God versus Satan.

In the Christian mythology, Satan (Hebrew, 'Adversary') is an Archangel, originally Lucifer (Latin), Phōsphoros (Greek), Helēl (Hebrew), meaning 'Light-bringer'. Because of his pride - his hubris - he and his followers, a third of all the angels in Heaven, fell, and are now condemned to suffer the torments of Hell forever. He, and they, are determined to ensure that as many humans as possible share their miserable fate, in order to spite their Creator.

The Greek translation of the Old Testament, or Jewish Bible (the Tanakh), the Septuagint (LXX), renders part of Isaiah 14:12 referring to Satan as 'ho heōsphoros ho prōi', the Morning Star, also identified with the Evening Star and the planet Venus, which to the Romans was, of course, a goddess, that of love, equated with Greek Aphroditē.

Let us now unpack this: we are to suppose that an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creator God, endowed with absolutely infallible foreknowledge, created Satan and all the angels that would rebel with him, knowing in advance what they would do, and did nothing to stop them doing it, in spite of also knowing the consequences of their actions, not only for them, but for millions - no, billions - of human beings who would end up suffering infinite pain and misery for all eternity along with them. G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716), in his Essais de Théodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l'homme et l'origine du mal (Essays of Theodicy on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil, 1710, pp.123-7, pdf.), the book which coined the term 'theodicy', was perfectly sanguine about the idea of the majority of the human race ending up in Hell, as are most, if not all, fundamentalist Christians today, on the grounds that anyone who is not a 'born-again, Bible-believing' Christian by the time of their death is inevitably damned. Furthermore, this world was supposed to be the 'best of all possible worlds' (p.126)!

Would a genuinely benevolent deity create such a place as Hell in the first place, or create beings he knew would end up there?

Is the existence of natural and moral evil, which is an undoubted and irrefutable fact, compatible with that of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent God? It would seem that God can have all the attributes traditionally ascribed to him (or her, or it) except for omnibenevolence.

The poet Shelley got it right, in his youthful poem, Queen Mab (1811), Canto VII:

'Spirit: "Is there a God?"/Ahasuerus: "Is there a God! - ay, an almighty God,/And vengeful as almighty! Once his voice/Was heard on earth; earth shuddered at the sound;/The fiery-visaged firmament expressed/Abhorrence, and the grave of Nature yawned/To swallow all the dauntless and the good/That dared to hurl defiance at his throne,/Girt as it was with power. None but slaves/Survived, - cold-blooded slaves, who did the work/Of tyrannous omnipotence...' (ll.83-93). 

Shelley describes God as 'the omnipotent Fiend', (l.97), whose name 'Has fenced about all crime with holiness' (l.27). In ll.106-160, he outlines his account of the Christian mythos and its soteriology (theology of 'salvation') with revulsion.

As for Jesus:

'He led/The crowd; he taught them justice, truth and peace,/In semblance; but he lit within their souls/The quenchless flames of zeal, and blessed the sword/He brought on earth to satiate with the blood/Of truth and freedom his malignant soul/At length his mortal frame was led to death./I stood beside him; on the torturing cross/No pain assailed his unterrestrial sense/And yet he groaned. Indignantly I summed/The massacres and miseries which his name/Had sanctioned in my country, and/I cried, "Go! go!" in mockery' (ll.167-179). To which Jesus replies:

'A smile of godlike malice reillumined/His fading lineaments. "I go," he cried,/"But thou shalt wander o'er the unquiet earth/Eternally"' (ll.180-183).

Ahasuerus, the 'Wandering Jew', falls into a trance, and when he wakes, finds:

'hell burned within my brain... But my soul,/From sight and sense of the polluting woe/Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer/Hell's freedom to the servitude of heaven./Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began/My lonely and unending pilgrimage,/Resolved to wage unweariable war/With my almighty tyrant and to hurl/Defiance at his impotence to harm/Beyond the curse I bore. The very hand,/That barred my passage to the peaceful grave,/Has crushed the earth to misery, and given/Its empire to the chosen of his slaves' (ll.186, 192-204).

In the Preface to his verse drama, Prometheus Unbound (1820), Shelley informs us that:

'The Prometheus Unbound of Æschylus supposed the reconciliation of Jupiter with his victim as the price of the disclosure of the danger threatened to his empire by the consummation of his marriage with Thetis... in truth, I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind.'

Shelley only fails to make the identification between Prometheus and Satan because he is overly dependent on the image of Satan supplied by Milton in Paradise Lost. The fact is, Jupiter (or Zeus) = God, and Prometheus = Satan, and Shelley (like Blake before him, at least in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) is a Satanist. He is undoubtedly a misotheist (a hater of God), his professed 'atheism' notwithstanding, as the above has made abundantly clear, and as is made clear again in the Notes to Queen Mab, VI.198; VII.13; VII.67, VII.135,136. See: Bernard Schweizer (2011), Hating God. The Untold Story of Misotheism, New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., ISBN: 978-0-19-975138-9, hdbk. (246pp.), pp.3-5, 14-15, 18-19, 23, 72, 83-84, 86-88, 94, 96-97, 99, 101, 104, 106, 123, 193, 213, 220.

Misotheism is a close relative of dystheism, belief in a bad, or at any rate, not wholly good, god, or that the one and only God is bad, or not wholly good. Dystheism is the only way to solve the theodicy question, or dilemma, other than atheism, and is the equivalent of belief in a Gnostic Demiurge, minus the 'true God' the Gnostics believed in.

If Satan is opposed to this God, he isn't evil, and nor can his fall be ascribed to 'pride'. If Christianity is represented by the sort of 'Christians' who support Donald Trump or Ron De Santis in America, who think 'God hates faggots', not to mention blacks, Hispanics, Jews, women who've had, or seek, abortions, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people, then to be a Satanist is not a bad thing at all.

Likewise, if God is represented by Catholic priests who sexually abuse children, or Catholic bishops who cover-up their abuse, Satanism can't be all bad.

Again, if God is represented by fundamentalist Christians, who deny science, who denounce the theory of evolution as the work of the Devil, who claim the Universe is only 6,000 years old, and that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax, on the grounds that God alone determines the climate, and humans have no influence over it, Satan is merely the victim of a very bad press, misrepresented for many centuries by religious propaganda.

The time has come to rehabilitate him. If I must play the (or to be more modest, an) Antichrist to him, then 666 has become my favourite number!