Is there a specific religious term for the belief "God exists and he is evil"?
I am not an atheist, I genuinely believe that God exists and he is evil, like a toddler who fries little ants with a lens.
Yes. It's Dystheism.
"Dystheism (from Ancient Greek: δυσ-, romanized: dus-, lit. 'bad' and θεός theos "god") is the belief that a god is not wholly good and can even be considered evil, or one and the same with Satan."
Also noteworthy is misotheism. Seems OP counts as both.
Dystheism
TIL
I've always said (jokingly since I'm an atheist) that Christians got it mixed up and thought Satan was God, so they've really been worshiping Satan all this time. They don't want to admit they're wrong about him being good, so they make up all kinds of excuses for all the horrible things he does. That's why they were totally conditioned and ready to do the same with trump.
Just a gentle reminder that there are very many more Christians in the world that aren't American and certainly don't support Trump. Or even care that much about American politics.
And a reminder that the Crusades and Inquisition both happened before USA was a country or even colonies. And Protestantism started because some people thought the Catholic church was too lenient (while trying to avoid being put to death by the Catholic church for saying that publically).
Not to defend American Christianity, but I'm not buying that it's fine outside of America.
No, Satan is just a being created by God who realized how fucked up God is.
Of course, the issue with God is that its presence equates power with morality, which makes people think Trump is a moral man.
the issue with God is that its presence equates power with morality
I can't agree with this enough. My sister, a Christian, even agrees. Things are "good" and "bad" because god says they are, and for no other reason. And god is the highest good simply because he said that he is. The reason he gets to make those rules is that he's the most powerful.
The Christian god is just a spurned lover who wrote in their diary about how stupid and mean their ex is and they should never have dumped him.
Satan is the dumper and has moved on long ago.
Most ancient religions had gods that were both good and evil. They were flawed and just as bad as humans if not worse for their abuse of power. Christianity and Judaism is pretty different in that they claim god is super good, especially Christians, even though there are things in their own Bible that show their god being evil.
I always used to wonder why they worshipped such a shitty god, and if I, a mere human, have better morals and know right and wrong better than the Christian god, what good is he?
100% and they should swap jobs too. You hear from Christians all the time "this is the devils work" or "Satan made me do it."
Conversely, how often do you hear this?
"What, that place? That one their? Yeah, that place is heaven on earth."
Never
But "hell on earth" we hear all the time. You know why?
Because Satan is busy.
Imagine how much work hed do, if he got to be in charge. "Wanna know what will really piss yahweh off?"
the term i always heard was maltheism. reading the other comments though, i'm surprised how many other terms there are for this.
fun fact: renowned mathematician Paul Erdős referred to God as the SF, or Supreme Fascist, who kept all the best mathematical proofs to himself.
Hmm. Does God know the largest prime? Does God know the last digit of pi?
The premises of the questions are wrong, hence they do not speak to the knowledge of anyone but yourself unfortunately. There are no last element in an infinite chain, because that is contradictory to the fact that they are infinite. Even questions such as the barber's paradox, that are not logical fallacies, do not imply the nonexistence of god.
Mathematically speaking, everyone knows the last digit in Pi due to there not being one. We call this concept that something is vacuously true. Similarly a nonsense statement such as "all ants on the moon eat people for breakfast" is also true by default.
so the proof of the irrationality of pi is a bit more than i want to get into here, but there's a very simple proof that there are infinite prime numbers which i will share here.
suppose that there is a finite number of prime numbers. write out a list of all of these prime numbers, and multiply them together. add one to this product, and you now have a number that is not divisible by any of our list of prime numbers, and thus should be another prime. this contradicts our initial assumption of finite primes, and therefore there are infinite primes.
any god is not above mathematics.
Knowing they don't exist would count.
Erdos was fucking weird, lol.
Maltheism or Dystheism might be your bag. Dystheism is the idea that God(s) are not all good and may be evil and Maltheism is a more recent addition that posits a strong belief that there exists only a categorically evil divinity.
Some forms of Gnosticism assert this.
Gnosticism is a broad group of early Christian cults that are influenced by earlier religions, so it's not a monolith and I don't want to paint them with the same brush, but:
Some of them include the idea that our souls (our consciousness) are from a realm or being of light, but the material/physical world was constructed by the demiurge (yahweh of the old testament) and has trapped us here.
According to this idea, Jesus is actually from that divinity beyond Yahweh, and is not the son of God. So Jesus' sacrifice was not just the crucifixion, but embodiment itself. He brings us knowledge (gnosis, thus gnosticism) of our true divinity and through that knowledge, salvation from this material prison.
There's an amazing book about all this, called, The Gnostic Religion, by the philosopher Hans Jonas.
There's an amazing book about all this, called, The Gnostic Religion, by the philosopher Hans Jonas.
