Satan was against God's plan of salvation. If Satan tempts people, he is helping to make the plan of salvation a success. The plan of salvation requires people to be tempted. If they are not tempted, they cannot overcome temptation, repent, and be saved.
If Satan refuses to tempt people, he makes the plan of salvation impossible to achieve.
God must follow the "rules of good", but Satan does not need to follow any rules. He can tempt some people, but he does not need to tempt every single person on earth. God must be fair to every single person, but Satan can prevent certain people from being saved by refusing to tempt them.
(Maybe people need to be tempted, but they don't need Satan to do the tempting. In that case, they can be saved even without Satan, but it makes Satan superfluous, in a way.)
Satan knows that no matter how hard he tempts people, God will come back at him with an opposing force of good that is just as strong or stronger than the evil force. So Satan has no long term incentive to tempt people very hard. Satan might tempt people for kicks, but that's about all the satisfaction he can get from it. Satan may be able to cause many people to commit sin temporarily, in the short run, but he cannot make people part of any long term Satanic kingdom. If he rules a kingdom, it is just a formality. People decide if they will join his kingdom on their own.
Satan, or "Lucifer", was needed to tempt Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. If it were not for Satan, Adam and Even would not have sinned, and the plan of salvation would have been prevented. Satan could have refused to tempt them if he had wanted to prevent the plan of salvation from unfolding.
Some people believe that the Biblical "serpent" that tempted Adam and Eve was not Satan, and in this case Satan may not have been necessary, but Mormons do not believe this.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 07/09/2021 10:42PM by behindcurtain.

Exactly. Satan could have thwarted God's plan by not playing God's little reindeer games.

Maybe Satan wasn't such a bad guy after all. He seemed to do exactly what God wanted him to do.

Satan won the War in Heaven. Mormons just aren’t in on the joke yet. Irony is not their strong suit.

Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Satan won the War in Heaven.

No, I did not. At least not yet.

. . . is that it doesn't have to actually make sense (i.e. independence from reason)

The second rule is it doesn't have to actually square with the facts (i.e. independence from reality)

Dr. No Wrote:

--------------------------
> The first rule is that it
> doesn't have to actually
> make sense
>         (i.e. independence
>         from reason)
>    
> The second rule is it does
> not have to actually square
> with the facts
>         (i.e. independence
>         from reality)
>

The third rule is that it does not have to actually be served with tea & crumpets
        (i.e. independence from Britain)

I have many names--Satan, Beelzebub, Belial, Mephistopheles--but I'm Lucy for you.

I’m only doing that which has been done in other worlds. Kind of like like the world those in the temple will receive* one day.

* Limited time offer, some restrictions apply.

So is religion in general.

There is no personified evil, no Satan or Lucifer, in the Bible before the Captivity. There the Hebrew/proto-Jewish elite interacted with Zoroastrians who had come to terms with the existence of evil in a divinely created world through such a Devil. Thereafter the Jewish scribes went to great lengths to assign new meanings to old verses in order to legitimize the new motifs. The Morning Star thus became Lucifer, who was now revealed to be the forgotten Hebrew name for the Devil.

Religions and other mythologies are interesting not so much as factual history as legendary history. The Bible contains remnants of all sorts of religions, from Babylon and Egypt and Canaan to the pseudo-Greek traditions of the Philistines and many other peoples. These congeries of conflicting belief systems make no logical sense but they do tell us about the Hebrews' and the Jews' interactions with others--and about what they valued at various points in time.

"Satin" is just a calling. Someone had to do it.

So If god hates you he will send you to hell ? Isn't that what satan wants ? Satan is god's buddy ?

I've often wondered hypothetically if since the narrative is written by the victors that the real evil character is Jesus and his jealous father?

Satan might tempt to see how far souls will go to destroy themselves but the guys that coded the game are the real sickos. Satan is their tester.

Also-

Why is he the most interesting character in the temple film?

and why oh WHY do we keep wearing the aprons Satan told us to?!

And if the aprons are a part of the "eternal dress code" in heaven, why do Elohim, Jehovah, and PJ and J not wear them??!!

...there are oh so many plot holes in the gospel. Almost like it's completely made up, or something...

I brought this up once as an Elder when I was TBM. The reasoning behind it, "TBM View" of course, is that the Devil wasn't really in the details yet. There was a plan but no details laid out yet. So he Satan thinks he is in his punished state.

The other thought is that there is actually nothing else to do. He is basically doing nothing at all and is bored. Almost like outer darkness or doing time in the hole Shawshank style. Satan figures he'll take down as many as he can since ultimately he is doomed.

IOW, Satan may have sat around watching Adam and Eve for so damn long he go bored and decided to start doing something rather than nothing.

I get your point of view though. Why cooperate? Hell with it, why not really create some mischief? Of course, did Satan really think he was going to get Jesus to sin when he tempted him in the desert? Sounds like a lose lose scenario. Kinda like the plan of salvation.

we understood "satan" to symbolize ego, the sense of being a separate self predicated upon bodily existence. Since this mode of consciousness pretty much characterizes ('fallen') human existence, you can see the meaning of the traditional idea that "Satan rules this world." Salvation--from what? From the limitations of egoic consciousness with all its fear, anxiety, competition, struggle for temporary survival, worry about 'others,' and bodily death.

"But that's all there is! That's reality. Anything else is delusion and fake news"...thus speaketh Satan, the ego.

trying to fortify the ego through accumulation of things of this world--money, possessions, power, perfect mate, even on to replaceable body parts & eventually downloading one's ego onto a chip that can be uploaded into artificial bodies. Physical immortality = ego perpetuity.

Religion + Science Fiction = One-third of the host of heaven (the 1/3 who followed Satan) getting to occupy android bodies with sexy parts and full feedback!

Every time a devilish android body is 'killed', the evil spirit goes back to the warehouse and checks out a new android body.

Eventually, the hosts of heaven win: two Good Children of ghawd tie, hands and ankles, an android-bodied evil spirit to a pole and they have to carry the body around for Eternity. Since there are two good spirits for every one evil spirit, the math works for peace to reign.

Pretty soon the good spirits take to decorating their captives and even making friends with them... but never trusting them. Jesus and a finally forgiven Judas usually win the decorating contests (they've got Lucifer strapped to the pole they share), but everyone knows it's cuz Elohim is the judge.


...soon to be a movie on a streaming platform somewhere...

Wow. Are you ovulating?

If you'd been paying attention, you'd have observed that real men are always ovulating ... until they reach their 70s, when they start reverse ovulating.

...not a pretty sight... but a pretty site.

Is that an inverse erection squared?

Yes.

And don't get me started on the balls being cubed.

in middle school, but he never showed up :P

Yet another allusion to Goethe's Faust.

Brava!