Why did God create the Devil?

Modernity as a whole makes the idea of a morally just God look ridiculous.

Today, we can easily cure illnesses that people in the Bible died from, we don't have the slavery and mass starvation described on each page in the Bible.

Who did end all of this? God? No, scientific progress did. Also consider that the most religious countries today (Africa and the Middle East) are also the worst shitholes, whilst atheism is on the rise everywhere in the civilized world.

>Also consider that the most religious countries today (Africa and the Middle East) are also the worst shitholes
I know this post is bait, but the most atheistic countries like Japan and Sweden are degenerate as fuck.

Chaos and suffering IS what's best for us. A universe of love without challenge or obstacle would serve no purpose. It would be like running a race of zero metres. It makes no sense. The universe that God made endures in love, despite all the evil. Suffering and chaos does not need to be eliminated for love to endure, it is always there.

But of course everything that I've just said will never make sense to a non-religious.

>we don't have the slavery and mass starvation described on each page of the Bible

Are you sure about that?

report non-literature threads
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Look into Hegels theodicy. According to Hegel, the creation of the world was an actualization of the mind of God. The same goes for evil: when God allows evil to come into being (in the form of the devil, or human beings acting immorally, or whatever), Gods ultimate goodness can be realized by overcoming evil.
Evil is also necessary for the freedom of human beings, cf. Hegels Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, §507-512.

From a religious point of view, they're "degenerate" and the peak of civilization would be something like Morocco, where people engage in pointless rituals and stone homosexuals to death, all while living in dirt.

From the point of civilization, however, Sweden and Japan are some of the best places to live, with the highest purchasing power and lowest crime and corruption.

>we don't have slavery and mass starvation
wat

To begin with?

He wasn't evil, ever.

But he did Sin. His Sin was to think he knew better than God. His Sin was to give true freedom to Mankind, because he knew better than God did what was best and right. In so doing, Satan ensured that Man could commit evil, where once he could not.

And for this, God punished Satan with eternal damnation:
To contend with the souls of the evil he himself had wrought through his misguided actions. A shephard to the evil he created.

Satan suffers perhaps the worst damnation of all: To be surrounded with the pain and suffering he has caused by his intention to do what is right. Every day he is reminded - He did this. He caused this. Every soul before him in this hellfire is there because of what he did to Mankind.

Hell doesn't exist to punish us. It exists to punish Satan.

>But of course everything that I've said will never make sense to a non-religious.

It doesn't, since, more often than not, people don't even get the chance "endure" and "overcome" chaos and suffering to reach for love.

There are child soldiers that never get a name before they die, babies born with incurable conditions, plagues that killed whole continents without higher purpose (in Latin America, when the Europeans arrived).

read your bible, son.

He is a misunderstood rebel that ultimately regrets his deeds, as leaving everything as it was (with humans knowing no free will or self-awareness, but no suffering either) was the better choice, in hindsight.

Ultimately, the novel isn't about the Devil, but about how two heroes react differently to his temptation (one accepting the Faustian pact, the other rejecting it). But the Devils' motives still have to be made somewhat relatable.

How is a question about the Bible a non-literature thread?

Wrong you absolute mong

>He caused this

God created him, so God caused it

Same reason you created this thread. Same reason I created this post. Boredom.

People always have the chance, Grace makes sure of that. "Reaching for love" does not require you to be a literal professing religious, it is a state of the soul.

The devil doesn't create sin, that's pretty basic stuff. He tempts people to sin, but we still ultimately make the choice to.

A huge part of God's plan is to give us free will, and the ability to choose him or to choose anything we want really.

Are you arguing that a God who let's you make no choices at all, so you can only do good is better than one who let's us do as we please? Would you feel the same about a government who did that?

There's this idea that the devil is the source of all evil that I honestly don't know how anyone justifies. Humans make evil choices, the devil just is.

That's an existentialist interpretation of the Bible.

I don't dislike it, but find it too decadent.

why is there something instead of nothing?

