture and Eternal Hell, which overall has left Christianity worse off. Should have put a disclaimer.

• The book of Matthew mentions an eternal hell as well. What we don't know for sure is if most humans stay in there forever in a conscious state or not.
• If John put a disclaimer, he could've been caught, Christianity would be in even more danger and history would be irrevocably altered. John couldn't have known something like this would happen, and it won't be anyone's problem for another 500 years.

The Prodigal Son is about Satan.

Take Jesus' commandment of Forgiveness, and the theory of Universal Reconciliation. and realize that the Prodigal Son himself is Satan, who was also meant to be redeemed. In Paradise Lost Hell is suspiciously easy to sneak out of, and both God and Lucifer mention that the fallen angels would be accepted back to heaven in a heartbeat if they asked God for forgiveness. The only reason they don't (and won't) is the pride that made them fall in the first place.

If this is the case, then where the younger son asks for his inheritance... he was demanding to have Earth, acquiring the world made him "the god of this age" hence why he has mastery over it, and tried to foolishly tempt Jesus/God (aka "god of all ages") with it. The current age of misery, sin, death and suffering we're in, is Lucifer squandering away his god-given fortune (the word "prodigal" after all means "wastefully extravagant"), until all is destroyed, and he has nothing.

He eventually gives up the Self-Inflicted Hell of "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven", and finally comes home to God, who forgives him immediately because he loves all his sons and has a celebration in Heaven. The other son is Archangel Michael, who is still mad at Satan for betraying God and can't understand how he always followed God, and yet, God seems to be happy the traitor is back. God explains he loves Michael, but Satan had fallen but was now with them again. Satan and Michael make up and all is well.

Origen and adherents of Universal Reconciliation were right all along

Jesus Christ himself said to Love and forgive your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. And if you would consider the Parable of the Lost Son, you would see what is basically the life of Lucifer. Lucifer rebelled believing that it is "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven", but eventually gives up this Self-Inflicted Hell, and finally comes home to God, who forgives him immediately because he loves all his sons and has a celebration in Heaven. This meant that Lucifer, the first sinner, was meant to be redeemed as well. However, the Medieval Catholic Church was exceedingly corrupt and totalitarian on a scale comparable to Soviet Russia, and so Augustine and Thomas Aquinas spread heresies such as the doctrine of a totalitarian complete-monster-of-a-God who would punish people with Eternal Punishment where sinners are never forgiven.

Esther wrote the book of Esther

Jesus is currently very sad.

Why?

• Perhaps His sacrifice for humanity's sin isn't a very effective idea.
• Alternatively, because people continue sinning and have all but forgotten about the whole sacrifice thing.

Jesus was originally meant to bring forth The End Of Days, but rejected it and gave humanity a second chance, saving us.

• If this is the case then why did He always say that he did the will of his father?

Eden was humanity's Choice. We didn't pass, but didn't fail. The Torah is the Manual.

Whenever a species achieves true sentience, they are offered the Choice: to exist as the One (God) intended, lightly and wisely, or to follow the Lone One and thereby achieve "greatness" (actually: death and pain).

Adam and Havah (Eve) were the first humans to achieve true sentience. The Serpent was the Lone One in its guise as the Old Serpent. Humanity tried to become "as gods", but were also wary enough to build an extra component into their choice: a demand that they could remake it as a group someday later.

Since they did choose the Entropy option, we can never fully remake our Choice, but groups of people can band together to partially remake it. The various occasions on which we've done so result in what we call religions.

Thus, the Torah, and later the Qur'an, are in fact condensed forms, for those whose eyes can see, of the Book of Night With Moon and the universe's Manual.

The Tree of Knowledge was in fact a Monolith.

The Monolith, which was created by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens whom we can find indistinguishable from Gods, came down on a backwater planet and gave these pathetically primitive apes who were almost on the verge of extinction the ability to create tools, explore more and piece together dissociated objects into increasing complexities, thus allowing them to rise on the top of the food chain and evolve into what we all know as Humanity, all while Also sprach Zarathustra is playing. However, with his newfound God powers, he became a bastard to nature and his own kin, and had to suffer curiosity's massive potentials for danger. As for the Tree of Life, it's in Jupiter, where another Monolith which will allow for ascension waits.

Our Universe is purgatory.

Paradise contains the combined enlightenment of its inhabitants.In order to keep it functioning and pure, god created some other places for "troublemakers" in Genesis,and anybody who didn't quite reach it will be reborn and given another try...

• Jossed: There was only one Jesus.

Jesus is a masochist suffering from Stockholm Syndrome

He was rejected by the Jews, tortured by the Romans and saw how much of a bastard humanity is, yet he still loves them. Hey, just look at this phrase: "Love your Enemies". Strangely, people like Christians react to Jesus' Stockholm Syndrome with their own (Orwellian) version of the Stockholm Syndrome: all those rants about how we are all slaves to God, how God controls every aspect of our life, and we will be sent to eternal punishment, yet we still need to love him.

• Actually, some christians pretty much see everything as a form of Stockholm Syndrome (most especially St. Paul, hence why Nietzsche hated the bastard). Sure, if you join God you become his obedient pet who will go to a place where sin (and thus free will) is impossible, but if you go otherwise and enjoy it, you are a slave to sin who is going to Hell. And the sin thing pretty much extends to science or buddhism or self-interest or sex or whatever. Disregarding fundamentalists, this "slave to sin's stockholm syndrome" assumption is pretty much obsolete, with more and more Christians opting for the "Eternal Separation from God with full consent" alternative, and the conception itself being parodied in the form of A Hell of a Time.

God is an overly-cliched Mary Sue / Creator's Pet

Perfect, omnipotent, omniscient yet perfectly human, supposed to be an Eldritch Abomination who simultaneously serves as the perfect protagonist of the entire bible, perfect, can be perfectly outside logic and do various questionable acts (like eternal punishment) and can get away with it and remain perfect without any effort, perfectly. Every single character in the Bible likes him and/or lives by his predetermined Will, even though in Real Life he has a Hate Dom (Atheists) who criticize him as being both a wish fulfillment self-insert fic no different from Enoby with a blindly following Fan Dumb no different from Justin Bieber / Twilight fangirls, and a Pavlovian control mechanism no different from Big Brother.

• Every fill out the Universal Mary Sue Test for Jesus? Heck, it's church canon that Jesus is an author insert.
  • When I did him (assuming the author is Matthew), he got a 98. For perspective, the worst score the site bothers to list is a fifty
• God may be this trope done right: part of the reason why Christianity became so popular is because their concept of The Lord keeps them content: the idea of a benevolent deity helps them get by when the world seems cruel, the idea of a perfect deity gives them hope that their happiness is guaranteed, and a vengeful deity satisfies their need for retribution. Interpretations of a Big Brother-esque deity are less a sign that God Is Evil, and more that the people who come up with those interpretations are messed up.
• Part-confirmed, part-jossed. The Mary Sue part is Canon-since God is canonically established as perfect and all who dislike him are inherently evil. Jossed on the Creator's Pet part, however, because a Creator's Pet is, by definition, unimportant to the plot-God is the entire point of the plot.

The Sun is Satan

Yahweh, according to 1 Kings and Psalms, is supposed to dwell in darkness, and solar worship is Heresy and thus punishable by death in either the Bible or the Qu'ran, not to mention that in abrahamic tradition there is no angel of the Sun (the closest being Shamshel, but that is meant to be a personification of the day; there's a huge difference), and Lucifer means "the light bringer" or the "morning star". What star is the most visible in the morning? Answer: The Sun. Either that, or the Sun is Hell/Lake of Fire.

• God created the Sun, so even if there is a bad spirit over it, it is overall pointless, much like Satan currently ruling over Earth.
• Oddly enough, it seems that Shamshel in abrahamic theology, despite being said to be "the angel of the Sun", is still a fallen angel. So yes, Yahweh has an enemy in the Sun.
• So that's why Roman Catholicism has a grimdark feeling over it.......
  • And also why Evil is "Hot"....
    • Not to mention the unsettling demeanor of a children's television icon.
• Solar Power is Heresy?
• Then all the Elizabethan poetry referring to the Sun as the "Eye of God" was Satanic recitations?
  • Yes.
• That's why it tries to kill you in Mario 3!

  • Wait a minute! Morning star is actually Venus not Sun. This also makes perfect sense because many scientists describe surface of Venus as something like Hell.
  • Venus is beautiful when you look at it, but behind that is the face of a monster. sounds like Satan to me!
  • But most "demons" like Moloch and Nergal are solar deities.
  • Yes, but The Bible regards them as demons. So no, they aren't the Sun.
  • It goes further when you consider that Venus represents the Goddess Aphrodite/Venus for Classical myths and Inanna/Ishtar for Sumerian/Babylonian myths, with these two being goddesses of sexuality and fertility, PERFECT for giving in to desire.

The Garden of Eden is in the center of the sun

God placed an angel guarding it with a flaming sword which faced in all directions - the sun's heat faces in all directions.

• Hey, all the heavy elements were created in the cores of stars and expelled in supernovae - we're star stuff - this adds a whole new dimension to being "cast out of the garden of Eden".
• Hydrogen (star fuel) is God. That explains why he's the One: he has only one proton in him. Also, if you search for Greek philosophy, Hydrogen is also shaped like the "Monad" (symbol for oneness/god).
  • Therefore by definition hydrogen is evil? That adds a new dimension to the Hindenburg inferno and the H-bomb.
• The planets do owe their existence to the Sun.
• What about Helios/Helium?

On both guesses: The Sun is both Satan and the Garden of Eden

Despite being considered evil, it's also shown that Satan is basically second to God, and he did help in creation (the aforementioned "cast out of the Garden of Eden"). And who knows, what was described as Hell/the Lake of Fire might as well be the omnidirectional heat surrounding the "creative" center of of the Sun.

Jesus and Lucifer are both the Sun AND the Morning Star

The latter is obvious because Jesus is also associated with Venus in the Bible. The first is an idea brought about by Hermetic ideology; Lucifer represents the intellectual light, while Christ represents the spiritual light.

• Jesus and the Sun are both actually the Unconquered Sun. Lucifer is the Morning Star. But the Evening Star is Venus, the Maiden of Serenity.

Jesus never really resurrected, and the rest of the Bible is actually his Dying Dream.

At first, it manifests itself as wishful thinking, such as escaping from his torment and living on. However, as his condition worsens, he becomes more delusional, which is why Revelation is such a Mind Screw.

• That's a really bizarre Unreliable Narrator then, since it was never written from his perspective; even the parts with him in it.
  • He was imagining his life as a book.
  • The secret is that he's still dying, and we're all figments of his imagination.
    • Waking Life, anyone?
  • That's kind of a Downer Ending then...

Jesus never really resurrected, and the rest of the new testaments are inaccurate hearsay.

Even in the bible itself, it is not clear that Jesus did resurrect. Only few people claimed to have seen him resurrect, and one of the disciples couldn't recognize the supposed ressurected Jesus.

• Well he was whipped 39 times, beaten, dehydrated, crucified, and then stabbed in the heart with a spear. So if he managed to just sleep that off than he's either Holy, or Rasputin. Either way he went fishing with his buddies afterwards. So...
  • Also lets not forget that guards were put near Christ's grave specifically to avert body snatching or similar accidents. And yet...
• A few? Try over five hundred, including his half-brother James, who didn't believe any of his claims to divinity before. So...
• While he may have been seen, he may not be technically alive.
  • Of course, the big kicker if this WMG is true is that it confirms once and for all that Christianity should be elliminated as a faith of liars, since without Jesus's actual, physical ressurection, much of Christian belief, particularly in the important topic of salvation is rendered moot, not to mention several tasty theological tidbits such as how the material world is good through a physical Resurrection.
• Islam (Jesus was never crucified/survived the crucifixion) and Leo Tolstoy (Jesus was Killed Off for Real on the cross) says hello.

Satan/Lucifer is God's younger sister.

God got tired of Lucy bitching about how the lipstick he got her for her birthday was the wrong color, so he snapped and kicked her out. The angels who preferred hanging out with a hot chick instead of a powerful guy followed her, and Hell is where you do have lots of sex but have to put up with woman complaining about "Does This Make Me Look Fat?" all day long. And that is the legend behind why evil can be sexy.

• God, what You see in Your presence is a He-Man Woman Hater. What You do with him is ... up to You, I guess?
• Now I'm picturing God and Satan as Dexter and Dee Dee...
  Enter at your own peril, past the pearly gates
  where impossible things may happen that the world has never seen before...
  In Yahweh's Laboratory lives the smartest God you've ever seen!
  But Satan blows his experiments to smithereens!
  There is gloom and doom while things go boom
  in Yahweh's Lab!
  

Both Creationism and Evolution can be true.

God is outside of Time. "A thousand years is one day, and one day is a thousand years." After the Eden incident, man became distanced from God, more of a creature of flesh than he was. To accomodate this, God wrote in a backstory to the Universe. From our perspective, being bound by time, time and space keep going back to the Big Bang; where even scientists admit "the rules had to be different at that moment." Man became a slave to the dust; to the physical; and evolution is the way God wrote that in. Now, God didn't sit down and explain this to Moses or whoever wrote Genesis because they were still working on the "Stop worshipping golden statues or I'll smite your ass" part. You try explaining metaphysics to a group of people who can't seem to figure that pattern out.

• Or (and I hope this is relevant enough to jamb under here) perhaps the creation stories (uh, I mean, story...) were just something God made up to explain things to people who still hadn't figured out to be careful around women in veils. Just like the stork, only with a firmament and your daughter-in-law... wait—
• Or Gods did make everything in 7 days, but then decided a cooler backstory was needed for better ratings...
• To this editor, the story of Eve being made from Adam's rib always sounded like the evolution of an asexual lifeform into a sexual one...
  • Its actually more about symbolism due to rib being close to heart. As Matthew henry says "The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved." d'awwww
• In the Bible is said God created so-and-so on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd day etc. But doesn't say how much time there was between each of those days. It doesn't state that those days followed each other immediately...
• The Hebrew word translated as "day" in English means "period of time," meaning that it could be just about any amount of time.
  • "Evening came, and morning followed..." ...and Morning and Evening marked the periods when ancient Hebrews were allowed to labor. So, seven periods of work.
• The Creation story could easily be a prescientific person's interpretation of how Life, the Universe and Everything formed— darkness into light (big bang), dust and water being gathered together (formation of stars and planets), sun and moon "appearing" (atmosphere of proto-Earth becoming clearer to make the sky visible from the surface), sea life coming before land life, etc. God showed the author approximately what happened, and the author wrote it using the only terms and references he understood.
  • Wait. "The Creation story could easily be a prescientific person's interpretation of how Life, the Universe and Everything formed?" And if creation took seven days... but only six days of doing anything... Seven times six... My mind is blown like the H-bomb in the above WMG.
• Thank you at least for the statue/metaphysics part. The other Mind Screw is that being omnipotent means making 2M year old rocks three days ago. Theatre scene and prop people live off this.
• Not only are both Creationism and Evolution true, but evolution is actually referenced in the Bible itself. Remember the Tree of Life, which Adam and Eve refused to consume due to preferring the Tree of Knowledge? well in Science the phylogenetic tree of evolution is also called the Tree of Life. Yes, exactly the same words. If the Tree of Life is present in the Bible, and the Tree of Life is present in Evolution, then Evolution might be present in the Bible. It might as well be interpreted that the Tree of Life is actually the physical manifestation of Evolution itself. If Evolution is the Tree of Life, then what is the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Life's antithesis? Answer: Knowledge and its fruits, such as Science, Civilization, Technology, etc. With knowledge, we can force the habitat to adapt to ourselves instead of us adapting to the habitat, and when everything is adapted to that one species (Homo Sapiens, humans), Homo Sapiens will remain as Homo Sapiens... forever, or until someone from the uncanny valley wipes us out. I came up with a new story that would reference both Evolution and the Bible: With the Tree of Life, one gains the power of Natural Selection, but he will remain ignorant and a slave to the cosmos. With the Tree of Knowledge, one gains the power of Civilization, but since Ignorance is Bliss, he will experience the full torture the cosmos can bring. Adam, the first man, refused to go with the laws of evolution (The Tree of Life) and preferred to eat the Tree of Knowledge. God warned Adam that since he has the Tree of Knowledge, he no longer needs the Tree of Life, and he will die (Humans Are Bastards who have the capacity to destroy each other given enough technology) and live in pain (after all, Ignorance is Bliss). The transgression forced him to modify the habitat itself instead of simple adaptation to the habitat. In other words, we replaced nature with knowledge.
• Alternatively, God created the world, but brought the power of evolution to us living things so that we can evolve on our own as Gods and such. And we took this long to realize this?
• It still does not rescue him from God Is Evil status. Evolution is evil, right?
• Creationism was true. God just tweaked his creation a bit.
• God created the Earth in six days, but He didn't really care that His (non-conventional-geologic) methods would lead to some people at one point in time concluding, logically but incorrectly, that the planet was like really really old. (This is why the entire debate confuses me. Sure, there's prolly some room for metaphor or something, but dating methods (which are based on the processes we observe now) don't mean much when you're dealing with someone who violates the laws of thermodynamics (and, indeed, created them) as a matter of course. There's just not really much reason not to take the passages at face value.)

Satan is just misunderstood.

In the Old Testament, he is described in neutral to approving terms as a servant of God. He carries out the murder of Job's family in collusion with on high and is clearly a part of the 'inner circle'. In the New Testament there is a sudden lurch in diction and he depicted as the (pick one) great dragon/beast of the apocalypse/enemy of mankind, a creature full of nothing but cartoonish malevolence. What we are seeing is a former party member who has been subjected to a furious negative spin campaign after he became disillusioned and jumped ship.

