Satan, Demons and heroes

                           Today, this movie would be considered cheap and poor. Funny rather than scary.

When I was in my grade school, my father, a pastor, brought me along to our church’s evangelistic crusades. The most popular way to evangelize during that time, the 80’s, was through film showing. I could never forget the movie that was being shown then, Burning Hell. I could not remember the story of the movie or the actors, what I could remember was the fire, the worms, the suffering, the pain—it was a graphic movie about what the sinner would expect when they go to hell. 

After watching that movie for many times, I started to have nightmares. I slept alone on my cot (or papag in tagalog) and each night I would wake up in the middle of the night, sweating, afraid and sometimes feeling cold because of the fear of hell; I was wishing that I had my parents beside me. To battle this fear I would pray for the Lord Jesus Christ to come into my heart to be my savior. This happened for most of my childhood, the nightmares, and every time I feel afraid, I always invite the Lord Jesus Christ to come into my heart until I outgrew the fear of hell in me and until I outgrew the belief the name Jesus Christ was a powerful talismanic-incantation for dealing with nightmares.

Of course scare tactics work i.e. for a time until one becomes too scared to the point of numbness. It was never my father's intention to scare the hell out of me. I am not taking this against my late father, I loved and still very much love the man. He was a pastor and all pastors suffer from, different degrees, messiah complex.

Anyway...

Graphic illustrations of the devil as a horrible creature having horns and tails are used to scare the hell out of people. It was effective before in the middle ages, dark ages where people are superstitious, ignorant and illiterate.  But in this age of cyber tech and relativism (whatever the hell is that word), cgi effects and the internet especially you tube where anybody may see gross videos of photo-shopped creatures that looked very real, I mean visually speaking, Satan or the devil has never looked better, and realistic, may I add.

In movies and in computer games, these creatures that look like satan or the devil are now heroes. Maybe people are starting to realize that because a creature is ugly, scary and gross, it does not necessarily make them evil. Really one of the faults of giving satan or the devil an animal-human description is that people focuses more on the look than on the nature of satan. I have a friend who looks like satan and he was called demonyo or satanas by everybody, but he was far from being evil. Take the snake for example, because snakes were thought to be the serpent that lured eve into the fall, they are killed out of fear because they are thought to be treacherous and fierce animals.

Lochner’s depiction of a horrifically beautiful scene seethes with the realistic bodies of the naked damned who scream as they undergo torture by legions of distorted, animalistic creatures.

Jahrakal, the troll warlord, one of the heroes in the Warcraft DOTA game.

Hellboy, A demon, raised from infancy after being conjured by and rescued from the Nazis, grows up to become a defender against the forces of darkness.

Anyway, my break is up...maybe I'll come back later and talk about what this beautification and heroification of demons etc. blah, blah, blah.....