Re: Nigel Tomes - LSM's Unorthodox Satanology
Christians believe that Satan entered the serpent to deceive Eve, a kind of demonic possession. But why couldn't Satan simply enter Eve directly and cause her to eat the fruit?
God said:
Genesis 3:14 "So the LORD God said to the snake, "Because you have done this, You are cursed more than all the wild or domestic animals. You will crawl on your belly.".
So before the serpent deceived Eve, it was not cursed, it was part of God's good creation. The serpent fell by deceiving Eve, and God cursed it.
We could say that mankind's fall and the snake's fall occurred at the same time.
Logically then, if the snake was Satan, then Satan's fall occurred when he deceived Eve, not before that.
So the idea of Satan falling from heaven prior to the fall of man in Genesis is questionable, as is the idea of Satan entering the snake.
Actually, the idea of talking animals is nonsense, because animals don't talk, and the snake has no intelligence of the sort displayed in Eden. The discourse between Eve and the snake in Eden I believe is Eve's conscience. She engaged in self-deception by imagining a discourse with one of the animals in the garden, the snake, by which she justified herself to eat of the tree of knowledge. I can imagine all of this taking place in her mind as she walked through the garden. The snake has rich symbolism in the Bible but to take it too literally leads to all sorts of impossible scenarios. A snake physically cannot utter the sorts of intelligible sounds and words required to have dialogue with a human, unless Eve figured out a "morse code" language between the animals, but still doesn't explain how the snake had enough intelligence to deceive Eve. The only animals God created with sufficient intelligence are the humans.
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