I have the feeling that over the past years, we’ve started seeing more TV shows that are either sympathetic towards Hell and Satan, or somewhat negative towards Heaven. I just watched “Hazbin Hotel” today, which isn’t too theological, but clearly is fairly negative towards Heaven.
In “The Good Place”,
Spoilers for The Good Place
the people in The Bad Place end up pushing to improve the whole system, whereas The Good Place is happy to spend hundreds of year not letting people in.
“Little Demon” has Satan as a main character, and he’s more or less sympathetic.
“Ugly Americans” shows demons and Satan as relatively normal, and Hell doesn’t seem too bad.
I only watched the first episode of “Lucifer”, but it’s also more or less sympathetic towards Lucifer.
I have a few more examples (Billy Joel: “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints”, or the very funny German “Ein Münchner im Himmel”, where Heaven is portrayed as fantastically boring), but I won’t list them all here.
My question is: how modern is this? I’ve heard of “Paradise Lost”, and I’ve heard that it portrays Satan somewhat sympathetically, though I found it very difficult to read. And the idea of the snake in the Garden of Eden as having given free will and wisdom to humanity can’t be that modern of a thought, even if it would have been heretical.
Is this something that’s happened in the last 10 years? Are there older examples? Does anyone have a good source I could read?
Note that I don’t claim Satan is always portrayed positively, or Heaven always negatively :).
As a Christian I find it strange that the literal embodiment of evil is celebrated like this. Like people act as if the biblical satan is a good guy
He killed a lot fewer people than biblical God who is supposed to be a good guy if you take it by the letter.
The “twist” makes a lot of sense TBH.
That is because Satan is not the Devil: https://youtu.be/z8j3HvmgpYc
Ah yes, the famous video which claims Bart Ehrman is a “pious protestant” and proceeds to make a bunch of faulty arguments 😂 while claiming that there are “secrets that your church is hiding from you” and bringing up basic stuff which I hear mentioned in church all of the time
as someone who bats for the other team, the combination of your faction’s hegemonic ubiquity and your more limited conceptions of heroism makes it really easy to read your literature from our perspective in order to gain spiritual insight and inspiration
for example Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost taught me great lessons on what it means to stand up again when all seems lost
“Awake, arise or be forever fallen” ✊ 👆 👇
Anyway I hope this was helpful