• Maybe God an Satan used to date. I mean, there is something of the flavor of a sour romantic relationship here...
  • That would mean God is gay, since they're both a gender I can't describe. That could explain a lot.
• As one of the ways that Satan is misunderstood, consider the Garden of Eden story: God tells Adam and Eve not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, saying they will be struck dead. The serpent (commonly taken for Satan by Christians) tells them that no, they won't be killed; God doesn't want them to eat from the tree because they'll become like Him. They eat from the tree, and don't die; instead they become self-aware, like God. Somehow, the serpent is cast as the deceiver in this little game. Clearly, Lucifer sees the potential in humanity that God would rather suppress here; he's been on our side all along. (It should be noted that I'm not a Christian, but a Sub-Genius, so any heresy committed here is purely in the eye of the beholder.)
  • The previous troper has been misinformed. Point to me where it says Adam & Eve would be struck dead as soon as they ate the fruit. You can't because it's not in the Bible. What God tells Adam is that they will die, but he doesn't say when. Satan on the other hand being the devious fellow he is, twists God's words, making it seem as though He meant instant death. When they don't instantly die, Adam & Eve are convinced the 'serpent' knew something they didn't and the rest is history.
    • That's getting rather semantic, don't you think? Especially for the innocent children Adam and Eve were presented as. "Do this and you die" is generally interpreted as immediately. I would say both the serpent and God hid the whole truth. How does this make one better?
    • "Do this and you die" might hold a different meaning if someone is immortal.
    • "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."—Genesis 2:17, King James Version.
• This story, by the way, has other interpretations, including the expulsion being, rather than a punishment, simply the inevitable consequence of the eye-opening the fruit induces. By this reading, the only punishments were having to work hard in the fields and in childbirth, and those were only because they didn't take responsibility for eating the fruit. Ideally, then, Adam and Eve would've eaten the fruit and left the garden of their own free will at some point, with full understanding of the implications, as a rite of passage for humanity - but that "free will" thing also led to the snake messing things up.
  • Ah, but that raises a deeper question; could a being without self-awareness and knowledge of right and wrong ever really grow to understand the implications? Would they ever be ready for any sort of "rite of passage"? Remember, Adam and Eve are painted as basically animals before they eat from the tree (sure, they talk, but apparently, so do the other creatures in the garden). Could they ever really grow to understand the consequences of eating from the tree without eating from the tree in the first place?
    • Indeed, in Paradise Lost, part of the serpent's argument is that "God said you'd die. But what's this 'death' thing anyway?"
    • The other animals talk in the same way a ventriloquist's dummy does. Satan was a very powerful cherub (no not the fat baby kind) who could do extraordinary things with that power. Besides, Adam & Eve obviously already had free will if they could CHOOSE to listen to the serpent and eat the fruit. And about the death part, Adam & Eve had existed for ? unrecorded years. Who knows how many animals they saw die of old age. They used 100% of their perfect brains. If we can go to the moon with >10%, I'm sure they could have understood death.
    • We went to the moon with a 100% of hundreds of people's collective brains and a good chunk of physics and astronomy knowledge from Newton and Copernicus all the way to the 60's. Perfect brains are useless without knowledge. They might understand the concept of death, just like three year olds might understand the concept of serendipity, but how are they to be expected to connect the word with the event, if they had not bothered to name it themselves? They could have thought it was a long sleep, for all we know. Isn't that how its explained to children?
    • So Adam and Eve were in the grip of permenant seizures? That explains alot.
  • Milton seems to have been a fan of this theory: The world was all before them, where to chose/ Their place of rest, and Providence their guide./ They hand in hand, with wand'ring steps and slow/ Through Eden took their solitary way.
  • I thought it pretty obvious: when humanity gained knowledge of what good and evil was, they also gained responsibility for their actions. Since its nigh impossible to not commit ANY evil when you are not omnipotent and omniscient the way God is, that meant humanity was tainted with sin from that on... until the Jesus Project comes along and buys humanity a way out.
  • I always thought it was a religious myth, ie. a story that explains certain aspects of our existence (why the husband works, why the wife is most concerned about the relationship, why childbirth hurts, why snakes crawl on their bellies).
    • It was implied that childbirth was ALREADY painful, God just increased humanity's birthing pain. Not only that, but it was flat out said that Adam did a lot of the work with naming the animals, and Eve was created to be his partner. And we have no idea what is meant by serpent. Something may be a serpent, but it's possible for it to not be a snake. Ancient Hebrew is a weird language.
    • Along those same lines, the story can be interpreted as an allegory about the passage from childhood to adulthood. Remember, for all intents and purposes, Adam and Eve were children, and innocent ones at that. Like a child, they did not understand the intricate details of good and evil, and like a child, were easily lead astray by the serpent's words. Once they ate of the forbidden fruit (puberty?), they now HAD to leave Eden (i.e. childhood) and take up adult responsibilities; Adam now had to work for his own food and provide for his own family, rather than be provided for by a "parent", and Eve now had to take up the responsibilities that came with being an adult female, including experiencing pain in childbirth (which, I might add and as far as I know, happens across the board with most adult female mammals, and which we are never told DIDN'T happen before the fall). Genesis is essentially a creation myth that also serves as a parable about coming into adulthood, as like the Garden of Eden, you can never return to childhood.
    • It may be painful for most adult female mammals, but humans have it particularly bad. Our hips are very narrow proportionate to the size of our babies, causing increased pain- but that's a structural necessity to allow for bipedal locomotion. So, either God tweaked the laws of physics to make hips narrower, or God was putting magic painkillers in Eden's fruit, which doesn't seem all that out there, come to think of it.
    • And as teenagers, we are often bitter about the responsibilities thrust upon us, thus the Adam and Eve story is presented negatively?
  • That's the plot of Stephen Schwartz's Children of Eden.
• In most traditions, Satan was also the leader of a large angelic rebellion - Milton's Paradise Lost puts the number at a third of angels in existence. It's hard to conceive of so many angels turning against their creator unless Lucifer had some valid griefs.
  • That, or what's more likely, Lucifer had one hell of a personality cult around him, with the angels getting really caught up in his rhetoric.
  • Or, the rebellion was staged, at the behest of God, for the benefit of humans. After all, what's the point of giving humans free will if you don't give them two sides to choose from?
    • Strawman Political, perhaps? Better your enemies side with the enemy you know (and guide) than strike out on their own and ruin your Batman Gambit.
• Satan really has huge number of interpretations. In Islam he is stated to be the enemy of mankind, but not God and is said to be forgiven in the Judgement Day. Some sects take this even further and state that Satan's original crime was overzealous love to God; he refused to bow to Adam because he didn't think that anything in the universe is worth bowing to, save God who originated it all.
  • Indeed, there are some related religions, such as the Yazidis, who hold (this is a very rough approximation) that God is really only interested in the act of creation, and once that was done, the corporeal universe lost interest for Him, and he gave it to their equivalent of Satan to reign over.
  • Satan is also eerily similar to Prometheus. Think about it. Both gave mortals something to enhance their lives against the direct orders of the god in power, and both were damned to eternal punishment as a result. The only difference is that Prometheus was freed eventually.
    • The differences: Zeus had ordered Prometheus not to give fire to man; no command was given against man discovering control of fire on his own. God ordered man not to eat from the tree; no command was given against Satan tempting man. Also, Satan lied; Prometheus didn't (probably why the latter eventually got free). Also also, Adam & Eve could've lived quite happily in Eden forever without the responsibility of conscience given by the fruit; the ancient Greeks, however, would've been foraging in the wilderness whether they had fire or not, so the additional tool really was a help. Also also also, Zeus didn't want man to have fire because he was a petty douche; this wasn't the only one of Olypmus's luxuries he kept from humanity. God, however, had only given the humans one rule, only one, & they still broke it.
    • The one rule covers a pretty big umbrella "don't know" - i.e., don't think, don't feel, don't choose, don't make mistakes, and, by extension, don't redeem yourself. This goes against human nature, so A & E became human by eating that fruit.
    • The Tree of Knowledge of GOOD AND EVIL people... stop leaving that part out. They could obviously choose (they ate the apple) and feel (the snake did appeal to their feelings).
    • ^^^^ in the original hebrew the name of the Tree could also be the Tree of Knowledge of Everthing. And when you were a child could you choose? If you were manipulated by an expert? Could you feel?
  • The Islamic explanation is almost exactly what happens in Paradise Lost, with a little more angst thrown in.
  • Note that the Dragon/Beast/Antichrist of Revelations is never actually identified as Satan in canon.
  • Neither, for that matter, is the serpent from the Garden of Eden. The two were not linked until much later.
    • Technically the serpent is a form of animism; given where the faith was founded, and how poisonous snakes are. Poisoning was an underhanded form of warfare at that time; a form of deception. So in other words, the whole Garden of Eden was an allegory to humankind learning the ways of warfare. The fruit of knowledge of life and death was exactly that. Knowledge to save or end lives. The beast, and dragon were most likely integrated from other religions.
• To whoever stated that the torments of Job were carried out in collusion with God, re-read the book. The essence of it was as a challenge toward God on Satan's part; God simply said the equivalent of 'fine, prove it.'
  • Which certainly counts as tacit collusion. C'mon, really; he's God. If he really wanted to prevent it he could've stopped it with an eyeblink.
    • Or said "NO" from the get go, as Satan more or less asked permission.
  • And it wasn't much of a challenge either, Satan only spoke his mind when God directly prompted him to.
• That damn serpent is masquerading as Satan. It is the true evil; a cosmic troll who's messing with the real Satan's image For the Evulz. The real Satan was kicked out because of it.

Jesus faked his own death.

Remember the part of the story of the crucifixion when Jesus asked for water, and a Roman soldier used his spear to raise a soaked sponge to Jesus' mouth, but the liquid in the sponge was (according to the Bible) not water but vinegar? Well, it wasn't really vinegar; it was a drug that sent Jesus into a near death trance. He was still alive when he was cut down from the cross and entombed, and His "resurrection" three days later was just the effects of the drug wearing off.

• I have long thought something similar. The Roman soldiers express surprise that Jesus died so quickly, and the two thieves crucified with him are still alive and need to be finished off. He gets buried rather quickly. His followers make several visits to his tomb after he is buried, bringing herbs and such to anoint his body. Herbs and such were what passed for medicine in those days, so perhaps they were not embalming a dead body, but healing a live one? After three days, Jesus has recovered enough to stumble out of the tomb, the sight of which event scares away the Roman soldiers guarding it. His followers show up with more medicine, and are surprised he's already gone. A few days later, Jesus, in disguise so the Romans don't catch him and finish him off properly this time, meets up again with his followers. He's still pretty badly injured, to the extent of having still-open wounds. After making a couple of semi-public appearances to cement his reputation as having rose from the dead, Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene (the first provided the tomb, the second was a key member of the group bringing herbs to the tomb all the time, and thus likely in on the scheme from the beginning) sneak him off to Gaul (inspiring The Da Vinci Code Grail conspiracy theories in the process) where he can live out a retirement somewhere the local Romans don't know what he looks like and aren't looking for him. Meanwhile, his followers back in Palestine are taking full advantage of his reputation for resurrection to expand their small cult into a mass movement. These followers demand their new converts donate all their wealth to the church, but seem perpetually impoverished themselves, since a big cut of their takings are being sent to Jesus and Mary Magdalene in their retirement villa in what will one day be the South of France.
  • Jossed by the spear through his side and his bleeding "blood and water," or pericardial fluid, a sure sign of death. Besides which, there was a rather large piece of rock in front of his tomb that a man in his prime couldn't be expected to move, let alone a drugged half-dead one.
    • The testaments were written at least, for their life spans, a generation later, and didn't Longinus "convert" afterwards? He was in on it, dude. Either the water was added later, like the "vinegar" to through off suspicion or it was setup somehow. As for the stone, we hear it was moved by Jesus' followers, wait... If several men moved it there, several men in a conspiracy moved it away later.
    • ...or (disregarding the guards at the tomb) as a third possibility, he, or a bystander, reported faithfully what happened. Most of this page works from the assumption that Biblical canon is Canon, after all.
• This could explain the whole "I'll be back before all of you die" bit. He didn't curse anyone with immortality, but had intended to come back out of hiding. He either forgot over the years, decided he had it good enough wherever he was hiding or died for real before he could finish his con.
• He still would've died from blood loss after being partially crucified. He had holes in his hands and feet.
  • Stage magic and fake blood. Crucified victims also had ropes to hold their limbs, in case the nails-through-flesh wasn't sturdy enough by itself (which it frequently wasn't). The "blood from his side" was a bladder of goats' blood. Conclusion: South Park was wrong, JESUS IS DAVID BLAINE.
• This is what Islam believes, actually. Well, they believe he created an illusion of his death.
• Tis a shame that it was impossible to fake the crucifixion death. The Romans were experts on death as well as recognizing it. If Jesus was not authentically dead, all of the soldiers responsible for the execution would be killed in His place instead. The Jews were absolutely sure that Jesus had died, otherwise they'd whine to Rome. It was designed specifically to suffocate you. Yes, Jesus died "quick", but He was still there pretty much the whole day. The quick burial is also explained in that it was Jewish custom to bury the dead within 4 days, otherwise they become unclean. Faking the crucifixion is the equivalent of faking your head getting blown off.
  • Hey, considering everything else he could do...

Everyone is Jesus.

Simple (entirely non-sequiter) logic, really: Jesus is the only son of God. Christian doctrine marks all people as the children of God. Therefore, everyone is Jesus.

• In Purgatory
• Two problems with that: 1)Christian doctrine marks all people as God's creations, but only believers as the children of God in the sense you are using, and 2) Jesus is called the only begotten son of God. Another reference in the scriptures states that those who believed were 'given the power to be called the sons of God', which sounds to me like a reasonably good description of a legal adoption.
  • Psalm 82:6 explicitly states that humans are "gods and sons of most high". Also, Jesus is Second Adam, so humans being sons of God applies to us due to this.
  • Also: Jesus is God, whereas we are just human.
    • Jesus was both fully God and fully Man. Your argument is invalid.
• Matthew 25:34-40: Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.' Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?' The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'
• On the road to Damascus, the Lord says "Why do you persecute Me?" And when Saul asked who He was, He answered "I am Jesus, Whom you persecute." Who did Saul persecute? Christians. 2 Peter 1:4 says that we are "partakers of the divine nature". Paul, especially in Ephesians, repeatedly says that we are the Body of Christ. What does this mean? "God became man, so that man may become God." (Athanasius, an early church father) "... in life and nature, but not in the godhead." (Witness Lee, a famous, if controversial, Bible expositor.) So yeah. This WMG is confirmed by the Bible, to an extent. The "not in the godhead" (as in, not deserving worship or being omnipotent) bit is important.

Jesus is a Sufficiently Advanced Alien.

Clarke's Law in full effect. All those "miracles" could be pulled off by enough Applied Phlebotinum.

• So... If Jesus, Then Aliens?

The Ark of the Covenant is a plutonium-powered manna making machine.

The device was secluded away in a carefully monitored temple (laboratory). Only certain priests (technicians) wearing specially-prepared (lead-lined) robes could approach it. Anyone else who opened or jostled it would die a 'strange death'. To cap it all, on two occasions the ark was stolen and then returned after it caused strings of mysterious deaths amongst them.

• A more common Epileptic Tree is that the Ark was a huge electrical capacitor, based on certain descriptions of its construction and appearance, and its tendency to apparently fry the unworthy (or rather, the uninsulated) with "lightning". What this amount of battery power was meant to be used for is completely up to speculation.
  • It is worth noting that the Smiting-the-unworthy incidents mainly happen when the Ark is outdoors or had recently been so: when exposed to blowing dust and sand an object of the Ark's described construction would build up a considerable static charge.
    • So, the "Don't touch my ark" rule was God saying "Don't stick the fork in the socket"?
    • Ever read the bit where David is taking the Ark back to Jerusalem, it starts falling off the chariot, some footsoldier pushes it back on, and God immediately kills the guy? Should he have really just let it fall to the road?
    • Yes. The Ark was designed to be lifted on two sturdy rods underneath it. Chances are, it would not have broken, just scratched.

Satan didn't fall until after the Old Testament

In the Old Testament, the only explicit depiction of Satan I remember is in the book of Job, where he basically "stress tested" Job for God. There's also the serpent in the Garden of Eden, but the serpent isn't named as anything other than just a serpent (at least not in the New International or the King James version; I'm not about to search every last English translation to see how true this is). As noted above in the "Satan is just misunderstood" entries, he doesn't start getting explicitly depicted as the enemy until the New Testament.

The "God's loyal Jerkass" and the "enemy of God and mankind" Satan are, however, the same being. The idea is that his rebellion didn't come "in the beginning" - it was a private rebellion that occurred while Jesus was fasting in the desert. Satan got it into his head that, since his duty was to test people for God, who better to apply it to than God's Son? Jesus passed muster, but God was not amused. Satan was cast out, and become not the loyal tester but the enemy, using the skills of his previous office to drive people away from God.

I admit I don't know the Bible well enough to state that there was definitely no other depiction of Satan as a fallen angel before the Gospels; the verse "O Lucifer, Son of the Morning, how art thou fallen from Heaven?" comes to mind, but most scholars I've heard say that this is about Nebuchadnezzar. Oh, and the serpent was someone else entirely - maybe just a run-of-the-mill talking snake who got uppity.

• Isaiah Chapter 14 verses 3-23. The whole passage where that appears is the rant God wants Isaiah to yell at Nebuchadnezzar when the Israelites are freed from their latest stint in bondage. Satan doesn't make an appearance, it is just a symbolic reference to a contemporary legend about the morning star.
  • Satan as a fallen angel isn't from the Bible at all, it was an early-Medieval concept.
    • The Book of Job does say that even Angels falter. It just doesn't go into any specifics on which ones did, unless your count Enoch, Jubilees or the Dead Sea Scrolls too.
• Perhaps Satan fell before and after the Old Testament. Heaven is said to be eternal, referring to it being a Place Beyond Time: fitting for YHVH and His angels. From Satan's perspective, he fell shortly before Revelations, taking a third of the angels with him. From our perspective, Satan crashed down around the beginning of time. God neglected to tell Satan of the villain he would become, because You Cannot Fight Fate, He didn't have the heart to tell him and He wanted Satan to choose his own path.

Satan is wisdom, God is faith

Since the time I heard the phrase Morningstar, I've been confused. Morningstar is a rather poetic name for the Ultimate Evil. It seems that all Satan did over the time is to bring wisdom to mankind as was done in Genesis, even at the cost of doing horrible things. God does the same with faith. So both of them have a good and evil side. Or, rather constructive and destructive side.

• So basically, Satan is the DNA Digivolved form of Hades and Prometheus.

The "forbidden fruit" acted as a "red pill".

Making the snake a Morpheus.

• There is a serious lack of Kung Fu in the Bible.
  • Adaptation Decay.
  • What about Samson?
  • What about The Gospel According to Biff?
• It's notable that Mormons interpret this as being the case.

The Old Testament is a Secret Test of Character.

The test, of course, being the extent to which one labels the nastier parts Fanon Discontinuity, and can thus be considered to be a decent human being.

• Alternatively, being the extent to which one labels the nastier parts Fanon Discontinuity, and can thus be considered to be a stalwart believer. But your guess of this test, I admit, is a test more secret than mine view.

God isn't against homosexuality or sexual perversion.

Despite what most fundamentalists say, The Lord Thy God does not adhere to the belief that Sex Is Evil and isn't ashamed of strange fornication; he just doesn't like it when it gets out of hand and interferes with the natural order of things.

For instance, when God trashed Sodom and Gomorrah, it wasn't because they were sexual deviants, but because they were notoriously ruthless and suspicious towards strangers; they wouldn't let the angels go until they had "known" (aka "gang-raped") them, even turning down an offer to get it on with Lot's daughters. Clearly, if it was just the sex part of their indignities and not the savage rapist mob mentality they had, I don't think they would've been so severely punished, or if God really is ruthless, then Ancient Greece (more infamous for homosexuality than Sodom will ever be) would be nothing more than one big smoking crater (Ergo, no Western Civilization and Democracy as we know it).

Also, His commandments against non-heterosexual sex in Exodus could be easily explained away by the fact that His people were few and scattered, and He needed them to breed and flourish to ensure they survived. And the sin of that one prophet, Onan, who refused God's order to impregnate his sister-in-law by "spilling his seed" instead? It wasn't the act that was sinful, but the fact that he did it in direct defiance of God's order (to elaborate: Onan wanted children only for himself, HE IS NOT A PROPONENT OF CONTRACEPTION, but did not want to impregnate his sterile brother's wife so his brother can have Onan's children, as God had ordered. Yes, God told Onan to get involved in netorare so that his brother can have an inheritor. Thus, even associating Onan with masturbation is just Guilt by Association, ala "Hitler is a wanker").

These seem to indicate that God Himself isn't opposed to the kinky sex we enjoy, now, just so long as it doesn't screw with our lives or those of others around us; the growing number of homosexuals nowadays could be God's way of telling us that his command to "be fruitful and multiply" has served its purpose and we can stop breeding for the sake of breeding. Besides, what explains the creation and existence of penile nerves and the clitoris (which feels good yet have no reproductive purpose)? If God absolutely hates sexual pleasure and adheres to the No Sex Allowed rule then he should have replaced our penises and vaginas with the far more formal eggs and spermatophores during Genesis.

• It actually does say in Leviticus that men should not have sex with men (right alongside the parts that tell you to sacrifice animals, referred to sea creatures without scales or fins as eldritch abominations (e.g., shellfish), and allowed you to beat your wife and slaves and kill off disobedient children (e.g., most teenagers nowadays) or sell off your daughter to slavery. There's a reason why the west has a good reason to argue that Jesus essentially cancelled out OT law). Lesbians, however, are not mentioned, so God is apparently a Yuri Fan.
  • This fits with the above idea that God was a teenager during this time.
  • Then again, that entire section in Leviticus only outlines the bad sex things men do, with women only mentioned/punished when they get taken down from the men. So either women can do anything they want sexually, or it's just an expression of the low social status of women at the time.
  • Lesbians are mentioned by description (or at least implicated) in one of the more-commonly cited passages from the New Testament, Romans 1:26-27. But it's more of a Word of Dante and backlash against the decadence of Rome.
• My personal theory is that in an age before condoms, the laws against homosexuality were health regulations—just like the laws that established quarantine periods and the "kosher" diets that forbade eating pigs and shellfish. After all, anal sex consists of inserting your penis into an incubator for all kinds of pathogens, and unlike homosexual-accepting societies such as Ancient Greece/Rome, the desert cultures live in a hot pathogenic area and didn't have access to proper sanitation and medical science. Hence the correlation between homosexuality and STD; the middle eastern religions, having no Hippocrates and microscopes, handwaved it as divine punishment. Which would explain why lesbian sex wasn't listed—it doesn't involve as much danger, especially in an age before antibiotics. (Also, women were quarantined during their periods; men, anytime they had a wet dream! Neither of those are sinful, obviously.)
  • Maybe not to us, today, using a modern definition of "sin" which revolves around personal choice and free will. But at that place and time, yes, they definitely were thought of as sinful, shameful, and unclean.
    • To be fair, periods and wet dreams are still unclean. Just not spiritually unclean. And you have to take in consideration what the other people were doing at the time. Canaanites were okay with child sacrifices, so who knows what kind of twisted stuff they did sexually. And the Romans (The Beautiful Elite to us) were in fact okay with stuff like bestiality, incest, paedophilia, netorare, multiple mistresses, compulsive wanton cheating that the multiple spouses all knew about and were okay with, drunken mass orgies, seppuku, sex slavery, some of the most humiliating tortures ever (crucifixion for example, and it's imposed on "slaves!"), gang rapes, rape as comedy, rape as drama, rape as love, raping in general (their chief god Zeus/Jupiter is a God of Rape and proud of it, and "Rape" is Latin for taking by force, e.g. abduction and looting, so in a sense the Roman Empire "raped" much of the world and "raped" gold and possessions while they raped women and raped children and raped slaves) guro and cannibalism (told you it was twisted), and other nasty stuff that would have surpassed /b/ and hentai and would have instantly created Slaanesh (God of the most unimaginable squickiest sensual pleasures you never know even existed) if given the chance. That is why fundies were so ardent about homosexual sex: they're the equivalent of the Exodites.
    • The only reason we "know" the Canaanites were into that stuff is because their most fervent enemies, who were intent on killing them and stealing their land, said so. There's no actual historical evidence for it.
    • The Greeks and Romans wrote about it too, and archaeologists have discovered evidence in Carthage, which was a Canaanite-descended culture.
    • Regardless of morality it can't really be called cheating if everyone involved knows about and is okay with it.
• There are two quotes many fundamentalist love to refer to whenever homosexuality is brought up. One refers to "lying with a man as one does with a woman". The other explicitly mentions 'homosexuals' in modern translations. However, not considering the fact that the 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 is completely taken out of context (the full quote is 9-11 and actually talks about redemption and the forgiving of sins), the version I have is a much older translation that contains an expression that implies MEN having BUTTSECHS with OTHER MEN. something that, while a stereotypical portrayal of gay people, doesn't describe homoromantics directly. The first quote also implies the same thing so my guess is, this really is just a rule against anal sex (the prohibition of which is reasonable for causing nasty shit like genital gangrene) and not much else.
  • The part about "lying with a man as one does a woman" calls to mind "straight men who have sex with men," ie, male prostitution.
• I vaguely remember that it was believed at the time that sperm was limited. So if you engage in homosexuality, you're wasting your seed and potentially dooming the community.