People should be aware that this book is severely out of date.
In 1998 the book Rethinking Gnosticism started a process of self-reflection over past work in scholarship and people started to realize they had their head up their asses with tautological thinking around Gnosticism based on significant propaganda from the church.
Here's Princeton's Elaine Paigels (author of The Gnostic Gospels) on the subject from an email debate years after this:
The earliest editors of "Gnostic" texts thought that they were dualistic, escapist, nihilistic, involving "esoteric ideas about aeons and demiurges," as you yourself write. As my former teacher at Harvard, Krister Stendhal, said to me recently about these texts, "we just thought these were weird." But can you point to any evidence of such "esoteric ideas" in Thomas? Anything about "aeons and demiurges"? Those first editors, not finding such evidence, assumed that this just goes to show how sneaky heretics are-they do not say what they mean. So when they found no evidence for such nihilism or dualism-on the contrary, the Gospel of Thomas speaks continually of God as the One good "Father of all"-they just read these into the text. Some scholars, usually those not very familiar with these sources, still do. So first let's talk about "Gnosticism"-and what I used to (but no longer) call "Gnostic Gospels." I have to take responsibility for part of the misunderstanding. Having been taught that these texts were "Gnostic," I just accepted it, and even coined the term "Gnostic gospels," which became the title of my book. I agree with you that we have no evidence for what we call "Gnosticism" from the first century, and have learned from our colleagues that what we thought about "Gnosticism" has virtually nothing to do with a text like the Gospel of Thomas-or, for that matter, with the New Testament Gospel of John which our teachers said also showed "Gnostic influences."
The history of what was actually going on and how the ideas developed is pretty interesting to follow.
The long and short is you had proto-Gnostic ideas like found in Thomas which introduced duality as a solution to the Epicurean argument that naturalist origins of life meant that there was no afterlife. Essentially, even if the world was the product of Lucretius's evolution and not intelligent design, as long as eventually that physical world would be recreated in non-physical form, the curse of a soul depending on a body would be broken. It suggests that we already are in that copy.
The problem was that by the second century Epicureanism was falling from favor and there was a resurgence of Platonist ideals, where for Plato the perfect form was an immaterial 'form' followed by an imperfect physical version and worst of all a copy of the physical. Through that lens, the original proto-Gnostic concept became that we were in the least worthwhile form of existence.
So in parallel to the rise of Neoplatonism you see things like Valentinian Gnosticism emerge which takes the proto-Gnostic recreator of a naturalist original world and flips it to the corrupter of a perfect world of forms. It goes from agent of salvation saving us from death due to dependence on physical bodies to a being that trapped us in physical form.
This debate and conversation goes all the way back to 1 Corinthians 15 where you can see Paul discussing the difference between a physical body and a spiritual one, and the claim that it's physical first and spiritual second, not the other way around. (And indeed, that was the early heretical point of view, but where it differed from Paul was the idea that we were already in the second version and he was arguing we were still in the first.)
So you are correct that certain later groups previously lumped together as 'Gnostics' believed there was a version of Plato's demiurge that corrupted pure forms into corrupted physical embodiments, and it's great you are aware it's not a monolith - but people should have a heads up if they start following up on your source that views on the subject changed dramatically around the start of the 21st century and are still evolving.
I also said that it's a broad group of early Christian cults and that not all of them espouse that idea.
Hans Jonas lovingly elucidates the rich meaning and symbolism of these early beliefs, and their origins. He has great respect and dedicated much of his life specifically to the gnostics.
More gnostic texts were discovered since his book, and expanded on our understanding. But it certainly didn't invalidate his excellent and beautiful work.
If you are into gnosticism I strongly suggest you read that book before (incorrectly) calling it out-of-date and discouraging people from reading it.
Misotheism.
Miso as in misogyny, misandry, etc. Not as in the delicious fermented paste that makes a lovely soup.
Its 'god(s) exist(s) and can absolutely go fuck itself/themselves, possibly for the following reasons...'
Somewhat pedantically speaking, the belief that an evil god exists (exclusively or otherwise) is dystheism. Misotheism is the hatred of a god or gods. Dystheism implies misotheism, but they're not exactly the same.
Valid. Though misotheism at least implies the person being identified as such thinks god(s) (is/are) morally fuckex
I genuinely believe that God exists and he is evil, like a toddler who fries little ants with a lens.
That could describe the Demiurge in Gnosticism.
Some of the Gnostics reckoned that El/Yaweh was an evil demiurge. There are some that believe that El/Yaweh is actually Loki and that we are on the verge or Ragnarok.
Shit, now there's a religion I could get behind!
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God is unreasonable and scary when you are a Christian, at least for me when I grew up. You're basically told he can read your mind so you pretend he's a great guy, but to me an evil God is just Christianity.
How does it help to pretend anything if he can read your mind?
