Transcription
This person says, "Can I ask a question? How do you deal with someone who interprets every religion as part of Christianity? Like fallen angels take place as gods through history? How do I even talk to someone about that?"
It's a good question and one that is frustrating to me as well. Mainly because on the channel I like to use comparative religion for people that are deconstructing to help show them that whatever they thought was so true, all the convictions they've ever had, the holy book that they read and understood and memorized, the stories that were so morally impactful, the healings and miracles and signs and wonders and prophecies that they read about that gave credence to their particular belief and their particular god all are mirrored in every other religion that's ever existed. And so many people are so sheltered, purposely indoctrinated into their religion and only their religion and against the worldly pagan religions that they don't know that.
I'll be honest, for me it was a shock when I found out that Muslims really believed that they thought they had a personal relationship with their God, that they had the same kind of talking points and apologetics about why the Quran was perfect, but the Bible was so flawed. And now I see it all so clearly. And I think when you can see that clearly, it can help normalize your experience and help you understand the human psychology involved in faith in religious belief.
But the Christian, in fact, the religious person has created a great antidote to this. They further insulate their religion as the only true religion by acknowledging other religion, other belief, but labeling it as the same religion. Oh, you think that someone worships a different god, even people back in the past that worshiped Zeus or Odin, they did, but they were just demons who had deceived them. And so, it can take some of that talking point away. It can take some of that normalizing away. And so I think it's a wonderful question to ask and for me to get to address because at the end of the day, what this is, is an apologetic for a monotheistic religion. But what I'm going to show you and what I've done before, so we'll do this quickly, is that this hasn't always been a monotheistic religion. And so even though you can pull this kind of argument from the Bible, and I'll show you that in just a second, you can also see in that same source material where that completely breaks down.
So this is the whole point of comment deep dive. I don't think I ever would have made a video about this, but a good question comes in and we can get hyperfixated and focused on it. So let me read you first where Christians get this idea from the Bible. In Deuteronomy 32:17, "They sacrificed to demons, not God, to deities they had never known." So equating the reality of other gods, but as demons. Psalm 106:37, "They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons." Jumping to the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 10:20, "What pagans sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God."
So, I should have been more careful before when I said that Christians and religious people have come up with a pretty good way to deal with this. No, sorry. The religion has already provided this for you in its source material. But again, that source material is not internally consistent on this idea. It's so funny to see this evolution of like people understanding Christian argumentation. At first, people don't know much about their holy book or their religious tradition in history, and so they can just believe anything. And then they're always shocked to find that, oh my gosh, for every single issue they could ever think of, for every single issue raised from a non-believer, there's something you can point to in the Bible. And this raises their level of faith. Wow, I have the one true perfect religion. Look, there's always an answer.
But then for some that are willing to be consistent and follow truth wherever it goes and actually read the rest of their source material, what they end up seeing is that the reason there's an answer for everything is because the Bible has given so many answers to so many things but without making sure that it was unified, that it was consistent, that it was not mutually exclusive. So yeah, can you find support for whatever position you take on any doctrine or part of apologetics? Yes, that provides an answer. But it does not provide the answer because there's another answer here and here and here. And they don't work together.
Let me show you how that applies to what we're speaking about right now. Psalm 82:1, "God has taken his place in the divine counsel. In the midst of the gods, he holds judgment." That sounds like literally more than one God. Deuteronomy 32:8-9 says, "When the Most High portioned the nations, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God." If you want to learn more about this, I can't recommend "God on an Anatomy" by Franchesca Stravakraulu any more than I already have. In fact, I've covered like the first eight or nine chapters. I think I dropped off a little bit, but during those chapters, I get heavy into this verse and verses like it to show the polytheistic original belief from the early tribes that are linked with and came from the Canaanite pantheon where Yahweh is just one of the many sons of God who gets portioned out his group of people, the Israelites. And so, some of those texts still made their way into parts of our Old Testament canon. And again, there's wonderful scholarly explanation on all of that, but it's not for today.
