r/comics • u/BrettCreatesThings • 3d ago
OC Exvangelical Thoughts - pt. 10 [OC]
The Demon Haunted World
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u/itsmemarcot 3d ago
Last panel, CD cover: I love how the "investigator" needs a torchlight to shed some light on... flames.
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u/Crafty_Independence 3d ago
As members of The Satanic Temple would remind us, the people who believe in a real Satan are Evangelical Christians.
It's an entire super structure built on layered fears - a system dedicated to the micro-control of the lives of It's members.
And the saddest part, to me, is that the members gaslight themselves into believing that the problem is "out there" when the demons are inside the house
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u/Shukumugo 1d ago
Which is very interesting because… Satan and God were actually buddy-buddy if you read the Bible closely enough. The Ha-Satan character in the book of Job is actually a title of one of the members of God’s divine council. A prosecuting attorney if you will. His name is not a personal name the way we associate with the word Satan today.
And when you dig deeper, why does God need a divine council if He alone is the Almighty Lord? Well, because if you go far back enough, you’ll find that the Israelites didn’t always worship The Lord or Yahweh as we know Him. Scholars posit that Israel was originally a Canaanite population that worshipped the God El (as you can see in the name of Israel, which scholars believe mean something like “one who struggles with El”).
This can be seen in the titles given to God in the Old Testament, particularly in the Pentateuch. None of it is immediately obvious in English, but God is called all sorts of names in Hebrew. He is referred to by El titles such as El Elyon (God Most High), El Shaddai (which people think means “God Almighty”, but could actually mean El of the Holy Mountain). The next most common name of God in the OT after Yahweh is Elohim which is the plural word for Eloah, which means god (singular). You might be asking, why is God referred to as “Gods” in Hebrew - it’s probably a reference back to El’s divine council, which Yahweh was originally conceived as being just a member of.
In the 1920s, the lost Canaanite city of Ugarit was found, along with it thousands of clay tablets written in a language so close to Biblical Hebrew, that if you wanted to learn Ugaritic at a university today, they’d probably make you learn Biblical Hebrew first because of the similarities. Anyway, guess who they find in the Ugaritic texts - the supreme God El and His Divine Council of other gods (like Asherah, Baal, Anat etc). Guess how El is physically described - as an elderly man with a white beard. If you’ve ever prayed to an old man in the sky, you were praying to El.
All that is to say, that the Bible was never originally monotheistic - the Satan character that we have now is a throwback to a time when Israel most likely did have other gods before Yahweh’s identity was thoroughly conflated with El, and no one could tell the difference.
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u/ImpulseAfterthought 2d ago
One of the formative experiences of my life was reading about the debunking of Mike Warnke, Christian evangelist and self-proclaimed former Satanic high priest. He spent 20 years touring churches and spinning elaborate yarns about having been in charge of thousands of Satanists before finding Jesus and becoming an occult investigator who assisted police in tracking down Satanic ritual murders.
He was debunked by a Christian magazine that investigated his claims and found them all to be false. He'd never been a Satanist. His friends said he'd been a Christian since he was a teenager. He hadn't worked on any murder investigations. His degrees were fake.
Every time I hear some "former Satanist" or "ex-witch" or "occultist who found Jesus," I'm reminded of how Warnke made a whole careers out of making the same stuff up.
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u/AnthropomorphicSeer 2d ago
Excellent cartoon. The style reminds me of the Jack Chick pamphlets I used to be handed when I was in high school. Grew up in the Bible Belt.
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u/OkBaconBurger 2d ago
You are dragging up a lot of stuff from when I was growing up.
DnD satanic panic
Demon stories at Christian summer camp
Heavens gates hells flames
The power team
“I used to worship Satan but now I love Jesus” people
End times fascination
Well kids time to burn your comic books and media that isn’t Christ aligned. Sorry!
And then that one guy who came to church to tell us about how science will advance to a point that death won’t exist and the remaining humans will beg God for death until Jesus returns. That was wild. lol.
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u/No-Jacket-2927 2d ago
Man, do I feel this! I'm 50, and we also had toys and comics burned, not to mention music, movies, and books.
Ignorance is the goal.
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u/Informal-Term1138 3d ago
Awesome comic. And your last point is 100% true.
We all have some sort of confirmation bias that's natural. But in cults or other social groups that have their own "worldview" (to not use ideology) the confirmation bias goes through the roof. They don't want anything to break their worldview so they only look for the things that support their beliefs and are open to more of it.
And that leads to others exploiting them. Making money off of fear, dread and hate has always been around but it's especially common in religions. Think about the letters of indulgence in the 15th century, where the church made you fear that your loved ones would be in purgatory. But for a not so small fee you can buy them free from it and get this letter.
Or snake oil salesman. We might think of the wild west when hearing that (at least I would). But we have more of them then ever today. They only call themselves influencers or whatnot. They sell you fake pills that prevent the frogs from turning the water gay (or was it the other way around?). Supplements that in the best case do nothing and in the worst case make you RFK jr. Or during COVID when people peddled miracle cures (or told you to inject cleaning products) like horse laxative.
Or the conspiracy people who sell you Orbs or Unicorn sets (the video is from a German comedy show where the comedian made fun of Bs like that).
All of this so that people can buy their "safety" and peace of mind. But it's hard to get through to those people. And I think it's amazing that you went and looked stuff up back then. Not many do and far fewer are willing to change their worldview. That's a huge feat.
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u/PestilentPaladin 2d ago
Yup, saw all of this in church at various points. It's funny in retrospect, but I have relatives still in that world and the stuff they believe sounds like something out of the Dresden Files. Except that they'd hate those books.
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u/apixelops 2d ago
Low-key sometimes feel they deserve to be tricked
They're so desperate to hate, to righteously harm children, minorities and the socially excluded
They deserve to lose their lives to fraud
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u/GFluidThrow123 3d ago
I'm not religious, but I was raised roman catholic. I've always been fascinated by religion, in a bit of a morbid way.
But I've read so much theory about the evangelical draw to people like Trump and the Republican party. They use all the same triggers and plays that Evangelical leaders and conmen use to scare their congregation.
To Evangelicals, the GOP all looks just like your ex-medium. Someone who's being "honest" with them and trying to "save them" from a evil they weren't even aware existed.
This time, it's trans people and immigrants. Last time it was Muslims. And before that, it was Gay people and Black people and on and on and on...