Is Satan better than God?

[Belacqua]

For me, as a metaphor, Satan is a lot about subtle deception (including self-deception). So-called acts of kindness or responsible acts are a means to manipulate, not out of any sense of care or dignity. Satan is also not about consistency in the upholding of so-called righteous principles. Satan is about achieving one's goals, especially at the expense of others.

Satan's a really really old character, and has been used to symbolize all kinds of things in the past. 

Your reading here is far more traditional than LaVey's. In modern times the best example of this type would be Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust. He flatters and grants wishes, but the goal is always to give the victim exactly what he wants in order to ruin his life, and the lives of those around him. He's the model of the sophisticated gentlemen Satan, as seen in certain Hollywood movies and Rolling Stones songs.

The other modern view of Satan would be that of Milton, which famously made the ostensible villain into a hero for the Romantic poets. More like tragic Prometheus than sly Mephistopheles. 

Blake remade Satan to fit his own eccentric theology (which was nonetheless deeply rooted in tradition). Blake thought that the Fall of Man didn't have to do with sin but with a division away from wholeness and full perception. (An ancient Neoplatonic trope.) When our doors of perception are fully open we will realize that we are one with God -- we are God. In this system Satan was made by God as a merciful lower limit below which we cannot fall -- the extreme limit of contraction into oneself. Satan was not an individual but a state of being -- as all the main characters are for Blake: Adam, Moses, Jesus, etc. 

LaVey has taken some common images of Satan, including a sort of Romantic hero of selfhood, and an individual not beholden to power, and made him into a pop-culture-level symbol of self-indulgence. There is nothing interesting about this Satan, because he's just giving us permission to do what we'd all like to do anyway -- be selfish and greedy and inconsiderate. There is no challenge involved. It's easy.

To me it's also boring because it's shallow. If you're an atheist, and Satan is just a symbol, then it's no different from dressing up as Spiderman and going to ComicCon. I mean, if people want to be furries and have sex with other furries that's up to them. But it's not a religion. This is in contrast to 19th century French Satanists, who actually believed that something was at stake -- they thought they were risking their everlasting souls.