Let me also read in Isaiah 44:9-20. You can just go read that whole passage, but it is mocking the idols as just pieces of wood. We see that again in 1 Corinthians 8:4, "We know that no idol in the world really exists." Okay, so within the Bible, in just these few verses, and there's more, and there's actually kind of subsets that we could get into, but I'd say that there are three different explanations of other religions. The gods are real divine spirits separate from Yahweh, or they're just demons within the monotheistic Yahweh narrative, or they're nothing but idols. So, this demon explanation is just one-third of what the Bible puts forward. And it's not even random. This isn't like, oh, at different points in the Bible, it says different things and it's all chaotic. We can see an evolution here. We can see more of ancient Israel, what we should call early Israel, like 1,200 to 900 BC. And the understanding is that other gods exist, but Yahweh is the God of Israel. Then you have the monolatry period where we're moving on to Yahweh worship only. Then you have later Judaism, which is other gods are declared as false and/or demonic. And then just kind of Christianity at large, which is where the demon reinterpretation expands.
But aside from the scriptures, there's a few logical problems with this belief. If the idea is that other gods are really just demons and demons are really just fallen angels, then we should actually expect way more similar religious structures everywhere as all these fallen angels would have kind of the same base for what they're doing as their pretend gods. But instead, religion developed very different ideas. The core concept of even what divinity is is so different. Take Hinduism for example where the core concept of divinity is the multiple manifestations of Brahman or in Buddhism it's often non-theistic or in Daoism it's about the Dao about cosmic balance but in Greek we get the anthropomorphic gods and in Norse we get mortal gods that are subject to fate and suffering where on the other side of the world you get Aztec religions with concepts of ritual cosmic maintenance and yeah I know Christians can just say well you know those are the different personalities of the demons or whatever excuse they want to insert. But again, it's not what we would expect to see from a singular systematic starting point.
And not to mention, we have the history. We have real information, real accounts about how these concepts and religions started and when and how they evolved. No demons required, no gods required. These systems emerged differently in different places and at different times and evolved differently and at different times independently across thousands of years. And anthropology can do a much better job explaining these religions to us than the catchall one-third iteration of the holy scriptures idea about other religions. Instead, we can look at things like cultural evolution, psychological pattern recognition, attempts to explain nature, social cohesion, and it all makes sense, and it all adds up. Meanwhile, there's no historical evidence linking all religions to a coordinated deception by supernatural beings with a grudge. How utterly stupid to try to make, again, this is what all religion is that is monotheistic in nature. You're trying to make the whole world, the whole universe, every other lived human's experience map on to your particular belief and your particular iteration of your belief that the vast majority of the time you don't know anything about and you only believe it because of where you were born or who you were raised by. It is the height of ego, the epitome of selfishness, and clear proof that you have absolutely no concept of other religions or history or science or psychology.
Another problem with the claim is of course the timing. I kind of mentioned that, but many religions predate even the earliest impressions or oral traditions of Yahweh worship. Like, in what world are we supposed to believe that a religion that comes around thousands of years after other religions that we can actually see copy straight from its captors at the time of its captivity is actually the original one. And everything else is a deception that happens at a certain linear point in time. When we know for a fact that certain religions predate that linear period of time by centuries or even millennia, there's an absolute defeater right there. Maybe the first religion could try to make this claim with a bit more believability, but any iteration of any religion based around Yahweh at all is not first. Sorry. And I think that's a pretty big disqualifier. Unless you're going to tell me again that that's also part of the deception. And now we're on the same thinking tier as the people who tell you, "Yes, dinosaur fossils are real and the dating is correct, but they were put there by either God or the devil." They can never agree to test you.
Which leads us to our next problem. It's unfalsifiable, just like all of that other nonsense. And you may think that makes it untouchable, but what it really means is we can just ignore it. The "they're demons" claim cannot be disproved by any evidence. And so you get interactions that would sound like this. Me saying something like, "Well, look at Muslims. Look at Hindus. Look at Mormons. See how they all really believe? See how they're sincere about their faith." To which the Christian responds, "Well, they're just deceived. They're deceived by and/or worshiping demons." So I say, "Well, yeah, whatever you believe." But their experiences feel real to them just like your experiences feel real to you. And so then the Christian response is again, well, demons can actually simulate and imitate that spiritual experience. At that point, the explanation explains everything and thus then nothing. Again, this is what is called an unfalsifiable claim. Carl Popper described this as a hallmark of non-scientific explanations.
