No, I’m Not Satan (Or, Why Comparing People to the Serpent in the Garden of Eden When They Disagree with Your Theology is Lazy and Illogical): A THREAD - 1/ 🐍
Sometimes when fundamentalists engage people whose biblical interpretation differs from their own, they will employ a rhetorical trick by referencing the serpent in the Garden of Eden who tempted Adam & Eve by asking, “Did God really say?...” 2/🐍
The idea is that by challenging their interpretation of Scripture, their opponent is actually challenging what GOD has said, just like that crafty serpent (who is never identified in the text as Satan, by the way, but I digress...) 3/🐍
(This happened to me most recently in that TGC piece by @alisachilders, and most dramatically a couple years ago when @EWErickson described me as a “snake with a Twitter account.”) 4/🐍
A cheeky way to shut this one down would be to tell the fundamentalist that God told you pour a bucket of bat poop over their head and when they object say, “Are you asking ‘did God really say?’ just like the snake in the Garden?” 5/🐍🦇
A more decorous way to address it might be to point out that abolitionists were also charged by fundamentalists with challenging the “clear teachings of Scripture” when they opposed American slavery by asking “Did God really say slavery is divinely instituted?” 6/🐍
Or you could just point out that the entire history of theology & biblical interpretation involves people asking one another “Did God really say that, or are we projecting our own biases, cultures, power dynamics assumptions, etc onto the text?” THOSE ARE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS 7/🐍
(Fundamentalist is probably an anachronistic term to use there - perhaps “biblical literalist”?)
The main point is that just because someone has a high degree of certainty about their own theological convictions doesn’t mean that they are God and anyone who challenges their opinion is Satan disguised as a snake. 8/8. The end.
P.S. Remember, Jesus liked to begin his teachings with “you have heard it said [quotes Scripture], but I say....” And Peter & Paul were accused of disagreeing with God when they declared Gentiles needn’t keep kosher or be circumcised.