The whole "don't lie with a man as with a woman" thing has been misinterpreted all this time.

It's not "lie" as in "lie in bed to have sex with", it's "lie" as in "say things that aren't true to both men and women". In short, "bros before hos". Maybe.

• Thou shalt not eat of the shellfish, because it has been stored in the desert heat for many hours. Thou shalt neither cockblock nor sleep with another Bro's woman, and leading by example, the Messiah shall abstain from "knowing" women, If Thou Knowest What The Lord Thy Bro Means in order to follow the first rule while allowing his Bro-thren to follow the second. Thou wilst not be a wing-Man-prophet to any but The Lord thy Bro. Thou shalt refer to The Lord thy Bro in the familiar form, hence all the "thou"s. Thou shalt know of the Three-Day Rule, as usual, the Messiah will be setting an example.
  • Made of Win
• Note: the Bible was not originally written in English.

Satan did the right thing on Eden, the Temptation was actually part of God's plan, and he was rewarded for that.

God needed the humans to become self-aware, but it couldn't be that they've become like that because he ordered, because that's not self-awareness. So he created a convoluted and rather complex plot that involved making the humans think they were actually disobeying him. So he planted the tree in the center of Eden — why, would you think, such an obvious place, after all? — and told them that it was forbidden to eat.

Adam and Eve were taking too long to complete the deed, so Lucifer decided to lend a hand and speed things up. Obviously, God saw what happened and was aware that it wasn't all their fault, and they were only expelled because it was part of the "self-awareness" process(see WMG Proposition 2). Lucifer was later rewarded by gaining his own kingdom outside Heaven, as well as one third of God's angels to follow him. After all, when someone tried to assume power, what kind of punishment it is to actually give him power?

• So wait... does that mean that Still Alive is Satan's theme song?

Adam and Eve couldn't have children in their Eden state, meaning there would be no Jesus, and Satan thought he was messing up God's plan by tempting them.

• That would explain how Satan and the snake are one of the same, despite being supposedly kicked out.

• Funnily enough, this is considered Mormon doctrine.

As in the above example, the Temptation turned out as expected, but Lucifer wasn't supposed to have interfered.

God was trying to work on a psychology project, but Lucifer got into it and was sent to Hell without any dinner. We were supposed to take the fruit of our own volition, and this tainted the entire project. Now we're like an old Sims file he keeps around to play with every so often, and he got bored of playing God Mode a couple thousand years ago.

Jesus was...

• One of the Istari.
  • Specifically, Radagast the Brown. Explaining his hippie-like views and Friend to All Living Things nature.

• A Naruto style ninja, thus explaining his ability to walk on water, and his using healing jutsus to cure the lepers etc.

• A vampire- thus explaining all the blood drinking imagery in christian (particularly catholic) rituals, as well as how he was killed by being nailed to a cross (if we assume that crosses weakening vampires actually has nothing to do with Jesus, and the myth is a chicken or the egg thing)
  • Technically, the blood-drinking comes from Mithraism, which had wine-as-blood symbolism since some four or five centuries BC.
  • Harry Turtledove has you covered.

• A high level Dungeons & Dragons cleric- explains his healing powers (particularly resurrection), and also his ardent pacifism even when it's not a good idea (such as when he was captured in the garden, and even healed the ear of one of the capturing soldiers)- he's lawful stupid.
  • Nope, that was obviously a Gambit Roulette. He knew what he was getting into... and the being-omniscient thing is kind of easy when you're God.
  • Water Walk isn't on the cleric class list, I think it may be in the water domain though

• The Avatar, natively a waterbender, enabling him to heal and walk on water (freezing it around his feet).

• The first mutant, metahuman, Scanner, Hero, witch, other kind of witch, wizard, Tomorrow Person, Newtype, Rynax, Diclonius, Terran Ghost, telepath, the Kwizatz Haderach that the Bene Gesserit are trying to recreate, a Super-Saiyan or Kryptonian or Antarian, an elf, or better yet one of the Valar, the Eternal Champion, or a Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot.
  • He was also a Jedi Time Lord
    • He did die on the cross; he just regenerated later.
    • And which Time Lord, you ask. I direct you to John 11:28
  And when she had so said, she went her way, and called Mary her sister secretly, saying, The Master is come, and calleth for thee.

Take your pick.

• And of course Warhammer40000 strongly implies that the Emperor was actually Jesus.

• While Shaman King suggests that he was an earlier Shaman King... and so was Buddha. Of course, this mostly resulted in me trying to come up who Jesus had kung-fu-shamanic battles with. He surely defeated and befriended John the Baptist, but who else?
  • Satan himself?

• Jesus was the first and founder of the Quincies. Prove me wrong. You can't.

• Jesus was a failed Sburb player who was forced to reset the universe via scratch. What?

• A periodic prankster and jokester (See His cursing of the fig tree), but the Apostles either didn't get the jokes because they took Him too seriously, or they realized what He was doing and spent a LOT of time and money making sure people didn't record it.

Satan is a victim of massive Memetic Mutation and Adaptation Decay.

Lucifer and Satan are actually separate entities; the reason Satan only appears as a stress-tester of men in the Old Testament is that whoever wrote the Old Testament down knew the difference between the two. All future incidences of Satan doing Ultimate-Evil-type things are recorded due to the people who recorded them not knowing the difference.

• Actually, that's pretty accurate. So far as I can tell, Satan (actually just meaning "adversary") was written in the Old Testament to be a test for humanity, a way to ensure that the faithful are truly so, and perhaps even a tool of divine retribution if it comes to that. Lucifer is an invention of medieval clergy who needed an enemy, a manifestation of evil that worked to thwart the Church, which thus deserves the great amount of power it gets from being the only ones able to save the world.
  • Actually, the name Satan comes from "shaitan" or "hasatan", which essentially means "to accuse". Satan, if the character actually existed, was more like a prosecuting attorney smack-dab on the far cynical end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism.
• Piers Anthony plays with this one in the Incarnations of Immortality series - Lucifer, Satan, and the like are names assumed by those who take on the mantle of the Incarnation of Evil, much like kings and queens take on reign-names in the real world. (so that, for example, the Incarnation known to the readers chose Satan as his formal name, but his predecessor was Lucifer)
• Lucifer and Satan were originally separate entities and the former did not even appear in the Old Testament canon, he only got a reference to illustrate how the Chaldean King was acting foolish. His later insertion into Judea-Christan apocrypha could be called demonization of the pagan god Attar...accept in this case Attar was exactly like that to begin with so it was more like taking someone else's fallen hero and changing the names around. Islam first put the two together by having Lucifer become Satan later in his life. Actually Satan has been equated with a lot of unrelated figures but those demonizations only lasted until the politics behind them blow over.

On a side note, Lucifer and Satan are treated as two entities in the MegaTen 'verse. Satan is explicity God's divine hammer of judgment, while Lucifer is a proponent of free will against God's more authoritarian dominion.

Abraham was a schizophrenic.

I think a few historians have actually argued this, actually.

Moses is a waterbender, taught by the avatar (god)

There is no other explanation as to how he could part the sea the way he did.

• But of course there is! This is Wild Mass Guessing!
• Hey, it makes more sense than him having a disintegrator pistol, as L. Ron Hubbard claimed. (I wonder if it fired Ancient Egyptian Laser Beams.)
• Telekinesis, Functional Magic, Nanomachines spread throughout the water, Tractor Beams, Gravity Control, conjuring water elementals, quantum-level manipulation of Van Der Waal forces, Earthbending to raise the ground into a land bridge, really good stage magic, ten trillion guys with buckets, etc.
• Moses might have just gotten lost and been too afraid to admit it. So God had Moses do some showy hocus-pocus, then told him that the water had dried up as a result. So they just walked across some random stretch of land, thinking it was the sea floor.
  • Explain how it suddenly became mud when the Egyptians touched it and how the water came and covered them afterwards, burying the chariots and drowning the chariot drivers?

Everyone sees Jesus as their own race.

All depictions of Jesus are accurate, whether he's white, middle-eastern, even the occasional black or Hispanic Jesus. And it doesn't just apply to humans, oh no. He goes from planet to planet, taking different forms, suffering through whatever method of execution each species uses.

• Oh, and before anyone asks whether I actually believe this, it's more about logic than faith. If Jesus and aliens then alien Jesus. Assuming both those premises, the only obvious alternatives are "all aliens go to hell" or "aliens aren't made in God's image", which is frankly appalling to even consider.
  • So Jesus is Galactus?
    • No, Jesus is K-PAXian.
    • No, he's a Vorlon. Probably Kosh Naranek.
  • You're assuming aliens in the first place. Given the nature of the extrasolar planets we've discovered, I'm not so sure about that.
    • Well of course I'm assuming aliens! I'm also assuming Jesus. The point is, if both exist and Jesus ever needed to die for aliens' sins, he wouldn't appear to them in human form. And by the way, a few hundred extrasolar planets is not a meaningful sample of space, much less time.
    • And the "nature of the extrasolar planets we've discovered" is purely determined by the limitations of our current technology. We couldn't even find Earth from the nearest star system using current methods. The vast majority of the universe is beyond the range of our telescopes.
• So if we find Mechanical Lifeforms out there, their Jesus would appear as Optimus Prime?

God created us and aliens in his image.

• Oh, they aren't Human Aliens. God's apperance is...something no-one can comprehend. So He's probably like Galactus: so bizarre, you can only manage to see it as you'd see your own form.

Ruth and Naomi had something going on.

You know it's true.

• Please, tell us more.
• Don't forget David and Jonathan.
• The evidence for it is actually kind of hard to ignore. Aside from the constant kissing, Ruth is described as clinging to Naomi using the same word used in the Book of Genesis to describe a man becoming one flesh with his wife. The Anguished Declaration of Love Ruth gives Naomi is now used as a reading in virtually all Christian wedding ceremonies, and even after Ruth married Boaz (a man who apparently understood Ruth and Naomi's needs more than a closer relative of Naomi's close husband) and her child, Obed is born, the declaration is that a child is born to Naomi. Boaz is clearly the Ur-Example of a sperm donor. Still not convinced? Remember that Ruth was willing to go with Naomi to a country which has been taught to be hostile to her people. More than willing, in fact...
• The full passage (KJV version here) is as follows, and it could easily be mistaken for wedding vows.
  Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.

There was nothing miraculous about Jesus walking on water.

Always extremely literal, I pointed out when I was a kid that ice is a form of water and that most people can, to some extent, walk on it. Of course, most people I know, myself included, can only get a few steps in before falling, but still. Either it wasn't translated that water was frozen, or the writer didn't know about the concept of water freezing and turning solid.

• Yeah, because frozen lakes are SO prone to having thrashing waves, and are popular boating areas.
  • I do admit that I did forget that the text makes it pretty clear the water in question was liquid when I posted the above entry. My point in posting the above was that many Christians I've talked to have pointed to his perfoming miracles as proof of his divinity. Walking on water is considered one of the miracles The Bible claims he performed. Whether Jesus was a real person, a real person and the son of a deity, a composite of several people, or a completely fictional character, it doesn't change the fact that ice is a form of water and that many, many people do have the capablity of walking on it. So, really, my issue is with people not using literal language, 'He walked on liquid water', than anything else.
    • From what I have seen, it's generally accepted that the term 'water' means only the liquid version unless serving as a modifier. (Water Ice as opposed to Dry Ice, or Water Vapor as opposed to various other vaporous substances.)
• Geologically speaking, wasn't this also the "Dead Sea" Jesus was walking on? Didn't everything float on it? Including, possibly, people if they walked on it? Even with thrashing waves?
  • Not the Dead Sea, but the Sea of Galilee, which is freshwater. The fishing isn't so good in the ultra-salty Dead Sea.
    • Even then you cannot walk on the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea may be viscous, but not that much. About the thinnest liquid you can walk on is custard.
    • Eh, the thinnest is actually cornstarch-saturated water, if you run.
• Been watching some John Wing stand-up, have we?
  "We Canadians are more skeptical. We believe Jesus walked on water, but...we figure it was probably winter."

Leviathan is Godzilla

Described in the Book Of Job as a massive sea monster, with scaly hide immune to mundane weaponry, breathing fire... c'mon, people!

• Better than my killjoy "modernized" translation that renders "Leviathan" as "crocodile." Crocs don't breathe fire!
  • Or have seven heads!

Hell isn't real

God merely uses "Hell" as a way of scaring people into believing in him. In reality, an all-loving God would never create a place of eternal suffering, and he did this just to test us. After all, if you believe in eternal punishment, why would you worship such a monster?

• The idea of hell as being eternal is actually Christian Adaptation Decay mixed with Word of Dante. Jewish belief holds that Hell is more like the Christian concept of purgatory, a place you go to receive horrible rehabilitations for a length of time proportional to your sinfulness. Everyone goes to heaven, sinful people just take longer.
  • The Jewish version is corroborated by various pagan sects and the Long Journey. Which is essentially you have to wander around Mordor until you can find a way into the Ghibli Hills
  • The idea that Hell exists at all in Judaism is Word of Dante.
• Some theologians hold that Hell is actually The Nothing After Death - good people go to Heaven, bad people go nowhere. Ever again. There's also the theory called Annihilationism / Conditional Immortality, where immortality is supposed to be a reward that is to be obtained, and sinners are euthanized / annihilated from existence^note Which is fitting for suicides, I may add. Some annihilationists propose that Biblical references to the "Lake of Fire" are in fact references to Gehenna, a Real Life trash incinerator where so much scum (corpses of criminals and sinners along with other garbage and just plainly disgusting things) were burned as fuel it gave the impression of an eternal fire "where the worms and Eldritch Abominations dieth not", and that the theory of predetermined immortality for all souls was a concept borrowed from Greek philosophy, most notably Plato's Theory of Forms^note which by the way was never intended to be combined with Tartarus aka Eternal punishment, with the Platonic Forms being more on the line of Buddhist reincarnation-and-nirvana theories. Despite portraying God as more of an asshole than a merciful practitioner of euthanasia, the Word of Dante simply survived as a better Orwellian control mechanism ^note since after all, those Greeks, Romans, Norse and other pagans are pretty much hedonistic or suicidal, and what better way to make them scared of themselves than eternal punishment? Unless you're a Nietzsche Wannabe suffering from Despair of Salvation.... ^note By the way, why would God give us bastards immortality in the first place? Who Wants to Live Forever? anyway? He specifically said Adam will just plain die / return to dust, and if we sinned, God repeatedly said he will destroy us, both body and soul in Gehenna).
  There's also a theory known as Universal Reconciliation which holds that at the end of time, all souls will be reunited with God, ala Instrumentality. Oh, and I'd like to call Fridge Logic on this one (which really did strike me on the way to the fridge) - if God is all-loving, and is, because of that, unable to create a place of eternal suffering as this action could be said to be morally ambiguous, can he still lie to us (again, eternally)?
  • Which is WORSE than eternal torment. Existing beats not existing.
    • Which is WORSE than not existing. Being able to create meaning out of nowhere beats being tormented for eternity.
    • I find that really hard to believe, if the alternative is an eternity of being tormented by demons and fire, I'll take non-existence any day. Think of it as an ultimate coup de grace. Ask Azrael for example.
    • The Nothing After Death ISN'T nonexistence. You're thinking Cessation of Existence.
    • My reading of Scripture indicates that Hell is intended for the punishment of Satan and the demons who followed him, and that God's entire aim throughout all of history has been to get humans out of the danger of Hell and into Heaven. Which leads me to conclude that the demons in Hell will suffer at least as much, if not more, than any condemned human there, assuming that the postulated theorem of non-existence is not actually correct.
    • How do you know? Can you remember a time in your life when you've not existed?
  • Perhaps all souls are God. What would be a better way to stave off an eternity of omnipotent boredom but to create a universe and independently live out all the experiences within it?
  • Universal Reconciliation sounds a lot like Human Instrumentality Project to me, with all the souls repenting in the end through the union of Angel / God and Human....
• Modern Christian interpretations of Hell are simply "eternal separation from God," meaning that leaving humanity to fend for itself is punishment enough.
  • What does that even mean? Fend for ourselves from what? I always thought the separation thing was just an euphemism.
    • Allow me to explain: the Eternal Separation idea of hell means that, if you don't repent and admit that you have sinned, then God cannot be with you, as evil and sin are literally anathema to him and what He is. After going through a person's life with them in every single detail, God then allows them to see EXACTLY what sort of person every single choice made them. If the person still cannot accept or admit their guilt, then God accepts that, and leaves the person to their own devices. They can now do whatever they want in the afterlife, but hell for them will be the void in their spirits that only God could fill/heal, a feeling of loss, separation and loneliness that will ALWAYS be with them in some form or another that is only worsened by some part of them KNOWING exactly why they feel this way.
      An easy way to understand this is through the Parable of the Prodigal Son by Jesus himself: you run away from home too young and too early, but eventually you get bankrupt both financially and emotionally, making you realize that at least your parents lived better. Even though existentialists accept living this, eternal separation is Cosmic Horror Story for some Christians.
    • The Eternal seperation concept of Hell almost sounds like an Assimilation Plot, since being one with God means having your consciousness fuse with God. People who reject Instrumentality rejects God and embraces existentialism.
    • It is not hard for many people to admit they are a flawed being, what many would refuse to admit is that they are tainted and sinful - sinful implying that no good qualities complement their bad.
    • Well, if someone repents for being sinful, wouldn't that be a good quality? Thereby making them merely flawed, and not sinful?
  • And there's the whole "knowing exactly how, when, where, and why you screwed up and why you didn't end up in Heaven" thing.
  • That one actually sounds like a reasonable compromise. The people who want to fuse with God can do so. The people who'd rather retain their individuality can do so as well.
• It's possible to have eternal hell and a merciful god with one basic change. Repentance is possible in hell. After all, God is all-forgiving, right? If repenting in hell is possible then the only way for someone to stay there forever is to be a total Jerkass who cannot ever accept that they did evil in their life, but still god is willing to grant forgiveness of their crimes against humanity.
  • Jesus Christ himself implies this in the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
  • Milton and Dante (the Trope Codifiers for Hell in modern thought) actually make it a point to bring this idea up. In Paradise Lost Hell is suspiciously easy to sneak out of, and both God and Lucifer mention that the fallen angels would be accepted back to heaven in a heartbeat if they asked God for forgiveness. The only reason they don't (and won't) is the pride that made them fall in the first place. Dante makes it almost comical — Satan is frozen up to the waist in Lake Cocytus, constantly flapping his wings to try and escape which generates the icy wind that keeps the lake frozen. If he stopped rebelling against his punishment he'd be on his merry way ... but that would mean accepting his sins and his guilt. And Dante himself was able to escape the "abandon all hope ye who enter here" place.
  • If such was possible, then it would have been mentioned by both God and Jesus in the accounts of what Hell is like. And it makes the whole idea of living for God rather unnecessary since you being in Hell would be more than enough proof that you done fucked up.
    • Not necessarily. First of all, "repentance" isn't just a talk session: it's about accepting your wrongs and/or becoming The Atoner. Which is hard for people with big egos. Second, some assholes really are that arrogant. Do you think Hitler or Stalin would ever acknowledge the suffering they caused in life? No, they'd just sit there, their massive egos ranting about how they were massively glorious über-dic- er, Übermenschen, unable to ever feel God's loving embrace. Most other people, especially those guilty of only minor sins (for example suicide, atheism, adultery and Freudian Excuse-related crimes), would probably learn, repent and go to Heaven.
    • Perhaps God and Jesus decided it would be better not to mention it so people wouldn't decide living for God was unnecessary because they could just repent in Hell.
• Hell was a Norse concept. Norse Mythology had an afterlife called Hel, where non-warriors are sent.....
• Hell is actually Earth, and Reincarnation is real. The only way to escape is to attain nirvana, or to merge with a person who has already reached nirvana (Jesus, Buddha)
• Alternatively, Hell is a massive psychological test to determine if humans really believe in deities because of fear of punishment, not because of the moral standards that said deities provide. Punishment, after all, is the best way to show power and impose a message of strict obedience. Turns out, most of Christians obey God because of the fear of being punished eternally, not because of the message of love and free will that Jesus communicated to us.
• Another interpretation of Hell is actually "Hell Is Other People" (as a reference to Sartre's play). There's no need for red-hot pokers, just research the ideas behind Hedgehog's Dilemma and you would get what Hell actually is. The closer sapient life come to each other the more likely they are to mutually become hell to each other, yet if they remain apart, they each would feel the pain of loneliness. When a hedgehog comes to share other hedgehogs' warmth, he has to experience the painful quills that are other hedgehogs, yet when he stays away from them, he experiences the coldness of loneliness. It's an existentialist concept. Now, the majority of us prefer an Assimilation Plot to escape from the hedgehog. This is where Religion comes in. Specifically, Christianity tries to overcome the hell that is Hedgehog's Dilemma by complementing each individual's problems through God's sacrifice, thus giving a more idealistic outlook on life. Just like Instrumentality.
• One interpretation popular in the Mormon Church is that when you stand before god you will have total recall of all you have done and be acutely aware of how every action you took affected those around you (meaning that in the end god won't judge you, you will judge yourself), which would be a pretty torturous thing if you made many mistakes in life, thus hell is a self imposed state of mind brought on by knowing just how much of a terrible person you are. In other words, Hell is the Nietzschean Eternal Recurrence.^note Of course, if you're a sociopathic Übermensch who will revel in his magnificent bastardry instead of wallowing in guilt, it won't affect you.
  • This can also explain why suicides and other Freudian Excuses still receive eternal punishment, it's not because of the God Is Evil Word of Dante eternal torment in lake of fire which everyone questions and despises, it's because they lived a life of Despair Event Horizon, which can be punishment in itself enough.
    • "Eternal torment in lake of fire" is not Word of Dante-it's literally the only thing about Hell that is actually in the Bible.
• Fools! The real reason for the sole existence for Hell is Rule of Cool! Think about it. Infernal Tropes, The Legions of Hell, To Hell and Back, A Hell of a Time, and so on....
• Hell is blasphemy. In reality there's Heaven and Purgatory. Hell's just used so evil preachers can frighten others into obedience.
  • And why would Jesus mention it then?

