I’d be interested in seeing what kind of mental gymnastics literalist Christians use to get out of this trap

Funny you should say that, I found a seventeenth century argument to that effect last night. Interestinglky, didn’t seem to havbe been to controversial.

Of course, you should fully expect to be swamped by hardcore Christians eager to tell you how wrong you are and how you are *so* going to Hell for equating the bearded longhair with Lucifer…

Well, we know how they felt about it the last ime (the Ophites), but they don’t have the option of burning folks any more. (Or we’d be short a few Mormons, anyhow).

Damien Youth “Mythical Light” The payoff is the last line.

Yup. Just looking for an excuse to post that.

Christ consciousness as a synthesis of the material and the spiritual (if I’m reading this right) seems like a more “correct” way to go. I’ve recently been thinking about how god “so loved the world” that he sent his only begotten son. Well, the “world” he sent his son to was the material one, this one. And why wouldn’t god love raspberries and sunsets and trees?

I’ve always been a sensual person, open to the delights of touch and taste and sight and hearing. One of the things that scared me away from spiritual practice, in the past, was its denial of the body. The ascetic current seems like an extreme reaction to the material world. Perhaps our real struggle is to learn to live in balance.

http://christianexodus.org/

i was just reading an article in gq about them. they’re pretty wild.

one is that the modern ‘fundamentalist’ christian behavior is pretty much textbook luciferanism. they become utterly infatuated by stories of light, miracles and visions of a place in a shining heaven and it tempts them to either devalue the material world, or despise it outright, hence hatred of sex, of the enviroment rgid morality to govern our behavior in a sinfull world, etc. this obsession with escape and redemption in some fantasy world is the quintessential pitfall of steinerian luciferanism.

another is the ‘classic’ gnostic viewpoint, which regards the material world as capital ‘E’ evil, and a creation of the demiurge. a trap for the sparks of divine light. in this schema the only difference from the first is a greater emphasis on Ahriman, who fills the role of the demiurge in this conception, and places jesus in the luciferian role of bringing us salvific knowledge to slip the bonds of material slavery. it tends to overlook the frequent admonitions of jesus that the kingdom of heaven is right here right now, and replace that with a another variation on the luciferian ascent into light, but in this case it’s structured in such a way as to exclude all the orthodox christians who are obviously pawns of the demiurge. elitist heaven basicly with no bad old roman authorities in it.
So the same imbalance just pushed from below not pulled from above.

and lastly the modern variant on gnosticism which tends to be skeptical of both poles but leans hevily towards Lucifer still, regarding worldy authority as incompetant corrupt and inherently evil or unworthy. it tends to deal less with ascent into light and more immanent transcendance of the material world and it’s negative aspects, in the manner of protestantism. a lot of modern luciferians do not seem to understand themselves as such, but you can see it in the obsession with the salvific quality of information, with acceleration, and occasionally even in some kind of apocalyptic transfiguration of the material world caused by the acceleration of the Lucifer current, whether it be the singularity, 2012 timewave zero, S.M.I.L.E. or the new jerusalem.

all three are unbalanced towards the Lucifer end of the spectrum, with individuals occasionally striking a good balance between the otherworldy and the material, transcendane and acceptance.

In general though, Ahriman has done a good job of driving seekers into the opposite end of the cattle chute towards the escape that Lucifer seems to offer. It’s the satanic dialectic if you will, according to rudolph steiner.

So to get back to the point moreso, you could say that jesus legitamtely adopted aspects of the lucifer energy to drive social progress and religious reform, but to take that and turn into an excuse to renounce the world and escape into fantasy is a distortion of what he meant. it’s good to remember there was no devil in the orginal bible, and ’sin’ just meant ‘error’.