And furthermore, again, such a glaring problem. Like there's so many ways to attack this. If you really believe that demons are capable of possessing you and deceiving you, stealing your free will, and tricking you into believing that they are some god, the only god, a real god, someone that deserves your worship or has convinced you that Yahweh is a false god. If you really believe that, then you have absolutely no way of defending yourself against this same thing. Which means that you too would be just as capable of being fully deceived right now that Yahweh is the real God and that it's demons that are all other gods. There is nothing to say then that Odin is not the real god and everything since has been dark spirits of the Norse underworld deceiving you away from the truth. And even that's a bit trickier because I chose something that's part of a pantheon. But whatever, like the point remains.
Furthermore, and this one's a huge one, you can have this argument, I guess, if you really want it, but it comes with some baggage that I think most Christians are not going to want attached. And that is that, and similar to what I just said before, it undermines all religious experience, including Christian religious experience. Christians argue all the time that billions of believers really experience the one real God. Every Sunday in every church all across the world, believers are giving testimonies used as some kind of personal evidence for the validity of the Christian God. But again, if religious experience of any kind can be faked by demons, then those experiences are no longer reliable evidence. You can't have this both ways. Either religious experience is trustworthy or it can easily be demonic deception and thus we should ignore it. Not, "Well, my experience is real but all other experiences demonic." That just makes you sound like an idiot. And that's what people who are making this argument are indeed sane. They just haven't thought through it. It was just a quick way for them to disengage, to turn off their brain, to feel good about their own specialness in the universe, and to not have to contend with real valid points made by others.
But here's what I will give Christians. You're not the only ones to do this. Nearly every exclusive religion and even some of the non-exclusive religions explain competing religions in the same way. Have you ever heard a Muslim talk about Christianity or talk about the Bible? They'll tell you that the Bible has been corrupted and that what you read and believe isn't true, that you're the one who's deceived. Mormons will tell you that other churches lost the true gospel. Ancient Greeks claimed that all foreign gods that they ran into were just misidentified versions of their own. So again, "All gods are Greek. You just call yours by a different name. But that's my god." Humans do this. They consistently reinterpret other beliefs through the lens of their own system, which makes sense again until you think about it. And then you see the error, the hypocrisy, the stupidity. It's a well-known phenomenon in the study of religion. It's called religious exclusivism.
To recap and close out, when someone has the audacity to say that other religions or other gods are just fallen angels or demons deceiving you, several things are happening. They're using just one interpretation of just a few passages of competing claims from the same source material as their backup. That interpretation is of course then not consistent across the Bible. It ignores their own historical development of the Israelite tradition and religion. It does not match the independent evolution of world religions that we can know about, that we can see, that we can study, that we can date. It creates an eternally unfalsifiable position or explanation. And it shoots themselves in the foot. It undermines completely the reliability of religious experience itself. So if someone wants to say that, they can. But now you know this.
I hope that that helped specifically to the one person who was asking, "How would I even talk about this? What am I supposed to say?" Because it is frustrating to hear people just so quickly stop thinking and that's what they're doing. And none of this is to say go out there and you should argue endlessly about demons. That's an upward battle that is just really not worth it. When I have these conversations, I talk as if I'm talking to a Christian so you can hear the argument. But I'm not going out of my way to try to convince someone that believes this that they're wrong. All of this is here for people that get stuck, who are in the middle, in the in-between doubting and deconstructing to be normalized and hear things from the other side of the coin. So, take this for what it was worth. I hope that you at least enjoyed hearing about it. I'll see you Sunday for what I think might be a kind of fun, unique episode. We'll see what I end up putting together. But until then, keep thinking.
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