Jesus was in fact a geek

Tell me if this doesn't make some parts of his life make more sense,lets start with the basics:

• quick note I was raised in greek orthodoxism and it's been a while since I've taken my last religion course,high school level so if any of my example's are flawed our are told differentely in the version of the bible you use please append so that the theory can be as complete as posible.
• childhood, in the only instance when Jesus went to Jerusalem as a kid he started discusing theology with the high priests and whining,now bear in mind that for the time and region theological discusions were perhaps the apex intellectual progress and the ultimate experts were being beaten by somebody way younger and who at that moment knew this stuf as a hobby if you will or as preparation for his future job.
• career choice,Joshep was a carpenter and I'm not sure if it's fanon or canon but I think that he wanted Jesus to become one too ,and with their tehnology level that was ? a midle level tech job, but no Jesus wanted to do his own high level completeley rewrite the philosophy of his age, intelectual stuff ,prophet where's the money in that,L.Ron Hubbard aside?
  • Joseph being a "carpenter" is actually the result of a mistranslation, the proper term would be a "craftsman" who back in that day had many and diverse talents and was actually a high-paying and desireable position. Especially with the build-happy Herod in charge thanks to the even more build-happy romans. Joseph was also a remnant of the house of David so he was very much part of an "old money" family.
• this is the part I'm not sure it's canon with the Pope a story I read can't remeber which gospel especialy Jesus went with Mary to a weding in Galilee this was just before the preaching so I'm thinking 20-25 years old the weding finishes the wine too early so Mary asks Jesus to do something he does a water to wine spell so let's recap:his at a party,25-30ish,with his mom,the boose dries up,he sits there,he has supernatural powers,

he has to be convinced by his mom to produce some alchohol,by his mom not realy geting a raver vibe from him.

• a large part of his work was telling people that they read the Old Testament wrong,it's a popular book he goes around telling people that they don't realy get it that he can quote it from his head that he knows more then them but don't worry he'll teach you.
• yes I'm aware of the paralels you don't get I have the truth, no I'm not in purgatory okay
• no canon physical relationships ever ,he was 30, and no I don't think that the Mary Magdalene foot washing sequence counts I don't think that fetish was evented by then alltough I'll accept that he had female folowers so he was in the presence of girls.
• do not the folowing qoutes make more sense with this version of Jesus:
• the meek shall inherit the earth... you know that guy you beat up in high school will be your boss
• turn the other cheek .. physical victory may not be posible acceptt defeat and don't worry you're the better man for not resorting to violence.
• that rampage against the merchants stalls:"-What do you mean 50 denari for Consul Caesar card he has 5/5 and isn't even in mint condition".
• let the children come to me.... I have a new deck and want to test it against your best player.
• spent a lot of time with his male friends discusing theoretical stuff.
• how many D&D spells are based on him he was just ahead of his time.
• religious discusion with the high priests->flame war->flame war+ religion+ politics against the moderators->no ban option->crucification
• after several people apocalipse should have already hapened,but it's obviously not maybe the J-man is impresed with our new tech and has already come and he's batling the Antichrist right now on a forum somewhere before they're both banned for causing flame wars and have to take it to another forum.

• One of Us! One of Us!
  • Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble.

All religions are "True", just relatives and same gods making new attempts

A version of the multiple gods WMG above. All religions had their own God or gods working together, but sometimes a god tried several times.

• Zorastrianism was Yawweh/Jehova's first attempt as a solo act, aka beta, religion before officially breaking the Jews away from a many god faith into his own special monotheism faith. However, when it became clear they were too much to manage he tried again by creating Jesus. However, after that quickly fell apart, Jesus went into hiding and died early, Yahweh sat around for a few centuries before deciding to go with another angle, Islam, by going back to the Jewish roots of Abraham's kids. This too collapsed when the Sunnis and Shiites broke apart. Along the way Yahweh created the Mormons as a fifth attempt at getting his own solo career going.
  • Actually Zoroastrianism's concepts were integrated into the Jewish faith during a time of exile for the Jews in Persia. If anything; Christianity is Pseudo Judaic-Zoroastrianism. Even the struggles between Good and Evil are parallel to that. And Zarathustra's (Original Prophet) religion existed as early as 1,100 BCE (Before Common Era) can validate this. Then it was even taken further by the Zurvanists who saw Ahura Mazda (Zoroasterian God) and Angra Manyu/Ahriman (Absolute Antithesis) both as children of Zurvan; the God of time.

Jesus was created to be the Messiah by his mother Mary, who lacked power being a woman in those days

Essentially, it goes like this. Jesus' mom wanted to assist in getting the Jews out from Rome's rule, but being a woman lacked the power to do so. So she looked at options available to her, and hatched a plan. Give birth to the "messiah", and from there to set in motion a plan to raise the messiah under her thumb.

For example, there is no reason for Mary to have been in Bethlehem. The census was for Romans or people who were dirt eating poor, and the latter were forced back to their home towns to work on farms. Jesus was the son of the carpenter, or general craftsman, not the Ancient-Roman-Occupied-Jewish equivalent of a welfare family. The census was an excuse Mary used to get herself in the place the messiah was prophecied to be born.

Child Jesus talking with the temple priests was simply him escaping while his mother and father had him on an educational trip. He was so impressive because they were filling his head with information at an early age. The next thirty years are unknown as they are thirty years planning for almost every contingency as possible, as well as the miracles.

All miracles are slight of hand, or exaggeration over the years. Things are a bit more muddled as the culture the people had in the area of writing Fan Fiction in official names, and passing it off as if written by the original author.

The crucifixion occurred enough to fool those who came to watch it initially happen. They waited for the mob to get bored, leave, and then Longinus, who later "converted" and was in on the deal, poked Jesus in the side. This is after Jesus is put into a drug coma by some bitter drink. Blood comes out, Longinus claims he sees blood and water to throw off the other guards if they aren't in on it.

The plan originally was for Jesus to come back a few years later, whence within that generation, but away from his domineering mother and with his "most trusted diciple", a romance that never was began to flourish. There was serious UST, but between being watched by his siblings and parents Jesus could never act on it.

He decides to give the metaphorical finger to his mother, becoming history's greatest Spanner in the Works, and never comes back like planned. Dies young, never completely recovered from crucifixion. His wife and daughter then go off to try to cash in on their husband/father's name for themselves.

The plan falls apart as planned. The original plan was to have all Jews unite behind Jesus, while instilling just enough fear into the Romans that a full scale war wouldn't be needed. Just enough of a minor win to signal Rome is weak, and start a whole powder keg of an ancient world war.

• This works well enough with a guess that Revelation was a letter of encouragement to believers suffering under the cruel reign of Domitian, and is largely symbolic. Most apocalyptic literature at the time were rants against Rome disguised as world ending prophecy. What does not really match up is that Loginus is not in the canonical New Testament and was not a convert in the contemporary texts.

Jesus always wanted there to be two popes: A male and a female

This is practically proven scientifically, as the original source-text of the bible stated that he entrusted his church into the hands of Petrus AND Mary-Magdalena. And that he had 12 female-apostels beside the male set. Makes 24 altogehter.The 12 women were written out of the final Bible, because, apparently, the patrialistic societies of this time didn't like the idea of beeing religiously led by a man AND a woman.

• Needs Citation. It's pretty much accepted amongst most scholars now that Mary Magdalene didn't even really exist. Or rather, the wife of Jesus didn't. Instead, MM's thought to be a compilation of at least three different Marys.
• And, to be entirely fair, I doubt Jesus said anything about popes to begin with. Sure, he entrusted Peter with his followers, but there's a big leap between that and the papacy.
  • Well yeah, I'd guess this theory is assuming Catholicism is correct with the whole papacy thing. (Though it's not really THAT big a leap.)
  • In Matthew 16:16-19 when Jesus asked who the apostles thought He was, Simon said that He is the Christ. Jesus told Simon that he was to be known as Peter, meaning rock, and would build His Church upon him, giving him the keys to the kingdom. In John 21:15-17), Jesus says to Peter that he must feed His lambs, meaning lead, be the shepherd of the Church. The word pope comes from the Greek word "papas" which means father, or leader of the family. Pope St. Clement I, Peter's 3rd successor (the 4th pope) stated in his Epistle to the Corinthians that Peter and the apostles chose successors. This was written about 80 A.D. (C.E.). Jesus may not have used the term "pope" directly, at least not that we know of, but He did choose a leader, and expected that leadership to continue.

Longinus was quested by God to obtain material for a new Eve.

He was supposed to rip out a chunk of rib, but instead ended up putting the spear right through his chest. Instead of coming back before everyone present died, he ended up being Killed Off for Real and was animated (with enough strength to move the rock) by the Power of God(TM) for just enough time to be seen a few times. Longinus converted not because he felt guilty or because he felt the followers made a good point, but rather because God gave him a preview of hell and he really wanted to get on His good side.

The story of Chelm is the final testament of the Bible

It's an allegory: God made millions of alien races and... guess who the dumb ones are.

• Actually, God has been trying to hint to us how dumb we are for millennia, not only with the story of Chelm, but also by giving us multiple, contradictory, and untrue stories about the ultimate meaning of life (called religions) and...oh, the time he dropped that guy with at least half a shred of intelligence into our midst as an April Fools Day joke.

Lumiel/Lucifer/Satan is a girl, and the only gendered angel before the fallen ones

In fact, the gendering of fallen angels may be due to her own. Also, that's why God is one hell of a mysogynist; he didn't trust girls since Lumiel betrayed him, and thought the ones that weirdo told him to create were just like her, and had to be submissive, like she wasn't; also, describing Satan with feminine beauty, and disguising herself as a harlot/seductress doesn't help, either... And being the angel of the Music, it might explain how the biggest successes are usually for girls...

• But what the reasoning behind this "Lumiel" being female in the first place? Where did "she" come from, and what was there to specify her from the other angels since they weren't given human form in the earliest texts? And who says God is a misogynist? Most misogynistic traits in religion are thrown in by the human race, after all, and saying that Satan is described with "feminine beauty" doesn't make much sense unless you can cite exactly how said beauty might be any different from that which men are sometimes ascribed in older religious texts. This WMG smells of Crystal Dragon Jesus to me... ;) Also, if you're saying that the biggest musical successes are female, there's quite a range of men (from Bing Crosby and the Big Bopper to the King, The Prince of Pop, several boy-bands and Nickleback/Fall Out Boy/Christian rock groups) who would disagree.
• It's Word of Dante that they ever were an angel. The Canaanite version has Astar/Astarte (god/ess of the morning/evening stars, the planet Venus) trying to take over the throne of Baal Hadad while he was faking his death to escape Death. What happened after varies by the source and tends to escalate over time: from the other gods's mild disappointment at Astarte not matching Baal's stature, to her getting kicked off of Baal's mountain palace by him upon his return, to her being violently cast out of Heaven by Elohim so hard she left an Impact Silhouette in the Earth on their way to The Underworld, etc. etc.

Jesus messed up the sacrifice he made the first time.

According to Christian lore, Jesus sacrificed himself to pay for all the sins of mankind. Three days later he rose from the dead, screwing up the entire sacrificial process. Sacrifices are normally permanent- if you sacrifice an animal, you don't get it back. By coming back to life, Jesus' sacrifice was ruined so he had to give himself up to Heaven again, but this time gave his body as well as his soul to God (sort of repaying with interest).

• The sacrifice is meaningless if death is not completely and utterly defeated. You see, the cost of sin is death. Jesus would only die for himself and no one else, so it would be in vain since he did no sin. Hence why the Resurrection was so important, it showed that Christ had overcome death, for everyone who believes.

Humans are not created in the image of god.

Humans wiped out the real chosen people of god a long time ago- the Dodo!

• The actual chosen people are the tardigrades, or water bears. Consider how tough they are for simple moss-eaters: if there is a God, they're probably His pinnacle invention. The only reason they haven't taken over the Earth is because they're scared of the giant humans, and we ate from the Tree of Knowledge first.

Jesus was a bread golem.

The bread was literally his flesh, no transubstantiation involved. The "wine" was a thick, almost batter-like filling made from figs, similar to ancient Egyptian beer but made from vine fruits, and all of the details were a divine miracle sort of thing that made him more human. Including what may have been pericardial fluid, during the crucifixion. This allows for a literal interpretation of the body and blood speech without requiring cannibalism. Face it, bread seems to be a common theme in a lot of miracles, pre-Christ as well as Christ-contemporary, and regenerative abilities could work for water-to-wine (de-concentrated wine-blood) and bread multiplication.

• Jesus got wasted on his blood, so he didn't suffer on the cross.
• Plus this avoids the issue of God explicitly banning human sacrifice. Unless you consider a golem to be a person.

There was no Jesus.

The crowd merely got confused after the release of Jesus Barrabas.

Satan's a vigilante angel who only revolted when Jesus was born

It's honestly surprised me that no theologian's ever considered this. In the Old Testament, Satan is the Accuser, sort of a divine prosecutor whose job is to test humanity and prove to God that humans aren't worthy of Heaven. In the New Testament, Satan is the outright enemy of God. Christianity explains this with the War in Heaven, when Satan tried to usurp the throne and lead the angels against God, and the basis for this is mostly found in the book of Revelations, the opening chapters of which metaphorically describe the war, Satan's defeat and the angels being banished from Heaven. But for some reason, probably because John Milton wrote it that way in Paradise Lost, people assume that the war happened eons ago, before the universe was even formed.

In Revelations, the war in Heaven is transposed with another vision that some theologians take to be Mary's flight from Herod. Well, what if it's happening at the same time? Maybe the whole reason the Massacre of the Innocents happened is because, seemingly out of nowhere, Satan turned on God and suddenly threw everything he had into killing Jesus? Perhaps that's the moment when the war in Heaven began, and Satan's shift from celestial prosecutor to Jesus's archenemy really is a new role, something he'd only recently become.

But why would Satan have only rebelled at that point? The answer is moral outrage. Satan had spent thousands of years documenting every sin humanity's ever committed, his whole existence aimed at proving beyond any shadow of doubt that humans are irredeemably evil and should be destroyed. And eventually God agrees with him... and then sends Jesus to offer salvation and make it all irrelevant. How would a human district attorney feel if he'd spent years building up the case for a depraved criminal, only for the trial judge to say "you're absolutely right, but I'm going to give him a break anyway". It was birth of Jesus, and the realization that humanity's going to go to Heaven even after all the evil he's seen them do, that turned Satan against God. His whole motive in trying to destroy humanity is that he thinks we deserve it, and if God won't do it, then he'll do it himself.

• There's a flaw in your thinking. Who is this Snake of Paradise Garden guy, then?
  • Good question. It was not a snake but a serpent and was not Satan. At most it acted as an agent of Satan but that is a relatively recent association.
• In the original Jewish folklore, Satan and Lucifer were two entirely separate entities, so this theory holds water.
  • The strange thing about Lucifer's prominence in Christianity and equation with Satan is how unimportant he is in Judaism. In canon he only got an offhand reference and even in apocryphal works and folklore he ended up as an underling to somebody else like Samael or Lilith, when even mentioned at all. In the Kelipot he is an underling of the third ranked underling under Satan.

Satan takes his job too seriously

The accuser's only goal it seems is to prove some people are unworthy of God's praise. This is shown in the book of Job. It is also stated in Job that even Angels can falter, the fallen angel thing was always there, Satan as a fallen angel wasn't but consider it foreshadowing. If angels can do evil just like people, then wouldn't the accuser be just as hard on them? God berated Jonah when Jonah insisted that God punish the Assyrians who were trying to repent. The war in heaven was the same, only more so. Satan convinced a bunch of angels to rebel then demanded God punish them. God instead punished Satan because he had gone too far, just like Jonah.

Compare how most real life Satanists are with how Satan acts in the Bible. They believe they are rebelling for freedom, Satan wants them to, to prove his point. Satan did bring harm to Job but just to get him to reject authority. All Satan asked Jesus to do was go wild with power or act unfaithful. He's not some Card-Carrying Villain, he's more like a police officer who believes entrapment is acceptable.

The accuser is notably not the most evil angel in the Bible, even if the others aren't actually named(Satan isn't a name either, just a title). Chances are he still thinks he's doing the right thing, even in the book of Revelation all the non Bible religions are destroyed first(well besides the new one he just rose up) before he comes after those faithful to the one God. As far as Satan's concerned if they are really faithful then they will go to heaven after he has them all killed. He's still doing his job, just far beyond what he was asked to do. Maybe what he really needs is more people to pray for him? Maybe that would make him ease up?

• This makes a chilling amount of sense. In Revelations, Satan tried to get people have the Mark of the Beast. Maybe it's not some generic take-over scheme, but rather "rooting out the good from the bad." A test to see who fits into his vision of good(and it's rather narrow.)

Abel deserved it

• You made me giggle.
• The SCP Foundation seems to agree with you (or at least, if he didn't deserve it then, he definitely does now).

Satan didn't immediately become pure evil after the fall, but gradually came to that point until after Jesus' resurrection

Satan did indeed attempt to usurp God's throne, and ultimately fell, though afterwards he didn't feel any maleovlent ill will towards God afterwards. At one time he sympathized with humans and felt that Adam and Eve weren't living up to their full potential, so he manipulated them into eating the apples. During the time of the Old Testament, he was a bit of a trickster but never did anything out of sheer maliciousness. Over time he witnessed human cruelty over the years and slowly started to get frustrated when they got chance after chance. He finally lost it when Jesus came down to Earth to save humanity. Satan didn't think humanity deserved another chance when they had blown many chances and he had got kicked out after the first time he screwed up. After Jesus' death and resurrection, Satan had finally had it. The pain of being outside of God's presence plus seeing God give humanity chance after chance even though they continued to deny, mock and not even believe that He existed. So Satan figured that if he was going down, he was going to take as many humans with him, hence the reason why he is pure evil in the New Testament and beyond.

Jesus Is Female

• Joseph wanted a carpenter for a child. Depending on your text, either he had no other children, or, let's say, none of them wanted to be carpenters. Well, Jesus did want to be a carpenter, as they found out at a very young age. After the angel appearing, Joseph and Mary both knew that s/he was going to be a special kid, so they decided this would be reasonable (with a possible idea that this would help woman's lib, if s/he were discovered). Then, when it came time to spread the message...who's gonna listen to the girl? (See the guess on Mary creating Jesus as savior.) No real reason for this to be so, except misogyny was fairly common and yet he still had an even split of male/females. (See the guess on there being both male and female Pope.)
  • If Jesus is female, then isn't she the universe's attempt at Moe?

Adam and Eve were preparing to leave Eden on their own

After becoming enlightened they knew there was nothing more they could gain from staying in their perfect little playground. They needed to go out into the greater world to begin their ascencion. They were making clothes in preparation for the journey. Adam hid from God because he didn't think God would approve of this development.

Eve was a parselmouth.

Well, she's had a conversation with a snake.

• I believe it's called, "Parseltoungue"
  • The language is Parseltongue, people who can speak it are Parselmouths
  • She talked to a serpent, not a snake. That thing had legs.

The abyss spoken of in revelation is a black hole.

