To: K-list
Recieved: 1999/10/02 10:23
Subject: Re: [K-list] Nature, Lucifer, and hell
From: Jon-Carl Lewis
On 1999/10/02 10:23, Jon-Carl Lewis posted thus to the K-list:
Greece had an eternal hell.
It was a one-shot, good or bad, up or down thing.
There was no cycle of life and death - at least not until Dionysus and Adonis (Eastern and foreign deities even to the Greeks).
I think that Christianity is mostly Greek, of a particular school of Greek thought at a particular time.
They didn't like things messy so they divided up the world: heaven hell, male female, good bad, earth spirit. It's all Greek thought -- which Paul knew very very well. He wasn't a Palestinian Jew at all, he was a Greek Jew, a Hellenized Jew.
And the Hellenic world was totally in love with dichotomies at the time.
No wonder they had such a struggle with the Eastern Church whose folks were more open to cycles of existence and the goodness of creation and the easy relationship between spirit and flesh.
I like the Greeks, but I hate them for this dichotomous legacy which has become the dominant paradigm of Western culture.
Of, course, the Greeks gave us Eros and Dionysus and Adonis / Tammuz also (in the West) so perhaps we could just go back and choose that thread instead.
Time for my nap.
Jon-Carl Lewis
*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********
On 10/2/1999 at 1:18 PM KungaJigmeATnospamaol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 10/2/99 9:46:24 AM Pacific Daylight Time, jclATnospamswcp.com
>writes:
>
><< Satan is a Christian deity. Islamic, too. He's an amalgam of some stouyff
>borrowed from the Hebrew tradition, the Greeks (who gave us Hell as we know
>it) and little old Loki from up north in Norselaw.
>
> Satan's about a Christian a God as you can get. >>
>
>Now this gets interesting. As a Buddhist I recognize "gods" as one of the
>realms of existence and, personally, am rather in agreement with what you
>say.
>
>>From inside the Christian mythos, as I understand it, Lucifer was created by
>the one deity. When he rebelled against that deity he became Satan, a
>corruption of the Arabic Shai-tan, meaning adversary.
>
>Being that Lucifer is considered, within the Christian mythos, an angel and a
>creation makes me place recognize him as more of a Deva than a god, perhaps
>somehow becoming an Asura (demigod) and thus "falling."
>
>The interesting question, to my mind, is: if Lucifer is a "Christian god"
>then what of Michael, Raphael, Gabriel, and the rest of the angelic host?
>Would they not then also be gods?
>
>As to the Greeks, I do not know when they handed us their hell, so to speak,
>but of the 1000+ hells of Tibetan Buddhism a few seem similar except, of
>course, that none are eternal!
>
>Sarva Mangalam!
>~James
Feel free to submit any questions you might have about what you read here to the Kundalini
mailing list moderators, and/or the author (if given). Specify if you would like your message forwarded to the list. Please subscribe to the K-list so you can read the responses.
All email addresses on this site have been spam proofed by the addition of ATnospam in place of the symbol.
All posts publicly archived with the permission of the people involved. Reproduction for anything other than personal use is prohibited by international copyright law. ©
This precious archive of experiential wisdom is made available thanks to sponsorship from Fire-Serpent.org.
URL: http://www.kundalini-gateway.org/klist/k1999b/k99b01922.html
|