Is Evil the main character?

Did it ever occur to you that in Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), Satan (the Devil) maybe the main character? 🤔

In Zoroastrianism, the God figure itself has two sides — Ahura Mazda (the benevolent nature of God) and Angra Mainyu (the maleficent nature of God).

In Chinese literature, there’s the balance between good and evil, the Yin and Yang.

In Hinduism, Lord Shiva is the kind and mystical super power, who is also the lord of destruction!

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying these religions are satanic, I’m saying — we often forget that believing in the existence of Satan i.e. Evil is probably as important as believing in God!

In Abrahamic religions however, especially in Islam, God is above and beyond all good and evil.

In a way, God is neither good nor bad. Rather good is good and evil is evil because God created the universe and all of the ideas within it with a set of laws — like the laws of physics, the laws of biology, the laws of morality etc.

God doesn’t allow us to break the laws of physics, biology etc. but God does allow us to bend and even break the laws of morality.

This ability to break the moral laws has a fancy name — freedom.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist!

— Charles Baudelaire

Once we have freedom, we are allowed to venture away from the moral boundaries set by God, but that will have undesirable consequences for us and others around us — this we know as evil.

Hence, our reason for being in this world is perhaps to venture our freedom, while avoiding the evil that maybe caused by the misuse of it!

So even though we value freedom so much, maybe the trick to our salvation is not in exercising it, rather in restraining it within the boundaries set by God!

In this scenario, evil (or the Devil himself) is probably the main character because avoiding evil is the end game we must win. And only by winning against our own tendency towards evil, we become our very own main character, we become the heroes of our own stories!

The most powerful way to resist evil is to sit with good friends who have turned their faces to God

— Rumi