Wiccans and other Religious Witches; what do you think of traditions who call their God Lucifer?
I'm not talking about Satanists here. This question is about Witchcraft Religions that use the name Lucifer to describe the Witches' God. For example, Stregha -- in _Aradia: Gospel of the Witches_, Lucifer is named as the brother of Diana and father of Aradia. To be fair, Lucifer was the name of a minor Roman God, and was never originally in the Bible -- repeat -- it is NOT a Biblical name. It was added in translation to the Latin, and remained in subsequent translations. So, just as the image of Pan became the image of the Christian Devil, the name Lucifer became the name of the Christian Devil.
So, my question is one of apologetics. Fundamentalist Christians accuse us of worshiping their Devil, and denying this claim is central to Wiccan apologetics. Do traditions that use the name Lucifer, or emphasize the Horned God's underworld aspects, undermine this apologetic? Or, is there even a point to it?
To continue my thought;
Is it honest to say we don't worship the Christian Devil, when the Christian Devil is in fact a corruption of our God? The Horned God of the Witches is both a God of Fertility and Nature, and of the Underworld and Death. He is consort to the Great Mother, and together they rule the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. He embodies our Animal Nature -- aspects of our humanity which the Christians would call "sinful." Conversely, for some Wiccans and Witches, the Christian God represents tyrany, repression, the "Patriarchy," a force against freedom, progress, and Enlightenment -- what the Gnostics would call the Demiurge.
To clarify -- Wicca is a new religion, attempting to reconstruct the Medeaval Witchcraft Religion that the Church was supposedly trying to wipe out during the "Burning Times." Satanism and Wicca are very, very different, as any Satanis will tell you. As for the Christian Devil, he is a mythological figure cobbled together from a variety of sources, Biblical legend, Pagan myth, Zoroastrian philosophy,etc. The idea of the Wiccan Horned God comes from the nature, fertility, hunting, agriculture, vegetation, solar, and underworld deities of pre-Christian Europe.
So all of these things -- the Satan of Christianity, the Satan of Theistic Satanism, and the Horned God of Wicca -- are three completely different collages, but cut from the same magazines. The resaults, however, are entirely different. The Christian Devil is a being of Evil, Temptation, Destruction, and Deception. The Wiccan Horned God is concerned with Life, Rebirth, and the cycles of Nature.