I've given the problem of the limitations of a God, as described in the Abrahamic faiths, some thought and i believe that such a God does not only lack limitation, but also contradiction.

A distinction that i think is more important.

And by that i mean that he can't intend to do something, and with sincerity attempt to bring it about, and then cause the opposite to occur. In contrast, humans, can and often do contradict their intentions via their ignorance of what could be abstracted as the truth.

And i think this is why, at least in the Christian genesis account, God allows the serpent into the garden. Adam and Eve are created to act as surrogates for the experiential simulation of duality through contradictory morality. To experience through us an instantiated and abstracted conundrum unsolvable to a more complicated and unbounded consciousness.

A consciousness devoid of ignorance, but also moral ambiguity.

so fucking close

woke

Yes, in traditional Christian theology. Satan is identified with the serpent in Eden and Genesis says the serpent was created by God

Genesis 3:1a
>Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made.

There's also the view that Satan is a fallen angel, in which case he's also created by God, the angels are divine but are still creations.

M8 I'm so drunk i can't even see straight so i ap[precaite your appreciation of my observations.

You should give me your skype, i can tell you're a cool dude.

Well there's a reason us Catholics use wine at mass :^)

Tbh though, my Christian friends are the biggest piss-pots I know

>ITT: over-analyzing Jewish high fantasy fiction

I don't buy it, an omniscient God would be able to know what a limited human life with moral problems would be like anyway. It doesn't explain why He had to make a flawed creation.

I'm an Atheist, son.

Have anpother of my theads

That';s the issue. Omniscience caries with it a single limitation; The lack of limitation.

return of the demiurge when?????????????????

>I'm an Atheist, son.
lol enjoy hell kiddo

Funnily enough, original monotheism knows no concept of hell

He's just a retard who doesn't, man, dw about him.

To prove His love

doesn't what?

But it would totally, fully understand what limitation would be like. If it needs to experience something by proxy to understand, it's not omniscient.

I dunno i'm drunk and have an IQ of 160 odd.

How could an entity without limitation experience limitation?Self imposed limitation would be temporary; Else Omniscience is not the correct label.

>an IQ of 160

Proofs?

>but find it too decadent.
How so? It seems awfully simplistic to me. That's why I like it.

It's sort of like:
>why is there something instead of nothing?
Why not?

So you're writing Faust.

Underrated

>Why not?
dude I don't know

My memes speak for themselves.

Exunctly.

>Are you arguing that a God who let's you make no choices at all, so you can only do good is better than one who let's us do as we please?
But if humans were unable to commit sin, the idea of evil or freedom as we know it now wouldn't exist, so it would make no difference, and everyone would be happier and lead better lives, so definitely. You can't define something by a world that lacks it. Freewill is just the things that were are capable of doing as human beings and the choices we make - if you removed the choice for sin, as in we were incapable of it, we'd still have freewill but the confines of the freedom and human capability would be different, is all

They prove you spend a lot of time on Veeky Forums

Which makes your claim about your IQ less, not more plausible

lmao rebuke my assessments of reality, faggot.

Not really, I'm only borrowing elements from Faust and inserting them into a high fantasy universe.

unrelated, but does anyone want to play a quick chess match with me ?

lichess.org/vo285z9b

>God made a man (oh yeah, God made a man)
>And man made a woman (maaan made a woman, yeah)
>But the woman made the devil
>We throw her out through the window

If you are coding a game that only you are going to play, it better have a stochastic element to it or else you are not really having fun.

Just remember that the universe is balanced. Remember that being is polar; and that you are bilaterally symmetrical.

I will user

thanks man

>lmao I have no idea what omniscience actually means
You realize that everyone argued over this in the 60s? It's done, we've hammered out the definition and ramifications of omniscience. It's a matter of public knowledge now. You could educate yourself on the topic right now.