The general time-line for the end times are as follows: Tribulation, Satan is sent into an "Abyss", 1000 years of mortal, perfect earth for those who survived previous events, Satan escapes, rebuilds army, Satan gets pwn'ed, sent to "lake of fire" forever, heaven and earth are remade, awesome eternity. (oh, and depending on who you ask, there may be a rapture in there somewhere.) Some studies theorize that when a black hole takes in matter, it eventually gets expelled in a grossly mangled state. It would be quite appropriate for the final showdown version of Satan to show a mangled form, completely stripped of any evidence that he was ever God's finest angel (cherubim, to be exact.)

The Bible has been entirely mistranslated.

Ancient Hebrew changed radically in meaning since the first books were written. More recent scholars simply imposed their own assumptions on what those words mean, and that version —of the language and the book— got accepted as canon.

• Then again, you'd have translation notes that would make Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei look tame. Thank God that we have manuscripts in Ancient Hebrew.
  • In several different versions, and with a number of books that have fallen in and out of official canon, and all written hundreds of years apart, and with some parts being clearly "hebrewized" variants of much older Babylonian stories. And that's just the OT: the New Testament was made of bits and pieces selected from thousands of documents by the Nicaean Council, most written generations to centuries after Jesus, with many of their choices being highly controversial and politicized, and again with several books being taken out and put in by various sects over the intervening millenia. Also, for a few centuries following the post-Crisi- er, post-Roman Diaspora, Ancient Hebrew was practically a dead language. Many of the oldest words lost their meaning and had to be "rediscovered". A few still are only guesswork even today.
• The Catholic Church's canon for the Old Testament is the Septuagint, which is what the Jewish Greeks used at the time of Christ. None of it has been changed. In fact, if you read the Douay-Rheims Bible, it has the Greek, English, and the Vulgate (Latin) side-by-side.

Adam and Eve were not the first humans.

Or at least, not the only ones. Rather they, were the first human sophonts - beings capable of conscious thought and moral decisions. This comes out of the fact that Adam and Eve canonically have only three children - Cain, Abel, and Seth - all of whom are male. Cain of course kills Abel and then is condemned to vagabondage by God. And then Seth's born. But who the hell did these kids get it on with in order to have children? The Bible clearly says they had children and that they "knew" women. The only conclusion, based on the logical hole as well as what we know now of genetics, is that Adam, Eve, and their children were not the only humans. Yes, I know this is a leap for a lot of people, but this is Wild Mass Guessing after all.

• Cain, Abel and Seth were their only named children. Adam and Eve were said to have many sons and daughters.
• There is another human besides Adam and Eve, by the way. She is named Lilith, and was Adam's actual first wife. Probably the other humans came from her.
  • That sounds like something that came out of Neon Genesis Evangelion, since in that series Lilim are indeed all matter-based life.
  • The issue with that is that the idea of Lilith as Adam's first wife didn't come around until the Middle Ages. Lilith was originally the name of a demon who murdered children.
    • (which makes me lol when people name their kids that)
    • Maybe it's done to placate her?

Humans were not the first people.

God said let us make people in our image. Male and female he created them and he told them the Earth is yours, be fruitful and multiply. Then he took a break, looked over his creation and declared day seven holy. God rose up a garden from a barren patch of land and with it rose Adam to tend to it. Adam was the first man and Eve was the first woman of what would become modern humans but there were already people outside of Eden doing their thing, laying the foundations of future nations. Then the serpent messed things up and Eve was cursed to bear children painfully. She and her husband would leave Eden and die.

Adam and Eve multiplied quickly after leaving Eden. The sons of God, the people already out in the world struggling to procreate like they were told to, were impressed by this. They saw the daughters of Adam were beautiful and took them as wives. There were giants in that time and sometime afterwards because the children of those unions grew big and strong, just like how breeding lions and tigers produce really big cats because the alleles that check growth cancel out. Eventually humanity out bred and assimilated all the other people but this made humanity's tendency to do evil dominant, thus the flood.

It fits in with the fossil record, which shows many other, older, variations of bipedal mammals that are similar to humans but are not linked to humans. Missing link? There is none. Some of them were out competed and died out, the rest of the bipeds interbred with Adam and Eve's kids and this lead to modern homo sapiens. Modern humans are now less susceptible to temptation than Adam and Eve because we have the originals made in God's image in our ancestry as well.

Furthermore, Hebrew and Aramaic, the languages of the Bible, the Semitic language family, it extends into O'mo, sight of the earliest modern humans so this theory can still work (though not as well) even if you take the Sons of God=Angels interpretation.

This Jesus character isn't going to stay dead long.

Now, don't spoil anything for me, I'm only about halfway through the book, but he's just way too important to stay dead. I give him three days, tops.

• If you're really halfway through one of the gospels, the foreshadowing that Jesus will rise from the dead exactly three days after being killed is kind of hard to miss. If you're making this guess halfway through the Bible itself... I dub you the spec-master of all time.
• Well considering he literally has four books about him that wouldn't be surprising.

Satan is mindless.

If Satan supposedly has power equal to God, it would make a lot of sense if he was God's polar opposite. God is a creative, vast intelligence, where as Satan is utterly mindless destruction. Satan's supposed intelligence is a ruse.When Lucifer became Satan and gained power to rival God, his mind was unable to take it, and was thus completely shredded. Now he sits swirling in the darkest pit of Hell, radiating waves of evil into the universe and babbling nonsensically. He's the Blind Idiot Devil.

• Satan being equal to God is not stated in the Bible, or any of the Abrahamic texts. That idea came from Manicheanism, which in turn got the idea from trying to unite Christianity with Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. Maybe if this was put forth on the wild mass guess page for one of those religion's books it would work.

Alternatively, Satan is slowly becoming more and more intelligent, while God is becoming less intelligent.

This explains why there aren't large scale miracles anymore, for God will be reduced to gibbering madness if he does them more.

• It follows that if intelligence is one of the defining opposing aspects, that God becoming dumber while Satan becomes smarter means that Satan will become more and more good over time and God will become more and more evil over time until either they are once again completely opposed, or until both are identical at the halfway point.
  • Not necessarily.
  • That means, Satan is to God where Nyarlathotep is to Azathoth.
  • Actually it seems God still possesses intelligence, but is rather unaware and unconscious of his power instead of mindless, with Satan taking the place as Advisor / Chancellor who is actually aware and in control of God's power. That means Satan is to God where the SOS Brigade is to Haruhi.
  • True. God = egotistical, insane Eldritch Abomination who relies on angels for him to think and punishes people eternally, Satan = egotistical, charismatic Magnificent Bastard who tricks humans into thinking they are just like God to further his own goals. However, even though God is mindless and Satan is highly intelligent, the biblical fact that they are both egotistical and use humans to further their own goals doesn't remove the fact that their relationship is still a form of Black-and-Gray Morality.

Alternatively, both God and Satan are becoming less intelligent, while Jesus and Mankind are becoming more intelligent.

Well, what explains science.

The current version of the Book of Daniel isn't quite correct

In the last 50 years or so, the majority of the evangelical community has declared the Book of Daniel to basically be propaganda written during the Roman occupation of Israel. There's still a minority who believes that everything in the Book of Daniel is true. I'm taking a third option. Daniel 12:9 says that the book is to be closed up until the end of time, right? So, somehow some information on the book, or on Daniel's experiences, got out before the book was sealed. Then, some guy circa 200 BC decides to write some anti-Roman propaganda and he decides to make what is essentially a Fan Fic out of the story of Daniel, which becomes Word of Dante. God decides to put it in the Bible for...undiscernable reasons a la Job. Once the end times start approaching, we'll find the real version of the Book of Daniel.

Abraham was hard of hearing

God told him to sanctify his son. Good thing he caught him at the last second with that BS about a Secret Test of Character.

Again, as pointed out above, the Bible was not written in English. That goes for the "celebrate" joke as well. At least this one is grammatically correct.

Satan wrote the Book of Job as anti-God propaganda

It makes God look really mean, and Satan look like a guy just loyally carrying out orders. It backfired.

• He probably should have left that part out about angels faltering just like humans...

The Bible is real, what Science tells you is wrong.

• Alternatively, science is right. God's power passes our understanding so he can bend the rules of the universe however he wants them too. Everything in the Bible that is scientifically impossible to us is because is a lot more powerful than man.
• Alternative theory. Every so called contradiction in the Bible was really just God's way of explaining things to humans who did not know better. "I stopped the Sun!" Actually he stopped the Earth but didn't want to explain axis turning and artificial gravity and junk to the dumb Hewbrews. Had the Bible events happened today God wouldn't have been so hand holding with humanity.

The Bible once contained a form of magic, that was corrupted by both Science and Fundamentalism

Think about it. The Bible is written in such a Mind Screw-y manner. The reason God existed in the distant past is because they just read The Bible in a way that they just went with the phenomenal cosmic powers of Mind Screw. Both Fundamentalists and Atheist Scientists made the biggest mistake: interpreting the Bible literally and coldly. Because The Bible was contained inside the totalitarian laws of Science and Morality, its Mind Screw energies were lost and froze into well, science and morality.

• Acutally, by freezing The Bible into Science, fundies and scientists saved us from the monster that is God. Don't forget he will torture us for all eternity.
  • They did save us from God, but they killed the Messiah that is Jesus. By freezing the Bible into science, Jesus vanished.
  • Actually, the "Eternal torment" part of Christian morality belongs more to fundamentalism, since in the Bible, when you sin, you simply die (Romans 6:23 "For the wages of sin is death").

Jesus is the Anti-Christ

The entire New Testament, as well as all of Christianity, is a lie.

• Then where did you get the idea of Anti Christ from? Shouldn't that not exist?
• Never mind antichrist in an adjective, not a noun. There is no one antichrist, it is a behavior anyone can partake. Thank you Word of Dante.

Jesus is Satan

He let himself be hated by us for our sins. "Hell" is in fact the pain and humiliation received from the crucifixion.

If Jesus is Satan, and Satan let himself be hated by the entire world for our sins, then Jesus is Lelouch Lamperouge

Because, why not. Lelouch gave us a common messiah and a common enemy so that our world be in peace, but the Corrupt Church that is The High Lords of Terra, I mean, Medieval Roman Catholicism perverted the message to create a Big Brother Is Watching hellhole. Heck, in a more imaginative WMG: The Bible is just an alternate Code Geass universe. Naturally God is the Emperor. The rest of the Britannian Aristocracy forms the Council of Angels, and the children of the Emperor have the roles of the archangels. Lelouch himself is Lucifer (as said in the title, and in the series he even admitted that he could be a Demon), but this time, the Oedipal Rebellion is not just pure egotism, but noticing how much of a totalitarian God is. Thus, he is banished to Hell (Area 11). He gains the power of Geass through contract (The Tree of Knowledge), meets with the Japanese (Adam and Eve) and gives them the power to rebel against The Emperor. Of course, he created an alternate persona, the Dark Messiah Zero. A lot of differences between the Code Geass universe and The Bible might ensue, like how there are many differences between the original universe and Code Geass: Nightmare of Nunnally, and "Jesus" in the story might have been a fusion of messianic figures like Zero with pacifistic figures like Nunnally and Euphemia, who might have succeeded with their plans for peace.

• YOU ARE A GENIUS!

The Forbidden Fruit thing was a test. We passed.

And... what is the reward? Will there be further tests?

• Are you there, Humanity? If so, you are probably the last creation standing. Now, perhaps you will succeed where the others have failed. You feel you now have control, don't you? You think you will walk away untested? I promise that my work will continue. That I have ensured. By eating the fruit, some will assume that this is over but I am still among you. You think it's over just because you have gained free will. It's not over. The games have just begun. -God

Hasatan, or "the satan" is a title, and the devil was merely the first one to hold it

]Satan was created specifically for the role of God's prosecutor (hence his keeping the name), but couldn't psychologically cope with holding it for too long; he went nuts and rebelled. Still needing someone to fill the job, but not wanting to make another angel specifically for the purpose for fear that holding it too long would prove to have a corruptive effect again, he made it into a job title, hence the definitive article. Satan-ing since then has been handed around from angel to angel on some sort of electory or lottery system designed to ensure that nobody holds it for too long. The Hasatans that appear in the Old Testament are actually just regular God-obeying angels on satan-duty, with the original fallen one not showing up in the actual text under that name until Revelations. This is why there's so much confusion over if Satan is for or against God- there's one against Him, and a rotating position for His servants using the same name.

• Enoch does say there is more than one Satan so this would hold water in the churches who still consider Enoch canon.

The Bible takes place in the Warhammer 40k universe

It's pretty clear, considering the fact that Jesus is the God-Emperor of Mankind and the Warp is Hell.

The Bible takes place inside the 1984 universe

God is Big Brother. And he's always watching you. He always loves you, and if you don't he's going to send you to Hell.

• A variation of this theory is popular with atheists. The idea that theocracies with an all-ruling God is simply Orwellian totalitarian dogma with another name. Think about it. Extreme worship of an abstract entity, a set of absolute rules to follow even though said rules intervene with privacy, total infallibility of the word of the ruler to the point where it would be beyond reason, "Big Brother Is Watching You", eternal damnation of those who do not follow, etc. It's all "Follow the Big Brother or you are going to Hell" memes, and the usage of Pavlovian fear conditioning to pacify the population. The difference between organized religion (such as Medieval Catholicism) and a secular dictatorship (such as Stalinist Russia) is that in religion the people worship an entirely imaginary entity (God) while in secular dictatorships the people worship a figure based on a real person (Stalin). A similar WMG can be seen in 1984's own WMG page.

Jesus is the Mary Sue

Idealized rendering of humanity? Check. Reality Warper? Check. Descended from a celestial power? Check. Perfect? Double check. He's not hated by the Real Life fandom since Jesus is a character in that realm.

• Don't say he has no hatedom...

Jesus could have defeated Dio Brando if they fought.

John 16:33: "... But take heart! I have overcome the world."

• Jesus is the first Jojo.

Cain was the world's first emo.

Instead of cutting himself, though, he cut his brother. And the rest is history.

• Emo does not work that way. Besides, Abel was cutting up animals well before Cain murdered him.

Cain's killing of Abel was a sacrifice.

Posited in The Book Of Nod.

The Reapers clashed with and copied from YHWH.

In Judges 14:19 it is said that "Then the Spirit of the LORD ASSUMED DIRECT CONTROL, I mean, came upon [Samson] in power." It's not the only time you see it, either.

Dragons are actually the shape angels assume after falling

It is never specified whereas Satan had shape shifted into a dragon or if he was permanently in that form. If so, its a huge improvement, since biblical angels are supposed to be quite terrifying.

Heaven isn't real, and there is only Hell

We all know this is depressing, but there is an explanation. The reason why Christians can go through the hardships of both Hell and Earth is because of their faith and the nature of ignorance being bliss and strength. After all, bliss can be another term for Heaven, and bliss can be another term for Ignorance.

Ultimately, all life goes to that one afterlife called Hell. Everyone sinned, all humans sin (Original Sin), Nature sins (carnivores, natural disasters, etc), Heck, even God sins (The mass genocide of humanity in the time of Noah, his sacrifice of his own Son, scaring people with Disproportionate Retribution). Those who experience the most pain are the materialists and people who are too aware of their surroundings, since they feel the obvious and visible pain that is Hell. However, there is a strange circle in Hell where some people we can recognize from Real Life are having dinner with someone who looks like he was brutally scourged, and they seem to ignore the pains of the Afterlife. Upon closer look, we realize that this person having supper in Hell is actually Jesus Christ himself, who helps the Christian faithful ignore the pains of Hell and live in happiness through friendship and faith in Him.

This could be the message Christianity is telling us all along. Because everything that exists since the creation of the Tree of Knowledge is sin, everything must go to Hell, and there is no escape. However, in Hell, there is still a choice: Either the person can remain aware but must experience the full agony of fire, brimstone and existential angst, or he can experience the full agony but can deny and ignore it through faith in Jesus, or any other religion the tormented sees fit for him / her, gaining bliss and the feeling of heaven (or nirvana) in the process. An analogy is Warhammer 40,000: The entire galaxy is a hell which will make you shit in terror, and it has a Hell, yet Space Marines can walk through it without fear because of their faith in the God Emperor (who might be Jesus himself, but that's another WMG). In other words, You Are Worth Hell.

• Hell is actually Real Life. Oh God, Reincarnation is true!
• It explains why some Christians are such annoying Moral Guardians: they are training themselves.

Jesus Died For Your Sins, and if you don't accept him, you will die for your sins.

Hence why in the modern secular world, Everybody Is Jesus in Purgatory.

God is Jesus in Purgatory.

Well, if everybody is, then so by definition is He, especially since they're both supposed to be kinda-sorta the same person anyway. This also nicely explains why He hasn't actually, you know, spoken to anybody in a good long while.

The Bible is one massive troll-fic

The entire universe is a giant series of novels by God, who is a famous author. Satan was hired to make an abridged version of it, but came out with the Bible instead. Why? For the lulz

Jesus was a Jedi

Just think about it. Jesus walked on water. Jedi can levitate stuff. Jesus used his Force-powers to "walk" on water when he was really hovering slightly above it. Jesus turned water into wine? He used the Jedi Mind Trick to make people believe that the water he had (which no-one saw he put food coloring into it) was wine. He healed the sick? Jedi have this power. Even his resurrection can be explained as his body dissolving into the Force, his Force Ghost appearing in front of people and his ascension into Heaven as becoming one with the Force. The celibacy of the Catholic Church was inspired by his Jedi teachings

• Jedi aren't celibate; they just can't get attached. At least according to George Lucas. Also, isn't resurrection a Sith power? That's sort of the whole point of Revenge of the Sith.
• Also, after the whole Eden fiasco, God sent an angel to guard it armed with "a flaming sword which turned every which way". It's likely that this sword was a lightsaber, since lightsabers are omnidirectional.

Satan is a Well-Intentioned Extremist, and so is God.

God believes the only way to keep peace and decency in the universe is to keep it in a state of unchanging order. That's why he forbid Adam and Eve from eating fruit that belongs to the Tree of Knowledge. It's also why he created heaven. Satan believes that man should be free to make their own descisions, and not be bossed around.That is why he caused the "Fall of Man", it was to give them freedom from God. Revelations is a propaganda by the angels to make Satan seem like a villain, while demons use Fundamentalists as propaganda so people think God Is Evil. In summary, God is on the positive side of Lawful Neutral, and Satan is on the positive side of Chaotic Neutral.

Both God and Satan are Well Intentioned Extremists.

Both want the best for mankind,however they have different ways of approaching this.God sees himself(or itself) as Lawful Good, and believes worship and obedience will curb mankind's violent tendencies. Satan sees himself(or herself,or itself) as Chaotic Good, and wants to free man from God's control so man can decide their own fate. It's essentially Order versus Chaos.

The serpent in the Garden of Eve was the origin of Satan's beliefs.The reason God doesn't just destroy Satan is it would be cheating.God isn't above using propaganda though:The New Testament is an example.

Jesus is a Time Lord.

Well duh

• He died, but his body regenerated. When he was resurrected, some people claimed not to recognize him any longer. He's from the past, but is going to arrive again in the future. There's plenty of reference to him and God (who is him too/his father) as a Lord and there's even discussion of the Master in the Bible. The cross was his TARDIS.

You don't have to be religious to go to Heaven.

When Jesus said you have to believe in him to reach the Kingdom of God,he wasn't being literal.He was referring to himself in a metaphorical sense.And since Jesus is suppose to represent empathy(treat your neighbour as you'd wish to be treated) and compassion(turn the other cheek),you have to believe and follow those principles to reach Paradise.This means that people like Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi will reach Heaven(even though they aren't Christian,or particularly religious) while Pat Robertson is damned to Hell(he is Christian,but doesn't believe in the Christian message of love thy neighbour).

We are in Hell.

Judgement Day already arrived,and we are descended from the sinners that were cast into Hell.Only Hell isn't a fiery place of torment,but a seperation from God. And there is no miracles and little evidence for God as a result

• Maybe that would make the Hindu, Buddhists, ect more compatible? Reincarnation works better in a spiritual sense if we are all in the world of the dead, that which will eventually be destroyed (or rather swallowed up) parallel to those religion's description of the coming end of the universe as it is now.

The Mormons Are Right.

Besides having a generally nicer gospel (even if you were a horrible jerk in life you still get a mansion in heaven that is better than anything on the Earth right now), some of their edits actually make sense. I may be biased as a Mormon, of course.

• You really believe Indians are the lost tribes of Israel, blacks are cursed, etc.? No, the Mormons are wrong, and only Mormons get into heaven, except for God, who is a Buddhist, and Saddam Hussein, because he abused his ex-boyfriend Satan.
  • Being a Mormon myself, I'd be offended (and I'd begin a long and winded theological argument against what you said), but that's just being rude. That aside, I found what you said to be hilarious. On a different note, you do get a nice mansion in Heaven even if you were a horrible jerk, according to the Mormons, but if you are like Jesus in life, according to them, you get even nicer things to the point where you become, quite literally, like God Himself.
    • Which is exactly the temptation which got Adam and Eve chucked out of Eden.

The Song of Songs/Solomon is just a random person's self-insert fic.

Besides it reading kind of like one, I just think it would be really funny if true.

When people speak in tongues, they aren't actually saying anything useful; their mouths are just having seizures.

That's right! Epileptic Tongues!

• Seizures do not work that way

The Bible was written so that people would misinterpret it and come up with insane theories.

You know, like the people on this page.

