From: "Kevin J. Maroney" <kmaroney@ungames.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Copperhead
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 11:23:19 

At 10:44 PM 5/23/01 -0400, Rostrum wrote:
>Is this a joke?  That's the very thing that Christians have always used to
>say "Manichaeanism is not us."  Satan is the opposite of Michael the
>Archangel; there is no counterpart Bad Thing that is the opposite of God.  
>God created everything, and some things are warped, but to the extent
>Satan has any good thing (intellegence, existence, charisma) it is simply
>a warped version of the good thing God gave him.   Nothing in orthodox
>Christianity or Judaism gives you the sense that Evil is a real rival to
>God that might have a chance of ultimately winning.  

I agree with all of that, but the last time I checked, Adam was not God.
The major theological distinction between the Abrahamist religions and the
religion of Mani is at the level of a dark equivalent to God. The
Abrahamist religions all posit the existence of completely evil things
which exist as mirrors to good things less than God. Calling "Good Adam,
Bad Lilith" "Manichaen" seems to me a misunderstaning of both the
Abrahamist religions and Mani's religion, since it ascribes a common
practice of the former group to being solely the province of the latter. 

I suppose there would be ways for an Abrahamist "Good Adam, Bad Lilith"
pair to be more Manichaen--if, for instance, Lilith were *created* by Satan
to subvert and destroy Adam--but if such a tradition exists, I'm unaware of
it. All of the versions of Lilith I've encountered have her created by the
Good God and then wander astray (much like Adam himself, of course, but for
some reason it is not assumed that the children of Adam are all demons). 

-- 
Wombat, a.k.a. Kevin Maroney kmaroney@ungames.com
Kitchen Staff Supervisor, New York Review of Science Fiction
http://www.nyrsf.com

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