Going by what I understand, people during Biblical times believed that God was responsible when things went well and when things went bad. Since some of these people believed they were God's "chosen" people, they wondered why things went so bad for them at times. In order to placate them, some of their leaders stated that a supernatural adversary was responsible for their woes, not God. During later translations adversary got changed to satan.
Was this a coincidence? After I finished writing the above, I wasn't certain if I was spelling one of the words correctly, grabbed my dictionary, and it opened to a page that said scapegoat at the top. Perhaps the word scapegoat should be used rather than the names satan and devil.
I Am Dude wrote on Oct 30th, 2008 at 7:07pm:My understanding is that past humans, in their limited understanding of the nature of reality beyond the physical, originally thought God was responsible for all things.
However, more than being praised for the good things in the world, God was being blamed for all of the negative things as well.
Therefore Satan was created as a balance, allowing humans to dump all responsibility for the world's negativity upon this imaginary being.
Of course, it seems God in this context is just as imaginary as Satan, just the opposite side of the coin- a being responsible for all good in the world.
In reality, we are the responsible ones- not some larger than life character. But we've been over this before...