Looks like he kept the boils, though.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/job/god_gives_job_replacement_children_money/jb42_10.html
So first we have the trials of Job, then the Fall of Lucifer, and only then does Lucifer/Satan tempt Eve and bring about the Fall of Adam?
Does this argument for the historicity of Job hinge on the Universe undergoing a complete cycle and rebooting, and it’s on the reboot that Adam and Eve screw up the bit with the apple?
I’ll say. In my Illustrated Bible Stories for Tiny Tots that I had when I was a tiny tot, there was a picture of Eve in the Garden getting deceived by the snake. In the branches of the apple tree, almost unnoticeable, a spider is sitting in its web. Very clearly, for all who have noticed the spider to see, one can discern the words “SOME SNAKE” woven into the strands of the web.
All practicing Mormon believers believe Satan is a real guy. There are 15 million mormons on the books. I don’t know how many of those are “practicing believers” but I’ve heard it’s in the 30% range, with probably many of the inactives believing in Satan as well (many Mormons are converted south american Catholics, who also tend to believe in Satan).
Not true. All practicing Mormon believers are required to say they believe Satan is a real guy. Only some fraction of them actually believe it.
My typing and/or my thinking was sloppy. I was concerned only with the god claimed by mainstream Christians.
That’s like saying “I believe Joseph Smith was a prophet”, but really not believing that. If you believe in Mormonism, you believe in the devil. You’re not a true believer otherwise.
IIRC, there is no oath in Mormonism that you have to take to say “you believe in the devil”. But he is explicitly taught as being a real being, not metaphorical.
There is a tradition that God made Lilith first, but she didn’t work out. Wanted to go to NOW meetings, and wanted a career, stuff like that. So he rebooted with Eve. So maybe.
And on the Sixth Day the world failed Beta Testing, and God said “oh shit, we need to do rework” and it was not good.
That may be based on the fucked up compilation of Genesis, which puts the first two chapters in apparent conflict with each other.
I see what you did there. 
Or it might be from other folklore which did not get edited into the final version, while the editor chose to use both the inconsistent accounts of the creation that are in there.
I understood it, no worries.
The Vulgate’s obviously closer chronologically than later translations; it isn’t necessarily closer linguistically, which is the main point here.
The transliterated form of the original Hebrew word for “Lucifer” seems to be “hê·lêl,” as seen here.
ETA: John Mace beat me to it!
This brings us to the main crux of most of these types of discussions.
As Prof. Hanegraaff put it back in 2003:
In this case, if you’d ask a Mormon theologian, it appears that (assuming the claims in this thread are correct) he or she would tell you that, yes, the Devil’s a real dude.
If you ask a statistically representative sample of Mormons, however, the majority of them might or might not agree with the view of the theologian.
Whether or not they’re in agreement with the theologian, does their opinion “count”? Do they - the actual Mormons themselves - ever get to define “the Mormon view”? Or must they, in order to count as “true believers” (as Ashtura puts it) in the first place, strictly adhere to the views of theirs theologians?
No it’s not, it’s about God using Satan, playing him like a fiddle, to correct a error of Job. In the end Job repented, so showing that there was a error in Job, and God did what was needed to get through to Job. The ‘bet’ was only the method God chose for this task.
Job’s error was not letting his children face the consequences of their sin (cursing God), making animal sacrifices on their behalf without their asking. Or even Job knowing if they cursed God, as Job was apparently not invited.
In the end people now came to Job when needed bringing their own animals for Job to perform the sacrifice. Job appears to be not only invited but the center figure now.
Good question. Brigham Young wrote a lot of things, while prophet, that have since been thoroughly disavowed by the Church. Now, a typical member might say that Young was speaking “as a man, and not the prophet”, when he wrote that stuff, but it does prove that you can’t just base it off a position of authority, and that “doctrine” can be flexible.
There is also disagreement about what scripture is literal and what is metaphorical, though as a rule Mormons tend to be literalist (this tends to change as things become scientifically indisputable, I doubt very many members think the earth is literally 6000 years old anymore, but they would likely say that “time is different between man and God”). My mom definitely held a literalist view back in the day, and said stuff like dinosaur bones came from matter God used to make the earth. Not official church doctrine of course, but probably was speculation used to justify literalist thinking.
One interesting point is in one of the Mormon temple ceremonies, there is a film with a reenactment of the Creation/Adam and Eve story. In it, Satan is depicted as a man, not a serpent. So the serpent part from the Bible definitely seems metaphorical rather than literal. Either that, or they thought a talking snake (which could only be accomplished by puppets until relatively recently) would look ridiculous.
Now, I have not been an active member for years, but I do not recall any source in official LDS literature or scripture, that speaks of Satan as metaphorical. Granted, things may have changed. I have never heard a member speak of Satan as metaphorical either. That’s not something that would be said very often, and most likely would be called out as “false doctrine.” I don’t doubt that some Mormons disbelieve in Satan, and I don’t doubt that some Mormons disbelieve in everything about the church and just go for the social aspect. But, AFAIK, Satan being a real guy is official church doctrine.
This is from their official website:
Just to mention the Bible also mentions a talking donkey, so such animal communication is not unique to serpents. Also in Revelation the serpent is ID’ed as Satan.
IDK how this reconciles with the book of Morman.
Been a while, but I don’t recall any talking animals in the BoM. I don’t think Mormons think Satan possessed an actual snake and talked to Adam and Eve, “the serpent” is an allegory for evil for them I think.
Given that the punishment for the serpent was to lose its legs and slither on the ground to bite the ankles of man, identifying it as being actually a man is kind of odd.
Balaam’s ass was inspired to speak just like the burning bush - so it might be a special case.
Satan being a real guy is baked really, really hard into the cosmology of mormonism - of the four “kingdoms” of heaven, the fourth one pretty much explicitly exists to house the third of the universal population that chose his side in the debate about whether there should be an earth. Plus he was instrumental in the debate on whether there should be an earth. To believe that Satan isn’t a real guy as a mormon, you have to discard pretty much all beliefs about the metaphysical universe, up to and including Jesus’s role in it. What satan does with his time or whether he interferes with humanity at all is debatable, but his basic existence isn’t.
Which is not to say that there aren’t mormons who haven’t done gone ahead and disbelieved in him, but they’d be very close to apostasy, if not straight-up over the line. Which is not to say they’re not attending, and certainly isn’t to say that they’re not still on the rolls.
IMO this part gets far too little “airplay” considering how common I think it is. People who are nominally religious and who are “on the rolls” but if the higher-ups knew that their flock was 80-90% “apostates” they’d be shocked. Or not, I don’t know.