God and the Devil?

Question

why do people assume because there is a God then there must be a devil ?

if they believe God is perfection .. does perfection need an opposite ?

just curious to your thoughts xx

i understand what the bible says ... i am asking this because i have seen this reply several times before
"well God exists so he must have an adversy "

chrome you assume wrong lol
and atheists are welcome to answer of course

Answer 1

What was, before the devil went bad, the devil was an Angel before he became Devil, so when he was an Angel, and God was still the same, perfection. So basically there was just good at one time.
unless Angels were known to go bad even in that time? just wondering.

Answer 2

Just thought I would say I believe in the bible. And yes the devil is real in it. However, just because God is perfect doesn't mean he needs an adversary. The bible shows how Satan was once an angel who became jealous of the worship God was getting and set out to get mankind to follow him. This is why the world is as it is, which is also in the bible. The bible also tells of a time when there will be no devil, God will destroy him and his followers. Revalation 20:1-10. So although the bible shows that their is devil, it also shows that he doesn't have to exist just as an opposite to God

Answer 3

Satan is not God's opposite as that implies equality, and he is not God's equal. Many wrongly assume there's a battle between good and evil and one will beat the other. The truth is that satan was beaten already when Jesus went to the cross, now the power to overcome evil is there for all of us, we simply have to choose to take it.
People are happy to believe in angels, well satan is just an angel gone wrong, and demons are his fallen angel followers. Apparantly, they had a choice too.

I think saying that because there is a God there 'must' be a devil is misleading. There is no 'must be' about it, there simply 'is'. It's not compulsory for him to exist, he just does.

Answer 4

The short answer is that people have been conditioned to believe this. Without religion the concept of a Devil is meaningless. Christianity and its Judaic and Egyptian roots are riddled with the concept of light and dark, the word "light" occurs 235 times in the K J Bible! BELOW is dark, anything below is dead, undesirable, the underworld, Hell ,Hades, the Grave. Above we have the Sun, God is "up" in Heaven, Angels come down from "above" Light is good, it means alive, not dead. A common belief adopted and altered by Christianity - nothing original.

Answer 5

Actually, in terms of Christianity the devil is not an "opposite". The devil is not the yin to God's yang. The devil was a subordinate that rebelled against God and became the devil.

What does this say about God when over 1/3 of heaven decided to rebel against him?

Answer 6

The devil is not the opposite of God. God is like no other to compare or contrast with. There are angels and the devil that was an angel but disobeyed Allah. We know there is a devil from the Quran and all the holy books and the temptation to sin.

Peace

Answer 7

The devil explains much of the evil in the world. A lot of evil comes from man's free will, but much of it comes as a result of the devil. So it's not so much that God needs a polar opposite, it's just a reality. If you believe the Bible, you should believe that there's a Satan.

Answer 8

In ancient Jewish tradition Satan is simply an angel doing the work that God assigned to Satan to do.

The word Satan means challenger. With the idea of Satan challenging us, or tempting if you will. This description sees Satan as the angel who is the embodiment of man's challenges. This idea of Satan works closely with God as an integral part of Gods plan for us. His job is to make choosing good over evil enough of a challenge so that it becomes clear to us that there can be only one meaningful or logical choice.

Contrast this to Christianity, which sees Satan as God's opponent. In Jewish thought, the idea that there exists anything capable of setting itself up as God's opponent would be considered polytheistic or setting up the devil to be an equally powerful polarity to god or a demigod.

Oddly, proof for The Christian satan/devil mythology is supposedly found in the ancient Jewish texts that were borrowed to create the bible. One can’t help but wonder how Christians came up with such a fantastically different interpretation of Gods assistant Satan in their theology.

Other hints about Satan’s role in human relations can be seen if you look at the name Lucifer. It’s meaning in the original tongue translates as Light bearer or light bringer. Essentially the bringer of enlightenment. The temptations of the Satan idea bring all of us eventually into Gods light. Hardly the Evil entity of Christian mythology.

Love and blessings
don

Answer 9

Irrespective of your religious beliefs, the world has a balance:

right and wrong,
light and dark
good and bad
fast and slow

the religious scholars gave the good and bad a different set of names to wrap their doctrines around. To keep things in balance, and as they were all about promoting God ( good), they needed a Devil ( bad) to even things up and to let followers know what is in store for them if they did not follow God's word.

it was a great marketing effort..!

Answer 10

This reminds me of apassage from the Phaedon, where Sokrates argues that everything gives birth to its opposite. He is actually arguing for the idea of rebirth but the main principle is this- eveything in the worls has a opposite side, hot and cold, north and south, male and female.
If you apply this to God, then there must be an opposite to create harmony in the kosmos (universe).