The more I think about it, the more I wonder about this.
Surely, a believer will immediately answer LAWD YES, and I have no doubt some of our resident apologists will attempt to construct a turgid lattice of Bible verses to 'prove' that he is, but history is written by the winners, and Satan lost his rebellion against God. If Satan and Lucifer are the same guy, I dunno. Most people seem to think so, and I'm going with it.
What makes Satan a bad guy, though? I think he is the bad guy primarily because he opposes the designated good guy, because there really doesn't seem to be a whole lot of direct villainy attributed to him. Most of it seems to involve blaming everything bad, ever, on this one being, without any real substantiation. He's bad because God said so, for the most part.
Yet, if you compare him to God objectively, it is impossible to suggest that Satan is worse. God is the one who orders, or directly causes, mass slaughters, torture, rape, slavery, mass destruction, infanticide, pestilence, and so on. What does Satan do? Well, for the most part, he doesn't seem to do anything except 'tempt'. Hell, the only time he kills anyone, he does it because God told him to. It may not have even been Satan in the book of Job. In any case, ten deaths is nothing compared to God's body count, which is in the billions and is often done with exceptional cruelty and malice. It is God, not Satan, who commands total devotion and love and punishes those who don't give it with an extended stay in a holocaust Disneyland.
This is not to say that Satan is a good guy, but God is infinitely worse in every conceivable way. If one is not brainwashed into believing tautological nonsense like "God is good because God says God is good", God comes across as a hideously evil monster with fantastic PR and Satan, at worst, is an antagonistic trickster who has been made out to be the destructive evil force that God actually is.
Surely, a believer will immediately answer LAWD YES, and I have no doubt some of our resident apologists will attempt to construct a turgid lattice of Bible verses to 'prove' that he is, but history is written by the winners, and Satan lost his rebellion against God. If Satan and Lucifer are the same guy, I dunno. Most people seem to think so, and I'm going with it.
What makes Satan a bad guy, though? I think he is the bad guy primarily because he opposes the designated good guy, because there really doesn't seem to be a whole lot of direct villainy attributed to him. Most of it seems to involve blaming everything bad, ever, on this one being, without any real substantiation. He's bad because God said so, for the most part.
Yet, if you compare him to God objectively, it is impossible to suggest that Satan is worse. God is the one who orders, or directly causes, mass slaughters, torture, rape, slavery, mass destruction, infanticide, pestilence, and so on. What does Satan do? Well, for the most part, he doesn't seem to do anything except 'tempt'. Hell, the only time he kills anyone, he does it because God told him to. It may not have even been Satan in the book of Job. In any case, ten deaths is nothing compared to God's body count, which is in the billions and is often done with exceptional cruelty and malice. It is God, not Satan, who commands total devotion and love and punishes those who don't give it with an extended stay in a holocaust Disneyland.
This is not to say that Satan is a good guy, but God is infinitely worse in every conceivable way. If one is not brainwashed into believing tautological nonsense like "God is good because God says God is good", God comes across as a hideously evil monster with fantastic PR and Satan, at worst, is an antagonistic trickster who has been made out to be the destructive evil force that God actually is.