The Devil is nothing more than the irrational fear of an imaginary bogeyman

>There are child soldiers that never get a name before they die, babies born with incurable conditions, plagues that killed whole continents without higher purpose (in Latin America, when the Europeans arrived).
Implying this didn't happened because of people.
Devil is the personification of human nature so it represents our instincts, cravings and selfishness. Since we can't perceive God through our five senses, it remains an aspiration of strength, reason and morality we all want to achieve. Man is a contradictory creature and it tends to be tempted by the 'Devil' because it's what comes from within. People cannot truly feel God without detaching from themselves as individual beings and thinking as a collective whole. Somehow, God didn't create the Devil, because the Devil was created by Adam and Eve when they committed the first sin.

It's a chicken-egg-problem theists won't be able to ever solve

Somewhere, sin had to originate
Even if it originated in humans or the Devil, it had to be inside God in the beginning

>Adam and Eve actually happened
Weeeeew

>Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made.
It can fully understand what limitation would be like, and what the experience of limitation would be like. It's not limited to experiencing one thing at a time, it can perfectly contemple limitation and the experience of limitation, without being limited itself, surely? It wouldn't just be experiencing limitation alone, that would be a subset of its thinking.

Humans don't even give it special experience of limitation because God doesn't become human, He can only understand perfectly what the humans are experiencing. In no way does He directly experience limitation itself.

>God doesn't become human
What is Jesus

Why do you have to take things literally? I meant the first people.

I'm just talking about an omniscient being creating humans and whether that creation alone allows it to experience limitation. Not becoming human as Jesus.

After seeing this lucky trips I have been converted

>the first people somehow literally ate from a metaphorical tree on the words of a metaphorical snake

>babies born with incurable conditions
>this happens because of people
Lmao

His full sentence obviously means to the same extent, nice reading comprehension

>God's omnipotent
>but he can't make a world where there is no chaos or suffering but there is still purpose
Heh, nice try

This this this couldn't have said it better

Used to wonder and then lit told me to read job.

The answer is in the book of job.

In most cases babies with incurable conditions are born to parents who aren't 100% healthy either.

Because he's a wicked demiurge and not the Supreme Good.

First time thinking about this subject, so I'm sorry for any intellectual holes in my 'theory.'

I assume it's like the movie "Click", if all we had were good times, our life would be a boring cycle of doing exclusively good things that eventually overlap each other in our memories. Much like "If everything is good, nothing is good".

Think about your stereotypical 80s family from the men's perspective, life was perfect: Food at the table, you don't need to heed for anyone (In modern times men would have to respect their wives, before they were free), your stereotypical family had money to do anything that isn't too lavish, and in the end it didn't matter- obviously that was purely fiction/marketing, but if we think about the 'perfect family' that's what we think about. The people back in that day really had nothing to live for other than short bursts of happiness now and then, while in the 'real world' people have ups and downs, and the downs inevitably make the ups feel much more genuine and pristine.

I hope this made sense as seen that English isn't my first language. If you want me to try and expand on it, I can.

So, put that in the context of the government. If you were surgically modified at birth to be incapable of taking any action bar the one that was seen as best overall, would you want it? Or would you rather be able to do what you want most?

Also, the whole point of humans was that they would have free will. God didn't want just servants.

You're forgetting once again that sin inherently comes from our ability to choose. If you take away our ability to sin, you take away our ability to choose.

And please don't come back with some dumb crap about how we can't fly yet still have freewill, those aren't comparable, and I've seen too many people use that as an argument.

Why did the Supreme Good create the demiurge?

He didn't, as for good and evil, he only created the "schism" between light and dark, and so good and bad. "And god seperated the light from the dark, and he saw that the light was good."

Generally they're heterozygous since most really bad diseases are recessive and recessive homozygotes get bred out of the gene pool quickly, so there's no way to really know that the babies will have a recessive disease. You can pay to god all you want, he won't give you a genetic assay. And really though the notion that the health of the baby may be influenced by the parents, if you go by the Bible it's a completely novel concept, since the understanding of genetics and its relation to phenotypes in the Bible is pants on head retarded

Book of job is retarded, God gets goaded into causing unnecessary suffering (which is cruel) by the devil. The book of job leads to more questions than answers

That actually would be comparable. The ability to fly is something that can be granted by God, yet is not, and the ability to sin is something that can be granted by God, and is. To say that removing the ability to sin would impinge on free will is to say removing or not giving the ability to fly also impinges on free will.

