satan

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a bad guy or a good guy

i vote that yes, satan is a good guy or a bad guy

haha i was thinking that the god of the old testement, and the god of the new testement was the same god

forget your gods, there all made up

answer! thread closed.

I tried to answer but my computer froze...it was very spooky,since I was being a real smart ass.I think I got a taste of how people learn to become supersticious.

I think that the whole satan/god thing is confusing.God is everything and created everything....that included a being who rebels against him.Then God decides to punish him by casting him on to Earth,the same plaent he creates humans and animals on?Does this seem like "good urban planning" to you?Could he not have sent him to Saturn or one of the other billion planets>No,he has to sind him to the same place as these creatures he has created who are total nubies and Do not even understand the concept of "good and evil",so how can they really understand that eating the fruit is "evil"?unitl after they have eaten it.And who thros a bunch of kindergartners onto the same playground as the crackdealers who hold a personal grudge against the principle.Does this really seem like a logical thing to do or a total set-up?I simply can not respect this kind of parenting.I wouldnt sit my 3 year old kid at the table in fromt of a bunch of cookies with the school sociopath, who I know hated me, and tell them..."dont eat those cookies".What kind of a sadist does this?And he is supposed to be the father of lies,given free access to "beings" who have no concept of of lies until after they eat the apple...how would they understand that he was lieing?

I dont know if satan is a good guy or not but the god I read about seems to have some real parenting issues.

he was very misunderstood so i will vote other

satan is an allagory,
who would god have to reflect himself in if not for satan

it always amused me that god the almighty, all powerful, etc. had to put up with satan.

I mean, can you tell me why god puts up with satan with out giving me a convoluted story that explains most of it but leaves a lot to 'we can not know what god wants?'

Satan is so many things and ideas throughout time...adversary, serpent, etc. But I think of him as the scapegoat for the inversion of values perpetrated by those who are incompetent in this life and promote an afterlife. To promote and afterlife at the expense of this one, you have to disown earthly values. So you have a devil created to tempt you towards sins of flesh, and a "messiah" who was meek and mild here but supposedly ruled the afterlife.

As Ayn Rand wrote in WE THE LIVING, evil is not a fire breathing horned beast. It's a louse. A small, miserable louse.

"Satan" is an amalgamation of many gods (and goddesses) of war, death, the cycle of life, and even of nature, love and prosperity. Even the name is a corruption of one borrowed from another culture.

This is not to say that there is not a concentration of unambiguous evil so powerful that it is sentient and capable of independent thought and action, which could meaningfully be equated to "Satan" in the Biblical sense, even if such an entity was not involved in any of the acts ascribed to it in that text.

By unambiguous, I mean that all individuals - even those whose relative morals and beliefs differ 180 degrees from my own - would agree that this was evil. If it were not unambiguous, then my perceptions only really talk about me, not this hypothetical being. It may be that "unambiguous evil" is an impossibility, or that no concentration of such evil could ever achieve sentience, but that's not my specialty and therefore I simply don't know.

By definition, such an unambiguous entity would be bad, if it exists.

I am also not going to say that there hasn't been an entity of some form or other that has interfered with humans for their own purposes. Whether such an entity is good or bad depends on what you believe, though, and so the question becomes subjective.

The Judeo-Christian Satan is a tough one. Some examples maybe a belief in such a being, others may simply be using the name to "name" their fears. In cultures that did not have much abstract thought, naming a fear by personifying it would make some sense. Other posters have talked of scapegoating. In ancient times amongst Semitic peoples, it was customary to load up a goat with confessions and other artifacts representing their fears, guilt and shame. The goat would then be driven out of the town, carrying all of this burden away. The idea of lumping such stuff onto an imaginary named goat would have much the same therapeutic value but without wasting a perfectly good animal.

But did (or does) their Satan exist? That's even harder. If you accept that non-physical sentience exists, then it is possible to imagine such a sentience interacting with early civilizations in a way that they eventually concluded was wrong. They may well have labeled such a sentience as "Satan".

So the question of whether or not "Satan" exists is independent of whether or not the Judeo-Christian depiction is talking of something real or imagined and whether or not unambiguous evil can even theoretically exist. It depends rather more on what you mean by "exist" (does an archetype "exist", since it is theoretical?), what you mean by "Satan", and given the "non-canonical" but contemporary texts, what you mean by "Judeo-Christian" - assuming that you limit yourself to documentation.

Satan was a confused boy.

Satan was an angel who was cast out from heaven for giving mankind the gift of light. The older name for the Devil is Lucifer which translates to 'giver of light'.

Ed Almos

P.S. I'm an Athiest, I just know stuff like this.

According to the Gnostic Christian Bible, Satan is the one who created Earth and mankind in the first place and God is the one who gave mankind Light to survive on it. Slight role-reversal. The Gnostics included the Essenes, a splinter group of which included John the Baptist. Remnants of that group, with a VERY different Bible, exist today in Iraq and parts of Iran. These are the only Gnostics that can be shown by written history to date to Roman times and by DNA studies to a specific sect.

It is reasons like this that make me suspicious of all popular or well-known explanations.

Plays by way too many rules.

Satan was an angel created by god his name was Lucifer first but he ran away and made hell now he is named satan. He is evil!

how is he 'evil' if he was an Angel created by god? From what I hear, he had had enough of this God the Father crap because if God never dies, then the son never takes over. Jesus was the 'good son' because he didn't upset the patriarchal hierarchy.
Satan must be 'evil' because he wanted the progression of the generations and ol' Jesus was a suck up daddy's boy and hence "good".