Yo man this is like, deep thinking bro
Some forms of gnosticism say this
The philosophers religion.
This is definitely some shit Nietzsche would crack up high as fuck on opium. Hell im pretty sure he did.
also, if we're going by traditional religious figures. Satanism. Though modern satanism is very different. I would argue that this is more accurately described as "christian satanism" or "christo-satanism"
This is definitely some shit Nietzsche would crack up high as fuck on opium. Hell im pretty sure he did
He said the opposite and very clearly mourns the decline in religion throughout his works. You should probably read the material before making wacko statements like this.
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” -Friedrich Nietzsche
You suggested them to read Nietzsche and from it you got he mourns the decline of religion through all of his works? Maybe you should also get a re-read.
The decline of religion is stated as a fact, killed by men's rationality and evolution. As any evolution it has opportunities and risks, in this case the bigger risk is the loss of morality.
But the only thing he clearly advocates for is overcoming religion and God because they are not needed anymore. The new Man should make its own meaning and rules.
It's the whole concept of the übermensch which is the single central point of his all system.
The quote is not supposed to be his opinion (not directly at least), it's a character in a story.
It's like taking the stance of Cephalus in the Plato's Republic and say it's Plato's opinion, while it's clearly just a tool to let Socrates speak.
Nietzsche is a character. Man has done a lot of things in his life. You can basically interpret everything he said in numerous ways. I was mostly pointing out that Nietzsche was probably the most apt example given this scenario. op literally said "like a toddler who fries little ants with a lens"
Anyway, i found the philosopher in the comments, my point was made.
I disagree, the post doesn't ask if there is a religion where there is a god who is good, with a fallen angel who is evil. Neither are they asking for one where you pray to the evil fallen angel who opposes a good principal god. They're asking for one where the principal god is evil.
I think, more specifically they're asking for the name to a belief system in which we observe the actions of the Abrahamic god and judge it to be evil.
well no see you misunderstand, this is satanism from the view of classical christianity (i'm definitely using this term wrong, i just think it's funny lol, don't read into it). I.E. satan is "an evil god" which even through classical christianity, is not accurate. But i would really recommend you see what certain christians think of satanism lol.
They lack the mental capacity to properly formulate any other religion, so they just replace jesus/god with satan/devil and call it a day at it's simplest.
In Christian Satanism is Jesus evil?
In Christian Satanism the Devil exists and is being worshipped. This is "classical" or "theist" Satanism where there is a belief in the existence of Satan.
Contrast that with modern atheist Satanism, where the Devil is merely a psychological symbol of rebellion, independence and freedom that serves to trigger theists while also being a representation of revolting against christan authoritarianism and, through the exploitation of rules stemming from theist-political decisionmaking, as a counter to the blatantly unconstitutional abuse of religious freedom laws for the benefit of a single religion.
"Christian Satanism" isn't a thing
No
i suppose the concept would be that from the view of christianity, that jesus would be the same, and that satanists would worship the devil, as depicted in christianity.
This was pretty much every polytheistic religion. Not all the gods were evil but there were always evil ones.
Generally they weren't depicted as 'evil' so much as necessary components of the divine ecosystem.
The idea of 'evil' as we know it largely developed out of monotheistic ideals and the idea that there was a perfect single good and that any opposition to that was inherently evil.
Zeus wasn't associated with the underworld, but he was a dick and not always good. And Hades wasn't always bad. In polytheism the gods were often a projection of spectrum of human qualities and behaviors and not monolithic.
Some forms of gnosticism also believe this. Look up the Demiurge and its background.
The term you’re looking for is Evilgodism
Misothiest is the term I heard.
Yet the first words there say
Misotheism is the "hatred of God"
so that's a different thing.
How about Divine Misanthropy?
I call it, god, the Tyrant.
A toddler who fries ants with a lens isn't evil, though.
At least not more evil than most toddlers.
He's only not evil because he can't understand his actions.
A god would have to be dumb for this logic to apply.
Yeah, that's a chaos god, not evil.
Isn't the god supposed to define what good and evil even is, and wouldn't therefore any monotheistic god be "good" by definition?!
Socrates answered this. If morality is objective or has an objective basis then it is necessarily independent from any God or god's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma
Edit to add: If you're interested in the concept of an evil God in the context of Christian beliefs I recommend reading "Answer to Job" by Carl Jung. He doesn't exactly make the Christian God evil but ascribes moral failings to God and frames Jesus as the redemption of God instead of the redemption of man.
Neither of those are necessarily true. For an Abrahamic god, sure, but one can certainly conceive of a god that doesn't define good and evil, and a god that defines good and evil and doesn't define itself as good.
That's what people say, but in practice people have their own ideas and just project them on to god.