• The bible contradicts itself, and self-contradictory philosophies are easily altered by fools seeking power. You know, Orwellian Doublethink...
• Or if you don't want to sound paranoid on the internet, it's about how we're supposed to have individual paths to God, which in conjunction with our individual spiritual fruits from God form an entire superorganism (think ant hives and bee hives) with multiple parts working at once for the greater good. Fridge brilliance indeed.

The Beast of Revelations is a metaphor for mob mentality.

There is literally no chance of the entire human race worshiping a single entity any time soon, regardless of who or what. But every day we hear about more and more people acting like fanatical nutjobs for no real reason. If God were to begin the apocalypse because of a specific mindset that had befallen every human being alive, which we refused to snap out of even when threatened with the very real prospect of total annihilation, what other explanation is there other than us having gone completely nucking futs?

Expanding on this, it is possible to determine that the Antichrist is some sort of fear-monger with a lot of weight behind his or her words. Therefore, I have narrowed down the identity of the Antichrist to either Glenn Beck, Fox News as a whole, or his personal favorite, Stephen Colbert after Becoming the Mask at his March to Keep Fear Alive.

• Or whoever invented the concept of Hell as "eternal torture"
• There is no single anti Christ in canon. It is possible for any of those sources to be a false prophet/fake messiah but that sounds too mean spirited. Can't they just be dumb, flawed humans?

Hell is in fact, /b/

He who goeth to /b/ shall go mad from the sinfulness. Beneath this fiery lake of immorality is Anonymous, The Legions Of Hell which is waiting to be unleasheth for the end of times (and your reputation).

The Bible is a metaphor for psychoanalysis

If you think of your mind as the world of The Bible while in a couch, it kinda reveals itself. Of course This is Wild Mass Guessing. For example:

• The Angels are possibly our behaviours / defense mechanisms / our thought patterns.
• God: The Super - Ego. Our internalized figure of our Father, our high ideals and standards, and powered / brought on by social reinforcement. God serves as our "conscience" and "ego ideal" which we are expected to follow in populist society. As our conscience, God / The Superego tells us what is right or wrong, what is our high ideals, and what has been conditioned into our brains by the authority. It also has the power to "eternally punish" through the usage of guilt (which in Christian doctrine, can only be removed through repentance to authority, hence "you are damned to Hell until you repent").
• Sin: The Id, obviously. Just look at christian doctrine and it pretty much screams "Repression", almost all of the acts that are enjoyed by the id are labeled as sin, and thus are not allowed to persist as permanent behaviours in the ego. Like oh for example, sex for pleasure. (Sodomy? Go to Hell. Porn? Go to Hell. Masturbation? Go to Hell. And so on). Also, the Seven deadly Sins (particularly Lust and Wrath) correspond to our unconscious animal instincts which our ancestors used before moving on to civilization. Sin / the Id works through the Pleasure Principle.
  • Satan / Lucifer / Demons / Fallen Angels might be manifestations of our repressed instincts, and Hell is simply metaphor for constant repression and the "eternal torment a.k.a trauma" that is the result of said repression. Satan himself is the Oedipus Complex. Before, Satan and his followers enjoyed their presence in the heavenly world, until Satan rebelled and God banished them to the depths of Hell. In our mind according to Freud, our instincts expressed themselves in our conscious mind, until the Oedipus Complex appeared and pushed thoughts of rebellion against the father figure, and the failure of rebellion against Father culminated in the creation of the Superego. Sounds similar, doesn't it? As an additional WMG: This means adolescence, where massive lust and something resembling the Oedipus complex reappear, is Armageddon (well teen-hood is certainly Armageddon for me), and adulthood, where we start to live according to the expectations of superego, is the Final Judgement.
  • Adam and Eve might represent the Thanatos ("you were made from dust, and dust you shall return") and Eros ("I will increase your trouble in giving childbirth, in spite of this, you will still have desire for your husband, yet you will be subject to him"), respectively.
    • Adam and Eve, or the entire Garden of Eden, could also represent the Unconscious Mind as a whole. Before, Adam and Eve were unconscious of their world around them, and that is why they were naked without knowing it. That is, until the Serpent brought on the Forbidden Fruit, and thus we had to repress our internal Eden of unconsciousness (well ignorance is bliss, ignorance is strength, and so on) as the cost of knowledge and learning. Of course this allowed the existence and propagation of the Ego (the prophets) and the Super Ego (the God of Morals today).
  • The attitudes of the OT and NT Gods respectively represent the Destrudo (OT god = tried Destroy as much humans as possible before, aka Noah's Flood) and Libido ("For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not die but have everlasting life", from John 3:16)
• The Prophets / Jesus: The Ego. They mediate between God / Superego, Sin / Id, and the World / our Conscious Mind. Jesus himself could be, well, the libido expressed in the form of platonic love, friendship, compassion, and loving thy neighbour.
  • Jesus also counts as the Ego Ideal, the part of the Superego which the ego tries to follow.

Dogma is the real interpretation of the Bible.

Whenever the Bible talks about eternal life, they don't necessarily mean personal immortality

They talk about SPIRIT. Not immortality for your personal brain, but simply eternal collective, simple hope that the faithful generate. Alone, individuals always end up dead. But when a person enters this collective spirit through hope and faith, he becomes assimilated and experiences the feeling of timelessness / nirvana / eternity / what-have-you. Well, us tropers should know the trope Who Wants to Live Forever?, a trope that portrays immortality as a Fate Worse than Death identical to And I Must Scream. Seriously, someone merciful will not impose Who Wants to Live Forever? on his subjects, unless he wants somebody to share his misery with (which is why Jesus was here in the first place). We might be uncertain whether this God might even exist, maybe he went Eldritch Abomination because of his immortality, or whether he is simply an Anthropomorphic Personification for collective hope. It does make some sense, since the hopeful die in bliss, while the guilty, unless they repent, die while being consumed by the dark whirlpooling eternal damnation vortex of Despair Event Horizon....

• That means the True God is Spiral Energy, and the Antichrist is Shinji Ikari?

Jesus, being a divine being, takes A Form You Are Comfortable With

When you see all the European Jesus pictures being white, the East Asian ones looking East Asian, etc., it has nothing whatsoever to do with the illustrators being biased towards their own ethnicity, it simply reflects the fact that, if Jesus were to visit these various groups of people, he would simply take an appearance resembling the particular types of people he is in. (I'm kind of fluctuating between serious and sarcastic for this guess, it does seem to have some actual points going for it.)

There were actually several "Noahs", probably thousands or perhaps even more

Obviously, a single ark as described in the current story wouldn't have been able to carry anywhere close to the required animals in the world, not to mention plants, soil fungi, soil bacteria, possibly freshwater fish (If the waters during the flood were able to mix well, this would be a saltwater flood, although I don't know a lot about how large water bodies work, and how quickly this would take place) etc. Instead, a large number of arks were used, (thousands, hundreds of thousands, I'm not sure how many would be needed.), however, to cover the world as much as possible to ensure that all the current animals were covered, these "Noah's" were spread out as much as possible from each other, and to encourage them to do the work properly, were all told that they would be the only survivors. As the Noah's resettled, and repopulated the dry land, they were sufficiently spread out to not come into contact with each other, and since their descendants had room to spread out, they would not be surprised to meet strangers who also claimed descent from a single survivor, and would not ask enough questions to realize there were still several survivors. As a result, the "single Noah builds ark" story survived.

(Which still leaves all the other issues with a literal flood in place, but is hopefully entertaining to read, at least.)

• That explains the staggering number of flood stories and range of flood stories as far away from the Middle East as Chile and New Zealand.

The Final Judgement is a metaphor for domestication.

The submissive people who are going to the Kingdom of Heaven? They're the pacified domesticated animals, livestock, pets, sheep. Well Jesus openly called his followers "sheep" (John 10:11, although he masked it by saying he lays his life for the sheep) and we all know, sheep are metaphor for totalitarianism, religious fervor and mob mentality! The domesticated animals / inhabitants of Heaven will be pacified and remain submissive to God while God takes care of them or probably eats them ala Cthulhu. The Crusaders and religious militants are the sheepdogs. Just look at Christian dogma, it seems like it wants us to become God's pets, forcing us into an Orwellian existence of eternal submission. Meanwhile, the sinners who are going to Hell are the wild animals. Hell isn't necessarily a place of eternal punishment, it's actually a place where the disobedient and heretical are dumped, "Survival of the Fittest" is in full effect, and it's a place of eternal chaos and wildness, and the wildness itself is the punishment (explains why Hell Is Other People, Hell is "Eternal Separation", Hell Is War, why Hell is such a Wretched Hive with A Hell of a Time, and so on). Hence why Christianity condemns the Id, the animal part of us which like sex, violence, chaos, pleasure and war. Who knows, maybe the Lake of Fire describes the temperatures of the stereotypical wild place, Africa.

My take on this idea is that God is like the nice owner of a animal sanctuary who wants to get the stray cats to come inside where it is nice and warm. He can't force them in, because He knows it's a bad idea to keep a wild animal as a pet. Babies who die are like kittens, which can be easily tamed. Evangelism is like using one cat to get another cat to come down from a tree.

The Old Testament Israelites should have established a republic

(This would be the "Exodus through Kings" period Israelites.)

Its clear in judges that without a strong government, the Israelites' success (whether at following god, or in other areas) is spotty at best. However, the Kings don't do too well either, as the Israelites' success is too dependent on one person's actions. Obviously, the Israelites needed to set up some sort of government where laws themselves are held to be the most important part of the government, and one where a single person couldn't have had much influence on how the country was run (religiously or otherwise). A Theocracy type government is out, (I think I remember that there were some instructions during the Moses part of the story against this, but may just be imagining things), but a Republic like government does fit the bill somewhat.

• But the Republican / democratic government would be invented by Greeks later on.

Fundamentalists and creationists are the propaganda of Satan.

The creationists are scientificially illiterate, and the fundamentalists paint God as a monster. This is all an Evil Plan by Satan to get people to either hate or not believe in God by making it seem God Is Illogical. That way he can use it to his advantage in Armageddon

Judaism is the one true religion and in the future everyone will convert to Judaism

All you need to do is read the messanic prophecies in the Tankah.

• Christianity is a poor man's ripoff of Judaism. 'Nuff said.
  • Christianity is Self-Insert Gary Stu fanfic that somehow became the More Popular Spin-Off.

The Egyptian Pantheon Caused the 10 plagues, or most of them

The Bible says yahweh did them, but yahweh likes to take credit for things he didn't do. We know that each of the plagues reresent one of the Egyptian Gods, which has mistakenly been taken as a Take That! or Our Gods Are Different when actually the Egyptian God were pissed at Pharaoh and the other Egyptians that were abusing the Hebrews. Yahweh struck a deal with them to let his people go, and you know the rest of the story.

The Battle Between God and Satan is just an obscenely elaborate and drawn-out WWE plotline

I mean, if God is the all-powerful creator of the universe, then how exactly is Satan supposed to be a propper threat to him? Answer: he's not. He's just been allowed to run loose, pummeling weaker opponents in order to build up a reputation of epic badassery so that The Final Battle will seem like a big hairy deal. Once things finally do down between The Man Upstairs and The Prince of Lies, God is just going to have Satan take a dive. Why? Because God loves to showboat and will jump on any chance to look cool, which is why he keeps Satan around in the first place: he's the ugly chick God stands next to in order to look sexier. Of course, billions will die horribly during this One Night Only Battle To The Death, but at least the special effects should be cool.

Heaven is located on the Sun.

Think about it. Heaven is supposed to be this beautiful, golden place in the sky, but humans can't get to it, only the dead. The sun is huge and golden, and if humans tried to get to it, they'd be incinerated! (This is totally my sister's theory, I'm just posting it.)

• So, heaven itself is only going to last for another 5.4 billion years? What happens then- does it just move?
• It gets recreated, God will make a new heaven, a better heaven that doesn't cause skin cancer in the living.
• Considering how we're stardust...

The 'Verse in the Bible is not ours.

It's a proto-type-one of the many universes YHWH has created over time.After the end of Revelations,God got bored,and so did His people.So He decided to create a new universe,but this time He'd sit back and watch.The Bible is a copy of His early works,distributed to us-and we assumed it referred to ours.

Revelation is a ploy to prevent the end of the world

In the actual gospel books, it is said a few times that the end of the world will come when no one expects it. Revelation, however, provides a bunch of signs of the world ending, which means people will be expecting it. As a result of these conditions, the end of the world cannot occur as long as anyone believes and looks for the events of revelation.

The Nephilim founded the Norse and Egyptian (and maybe the Greek or others) religions and played at being gods

The Nephilim were.... well reports vary from ancient giants, the offspring of fallen angels and man, or just fallen angels. They were described as giants, and they supposedly knew magic, and were sometimes described as having animal heads (like the Egyptian gods), and would probably enjoy making humans worship them. This could also explain the prominence of giants, the lack of women (many reports suggest the Nephilim were all male), and why the Norse have a place with a similar name to creatures in a seemingly unrelated book. I thought I was the first person to make the link, but I'm apparently not [1].Even if this theory is utterly stupid, it would make good story material, no? And if it's somehow true, it gives the Bible a rather interesting link to history......

• Actually, Paul flat out states that any god that isn't God is actually a demon. That and God has confirmed that there's other gods, or used to. Regardless, God has kicked Thor's and Odin's asses, is currently kicking their asses and will kick their asses.

The Israelites who left Egypt were a group of Engineers with advanced technology

The actual Exodus story goes as follows:

Israelites are settled in Egypt, increase in numbers. While living there, they develop a number of new technologies and become skilled engineers, helping to organize the construction of many cities. However, the pharaoh grew scared of this new technology and power, and decided to enslave the Israelites. Time goes on, Moses appears, decides to lead the Israelites from Egypt. The Pharaoh doesn't want to let the Israelites go, out of few of loosing their skills to an enemy, plus general pride and desire to maintain power. The Israelites use their engineering skills to sabotage several egyptian public works projects (Sewer systems, irrigation works, etc.), some of which they likely helped build, causing problems that lead to the ten plagues.

Eventually, the destruction convinces the pharaoh to let the Israelites leave, but he than changes his mind and decides to chase them. The Israelites, either guessing this would occur, or learning of it, decide to trap and destroy the pharaoh's army, to save future trouble for themselves. To do this, they dam the Red Sea, and pump the water out, setting up a corridor of dry land to travel through. As the Egyptian army approached, the Israelites had a large chunk of their population start on the egyptian side of the cleared red sea, than walk across to tempt the Egyptians. Once clear, the Israelites blew up the dams, and stopped the pumps, drowing the army.

They than spent several years in the desert, before being able to actually conquer Canaan. during this time, they weren't able to use their engineering skills much, but still taught them. When they started their first conquest at Jericho, they snuck close to the walls over several nights, planting explosives, than, when ready, detonated the explosives and destroyed the walls, making the city much easier to conquer. The Israelites than went on to conquer more of Canaan, destroying many of the cities.

However, during the time of Judges, the Israelite organization disintegrated, and they lost much of their engineering skill and technology. As a result, they did not understand how the major events of the escape from Egypt occurred without divine intervention, and changed the stories accordingly. This explains why the miracles seem to largely taper off after these stories, and would also explain some of the UFO consiracy oddities of Egyptian monuments, which were presumably added by the Israelites for some reason or other.

The Angels, Devils and Squid trope truly describes reality.

John was freaked out when Jesus appeared in Revelation, but not for the obvious reasons...

"In his right hand he held seven stars, and out of his mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. ... Then he placed his right hand on me and said: "Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last." Revelation 1:16-17 (Bold by me)

How did Jesus say that with a sword sticking out of his mouth? Stick two fingers in your mouth and say "Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last". Go ahead.

• I'll take two shots at this. 1: He spat out or coughed up the sword until it was no longer in his mouth before speaking (i.e., the "never talk with your mouth full" doctrine of the Perfect Son). 2: Telepathy.

All gods and goddesses of all religions exist.

Even the ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek/Roman gods. All the gods of all religions are related— cousins, siblings, who knows— and co-run the world. After a while, the Greek/Roman gods and Egyptian gods decided to retire, handing the job over to their younger fellow gods— God Himself among them.

The "apocalypse"/"end of Days"/etc. was the early/middle 20th Century

Many of the prophet books describing the Babylonian period seem to describe the idea of the exiles coming back, the Kingdom being reestablished, etc. This obviously didn't work out exactly as expected, with the Temple getting rebuilt, the various priests and other exiles coming back, but under the control of larger empires, and some other minor details not quite fitting.

In this WMG, a similar thing occurs with the later apocalyptic type expectations. There were large world wars, often involving ideological battles that more resemble good vs. evil type fighting more than other types of wars, Israel got founded again, our world reaching a One World Order state, etc. However, there were no resurrections, nothing else mystical happening, no Kingship, and just like the first sety of prophecies, a new series of conflicts and issues appeared after the events took place.

• Concerning Clarke's Third Law, anything magical and eldritch in the Apocalypse is just how the prophets saw modern technology.

Creationism is true in some form.

Because if God is omnipotent, he can create the world however the hell he wants to create it.

The Bible doesn't really exist.

...but I don't honestly know how that works out. I'm just putting it out there because all the more elaborate theories have been taken.

• If I may: There is no "Bible". Whenever you think you are looking at or reading one, what your eyes actually see but your inner Weirdness Censor will steadfastly refuse to acknowledge is always the same cleverly disguised Tome of Eldritch Lore. Oh, for the time being we are safe enough. But it may come to pass in years ahead that every human being will find him- or herself in possession of a so-called "Bible", whether they believe its purported message or not; in fact, the seemingly ever-increasing spread of information across the globe would seem to all but guarantee it. And then, when the stars align just right, it may next occur that we will all feel an inexplicable urge to turn to our "Bibles" at the same time. Then, and only then, will the truth be revealed to everyone so we can all Go Mad from the Revelation together...

Many churches denies the existence of the Desposyni (siblings of Jesus) to protect their descendants.

The bible has stated in Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55-56 that Jesus had blood siblings but the many churches deny their existence. The truth is that they forced themselves to go against the scriptures and even created the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity to hide the descendants. This was done so that bloodline of Jesus would live on.

The planet Venus is Satan/Hell.

Venus is the Morning Star, which is what Satan was described as. Much like Venus, Satan(with a few exceptions) is deceptively beautiful. Being an angel, Satan's true form would be pretty damn weird, so he could easily be one big planet. The fact that Venus gets the closest to us represents his corruptive nature. Hell is also Venus-the planet has been compared to Hell, and it's the biggest Death World in the Solar System. Venus' opposite orbit is symbolic of Satan being against the order God has established.

The other planets are angels and demons respectively. Their alignments?

• Mercury is a demon, because it's a barren wasteland. Likely the messenger of Satan.
• Mars could be a demon or angel. Mars is the most likely category for life elsewhere in our solar system, meaning it has a connection to God. However its barren nature and the fact it no longer possesses oceans may refer to it going through a Heel–Face Turn.
  • Its two moons are in fact the home of the Horseman of War. This is because Phobos and Deimos were children of Ares, god of war.
• Jupiter is The Son. It protects us from asteroids by absorbing the blow(much like how its human form died for our sins), and posseses Io and Europa(Io is the most active object in our solar system, and Europa has a giant ocean beneath its ice-covered surface.) And its the King of the Planets.
• Saturn is also an angel. After all, it posseses Titan and Enceladus(Titan is very much like a primeval Earth, and Enceladus has geyesers of water).
• Uranus and Neptune are unclear. Uranus is an obscure angel/demon, due to it being near-impossible to see with the naked eye. Neptune isn't an angel or demon at all, but an Elder God.
• And is Pluto supposed to be just a big floating rock?

One person can repent for the sin of suicide, and maybe already has:

Judas, assuming he is the Wandering Jew.

Jesus is God's attempt at understanding the human viewpoint.

God was very omninescent but because of his godly nature, had very little chance of understanding humans, so he decided to be born as Jesus to understand how humans truly lived and learned.

Why Satan fell.

In the beginning, YHWH created the Heavens and the Earth. The serpent, who was not Satan, decided to tempt Adam and Eve. The result was knowledge, yet with knowledge came sin. At first, YHWH decided to take it upon Himself to deal with this. Prior to Satan, he used angels to take care of this. But the angels "knew" the humans, which led us to the story of Noah's Ark. So YHWH started again, creating a judge of humanity: Lucifer/Satan/the Accuser. At first, it was good. However, over the centuries, Satan became tired of the sin of humanity. He had gained a solid Humans Are Bastards mentality.

The Book of Job shows this. It was Satan's desperate attempt to show that humans were sycophants to YHWH, however Job still retained faith. Angered by this, Satan would continue to try and prove his philosophy. Eventually YHWH came to the realisation that, because of His punishments, He and Satan were not so different. Thus, Satan fell. To ensure something like Satan could never happen again, God made it his mission to understand humanity: hence Jesus.

Being a Knight Templar, Satan felt that something was wrong with YHWH's judgement. It is for this reason that he tempted Jesus himself. It didn't work out. In order to be more distant from Satan, YHWH gave us fake origins: that he was the serpent. This would've been a total Ironic Hell for Satan. By the point of Revelations, Satan has become a Misanthrope Supreme: controlling and condemning humanity to a Fate Worse than Death because, frankly, he thinks we deserve it.

