Please note the forum and the phrasing of the question. If I had wanted to start a debate on Christian theology, I’d have gone to Great Debates. If I’d meant to start a thread mocking Christians, I’d be in the Pit (and also someone other than myself).
When answering, please share whatever you feel comfortable about what denomination you were raised in.
Thanks!
I was raised RCC.
Very little was ever said about Satan. I don’t think my parents believed in a Satan. They barely believed in Hell. My mother told me once that for people to be truly evil they had to be insane and once they were insane it wasn’t their fault. Hitler, for example, had to have been insane and therefore not responsible for his evil.
Not really much discussion of it otherwise.
I was taught that Lucifer was once the most majestic of God’s angels. At some point before the creation of the Heavens and the Earth, Lucifer began to fancy himself smarter and more powerful than God, and he spearheaded a mutiny against God with the help of some of his celestial cronies. They were soundly defeated and cast out of heaven. Lucifer became Satan; his partners in crime became known as demons. When Christ makes a comeback, Satan and all the demons will be cast into a lake of fire and destroyed forever.
That’s what I’ve always been told anyway. I have no idea where this story came from.
Lucifer was the most glorious of angels, and pride was his downfall. Raised a Catholic some decades ago, I didn’t get much on the “end days” stuff.
Same here - ELCA Lutheran, and we didn’t talk about Satan much, if at all.
The only explanation of Satan’s motives that I ever heard was in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and amounts mostly to a Latin quote that 'misery loves company".
Regards,
Shodan
Raised Methodist.
Nada. Zilch. Diddly.
I don’t think it was ever actively asserted that Satan is an actual entity. They were a bit squeamish about coming out and actually asserting much of anything of a supernatural character to be held to be real. Mostly that God is a genuine entity and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are divine teachings that reflect the will of God. They were a little nervous about the resurrection, the miracles attributed to Jesus, the virgin birth and star in the sky thingie, and so on. The big emphasis was on doing good works.
I always had the impression that some of the folks who attended “believed” in the same sense that the author of “Yes Virginia there is a Santa Claus” could be said to “believe” in Santa.
Anyway, not Satan / the Devil. Just didn’t get any air time at all.
I guess I should’ve mentioned that I attended a Baptist church, but my parents were always dragging us to those little storefront “churches” where people occasionally spoke in tongues or were otherwise “overwhelmed” by the Holy Spirit.
The existence of Satan and the ever-present threat he posed to Christians was a common thread in the lessons in these makeshift churches.
Raised in a large Southern Baptist church. A lot of vagueness about the details and no one except possible the seminary-trained pastor seemed to have a firm grasp of the theology. The focus was that Hell was real and that you need to Accept Christ as Your Personal Savior to avoid going there. Very little mention of the devil or Satan except in passing references to things being “the work of the devil.” A visiting revival evangelist might make rhetorical use of the phrase you must choose between serving God and serving Satan but didn’t elaborate much on what serving Satan meant—except that no one in the audience would think it a good thing.
Wasn’t really taught anything specific, except that God = Good, and Evil = Bad.
IMPO, things work out better (and cost less) when Good/Evil meet FTF. (If heavnly possible…)
TLTE: sorry for above…drinkin’ & postin’ :smack:
I was raised protestant (Evangelical Covenant, to be exact):
motives: wanting to spread the misery-maybe?
origins: Lucifer was an archangel who challenged and disobeyed God and was cast from heaven.
destiny: the final end result is to be bound and cast in a lake of fire and subject to everlasting torment for all eternity.
It’s hard to separate out what I was explicitly taught, versus what I picked up from popular culture (movies) or what I picked up from Christian culture (books and movies). Honestly, I don’t remember Satan coming up all that much in church. It certainly wasn’t a focus.
Raised mainline, maybe slightly liberal, protestant. Don’t remember ever hearing a thing about Satan.
Have some relatives who went to a rural, Southern Baptist church and I went a few times with them. It was all fire and brimstone, all the time. I hated it.
I was raised in a Southern Baptist church and I agree with the above. Most of the specifics concerning hell and Satan came from my grandmother; she believed in Satan the same way she believed in God: He was real and he was after your ass.
Episcopalian: Satan and Hell are not part of Anglican theology nor of worship. Never heard about them in sermons or in education classes.
God gave us and his angels free choice. Once we had that we could then succumb to self worship, Satan is the personification of self worship, that is how it was explained to us. God is about selfless love and Satan self love.
My family didn’t go to our Methodist church very often when I was a kid, but I don’t recall any mention of Satan in any sermons or during our confirmation classes. My mom, however, occasionally likes to say things like “America is Satan’s playground” and when I said I didn’t think God would have a problem with my being gay, “That’s not God, that’s Satan.” My family went to the same church she had gone to her entire life, so I have no idea if had been harder-core back in the day or if she picked this up during her reading-The-Late-Great-Planet-Earth period. I never took anything she said seriously.
what Vlad/Igor said.
Catholic. Like most others, I wasn’t told that much about Satan. Even though there are probably things I was told and forgot, the only one I remember is the temptation of Jesus ( written a bit later : and also the temptator in the garden of Eden). I’m not sure how I perceived him, from a religious point of view, besides this temptator aspect.
On the other hand, I was an avid reader of tales, found in local folklorist publications, and I was way more familiar with him as a tale character. In many, he’s a dupe, but in a number, he’s rather frightening (and frightened me). I think that this Satan, with whom you could have a dreadful encounter at night at a crossing of roads or something like that was way more familiar to me than the Satan of the church.
I don’t think that the supposedly real Satan (of the church) frightened me. I didn’t hear much about hell, and the old local priest, who taught the cathechism himself, was very reluctant to send anybody there, anyway, so it’s not like I was raised in the fear of hell, either. That a trickster/conman would try to go after big fish from the ancient time like Jesus or Eve seemed logical, but most certainly he wouldn’t care much about ordinary contemporary people. The issue was the relationship with God, and Satan didn’t really enter in the picture. This relationship could be tainted, but sin was the result of one’s own actions, and I think it would never had occured to me that Satan could have been involved in any way, shape or form in the sins I could commit.
I’m not sure I was ever told whence he came from, besides being a fallen angel or what his motives were. Or if I’ve been told more, I have forgotten.
I was raised Methodist and like the two others upthread, I cannot remember Satan ever being mentioned in church. My parents might have occasionally discussed it with us in a very academic sense, but Hell was not really a point of any emphasis. I had a very cartoonish vision of the devil up until I got to college and took some religion classes.
I was raised a Northern Baptist. We considered Southern Baptists as liberals because you smoked and drank alcohol. 
I think your grandma would have made a good Yankee.