Was The Devil A Creation Of God?

There are two basic emotions that shape what humanity perceives as good and evil. Most may assume these two emotions are love and hate. But in reality, it is love and fear. Hate is actually a byproduct of fear.

Do I believe in some evil force in the world, i.e., the devil? No. I believe humans need something tangible to assign to the fear-based emotion of hate. They need a scapegoat. Something to hang blame on for the unspeakable deeds this hate, which is really the absence of love, is capable of producing. Where there is no love, there is fear. Fear, which manifests itself as hate, jealousy, envy, prejudice, resentment, anger, violence, loneliness, and a hoard of other dysfunctions, produces lives full of despair, unhappiness, misery, discontent, dread, and suffering. Now, doesn't that sound like a list deserving of a big old mean devil?

How about this instead? God created man in his image. Life is the process through which God creates himself, and then experiences the creation. God or Spirit is pure energy. Relativity and physicality are the tools with which God works. He gave us physical bodies in order for us to experience the ecstasy and agony of the polarity of existence in a physical realm. For example, the good and the evil. The up and the down. The hot and the cold. Good does not, cannot, exist experientially without its opposite. Nothing can. There has to be pain in order to fully understand joy and vice versa. If everything were mediocre, we would be robbed of experiencing the extremes and all the in betweenness. If there were no up and down, there would only be the middle. If there were only warmth, there would be no choice of cold or hot. We need variety, choices, and polar opposites and all that lies between in order to fully experience our physicalness, and we need our physicalness in order to experience life as God intended it. Along with this, God gave us free will. Evil just comes as part of the package of emotions that comes from fear that comes from the absence of love. That, my dear friends, is a decision made by man. Not God. God created us in his likeness as extensions of Him; He loves and lives in each and every one of us. It is we who choose to acknowledge or deny him. When we deny him, we separate ourselves from him. That creates fear, which then opens the door to all the aforementioned byproducts of fear. We do that, not God, and not some big bad devil. Therefore, in answer to the question, "Was the devil a creation of God?" Nope. Man did that one all by himself.