Um... May I draw your attention to all the psychopaths & pedophiles currently running the world & reveling in wealth & luxury? Bad people are absolutely being rewarded. The concept of God vs Satan is debatable but there is definitely some horrific fuckery afoot.

It's interesting to think of the world religions that could have been, had the scales of power tipped in different directions. Gnosticism is an interesting take on Abrahamic religions, almost like a blend of Christianity and Buddhism.

There were even literal Greek Buddhists before there were Greek Christians. Heck, Christianity as we know it might not have survived without the original Greek drafts of the New Testament. There's another universe out there where the eastern Greco-Romans were way too busy with the karmic cycle and achieving enlightenment to worry about the execution of some random guy with daddy issues in the desert.

Well, I'm not not gnostic. Or aagnostic, if you will.

I always thought it was Satan was given a promotion for dissenting.

IIRC, current Catholic view is that Satan got upset that God treated humanity so nicely, to the point of giving us his only son to murder in order to redeem us. But earlier Christian views, and Judaism, has no war in Heaven. Satan was not cast out, is not in charge of, or trapped in, Hell. Satan was the Judaic version of Nemesis, the angel God sent to test mortals.

Also, Lucifer as a name for Satan is a mistranslation. A Hebrew prophet tried to warn the Babylonian king not to make the tower of Babel. He used an analogy the king would recognize, and compared him to a myth from the Babylonian pantheon. The pantheon was ruled by the two brightest celestial bodies, the sun and moon gods. The third brightest celestial body, Venus, tried to usurp them. His rebellion was put down, and he was forced to repeat his unsuccessful coup for eternity as punishment. This is a reference to the fact that the inner planets, Venus, and the as-yet undiscovered Mercury, never fully cross the sky. They rise, traverse, and then reverse and set the same direction they rose from. The whole of the myth wasn't spelled out in the Bible, but enough was described that it did sound very similar to the war in Heaven, so a translator assumed Lucifer must be a name for Satan. They liked it so much they sprinkled it around in some other places top. Which is how Satan came to be known as Venus/Lucifer the evening/morning star.

God cast Lucifer down into Hell for asking too many questions?

I mean, it's a mythology that changes based on who is telling the tale, so...

Yeah, sure, if that's the story you want to tell.

But other reasons range:

• He tried to create stuff from nothing, a thing only God is capable of doing, and was cast out for this blasphemy
• He fucked God's Wife (Lilith, the First Woman)
• He taught humanity to defy God by lying, which is the True Original Sin
• He was dispatched by God, deliberately, as a Loyal Opposition and all part of the Great Plan
• That shit ain't even in the Bible, you're a heretic for believing it

The fact it was edited down to condone owning people is diabolical and should be a perfect reason to hate religion.

Satan's house is just a place you can go to?

Real answer: It's not that knowledge is itself evil. It's that by obtaining the knowledge of good and evil, mankind was responsible for its actions.

The idea is that animals aren't capable of being good or evil because they have no knowledge of the concept. Whereas humanity's knowledge and understanding means we're aware of the morality of our actions.

To put it in a more contemporary, non-religous context - you can't blame or judge invasive Kudzu or Bark Beeltes for the environmental damage they cause because they aren't aware of their impact. Humans are aware, and should be held to account for their actions.

A curious flaw in that story is that Adam and Eve were supposed to know in advance that disobeying and eating from the tree is wrong, before they had knowledge of what wrongness or disobedience is.

I like the evolutionary interpretation, that humans developed the capacity for social cooperation (including interpersonal ethics, moral good and evil) and then realized paradise (the natural world) was actually a bot of a quagmire, teeming with disease and parasites. They were less evicted as realized they could do better.

"NoOoOoOo, but they're Satanists, they do satanic rites killing and eating children and making orgies!!1!1!!1"

Look, I don't know what to tell to you "atheists." I met the devil last week and she was utterly forthright and honest in the reason for her expulsion from heaven. Clams. Paella, specifically. She has no idea where people got this rebellion thing.

Almost. God forced humanity into making that mistake. He deliberately withheld the ability to develop morality, so they literally could not know it was wrong. The omniscient creator of all things must have known he could have set things up differently and how it would have played out. The omnipotent creator of the universe could have made things any other way. Humanity's fall, according to Christian mythology, was an act of ultimate deliberation.