Does Good Omens contain blasphemy?

If so, it is not the one John Horvath decried when launching a protest against Netflix doing Good Omens.

To John Horvath, the mere depiction of Satanists as normal people is, per se, a blasphemy.

Is Satanism a normal religion? No. It's not Catholicism, ergo ... are Satanists sometimes normal people despite this? There are some people without the boundaries of the Catholic Church who do seem normal, much of the time.

Do Satanists believe they are backing a puny rebel against their Creator who will lose in the end, and do it anyway? That's not Satanists, that's people signing a Pact with the Devil, which some do, forgetting the end, and preferring some of the things which should be means to the means to get there. Now, while both Satanists and such people do in a sense serve Satan, they only partially coincide.

Satanists typically either are Atheists who consider Satan as a symbol for Evolution (meaning they are as abnormal as other Evolutionists, in believing Evolution over God creating), or Goddess Worshippers or Luciferians. All of whom differ from the Christian backstory about Satan before in some sense backing him. They are as culpable of worshipping Satan as Christians know him to be, as New Age Hindoos are meritorious in believing in the real Jesus - when they are believing in a New Age Guru projected into some of the historical details of Jesus Christ.

Now, they are a very Antichristian religion, often enough aware that Christianity is Catholicism and then sharing Protestant prejudices about Catholicism, which means they are an umpteenth avatar of Protestantism turned against Christianity even the remaining such in Protestantism.

Saying that they are not all monsters, that they are fit to raise children, that they can have a good influence on someone, etc, all of this is not blasphemy. Precisely as Neil Gaiman painting Adam and Eve as blacks in the beginning of the work is also not blasphemy.

Arguably, Adam and Eve had brown skin, brown eyes, black or dark brown hair, but "Caucasian" features rather than those typical of blacks of Africa or of Chinamen. Including hair that was wavy rather than curly or straight. Why? Because, if on colour scheme, "Caucasians" are one extreme and the Caucasian colours came around through mutations, on many other items, "Caucasians" either are middle (hair structure) or have a very broad spectrum (lip thickness), because the "Caucasian" colour scheme has spread to so many "subraces" that "Caucasians" are the least unified "major race".

If they were painted as blacks of Africa, slightly inaccurate, but painting them as "Caucasian" also in white is also slightly inaccurate. It's not blasphemy.

Painting Satanists as people who are normal in many ways is even slightly or even not so slightly more accurate than John Horvath's take, even if they are people one can do some ritual shunning of if they announce their Satanism too broadly.

But, they are in error, and a Christian should not confide his fate to their cares, if avoidable. As with a Protestant, as with a Muslim, as with an unbelieving Jew ... however, while I have not seen or read Good Omens, I think confiding a baby not baptised whom one thought destined to be Antichrist to them was, well, not good, but not as catastrophic as one might fear either. Not sure of the details in that novel I did not read.

The main point is, a man destined to be Antichrist can avoid becoming Antichrist. It's a good point. Apocalypse 19 has two people, at least one of whom has a name adding up to 666, thrown alive into the lake of fire. Today's world has at least four people, plus two more adding up to 616, among the well known. ASCII, Hebrew, Greek gematria were used by me. 4 to 6 being more than 2, some of these 4 or 6 will not be the two. Some who seem destined to become Antichrist if you lookk at only their gematria, will, like the Antichrist of Good Omens, not be Antichrist for real. Sorry, Gaiman, if I misrepresented a novel of yours I did not read. Yet.

I often side with John Horvath, and also often disagree with him - on this one, I disagree with him.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris XI
Sunday after Corpus Christi
23.VI.2019

It is also Vigil of St. John the Baptist's Nativity, but I think Sunday passes before Vigil Fast./HGL

Here is Gaiman at his best: Neil Gaiman 2012 Commencement Speech "Make Good Art" - by the way, Neil Gaiman's nightmare of a man with a clipboard is actually a real horror vision of Antichrist./HGL