The Bible Is a Cook Book

In the song Silent Night, Jesus is referred to as "Tender and Mild". During the Last Supper Jesus asks them to eat him. To this day we eat him.

• It's a cookbook! IT'S A COOKBOOK!

God values free will above life

It is the only humanly conceivable way He could be omnibenevolent and omnipotent.He has said before that we will ressurect at the end of days,therefore we are eternal and death is not real.He used natural disasters because a complex universe could not exist without them(note1:they are all based on physic laws that do other useful,often vital things as well,note2:if they did not happen,human would eventually discover that they should happen,thus proving to himself that God exists,since he does not let them happen,and doing that would be like forcing people to follow him,thus denying him the free will of following him or not note3:making a less complex world would give to humen less space for exploration,therefore denying him his pontential).Evil is created as a sidefect of free will.God could not create it,but using logic laws,good should have an oposite,therefore not creating it would take free will away from humans.God does miracles only in front of believers,or people who asked sincerely and without evil intentions His help ,because since they know He exists andwant Him to help,it does not bypass their free will.Miracles diminished because less people did that(fanatics and people who do not understand the bible's teatchings do not really count as believers.You have to understand some things,not only believe)

To get into Heaven, you first have to go to Room 101.

Everyone who goes to Heaven fully loves God, right?

Satan's actual name.

As you may know, Satan isn't actually a name but rather a rank in Jewish beliefs. Given this, who might the Satan we're familiar too actually be?

• Samael. According to some sources, he tempted Eve, and is seen as a tempter/accuser by Talmudic traditions.
• Jubilees states his true name is Mastema but Ethiopia is the only place where the mainstream Jew and Christians think this is canon.
• Sataniel or Satariel in the book of Enoch. Enoch goes on to state there are multiple satans.
• Belial in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• Multiple different beings could have held the title of Satan.

Everyone in Heaven is high on drugs.

Hence why it's paradise up there. You can't make a perfect paradise without first getting rid of the flaws. Since free will causes both good and evil to exist, God decided to find a way that lets someone lack "evil" and still have free will: dope them up on a mystical drug keeping them complacent and in bliss. The Tree of Knowledge is the antidote, in case the trip went bad. Hell is a bad trip.

Angels are the deceased souls of earlier races God created in other universes or on other planets, and the deceased souls of humans will be angels for God for future races that he creates.

It would fit with a lot of things.

• It'd explain the widespread misconception that angels are the deceased souls of humans - the misconception would be at least half correct.
• It'd explain where angels came from.
• God being timeless does not contradict the existence of previous creations or later creations.
• It'd help resolve the issue of "so what do we actually do once we're in Heaven with God".
• Why would a perfect being want a finite, permanently unchanging number of companions? The claim that there is such a finite number is bizarre. The idea that it'll continue expanding indefinitely makes more sense.
• The descriptions of the angels are very bizarre. Starfish Aliens, anyone?
• On that note, alien visitors to Earth would be members of one of those previous races who got on a Generation Ship to escape their apocalypse/judgement.

Demons were behind the Arrest and Crucifixion of Jesus

During the trial that Jesus faced before his inevitable execution, Satan sends demons to take possession of nearly all the populous there. When Pilate asks which one that they wanted, they chose Barabbas. This would explain why the crowd that welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday suddenly turned on them. It also gives an explanation to why they chose a convicted murder rather than Christ, because demons spoke through the people like a ventriloquist dummy. Demons also took possession of the Romans that were crucifying Jesus, and through them, they gave him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown by flagging, and then crucifying them. This would give the answer to why Jesus told His Father to forgive them for they didn't know what they were doing. When the crowd started to realize that He truly was God's Son, the demons left the bodies seemingly victorious.

The Devil isn't just the personification of evil, but the personification of God's Evil.

After getting a human perspective on good and evil via Jesus, God came to believe that even He was not without sin. Re-evaluating His self-opinion, God expelled all that He considered evil from himself. Said evil eventually found a vessel on the fallen angel Lucifer/Satan/whatever. The reason why God allows the Devil to exist is because He's trying to set an example for humanity by fighting His own evil. The reason why the Devil has such great power and is considered God's Arch-Enemy is because he's also a half of God.

The Bible is missing a page from the beginning.

To my darling Candy. All characters portrayed within this book are fictitous and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

The Tanakh is just an extension of an older Semitic religion and the New Testament is an extension of the Tanakh.

It is possible El (god) and Elyon (highest god) are not the same thing as Canaanites listed them separately. Likely Elyon (a name of God in the Bible) appointed El and Athirat/Asherah over Beirut (the first city) to help people. El's three sons —Baal-Hadad, Yam, and Mot— regularly competed to be "king of the gods" and were known trouble makers, unjust gods (Psalm 82). Secondly, the Israelis in Exodus and Kings invoked YHWH's wrath by making calf idols but in Canaanite myth the calf of El. Atik, was another trouble maker slain by the goddess of war Anat (who was known for accidental murder and droughts).

YHWH, fed up with the antics of its siblings, decided to serve the Israelis in place of Atik and eventually the entire world after all other gods had been eliminated. YHWH got more powerful as it took on attributes of other gods it defeated until it was seemingly omnipotent. The only thing standing in the way of absolute victory was Elyon, whose name YHWH had already taken, but when it took on Elyon for real it found itself just as powerless as Anat and Baal-Hadad were when they did. Even after expanding to the point of being present everywhere and everything (Jeremiah 23) YHWH still could not comprehend Elyon who transcends all creation. Elyon then pointed out to YHWH that despite its efforts to be the perfect god it still could not make Israelis or anyone else live up to its standards and its angels were just as bad as the old gods. Remorseful, YHWH gave itself up to Elyon completely and Elyon had it atone for its mistakes by living a human life, promoting brotherly love and suffering a brutal death.

The word YWHW has several possible meanings, one of which is "self existent". Jesus going from Aramaic to Hebrew can be rendered, Yahushua, roughly "self existent savior". YHWH became one with Elyon as it was before Elyon created anything. Elyon was always self existent and YHWH was only a part of Elyon allowed to temporarily exist separately to show that nothing is perfect without fully knowing and being him, even a part of himself. Through YHWH and Mary, Yahushua/Yehoshua became Elyon's incarnate son. This is why the demon in Mark called Jesus "Son of The Most High!" and expected destruction, YHWH's previous MO but now having known the Most High father Yahushua cared more for salvation than destruction (Luke 9). Those who believe in the self existent savior will find a better life than this world the unjust gods (and YHWH) ruined and those that do not will die (the price of sin). None who disbelieve in the son of The Most High will be able to escape Abbadon, Sheol or the outer darkness where they end up according to Elyon's judgment and shall dwell there forever. But Elyon does not forget anything even if it goes to the place of death or the place of destruction destruction (Proverbs 15:11). Elyon will swallow up death (Isaiah 25) and those in death will find new life with with the Father and his son after they have paid their sin debt. That which is destroyed will be remade and light will come to the darkness, that is the world to come.

Balaam Ben Beor, son of the opening swallower of people, was prevented by Elyon cursing Israel and then his enemies were allowed to kill him in battle since he was going to accept a bribe from people rebelling against YHWH. But keep in mind it is Elyon which Balaam laments to and the meaning of his name is especially important. Paul also restates how death will be swallowed in 1 Corinthians 15. The repeated imagery is a call back to the Semitic god of death Mot who killed things by swallowing them, often whole. The swallowing is not just salvation from death, it is making an example of Mot who was possibly the most unjust god of all. The method of resurrection prior to this ultimate end of death is also recognition to the Semite religion. The Elohim were not immortal in the truest since but escaped death through resurrection. They could even add mortals to their ranks this way, giving them life in new bodies. Astarte created the god Eshmun this way against his will and many gods offered this to the hero Aqhat who died for his refusal. Aqhat's death could be what inspired YHWH to take down the Elohim in the first place, Jesus offering it again is coming full circle. It is optional this time and free of the lustful motivations that caused the whole mess.

Semitic religions are often described as "Abrahamic", Jews claiming authority from a covenant with Isaac, Muslim Arabs with Ishmael but Psalm 110 talks about Melchizedek, who in Genesis was the High Priest of El Elyon. Abraham gave tithe to this man. The law of Moses, the pact with Isaac, Abraham's blessing, not only were they inferior to an older religion of Elyon but the Bible admits it. That is why the book of Jonah is near the end of the Tanakh despite happening before many preceding books. It is to remind readers that no Semites or people are ultimately more important to The Most High than another.

The purpose of Abraham's blessing was to spread it throughout the entire world through his descendents. This is why Hebrews gives Jesus authority in the priesthood of Melchizedek. He is technically a descendent of Abraham and by paying for all sin with his death to resurrection YHWH was keeping his promise to bless the whole world through Abraham's descendents but in truth Abraham's descendents violated that pact, broke it. But the pact of Elyon will never be broken. This is why YHWH is inferior to Elyon despite being part of Elyon, the son did not know the entirety of the father (Matthew 24:36).

The Bible is the story of Yahweh's journey From Nobody to Nightmare (Good version or not)

In the beginning, the gods came the Heavens and the Earth, and all the animals that lived upon it, including man already formed. The gods, after some strife, divided the earth up amongst themselves,creating different pantheons in different parts of the globe. The chief of the gods who took the Levant was Elyon, the most high, and King of the Pantheon, he was the one that spoke to Adam and Eve in the garden, and the one that cast them out after they ate the forbidden fruit. Yahweh was simply a god of war and battle, one of the more minor gods of the pantheon.

Elyon was the god that spoke to Abraham and told him to go to Canaan, but Yahweh was the one that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, as well as the one responsible for most of the warlike acts in Genesis. Eventually, after or near the end of the book of Genesis, Yahweh decided he wanted the worship his fellow gods received, and betrayed them, using his status as a warrior god to kill them all, and take their worshippers.

Eventually, the Hebrews were taken into captivity in Egypt, and Yahweh, grown powerful from the killing of the rest of his pantheon, was the one who fought and humbled the Egyptian Pantheon, freeing the Jews and leading them back into Israel. He then ran into some new competition, the Canaanite gods, Baal, Asherah, and others, he convinced the Israelites to wage war on these gods and their followers, in order to remove them as competition for worship and praise, weakening them enough so he could slay them as well. Eventually, after wiping out all the gods of the Canaanites and the Phillistines, (his defeat of Dagon is recorded in the Book of Numbers), Yahweh settled into the position of Israel's one god.

However, things did not end there, a few hundred years later, Yahweh was faced with a new threat, the gods of Babylon and Assyria. Try as he might, he could not defeat these mighty gods, and they used their followers to defeat his, taking the jews into captivity. After this, Yahweh adapted a different strategy, he told the Jews that the other gods did not even exist, and that besides he, there were no gods at all. So, the Jews became strict Monotheists, and Yahweh, with all Jewish worship now dedicated solely to him, grew even more powerful.

But this was just step one of his plan, 600 years after his people were freed from Babylon, Yahweh completed his plan to expand his worship beyond the Levant, and unite all the world under him. Yahweh sent his son down to earth in the form of a man, who preached obedience to Yahweh as the one god, and promised a fiery torment for all eternity to those who did not, while eternal bliss would be given to the faithful. These teachings spread like a wildfire, and slowly the worshippers of other gods came into Yahweh's fold. The other gods of earth were weakened, so much that they could be easily driven from the earth, or killed. The rest of the Pagans were dealt with 600 years later, when he guided a Meccan Merchant to conquer the Middle East, and wipe out the last vestiges of Polytheism therein.

Finally, with almost all competitors eradicated or driven off, Yahweh has nearly succeeded in taking all the world's worship for himseld.With the exception of the east, and some dissenters here and there, Almost all the world worships him under the Star, the Cross, or the Crescent.

He, who was once just the humble god of war.

Satan will make a Heel–Face Turn

Because what could better show the power of redemption than for the Fallen Angel to repent and redeem himself? And we'd get the greatest Mass "Oh, Crap!" in history when the Antichrist's army realizes that Hell has switched sides.

• The Bible says that angels are unable to redeem themselves, however.
  • Why? Angels have free will(which is why they can fall in the first place), so unless God is showing favouritism to the human race, it should be possible.

Satan will leave the universe, if he hasn't done it already.

Assuming God hasn't abandoned the whole Revelations plot, Satan has had centuries to both wander the Earth and look up the prophecy. With so much time left to cool off, Satan looked upon Revelations and realised that if he continued his war on God he would lose. Badly. This brought him to the conclusion that trying to overthrow God is a bad idea, but at the same time he can't bear to be under God's thumb. Solution? Leave God behind, and escape to another universe. Even if there isn't one that God doesn't control, Satan could still try and make brownie points with Him so that he could be left alone(likely by redeeming himself), and in return he'll leave everyone else alone. Granted, God probably wants Satan back, but due to the "no messing with free will" law even He couldn't convince Satan to be an angel once more.

One of the commandments that was broken in the story of Exodus would've solved everything.

Said commandment was essentially "Don't be a dick, humanity." The Commandments not dealing with worshipping God were a failed attempt to replace/translate this commandment.

Religion promotes the idea that The Complainer Is Always Wrong.

It's just no secret how many believers have made non-believers to accept God in their lives and will try to convert more along the way. Instead of the complainer being always wrong, but the complainer will always burn.

Satan is the victim of massive Flanderization.

Look back at the Old Testament-whether he was a nice guy or not is debatable, but Satan functioned as God's servant, who judged people to see if they were evil/disloyal. Come New Testament, and he's turned into The Corrupter instead of a Secret Test of Character. By Revelation he's been turn into a direct antagonist and the Big Bad of the The Bible (and the universe to most believers). Fanon goes further, turning him into a Dark Is Evil Card-Carrying Villain and ironically transforming him into a nigh-unstoppable opposite and equal of God, even though he'd be swatted like a fly in the conflict. Why do this? As they moved on from Early-Installment Weirdness and focused more on God being a force of pure, unrelenting good, they felt the accuser role wasn't working(after all, what does God need with a Secret Test of Character if He's doing so all the time?) and that an actual antagonist was needed. Satan already had a record of tempting humans, so they took the Bad job, bad people route. The Serpent was added in because it was already responsible for humanity's fall, and Lucifer because he was already antagonising God. Thus, the current Satan is a flanderized Composite Character of the original accuser, the prideful Lucifer and the corruptor Serpent.

Satan is an Anti-Villain.

A variant of a Well-Intentioned Extremist and Punch-Clock Villain. For the former, he tries to do whatever he can to free humanity from God's twisted authority as he had tried doing in the Garden of Eden when tricking Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. For the latter, it turns out that he serves as God's ultimate tool of evil as proven in the Book of Job, although both God and Satan are in bad terms. Of course, he doesn't like this job and still wanted humanity to embrace their nature.

The Virgin Mary was attractive.

Think about it: with the possible exception of Jezebel and whatever Lucifer's human form is, Beauty Equals Goodness in The Bible. The Virgin Mary is regarded as free of sin. Thus, its likely that she was a mom.

Christians are Principles Zealots.

The best way that they show how dedicated and loyal to God is by reciting various scriptures and do things that non-believers are unable to comprehend, which God commands anyways. Once you think about it, it's one of the reasons why many Bible verses are widely popular.

Archangel Michael is the angelic equivalent/prototype of Jesus.

Let's look at the facts: he cast out Lucifer himself. His name means "He who Is Like God." He's the greatest of the angels, and usually second to God Himself(Metatron is arguably higher than Michael, though he's arguably just A Form You Are Comfortable With of God). He is also regarded as the first of God's creations, so could be considered the son of God(though not technically because Micheal's an angel, so Jesus still fits the "only begotten son" role). Michael is the original model for "God the Son" to YHWH's "God the Father". Lucifer was a back-up(hence why he's called "the most beautiful angel"), which worked perfectly.

The story of Adam and Eve is one big sex metaphor.

• Eve was made from Adam's rib bone. He was basically making a mate like himself.
• The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil represents knowledge about sexuality. Note that while God created Eve to be Adam's partner, he never said anything about being his "partner".
• Adam and Eve were shameless in their nakedness because they weren't sexually active yet, and didn't get the difference. The main taboo with nudity is the idea that its sexual, hence why they covered their nakedness.
• God is the strict parent who doesn't want his kids finding out about sex. Banishing them is the equivalent of kicking out your kids because they're doing it under your roof.
• Eve was tempted first because females mature faster than males.
• The being that tempted Eve into eating the fruit was a serpent or snake, aka a fertility symbol. Eating the fruit was the equivalent of losing one's virginity.
• And of course, the Sex Is Evil morality of Christianity in general.

The Book of Revelation is an Esoteric Happy Ending.

It shouldn't be that difficult to realize this. In the end, the good people (translation: those who have accepted God in their lives) will go to heaven, while the wicked (translation: those who did NOT accept or outright reject God) will burn in The Lake of Fire forever. That means that Christians will never get see their loved ones again in heaven because they didn't accept God as their savior. But who cares? It's all about what God wants, and they deserved to be sent down into that fiery torture chamber along with their buddy Satan.

The Tree of Knowledge made Mankind a " demi-God" and therefore immune to God's omnipotence.

If we think of the Tree of Life and Tree of Knowledge as representing half of God power. Yahweh possesses the Tree of Life, so do the Angels, but they don't have free will; even Satan himself was originally just a Punch-Clock Villain prosecutor acting according to the Word of God (that was caricatured into The Anti-God thanks to Memetic Mutation). So when Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge, it gave him one-half God power, that is knowledge, for example knowledge of how to Screw Destiny, and therefore free will. In other words, we have become like the Gods now. This explains why Yahweh can't simply use his omnipotence to brainwash everyone, and instead tries to break Man's will through indirect disasters and punishments; he can't, and is afraid that if Mankind uses science to eat from the Tree of Life (or even invent their own), he will become basically another God to rival Yahweh. We can't punch out God, but we can screw with his rules, and that's why Revelations ain't happening.

• Perhaps YHWH allowed this to happen. Think about it: if God wanted no free will, He wouldn't make the Tree of Knowledge with tasty fruit. Humanity able to defy God is actually an experiment to see if they follow Him on their own accord. Why does He want this besides tradition?: He has said that He is a jealous God, which is why He gets pissed at other deities being worshipped. He wants us all to love Him, but if we are conditioned to it isn't love. Worshipping Him is the equivalent of God going "See?! I told you they loved me, nyeh nyeh nyeh!"

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is full of Blue-and-Orange Morality.

After Adam and Eve ate from the fruit, they have the knowledge of what is good and evil, but once you think about it, good and evil are seemingly twisted and contradictory and it's no wonder that morality in general has become extremely debatable throughout many centuries. In fact, this explains how God behaves towards his creation from time to time. Here are some examples:

• Goodness is mean and harsh while evil is pleasant and nice although it's very deceiving.
• Goodness is boring while evil is exciting.
• Goodness is unattractive while evil is beautiful.
• Goodness is difficult to do while Evil Is Easy and it feels good, even though it will eventually become an unpleasant fate.
• Goodness is weaker while evil isn't.
• Goodness is dark and scary while evil is light and bright.
• Goodness is rather dumb while evil is intelligent.
• Goodness tastes bad while evil doesn't.
• Pain and suffering is good while pleasure and amusement is bad.

Jesus is a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing.

He appears to be the loving and forgiving messiah, but as soon as you get close to it, He said that he isn't just going to bring peace but a sword (in other words: division in the family). He accuses everyone to be His enemy even though they don't act like they're against Him. He lost His temper when He saw the merchants in the church, thus trying to whip them too without mercy. He even threatens to send people to Hell because they don't believe Him, especially when He said that He will come back soon, which won't be a pleasant sight to see. For the miracles He performed, He didn't do this to please anyone, but it's just a way to sooth His own ego (yep, He's secretly a narcissist) and to lure people to His side. And for someone who forgives all sins, He actually had the audacity to announce the unforgivable sin. All of these things makes a lot sense considering that He's the human form of God.

The Bible is full of bizarre aesops.

Let's start, shall we?

