It's interesting that you bring up the idea that there might not be a God if there is not Satan, because the predecessor to Christianity, Milton's very favorite and very questioned religion, is Judaism, which has no concept of Satan, or, for that matter, a Heaven or Hell. Yet in Judaism, there still is this concept of good (with the 613 mitzvahs (good deeds) enumerated in the Talmud) and of service to God. There are stories of evil in the Torah, they just don't happen to come from an outside source like Satan. So in Judaism, as well as several other religions, there certainly is a God without a Satan.
However, keeping this in mind, it's also interesting to note that Christianity and Islam, two religions with very definite concepts of good and God, evil and Satan, have a far greater population of followers than Judaism and other religions with no Satan. This suggests that other people agree with Milton's idea that a virtue untested is hardly one at all.
0 comments:
Post a Comment