Hi Small Block. The serpent is never refered to as Satan. According to a theology study I read on Angels, Lucifer is refered to in context as the King of Babylon and had mistakenly been re-interpreted as Satan. Satan originally means accuser and Devil means slanderer in the original context, he accused Saints, etc. i can't remember the exact books in the Bible. The original meaning of Demon is actually Divine Being. So the originality of the names and words has been corrupted which happens with cultural crossovers etc. The Devil actually comes from the around 12 BC from the Persian prophet Zaroaster who devised a mythological system which was based on the Persian worship of the Ahuras, good deities eternally at war with the evil Daevas. A basic moral compass. The point I tried to make initially is that there is so much crossover regarding culture and religion that the "true Human Race" would be hard to define. This crossover , of course, has benefits and negative aspects. Joseph Conrad spent his life unraveling culture, mysticism and religion and mythology. He has some very interesting reads. So in order to understand where we come from, who we are and what and why we believe certain things, we have to try and look back. Of course the human race is changing even more rapidly due to the bombardment of advertising in media and political forms. For example, in the USA, think of the massive advertising of pharmaceuticals for every ailment that the television viewer is subjected to. How has this and how will this impact American culture? How will the global recession impact the belief systems of the everyday man and woman in the workplace about money? What culture will that bring about? Because of the dynamic and instant pace of the world that we live in, all our cultures are changing rapidly. When the food stocks in the sea are depleted in 40 years and the worlds population reaches 9 Billion in 2040 and land becomes scarcer, what aspects of the human race will be sacrificed for survival? That's a bit of a catastrophic outlook but the human race changes to adapt to survive. Whew maybe a bit too much info but food for thought I hope.
B