• Fall of Man:
  • Humans are born evil and disgusting creatures who deserve to suffer all because the first man and woman ate from a fruit a talking snake told them to eat. Bonus points if the creator was (whether or not) aware of said talking snake or even allowed it to deceive them.
  • It doesn't matter if you have no knowledge of morality and if the talking snake tricked you, it's your own damned fault for bringing evil in the world and you deserve the consequences!
• The Tower of Babel: Don't create a tower to reach to heaven or God will confuse you and everyone's languages.
• Story of Abraham:
  • Don't look back at a destroyed city or you will turn into a pillar of salt.
  • If you want to prove your faithfulness to God, kill your own son, which He'll later tell you not to.
• Story of Moses:
  • To convince someone to free the slaves, you must harden his heart, and then send in ten plagues, one of them including killing children.
  • Sacrificing your children is okay if God commands it.
  • Never kill anyone unless God tells you to do it.
  • Children will be punished for the sins of their ancestors.
  • Disobedient children deserve to be stoned to death.
  • Slavery is okay as long as you treat the slave as an equal.
    • Whoever beats a slave to death will be punished. However, whoever beats a slave, and the slave survives a day or two, then it's okay.
  • If you complain, God will viciously kill you.
• If a group of young men mock your bald head, summon 2 bears to kill them.
• The Story of Job:
  • If God is screwing around your life, it's only just to test your faith in Him because He accepted a bet against Satan, whom He allowed to ruin your life.
  • Who cares about what happened to your previous children and wife? God will give you better ones.
  • You want to know why God is putting you through so much suffering? Because God is beyond what tiny insignificant humans can understand, and your problems are completely unimportant to the grand scheme of things. So you have no right to ask God questions or even question His perfect authority, so shut up and deal with it!
  • Praise God even if He kills your entire family and inflicts suffering upon you.
• Beating your child with a rod is a sign of parental love; it will also make him/her a better person when s/he becomes an adult.
• The Book of Jonah: Do what God says or you will get swallowed up by a whale.
• The Story of Jesus:
  • The best way to bring your Son to the world is by impregnating a random woman He can be born of.
  • If you love God more than your family and friends, then you are His disciple.
  • If you want to be a disciple for Christ, you must give up all of your possessions and abandon your family.
  • If you're not for God, then you're against Him.
  • Lusting at a woman makes you an adulterer. Also, hating someone makes you a murderer.
  • Treat your enemies nicely, even to the point of letting them attack you or get away with your belongings.
  • Getting antagonized for your belief in Christ is worthy of high rewards.
  • If you love your life, you will lose it, but if you lose your life for Him, you will save it.
  • Forgive everyone or else God won't forgive you (and will send you to hell).
  • To redeem humanity, you must send your own Son (or yourself) to be tortured and killed.
  • What makes you a truly good person worthy of heaven is believing that a deity sent His Son to be killed for your sins. So whether you've done good deeds like helping others and being nice to everyone or bad deeds like killing millions of people and being rude to everyone, you're still evil in God's eyes and you deserve to burn in hell forever!
• The best way to solve your problems in life is by daily praying and worshiping a powerful deity who caused said problems in the first place.
• Salvation is by accepting that a deity wants to save you from Himself (paraphrased as if you reject Him, He will send you to Hell where you will be tortured forever).
• Gibberish speaking is proof that God's spirit is within you.
• Thinking for yourself is evil.
• Breaking one of God's laws means you've broken all of them.
• Suffering is good.
• An afterlife where you will be infinitely tortured by fire for your finite transgressions is a just and fitting punishment.

Hell is a form of Cruel Mercy.

Just think about it. God gives us a choice to either accept Him or reject Him. If we accept Him, then we would have to refrain from enjoying pleasure, following God's laws, and go through all the trials and tribulations in order to live in paradise with Him. If we reject Him, however, then He will let us enjoy the temporary pleasures of sin, only for Him to take our lives away and sends us to the Lake of Fire for eternity. It also makes sense due to the fact God is loving, merciful, and forgiving, and sending non-believers to Hell isn't really a punishment, it's more of His own bizarre and twisted way of rewarding us and His symbolic form of saying "I forgive you."

Murder and suicide is a way of hurting God's ego.

The reason why murdering others and suicide are grievous sins against God is because it ruins His purpose of being the only one who takes away lives since He knows everyone's end from their beginning (Hey, He's God after all and He does whatever pleases Him). Because of all of the killings and suicides in today's ages, it's obvious that God's ego is battered one times too many, which is no wonder that Judgement Day is coming soon. It doesn't help that He's a Blood Knight.

All of the WMG entries of this page will obviously be Jossed.

Because no one is smarter than God. And sadly, those who written these entries will most likely face His wrath when Judgement Day comes.

• Bring it, big man.
• God has better things to do than screw around with tropers - they're already in Hell.

Bishop Usher's dating is correct, but he made a logical error

The 6000 year dating is based on the genealogy in Genesis. But said genealogy only starts counting after Adam is kicked out of Eden. Therefore, Adam and Eve spent an undefined amount of time in Eden.

Heaven and Hell are creations of the human psychology.

No, not Atheism. Rather, the afterlife is pretty mundane. However, the mind is its own place, can make a Heaven out of Hell, or a Hell out of Heaven. Heaven and Hell are simply perspectives created by the human soul after death, where the entire memories and record of your life are played back onto you (which explains near-death experiences being recalled memories). It is not God who will judge you, but rather you yourself, as you watch your own life.

If you made a depressing tragic life full of regrets and unwanted memories, then the replay of these memories would Mind Rape you to Absolute Despair Event Horizon, and you would become a Pessimist with low self-esteem. If you are a Pessimist, then you would expect the worst out of everything, and if you expect the worst out of everything, then you would conclude that you are in an inescapable Hell and therefore succumb to Absolute Despair. Your pessimism then projects an Absolute Terror Field that isolates yourself from the hope and light of God for all of eternity. God isn't an Evil Complete Monster who punishes you for being depressed, but rather, you distance yourself from the hope and light of God, Heaven, and everybody by isolating yourself in an Absolute Terror Field where your own depression torments your mind for eternity. This explains why suicide is the "Unforgivable Sin" and condemns you to "Hell"; a depressed, tormented mind in Absolute Despair is already a Hell in itself. By committing suicide rather than trying to find resolution, you affirm that your life ends in a complete Tragedy, and give up any of your own hopes and opportunities to experience happiness.

God is always ready to offer therapeutic advice and forgive his Prodigal Sons, but ultimately, God prevents himself from interfering with other people's free will, and those who are trapped in their A.T. Fields of despair are the only ones who can free themselves from their prison. Heaven is nothing more than Nirvana/Contentment, the satisfaction that you did good in life and made yourself and others happy.

• So, because I suffer from a neurotransmitter imbalance causing clinical depression irregardless of actual success or quality of life, I'm doomed to hell?
  • And Antidepressants are the keys to Heaven.

Canonically, the seraphim are the highest class of angel.

Think about it: whenever God shows himself or something carries His presence, He usually appears as either some sort of fire(the burning bush, anyone?), some extremely bright light (Revelations!Jesus) or a source of power so great it strikes people dead (The Ark of the Covenant). The seraphim are so fiery and bright they need to use their wings to cover themselves so that you don't die in their presence, which some theologians say is a result of understanding The Almighty. Given the similarities, it would be fitting that they're the angels second only to YHVH Himself.

Lucifer was a former seraphim

His name means "Light-bearer" and is the Angel who represents Enlightenment, and also second only to YHWH Himself before he fell. According to the above, such beings of light who are second only to YHWH Himself are called the seraphim.

• This would go to explain the pride and fall: you'd get a swell head from being almost as powerful as God, and get tired with shouting Holy! Holy! forever. This also makes Archangel Michael even more of a badass.

Many of evil or cruel people in the world are secretly controlled by God.

Whether it's those kids or teenagers who pick on you in school, the mean ol' boss who just wants an excuse to fire you much to the delight of the smarmy co-workers, a person who has evaded his punishment for stealing a car, a criminal who kills innocents, or a guy who insulted you in a Youtube comment section just for asking an obvious question, all of those people happen to be unknowingly controlled by God. After all, God does control both good and evil and uses evil people as a way to bring forth a good in the one who is mistreated. To look at it even further, since Humans Are Flawed, and if we are at our very worst, maybe we all just happen to be doing God a lot of favors.

Parenting is an allegory of God's dominion over humanity.

While it's obvious that God is our heavenly Father, it's a little more complex than that. Here's a list of facts where parenting and God's ruling are symbolic:

• Parents who adopt children is symbolic of a God accepting a person to their kingdom after the person converts.
• Parents punishing their children for bad behavior or bad decisions is akin to God sending curses to His people for their sins.
• Parents are adults who control children while God is an immortal who controls the mortals.
• Parents who disown their children is akin to God throwing people to Hell.
• Children who complain about the parents' authority symbolizes non-believers who complain about the justice of God.
• Parents who aren't always there to help their children is akin to God allowing humanity to fend with problems they are able to solve.
• Parents who want their children to follow the family business symbolizes God wanting humanity to serve in the ministry.
• Children don't understand why parents act the way they act towards them just as humanity can't comprehend God's moral standards.
• Parents telling children not to be influenced by other people is symbolic to God warning His followers not to associate those who are not a part of their religion.

The "you shall not lie with a man" line was an attempt to stamp out Jesus slash.

Due to knowing everything, God eventually knew how popular the Slash Fic genre would get. Since His son Jesus spent time primarily with male followers, traditionally abstained from women and is often painted not too dissimilar from a Bishonen, God was worried that people would get a bunch of homosexual undertones, leading to Jesus being a majorly popular figure in Slash Fic. The Almighty reasoned that the reputation of slash would lead people to care less about his message and more about him being a literal Love God. For that reason, God helped justify homophobia so people would lesson to Jesus' message. It's the same reason why Jesus is portrayed as uninterested in sex with women: God didn't want Jesus becoming the new Zeus in terms of reputation.

• It is obvious that this attempt backfired because the so-called Christian conservatives cared even less about Jesus' message and depicted him as the complete opposite: one who condemns anyone who "Loves thy Neighbour" into eternal torment. Gone Horribly Right does not even begin to describe this.

Satan is a Designated Villain.

The Bible has a lot of things to paint Satan as the ultimate evil being whose heinous crime was his Acquired Situational Narcissism. After that, it appears that that was the last he was seen until in Genesis when he appeared as a serpent who actually got Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, which God told them not to. Then in Job, God agreed to make a bet with Satan to torture Job for his faith and then label him as a bad guy for making Job turn against God. Then in the New Testament, it appears that Satan will turn into a utter monster, although this is only because he is tired of God thwarting his plans to give humanity a chance to live out their dreams instead of being continuously under the strict authority of God. This also doesn't help matters that God hated Satan not because he became prideful, but it's because Satan had damaged God's pride. God hates it when His creation do what they want instead of what He wants.

An alternative to the above: Satan designated himself the villain.

In reality, Satan and Yahweh are still working together. Satan is basically Lelouch Lamperouge; focusing all of mankind's hatred and flaws unto himself in order to approve him. While God had His own plan, Satan had a better idea. Having Time Dissonance, they already knew that things would go bad, and because God thought ensuring they never change would defeat the point didn't have much problem with what Satan would do:

• Lucifer's fall was a stage act, and that's assuming they're even the same guy. Either the two are different entities and Satan pretended to be his most infamous brother to make it seem believable, or they are the same guy and he's a brilliant villain actor.
• If Satan is considered to be the Serpent, that's for believability. Given enough time, humanity would eventually choose to disobey God and eat the Fruit of Knowledge. As such, Satan knew that even if he did tempt them, in the long run nothing would change. As such, his conscious was cleared and spoke to Eve
• Trying to tempt Jesus was basically a PR stunt he worked for God. He'd pretend to want to turn Jesus to The Dark Side and people would be like "Look, Satan's trying to corrupt the Messiah! Clearly this is unequivocal proof that Jesus is the ultimate good and Satan is pure evil!"
• Revelations? The equivalent of a WWE tournament finale. Satan doesn't even care about being in Hell, because it was worth it to achieve his goals.

God and Satan are not so different.

They deal with the same mentality: Pride. It's how Satan was kicked out of heaven and it's how God allowed Michael Archangel to throw him to Hell because His pride was insulted. However, God's number of killings are way higher than Satan's.

Moses was tripping off God Smoke

He discovers a burning bush and suddenly he has the power of god? The freeing of the slaves probably didn't go down like he remembers. Moses was tripping so hard he did something so crazy and out of left field that the Egyptians could never had anticipated it.

Adam, Eve, and the serpent caused God's Face–Heel Turn.

The doctrine of Mortal Sin is inaccurate.

According to Catholics, willfully committing a sin with the full knowledge that it is sin will eventually lead you to eternal damnation just like blaspheming the Holy Spirit, which is commonly known as the unforgivable sin. However, this is all just an easy tool to scare people into strict obedience to God. Then, there's Hebrews 10:26-29 which deal with willingly committing a sin just after you accepted God. Yet, In fact, mortal sin dates back in the Old Testament where Saul disobeys God twice and when David committed adultery and had Uriah to be killed in the front lines of war. Yes, humanity isn't perfect and often willingly commit acts, but to give in to some vices whether as a Christian or non-Christian makes this concept totally out of proportion.

Satan is a Deconstruction of Break the Haughty.

Satan got very keen on wanting to be like God, but this led himself to be kicked out by one of his own brothers no less. After being sent to Hell, his pride was shattered, yet he doesn't want to acknowledge this fact. His lack of willingness to humble himself and repent to God had contributed his growing insanity and decides to hate everything and everyone around him. Even if he did repent, it would've been too late for him.

The Mark of Cain is blood on his hands.

God said that Cain would be given a mark that would both show his crime and warn others. When people see blood staining his hands, they will know he would have to be a murderer and anyone with blood-drenched hands would warn them Cain is not to be messed with. It's rather fitting in terms of symbolism, physically showing how the weight of his murder will never be lifted

The Bible has a list of Idiot Ball moments.

Non-believers don't exist after death.

John 3:16 had Jesus say "For God loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life." Heaven, a place where you die is considered life, meaning this counts afterlives as well. Since you're tortured forever in Hell, you're technically given eternal life and as such if you want to take it at face value God just obliterates you after death. Which seems far more humane than torturing you for belief while still giving preference to believers. Talk in Revelation contradicting it? Well in Revelation God is obviously present, so it's less about sending athiests to Hell and more about sending maltheists to Hell, though that still remains under debate.

Folklore based WMG: Judas Iscariot is the Wandering Jew.

According to legend, the Wandering Jew was someone who insulted Jesus on his way to a cross. What would be a greater insult to Jesus than Judas selling him out for wealth? Yes, it says he killed himself, but that doesn't mean he came back anyway. The Wandering Jew curse could be considered an ironic punishment as well: as a follower he gets eternal life, just not the one he was hoping for.

The "fruit of knowledge" is the Hindi "soma". The Tanakh was written by Zoroaster as a way to foil his arch-nemesis, Guatama Buddha.

Zoroaster and Buddha are actually Shiva and Vishnu, respectively. They used to be gay lovers but had a falling-out, explaining a whole lot. Like the early Hebrews, the early Zoroastrians ascribed actual divinity to other gods, but instructed their followers not to worship them. Due to the particularly nasty effects of soma when consumed by humans, the "death" promised by Yahweh and the "godhood" promised by the serpent can be seen as a particularly nasty form of Exact Words...albeit, one that is quite compatible certain conceptions of divinity.

Because of this, Shiva had a Face–Heel Turn from the gods' usual shtick. His lover, Vishnu, did not, leading to the adversarial relationship between Ohrmazd/Yahweh and Ahriman/Satan in these new faiths, both of which were founded independently by Shiva in order to provide "corroborating evidence" that his ideal was the true one.

He was, on the other hand, not sufficiently removed from the ideals he sought to betray, making it easy for Vishnu, having since founded his own breakaway religion, to move in and "revise" the new faith according to his own ideals, resulting in the Trope Namer... tying the majority of all world religions together into a somewhat-literal Grey-and-Grey Morality, as all relevant faiths have a sort of "only one truth" attitude going on, but disagree significantly as to the nature of this truth:

Shiva favours authoritarianism in the guise of objectivism, rejecting "lies" while being somewhat arbitrary in declaring truth; Vishnu favours annihilationism in the guise of mercy, promising a return to the bliss of "cosmic oneness", ExactWords. Vishnu thinks Shiva is a dictator. Shiva thinks Vishnu is crazy. Neither are necessarily wrong in this regard.

Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism "versus" Christianity, Gnosticism, Buddhism is an historical example of Evil Versus Oblivion. Islam and Wicca are the result of particularly awkward GambitPileups. And of course, the other gods still exist, mind you... they're just having a little trouble getting a word in edge-wise, these days.

The Bible is Satan's greatest act of deception

The Bible portrays God as an active force, always interacting with prophets and followers. But nowadays, he hardly (if ever) does anything noticeable. Maybe God has never been that active. Maybe it wasn't God who did all those things. Maybe Satan has just been posing as God this whole time, and no one ever questioned it. Of course the devil would like us to think he's so easily beaten. He can lie to us, and we'd never know until it's too late. He can feed us false information, convince people to follow certain rules, all so he can ultimately drag them down to join him in the fiery pit. Truly, he is the lord of lies.

The Angel of the LORD in the Old Testament is Jesus!

Both accept worship, both are recognized as God by the people they show up to, and the Angel of the LORD is never around when Jesus is around. Since neither wears corrective lenses, we don't have to account for that! Seriously, as a Christian, I'd like better WMG's on this page. Anyone want to discuss why the demons reacted to Jesus the way they did? To make this really WMG, I'll posit that Jesus actually went back in time after His Ascension to do all the stuff that would require a physical body. This would explain why Jacob successfully wrestled with God. He was only using human level strentgh and not using any supernatural abilities. Other than when He gave Jacob a limp.

John the Apostle's visions were of an Alien Invasion intent on manipulating human culture to their advantage.

Lucifer is a Fallen Angel, Satan is The Anti-God.

The latter of whom being a primordial force of evil that has existed since the dawn of creation.

The Bible is false.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN.

Even if Satan made a Heel–Face Turn, God will send him to Hell anyways.

Putting the end of Revelation to account, this might be possible. This is because God has a massive grudge against Satan for becoming prideful and labels him as the ultimate source of evil and suffering in the world after he deceived Adam and Eve. It didn't matter if Satan tried to make things right. God still wants to fulfill His promise in Revelation in sending him to hell for all eternity.

Hell is the Void Between the Worlds.

It only makes sense for demons to dwell in such a place.

Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus are the same person.

Demons are a byproduct of God's creation.

Adam and Eve are Homo erectus.

This would explain why Homo erectus fossil sites have very little technology and religious or symbolic artifacts. This would represent the stage when people were still "innocent" like a little child. That species was fully human but not quite as advanced as Homo neanderthalensis/sapiens. After the fall, we soon became the later sister species clade. This also explains the part where in Genesis 1 God makes humans and tells them to spread across the world. In Genesis 2 it is expanded on where Adam and Eve are responsible for humanity's fall and they go out into the harsh world, but doesn't tell them exactly to populate the planet. Then, we are told Cain got a wife. It does not say if Adam and Eve talked to other people at the edge of the Garden or not....

Bad things happen to good people because God has face blindness

From the perspective of God, no bad thing has ever happened to a good person, and all reasonable prayers are promptly answered. It's just that God can't tell any human beings apart, so if you ask god to cure your cancer he'll cure somebody's cancer, but probably not yours. And the same goes for divine punishment, when you sin god tries to punish you appropriately and proportionally while you're on earth, but he fails, meaning that bad things just randomly happen to good people for reasons they have no way of knowing because someone else did something wrong. - And in his defense, it would be hard for us to keep 107 billion faces straight too. It was much easier when there were only two, and one of them had boobs.

That's why he eventually settled on universal salvation, saves the trouble of trying to correctly identify everyone while they're on earth. And also why Heaven has a doorman even though nobody should be able to get in unless God wants them to, Saint Peter's the one checking his face-book to make sure they're actually who they say they are.

Exodus is an allegory for a liberation movement

This theory hinges on knowledge of the prequel's characters, the sons of Jacob, who share the same names as the twelve tribes of Israel who we have a loose record of actually existing; it's possible that these characters are anthropomorphic representations of these tribes, we've seen this habit before with Canaan, Moab and Ammon. Before Exodus, Joseph and his brothers founds themselves in Egypt before their descendants became enslaved. My theory is, this represented the time where Egypt and the peoples around the area initially had commercial relations until the latter was annexed. Moses would become a leader that would unite these tribes to break free from Egyptian rule. It would explain why there was no evidence of a long trek from Egypt to Canaan, they didn't actually have to.Here's an interesting article about Egyptian occupation of Canaan.

Original Sin was made up by the early Christians to justify Jesus's sacrifice

• The only way his sacrifice would actually be needed is if everyone was already full of sin, otherwise he died for nothing. Judaism has no need for a concept of Original Sin since they don't believe the Messiah will die "for" anyone.

God was going to let Adam and Eve eat the Fruit of Knowledge later, their sin was actually eating it too early

And this isn't just some troper talking out of nowhere. Here is Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, a bishop from the 2nd-century A.D., writing: "God had power at the beginning to grant perfection to man; but as the latter was only recently created, he could not possibly have received it, or even if he had received it, could he have contained it, or containing it, could he have retained it." (Adv. Haer. 4.38.2). While he doesn't mention the Tree here, could it be that God was going to let them have knowledge of good and evil later? Could it be that their sin wasn't wanting knowledge, but actually being impatient?

Azrael or the Angel of Death is or was Cain.

Before the original sin death, at least in humans, didn't exist, so there wouldn't be a need for an angel of death. Some angels in extracanonical sources, like Metatron, were humans that became angels. The Mark of Cain meant to punish him was the role of the Angel of Death; the first murderer would be forced to relive death for everyone, his parents and whatever lover and children he has included. Basically he will have to know how Abel's loved ones will feel until Doomsday. Being the angel of Death would also force Cain to forever be wandering since he always has to go from place to place due to his job.

Demons are a race created by God.

And they're an entirely separate race from angels. The reason why they're evil is because they hated what God and his angels were doing and so they decided that they would oppose everything good and just. However, it isn't all black and white. Demons can still become good while angels can still become evil.