Raised in a Brethen church. No one is very obsessed with Hell or satan there. I have never heard of a sermon about satan or Hell before.
What I know, from reading various sources, is that he’s the most glorious of all Angels, grew prideful, rebel and fell to Earth. And that he tempted Jesus.
A bit of RCC, a lot of Christian & Missionary Alliance (that really is the name of a denomination) ~
Long story short: Anchangel Lucifer became full of pride in his Diving gifts, envied God’s supremacy, led an Angelic rebellion to take the Throne, once abased- he lashed out at God by tempting His favored creation humanity into sinfulness.
(This was cobbled together from Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28 & Revelation 12)
Christ’s first coming broke his deceptive hold of the nations & the faithful Church is rolling back his deception by bringing people to Christ. He’ll have one big hurrah after the Rapture through his man the Beast, but he’ll be imprisoned during the Millenium, released a short time for one last shot at humanity & finally cast into the Lake of Fire forever.
I was told that Satan caused my ADHD and the medication I took was a prison for him. Really.
Other than that whatever religious exposure I had was focused on God himself.
Raised Russian Orthodox:
We were taught that Satan was the best of God’s angels, questioned him on something at some point and wouldn’t let it go. Eventually he stirred up enough shit that some other angels joined his side and God threw them out of heaven and either created or “allowed” Satan to create, his own realm. In this place he was given the job of governing over all the people he could recruit. After that, we never heard much about it other than Hell is where you go if you are bad, it is a place of torment, and at the end of time it will be destroyed in an all out war with heaven. They never mentioned WHY Satan would fight a futile war, but whatever. Smelled of propaganda to me.
Actually it was hell that pretty much sealed the deal on my atheism. It just doesn’t make an sense on so many levels. Frankly, if you take it all at face value, it would be the smarter move to join Hell. Since in the Orthodox church it is where all non christians go, Satan will have the larger army by orders of magnitude.
Raised in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), one of the mainline Protestant denominations.
I don’t remember what, if anything, I was ever taught about Satan’s motives, origins, or destiny, though I do remember studying the Bible stories which involve Satan (e.g. the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness).
My father is a deeply religious Christian, in a very quiet sort of way. He’s also immensely ethical where it comes to forcing his beliefs on his children. We’ve had to come to our understanding of faith on our own, with very little external indoctrination.
In short, we’ve all had to come to our own conclusions on Satan/Lucifer/The Opponent/whatever-name-you-like. I can tell you what I think about him now, but we weren’t taught anything about him as children. Instead, we were taught how to read, and how to think.
Raised a Byzantine Catholic, often referred to as Greek Catholic here in the US. I don’t remember Satan being mentioned at all either during the sermon at Divine Liturgy or at catechism. All the emphasis seemed to be on that Jesus fellow.
I also attended a Roman Catholic school for several years and received a pretty fair grounding in their flavor of Catholicism. Some of the nuns prattled on about The Devil, but I don’t remember Satan being a major part of things there, either. WRT the nuns, a priest who is a friend of mine told me some years later that what the nuns teach can often best be described as “Folk Catholicism” because of the way it deviates from The Church’s official dogmas.
Raised primarily in a liberal Mennonite church, later in an even more liberal Quaker Meeting.
In the Mennonite church, we were taught about Hell in a vague way - it was where people’s souls went for eternity if they were sufficiently bad, although the exact cutoff point was rather vague. I don’t remember any teachings about Satan. I think he was mostly considered a metaphor for our intrinsically sinful nature (there was a lot of emphasis on how we’re all sinful sinners and should beg God for forgiveness and then follow His path for our lives, regardless of our own feelings on the matter).
The religious ed. classes I attended at the Quaker Meeting focused on broad values of peace and charity rather than specific church teachings. Hell and Satan were never mentioned, and I think most people in the congregation didn’t believe in them.
Let’s see: Satan was originally an angel named Lucifer who rebelled against God. He was quite high up in rank (an archangel like Michael and Gabriel), and tried to set himself up as a being to be worshiped, and got one third of the other angels to follow him. God punished him by sending him to Hell, along with the other angels.
Later, when God created the universe, Satan somehow took the form of a snake and tempted Adam and Eve. Ever since then, he’s been going around tempting everyone, somehow. And rather than destroy him, God has decided to use him to test his people (cf. Job).
His motives are basically to get back at God, and he does so by trying to get people not to worship or follow God. He knows he can’t win, but his goal is to hurt God as much as possible. He does this by talking to us in our minds. He’s acts very similarly to the “evil conscience” you see in cartoons.
