(July 22, 2015 at 11:07 am)dyresand Wrote: I'll start it off
Satan isn't evil nor bad. In the bible he has done nothing really to show he is bad he showed
some what of a good side considering he didn't want jesus to die on a roman crucifixion. To start it off
with genesis god actually lied to adam and eve the serpent told the truth and god cursed humanity.
Note why would god curse humanity? if god told the truth they would have died were they stood but
the serpent told the truth while god simply lied.
If you view the Bible as a whole, then Satan is identified as a liar and murderer by Jesus in John 8:44. In Revelation 12:9 he is said to "lead the whole world astray." The NT links Satan to the serpent and specifically blames him for leading people away from god and towards their doom, which he will eventually share. He is the main bad guy in the Bible, since much of the wickedness in the OT can be laid at his feet in some manner or other.
If you view the Bible as a lot of different stories that were eventually mashed together to form an imperfect whole, then it is more ambiguous because the serpent may simply be a serpent and the Satan from the book of Job does not act without god's consent, and could be considered an agent of god or a counselor of sorts. When he urges god to stop protecting Job, god does so instead of telling Satan to shove off. At the end there is no indication that anything at all happens to Satan; his part in the whole drama is done and he goes his merry way. The NT authors sought to provide a more substantial villain for their narrative, and I guess the best they could come up with was a fallen angel who would get a shot at god after he almost completely "de-powered" himself but who was otherwise no longer a threat.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
