Are we suppose to infer that god has a parental instinct to create?
Ok, not in the bible, then what is Satan? Who staffs the torture chambers in Hell?
A king and his kingdom can be harmed, disposed of. Assuming there’s no way for anything to usurp god, why should he care so much that some of us disobey him? It would never harm him and he could simply create more, as he did with man even though he already had angels.
Why was the temptation in Eden in the first place? If I wanted a child to learn not to touch a hot stove, I don’t turn on the stove and wait for him to burn himself.
But humans create children because of a biological drive. If you think about it, there’s also plenty of other reasons to have kids. Our current Western ideal of love and family is not at all reflected in the majority of history. Children were property, they were a way of passing down your legacy, and a way of having free manual labor.
Plus, humans have kids because that’s the easiest way for us to get this love. God can just create beings already in love with him, or flip a switch in the minds of angels to give him whatever it was that humans were supposed to give him
Satan in the Old Testament and in Jewish tradition is an angel who works in service to God. He is the “adversary” in a rhetorical sense. His job is to challenge God and keep him on his toes, but he’s not an enemy of God or the Devil of Christianity.
In the New Testament, Satan is basically the evil, devil anti-God of convention, but he doesn’t dwell in Hell. Revelation says he will be thrown in a lake of fire at the end of the world (but that lake is only for “Satan and his demons”). Satan in the NT is basically a tempter.
Being perfect and all, god cannot lack or desire praise (or feel alone, or feel the need to have kids, or wonder about the meaning of life in the absence of anything else, etc…)
That’s why there can’t be a rational explanation for the creation. It has to be a matter of faith.
Why can’t one? “Perfect” is pretty meaningless when talking about a deity, anyway. What do we measure it against? Perfect by what standards? “God is perfect” is pretty much a tautology.
Angelic rebellion isn’t in the bible? Or did you mean something else?
[QUOTE=Revelation 12:7-9]
7And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,
8And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.
9And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
[/QUOTE]
I think the answer would be that we don’t know, love, and serve God for God’s benefit, but that we do it for our benefit It’s a god who loves us and wants us to be happy, and knows that the best way for us to be happy is to know, love, and obey him.
And that playing by the rules of the thread it can be offered as evidence of the ability (or arguably destiny) of some portion of the heavenly host to rebel?
I’m happy to go with the events of Revelations not yet having happened… although by logical extension then there are no demons or fallen angels, and Satan is still currently an officer in good standing in the celestial court.
That’s the way it reads to me. How’d you like to be Satan, though-predestined to be the biggest screw up in the history of the universe, everyone already knows about it, and there isn’t a damn(sorry-had to) thing he can do about it.
