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Who is Satan?  By popular opinion, he’s some Lord of Darkness that is responsible for the evils of the world.  If this is true, how did this come to be?  Satan, like everything else in the universe according to Christian mythology is the will of God.  Satan is God’s creation.   If Satan is bad it is because God has designed him to be.  When you’re trying to come up with explanations for people to bolster your myth, for it to make sense to people,  having an evil character to counterbalance your good character makes sense.

The character of Satan is almost necessary for most people.  If you were to remove Satan from the equation, how would you explain: famine, disease, sin, etc., to people.  Surely you wouldn’t want the people to blame God for all of that!  You’re trying to get people to be obedient to God and the church here on earth.  So you have someone else that takes all that blame.   However,  Satan is still God’s creation.  Everything happens according to God’s will and God can blink Satan out of existence at will.   In fact, God will forgive you of anything just by asking him to.

Everything is still God’s fault regardless.  He created Satan, and he created us.  He created all diseases.  Everything happens to plan.  This brings us to Jesus and Judas.  God, the Father, was also Jesus, the Son.  In the Father’s plan was to have the Son die to forgive everyone.  A fresh start; a blank slate.  Why?  Have you ever wondered why the Father decided that someone needed to die in order to forgive the rest of his creations, his children?  He’s omnipotent.  He could just decide to forgive people if he wanted to.  No one had to die.

Since no one had to die, Judas was a completely unnecessary tool.  However,  since the Father decided his plan involved the Son’s death was necessary someone had to set it up.  Judas was told in advance he was going to do what he did.    Jesus couldn’t have just turned himself in, that would have been akin to suicide and that’s against the rules.  Someone had to do it for him so he could have been the victim, even though he knew it was going to happen the entire time.  The plan was set, the completely unnecessary plan.  Judas was just doing his job, that God had given him.

Let’s remove Jesus and Judas from the equation as well.  Would God still be going around killing entire cities?  Flooding the planet?  Plaguing populations?   Again,  this is THE omnipotent being in the universe.  He can just stop that at anytime.   After the Father kills his Son, he just up and disappears.  Meanwhile, people still blame Satan for stuff all the time.   Blaming Satan for your ills is like blaming only the gun and never the shooter when you get shot.  We want fewer guns, but the shooter needs to be punished for his actions.

Satan is God’s tool.  He exists to show how good he is by comparison.   Satan is supposed to make you want to run to God even more.  If you’re scared of Satan you’ll plead for God’s help.   If Satan is responsible for everything bad, then only God gets credit for everything that goes right.   You’re not supposed to look behind the curtain.   Stories have been thrown around about how Satan got expelled from heaven, rebelled, or otherwise lost favor and became evil.   There has to be an origin myth to set up how it wasn’t God’s fault.

That’s a key element to all of this.  God is omnipotent, infallible, and has a plan for us all, but everytime something goes wrong then it isn’t his fault.   If people aren’t willing to hold the original parental figure accountable for their actions,  the source of all authority,  then why would we expect them to act any different on earth?   When politicians do shady stuff and skirt around it, are we surprised that they get away with it over and over again?  What about church leaders?  Corporate officers?  Law enforcement officials?

No.  Authority increasingly goes unchallenged and unaccounted for until something massive happens in someone’s personal life that they simply can’t ignore any longer.  By then, it’s often too late.   Then they’re fighting an entire system.  For people outside a center of power:  women, ethnic minorities, people with accents, LGBTQ, people of different faiths, etc, this becomes even more apparent in their day to day life.

Satan doesn’t deserve his reputation  but God deserves more of one.  God is the authority figure.   Challenge authority, hold them accountable.   Maybe God isn’t worth worshipping?  That’s for you to decide.   Maybe political parties aren’t worth blind loyalty?   Maybe we don’t have anything to hide, but we still want our privacy anyway.  Maybe life isn’t like sports,  where you just want your side to win.  When authority can divide, they can conquer.   God has been good at division.  Look at all the deaths in his name.   Human-based authority isn’t that far behind.