If you're creating the schism that's tantamount to creating whatever exists on either side of the schism.

But the context is different - every choice we are capable of within the confines of God's universe is freewill, if sin didn't exist we would still have freewill it's just that a decision to sin wouldn't be one that existed even conceptually. What you're saying is different as your example is the removal of something that we once had, which is different to God in his conception of the universe giving us the idea of sin which only exists to cause pain and suffering and only has a bearing on freewill because God decided it should exist - Freewill can exist without sin

Because he's a hack

The theological development of the concept of what God is and what the role of the devil was is fascinating. It was a lot easier to comprehend it in earlier Judaism.

God can't think, he can't make a logically coherent universe. There's no discernible talent

>God said "Let there be light. And there was light"
Wow God nice job, you really explained the plot there in an interesting way, great prose

When you read the bible you're truly being trained to read Stephens King.

I went to the Yale University bookstore and bought and read a copy of "The Holy Bible" I suffered a great deal in the process. The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character had a child, the author wrote instead that the character "begat". I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times.

Why didn't the "prophets" just resurrect themselves out of the dullest book in the history of literature? Seriously, each episode following the fickle God and his chosen people as they fight assorted unbelievers has been indistinguishable from the others. Aside from the gloomy imagery, the book's only consistency is its lack of excitement and ineffective use of prophecies, all to make miracles unmiraculous, to make action seem inert.

Perhaps the die was cast when God vetoed the idea of Satan directing the book; He made sure the book would never be mistaken for a work that meant anything to anybody, just ridiculously profitable cross promotion for His ideology. The Bible might be pro-Gnostic (or not), but it's certainly the most anti-Greek pantheon in its refusal of wonder, beauty and excitement. No one wants to face that fact. Now, thankfully, they no longer have to.

>a-at least the prose was good though

No!

The writing is dreadful, the book was terrible.
As I read, I noticed that every time a character had a child, the author wrote instead that the character "begat". I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times.

The same reason I created my cyborg racoon megabrain: so that it will give me handjobs eventually.

I was incredulous. God's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that He has no other style of writing. Later, I read a loving, lavish review of the Bible by Joseph Smith. He wrote something to the effect of "if these kids are reading the Bible at 11 or 12, then when they got older they will go on to read golden plates". And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read the Bible, you are, in fact, trained to read Joseph Smith.

>Who did end all of this? God? No, scientific progress did

This user has a good point, scientific progress is capable of more than just alleviating starvation and poverty, it's also capable of reducing casualties due to immense shows of power that cause rapid surrender , and leading to potential scenarios of mutually assured destruction which keep world powers eager to negotiate.

Scientific Progress only ever created higher and higher kill counts, it has only ever been morality -- and the grounding of that morality -- that ever pauses it.

Yeah, posting this again:

>The idea is that nothing is worth doing, neither in and of itself nor for anything else. All personhood is refraction carried out relative to Self-reflection. Pleroma being irreducible and indestructible means modes of plurality like space and time have infinitely negative value. The only meaningful aspect of Evil that must be realized is that it is pointless. This makes the nebulous Christian or Hindu idea of free will very clear, also simultaneously more comforting and more terrifying. "We" as persons are persons for no reason, though a Creator can be ascertained where Nous refracts into Logos, this is Ontological Pareidolia. There is no Mind and no Good in that process and certainly none to be found beyond it given infinite freedom. Acting to the contrary is replicating this illusion on a smaller scale, actually being the Demiurge. Refraction is incidental to reflection, perpetuating the former is its own punishment. The irreducible particle of everything, Truth and Good itself and Truth in Good itself, is such not by contractual exemption from corruption but by its own immanence despite infinite corruption. Look the other way.

See: