Why Sista be messin wit the Devil

[Terrance]

Ghetta Life wrote:
> 
> I'm talking about the Genesis story, not Milton.
> 
> God created the serpent and left him to roam around in the garden knowing
> full well what he would do.  WHY?  

Yeah. Good question to ask St. Patrick. 
Or a Unicorn. 

 

Milton and Augustine on the Serpent: 

That proud and therefore envious angel preferring to rule with a kind of
pomp of empire rather than to be another's subject, fell from the
spiritual Paradise, and essaying to
insinuate his persuasive guile into the mind of man, whose unfallen
condition
provoked him to envy now that himself was fallen, he chose the serpent
as his
mouthpiece in that bodily Paradise in which it and all the other earthly
animals
were living with those two human beings, the man and his wife, subject
to them,
and harmless; and he chose the serpent because, being slippery, and
moving in
tortuous windings, it was suitable for his purpose. 

Milton's poem reads like a poetic translations of Augustine on this. 

The infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile,
Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The mother of mankind; what time his pride
Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host
Of rebel Angels; by whose aid, aspiring
To set himself in glory above his peers,
He trusted to have equalled the Most High

Equal the most high? That's great isn't it? 
Superlatives and oxymorons! 


Not an answer to your question ... just a little bit of stuff that
floated by. 


And they shut him out of paradise
Called him lucifer and frowned
She took pride in what God made him
Even before the angels shot him down to the ground

--Van the Man