Oh, and he may not do most of those actions directly, but may rely on those fallen angels which are what we call demons. Or, demons and angels may be completely different things (as angels can’t possess people), and Satan and his angels are all still chained up in hell. I got a lot of conflicting information.
As for his destiny, it is as described in the Book of Revelation, where he is bound up for 1000 years after Jesus comes back, and is then released for a short time, and then finally thrown into the lake of fire, along with everything else that is evil. After that, he effectively ceases to exist.
I will also point out that, although I am still a Christian, my understanding has changed somewhat. I’m not sure if it is a good idea to get into the specifics.
To strike fear in our hearts, we were told Satan was a Republican.
Raised Catholic - I had only one conversation regarding Satan that I recall.
I told my 7th grade religion teacher I though it was a bunch of bunk and people were perfectly capable of being evil without any supernatural influence.
He did not take any offence at this and commented that it was an interesting thought.
Methodist, with a brief diversion to Christian (Disciples of Christ), and frankly, I generally wasn’t paying a lot of attention, but I don’t remember much stuff about Satan at all. He was evil, whatever that was. I cannot think of when or if he was mentioned by name, but “the evil one” and “our ancient foe” came up in songs. Methodist churches can be really different. Ours was pretty high church.
I do remember that I got really fascinated about the “There were giants on the earth in those days” line, and someone explained to me that these were fallen angels. There was also a rather provocative line about the sons of God falling for the daughters of men. The sons of God were, again, those fallen angels. Blame everything on the fallen angels!
I was raised Episcopalian.
I don’t remember much discussion about Satan; I DO remember the picture of him in a children’s Bible scaring the daylights out of me.
The most I can remember discussing is that he was a fallen angel, and all the names associated with him.
Raised Baptist.
We didn’t spend a lot of time preoccupied with Satan, but what we did know was that he was an angel, possibly the most beautiful/charismatic, and that he rebelled against God as was cast out of heaven. The world is his kingdom (for now) and he is constantly trying to thwart mankind’s relationship with God.
He is not all-powerful but beguiling and a skilled liar. Ultimately he will be destroyed by God in the eschaton.
I was raised Episcopalian by my dad who was raised Catholic. I got the standard boilerplate that some have already posted here about how Satan used to be Lucifer, the most glorious of all the angels who got prideful and thought himself equal to God.
This, with one very significant alteration. It was only after the creation of Adam that Lucifer rebelled. Lucifer saw how God loved his new creation and ranked man above the angels. Only then did Lucifer object. He didn’t strive to replace God as much as to argue that humans weren’t all that, and that God should continue to value him and his brothers above men. For this was he cast down, and this is why he struggles to bring mankind down.
I wasn’t actually raised Christian by my parents, but a great deal of my family was Southern Baptist (I say “was” because I don’t really communicate with them anymore). I’d sometimes go to church when my gramma was watching me and my sister, though we didn’t have to. We were curious about it. So while my parents didn’t go to a church or teach me anything about satan, I did have a very clear conception of hellfire from a young age.
One of my cousins ended up marrying (and later divorcing, good thing they weren’t Catholic lol) that church’s pastor’s son, so they were all VERY INVOLVED with the church.
I clearly remember going to that church one time with my dad, right after my parents divorced (I was 12 or 13). I already had my own clearly defined ideas of religion, but I decided to go with my dad because we only got to see him on Sundays anyway and he wanted to go to church after the divorce. Whatever. So we went to that stupid Baptist church and the pastor told all the adults to get pictures of their kids or grandkids out of their wallets and show them to neighbors and talk about them for a while. Then after about 10 minutes of freeform kid-photo worship, he made an announcement that unless all their little souls were Baptized, those adorable kids were going to burn in hell for eternity.
I’ve never seen anyone storm out of a church ceremony before or since that day. But out the door we went with Dad. XD
I grew up during the “Jesus loves you” years, so nothing.
I’m Catholic and was born in 1961.
I went to a Catholic elementary school and a Jesuit high school, which means I got all the last of the old-school nuns just before they retired AND all the last of the young, folk-singing hippie nuns just before they quit.
Satan and Hell almost NEVER came up. They were mentioned in a few of our standard prayers, but weren’t emphasized at all. We were told that Satan was a fallen angel,that he tempted Adam and Eve in Eden, that he tempted Jesus in the desert… and that’s about it.
Just popping in to note that I read the thread title as “What were you taught about Santa’s motives, origins, & destiny?” Puts a more cheerful spin on it, I think.