There is no reason to believe that a higher power cares about the concepts of good and evil to begin with. Taking a walk through the woods seems like a morally neutral activity, but all of the insects you crush along the way might view you as evil for what you do to them.
Somewhat off-topic, but there's this line of thought, which multiple Christian thinkers have come up with throughout the centuries, called the Ontological Argument. It basically tries to prove the existence of the Christian God with only pure logic, no axioms involved.
Proofs without axioms don't exist elsewhere, so take the following with a massive grain of salt, but basically it goes:
God is a maximally good being. Existence of a maximally good being is itself good. Therefore, God must exist.
Aside from this being circular reasoning, it also involves a massive axiom: The existence and definition of good vs. bad.
But with your point, we can advance the argument even further:
Defining what's good is good.
That way, we get twice the circular reasoning, but no axioms anymore. 🙃
Philosophical, not logical. The actual axiom is still 'god exists."
Defining what god must be, rather than defining what would qualify as a god, assumes there is such a thing as god.
Example: The cat god is a being that is a better cat than any other imaginable cat.
Compared to: A god would be all-powerful. This being, x, is all-powerful. Therefore, x is a god.
Compared to: There exists a cat better than any other cat. This cat, being greater than all others must be the god of cats. (Does this qualify as an omnipotent 'god'? No, but at least the cat is provable.
Defining what’s good is good.
Adam and Eve were canonically cast from heaven for being able to define good and evil.
My limited experience with going to Church of God places indicated to me that they hold this belief, but I do jot know the term for it. They didn't pray to god, they prayed to Jesus, specifically. And cried for him. And thanked him. And apologized to him. And so on. All to Jesus, not god, who are apparently different.
The idea of the Trinity is not the same across all "Christian" religions, see Arianism for example of an early split.
I'd never heard of them, but I looked them up, and I don't see anything in their declaration of beliefs to suggest that they think that God is bad or evil. They just seem to have an emphasis on praying to Jesus, but they seem to have pretty standard Christian belief that God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost are all parts of the same being.
I am not sure how aligned all of the different Church of God denominations are in their beliefs, but the main website for them seems to be pretty standard Christian stuff.
You're right, I just mentioned them as an example of splits about exactly what has gone on with the differing beliefs about trinity interpretation. I don't recall that they believed in an evil god. I do recall that some interpretations have other feelings and operate as such.
The Arians and the Church of God are probably not really connected to what op is getting at. I'm definitely not a theologist haha! Maybe I should stay oiy of this...
They certainly didn't start out this way, but the terms gnosticism and manichaeism are now both used loosely for this depending on the context.
Anti-theist.
No, antitheists oppose belief in deities.
You're right.
Though anti-theist is an umbrella term that includes opposition to religion, not just belief in god. Which includes believing religions are harmful. As it isn't a regulated religious body, the term is rather loose and not stringently defined. I personally believe it's better to distinguish the faithful from the non-worshipful.
As opposed to dytheism, which typically holds god may be, or is, malicious and should still be worshiped. Though dytheism is not exclusively faithful, the term connotes faith more often than simple agreement god is evil.
Adaptus Ministorum
Anti-theism?
No, that's being opposed to the belief in god or gods.
God is real [points thumbs to self] and he's evil as fuck.
I am unimportant. This world is primed for the great devourer.
The star children come to make us whole.
All hail zorp the surveyor
https://ninjago.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Devourer
The Great Devourer will consume us all! Move forth to the Lost City of Ouroboros!
There is no god, but if there was one, the only logical conclusion is that he’s evil. So whatever you call it, your religion is the most sane one I’ve ever heard about
Fellow Sapiens enjoyer
I think it’s a common argument that’s been made by Hitchens and Steven Fry too, but you’re right 😁
the only logical conclusion is that he’s evil
If you're talking about the Abrahamic one, yes. Others could be good or neutral depending on their claimed characteristics.
Maybe apatheism?
I get what youre saying but unless you believe in a whole deific pantheon that spans the moral spectrum, you just cant logically label a single god-like entity as evil, as it would have no meaning without contrast.
How is this different than labeling god good?
The ideology is that if you don't know the difference between right and wrong nothing you do can be wrong.
It's no different at all.
Feeble mindedness ?
That’s just religion
Gottem! /s
Blasphemy?
So many things are blasphemy to someone. More specific please.
The real question is why do you feel so angry and upset about your life? I would start focusing on the good things not just the bad ones.
What a wild assumption to make based off someone seeing all the evil in the world and the garbage religious people justify, and thinking they are angry about their life.
That's completely irrelevant. You can be working hard towards something and achieve it while there is someone always trying to sabotage you. I am asking about the saboteur
Persepctive is extremely relevant. For example if you live under a government and things are going great for you, you will more likely think the government is good than someone that is in poverty and under attack by the government.
What in your life is not going so great that you are unhappy? Writing someone might actually help.
