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When you consider the irony in this, it's almost comical in a perversely twisted way. Want something from God? Follow a complicated formula. Make sure to cross every T and dot every I. Want something from Satan? No problem. Just think it. It's yours. You want to know what killed that little boy? He spun 'round and 'round trying to make sense of it all and fell over dead from dizziness.

Wait until you guys start getting into Yahweh and the Pantheon of Canaanite gods!

Let's not confuse TWI with Christianity. In my experience, cults are far more interested in combatting demonic activity than the average Christian is. In my experience, Christians just want to live their lives and respect their beliefs. Cults? Cults want you to be afraid of every demon or devil lurking behind every corner, en garde! ready to fight at a moment's notice. It's EASY to let extremism paint all of religion, just like it's easy to let nihilism define atheism. They're not the same thing, but how do you resist the temptation to conclude If A, Then N? Especially when you add time to the equation, when it becomes increasingly justified. An atheist NOW may not be a nihilist, but ask him what he thinks of everything 6 billion years from now, and the opinion of an atheist will be indistinguishable from that of a nihilist. But the point is most of us are not nihilists NOW. Atheists do not reject moral principles and we don't consider life meaningless. There is much meaning in life. In fact, this being the only life we have, we treasure life. That's why you don't see atheist suicide bombers. No one's promising us 72 science textbooks if we sacrifice ourselves for Darwin. You'll never see us flying a plane into a building while shouting "REASON!!!!!!" until the last second. Defining a group by the actions or beliefs of its extremists is usually not fair at all. Muslims suffer some of the worst prejudice for this. Atheists too. Christians, not so much. There are so many Christians that most people recognize "that's not all of us" when they're criticizing one religious group. JW's have the blood transfusion ban, not Christianity. Westboro Baptist teaches God Hates F*gs, not the average Christjan. But that's part of what makes it so challenging to discuss some of these issues. No matter what belief Charity deconstructs as part of her journey, there will always be some branch of Christianity somewhere that says Or So now, while Charity tries to make sense of what Christianity teaches and whether/why she rejects it, she suddenly becomes compelled to evaluate and reject every alternative interpretation of Christianity before being permitted the luxury of saying, "You know, I think none of it is true." Well that's preposterous. There are 45,000 Christian denominations on earth today. 45 THOUSAND. The OVERHWELMING MAJORITY of Christians and Jews, throughout all of time, believe that Genesis 22 records God telling Abraham to kill his son as a test. When the angel stops Abraham, at no point is there a "correction." The angel SAYS: The angel does NOT say: "Stop! You TOTALLY misunderstood what God asked you to do. He wasn't asking you to kill your son. Are you crazy?" And the Bible later says Abraham BELIEVED God, and it was imputed to him for righteousness. It doesn't say "Abraham misunderstood God, but in doing so he demonstrated a faith that impressed the Almighty." I do not know if Wierwille was alone in teaching that the burnt offering meant something other than what Abraham took it to mean. I do know that he cited no sources in making this claim. Where is he getting this information? He doesn't say. And I may not have delved into the practice with all the resources and time of a scholar, but I am not finding a scrap of support for Wierwille's sentence quoted above. If anyone can find a scholarly source, not Wierwille, to indicate that God might have meant something else when he said "offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I will tell you," I would be glad to see it. But absent any other evidence, the only source for this claim is Wierwille. The verse and context are clear: God was testing Abraham when He asked him to kill his son. And Abraham passed the test. The angel didn't intervene to correct Abraham. The angel intervened because IT WAS A TEST and IT WAS OVER. Did God really want Isaac to die? No. If He did, He would have let Abraham go through with it. Did God tell Abraham to kill Isaac? Yes. He was testing Abraham. He says so. But doesn't the Bible say God does not tempt? Yes. A thousand or two years after the Abraham incident, God says he does not tempt people with evil. But obedience to God is not evil. Trusting God to fulfill His promises is not evil. Abraham passed the test because he trusted God, not because he misunderstood Him. Let the Bible speak for itself and the message is clear. Now, stepping OUTSIDE the internal story that's being told, we turn our attention to the story as human beings. God told Abraham to kill his son. It was a test. ABRAHAM DIDN'T KNOW THAT. We do. So we can look at the big picture, while Abraham is stuck in the present. God just told me to kill my kid. What do I do? Any parent with a heart is going to answer the same way: "Tell Him No!" Maybe add an expletive or two after that. As unbelievers, we are not criticizing God in this story, because we are not asked to identify with him. We are criticizing the character we're supposed to admire, the one we're supposed to emulate, the one we're supposed to look up to as an example of steadfastness of faith: Abraham. But in REAL life, if someone told you he was about to kill his kid because God told him to, you would do everything in your power to stop him because, and this is key, you would not even entertain for a nanosecond the notion that he's telling you the truth. And since the subject of this thread is deconversion (and by extension deconstruction) it should be pointed out that the majority of Biblical stories are tales you would flat out reject if someone claimed them in front of you right now. Imagine someone washing up on Miami Beach right now and saying, "Lo! Spring Breakers! I just spent three days and three nights in the stomach of a whale after passing through his 25 centimeter esophagus, and I sat there with hundreds of pounds of krill in a vat of hydrochloric acid, only to go back through the esophagus for the whale to throw me up three days and three nights later (by the way, the Apple Watch battery lasts a long time, but that's how I knew how much time was passing as the acid disintegrated my skin). And I have come to tell you REPENT! REPENT! Or God will destroy Miami!" You would not have gotten two sentences into that without calling mental health experts and fitting him for a nice white coat with REALLLLY long sleeves. But you're supposed to believe Nineveh heard Jonah's warning and converted. There is no evidence of any long term sudden change of religion in Nineveh. Just a Bible story that never happened. Similar to how the story of God testing Abraham never happened. It's a story. If it were real, Abraham would be the bad guy and no one would admire him.

Agreed.

This is as labyrinthine a rabbit hole as how El became Yahweh. There should be plenty of books, articles and videos on the subject. I suspect someone here has an answer, but I think you are on the right track. It seems to me, if I remember correctly, the contemporary Christian idea of Satan is an evolved amalgamation. The ha-satan of Job is not the god of this world Paul writes about, and different still from what people mean today when they say Satan. ———— I had never heard so much daily talk about the devil until I married into that Way family. The adversary received more credit than God - no joke, no hyperbole, no figger of speech. The power of God depended upon beleeef, but the power of the adversary depended on nothing and was an absolute factual certainty. According to them, the devil was everywhere, especially over your shoulder - Look out! God and Christ were absent in another realm. I had no idea how polytheistic Christianity was until I took “the class.”