Lucifer and religion in fiction

Apparently Comcast is having problems at the moment, so I am writing this offline and will upload when it returns.

Fall TV has started up again, which means now I have to figure out how to watch the innumerable shows I like while at the same time playing too many video games and still going to work, doing the usual chores, paying attention to my wife, and so on. I live a hard life it is true.

Lucifer had it's season premier last night, and it is totally my jam after a pretty solid season one. I have mentioned before that I love modern fantasy stories, and the literal devil hanging out in Los Angeles solving murders is very much in my wheelhouse. Based on, or rather inspired by, the Sandman spin-off of the same, comic book purists will not care for it's rather extreme divergence from the book, but screw them, comic book fans are creepy wierdos who are never happy and are entirely unwilling to let things just be fun.

I can't stand religious stuff in real life, it makes me quite angry for the most part, but I rather do enjoy seeing mythological characters interpreted into movies or books. Say what you will about the life lessons and moral guidance, or lack thereof, you can take from holy books and legends, but they are characters with some real potential for interesting stories. They are these figures that do stuff, but there isn't a ton of context given for why and how they do it. Lucifer rebelled and fell, but why? Details on the motivations are scarce in the bible, and even fewer outside of Revelations, it usually falls back on pride, and that is surely the interpretation a lot of scholars give it, him thinking he deserves to rule more than god, but the actual details are not fleshed out.

This doesn't make for a great story in and of itself, but because there isn't a ton of explanation it means that writers of fiction can come up with whatever they want when using the characters elsewhere. Sympathetic interpretations are plentiful, as with the TV show and with the Church of Satan, but also other villainous versions are done and those are fine too. In most cases, god rarely comes out looking good, and when you take him out of the context of the bible and remove the "mysterious ways" get out of jail free card, god honestly doesn't look that good if you try to rationalize his motivations, Lucifer is very easy to cast as a sympathetic character.

Most gods of the underworld are though, Hades from Greek mythology was about the only member of the pantheon to not make a habit out of screwing with humanity for fun, in Norse myth, Hel was not exactly a nice character, but her role was required if Ragnarok was to go as planned and she took her job seriously for the most part. But again, legends are light on really fleshing out characters which means a lot can be done with them once they are taken out of the context of religion which, as I have mentioned before, doesn't really encourage original thought generally, and particularly disapproves of role reversals in its central figures.

Good fiction rarely has much nice to say about god if he is used as a character at all, the Dresden Files has god in it, but he is entirely hands off and relies on angels and "mysterious ways" as his excuse, it works for the most part but it tends to be a stretch, Preacher has an absentee god as well, in this case because he is running scared of the main character. There are others too, but he is rarely portrayed as nice if he is shown "on screen" and if he is nice he is portrayed as extremely limited insofar as the power he can wield. This makes sense from a writing perspective, and omnipotent, omniscient deity is perhaps the most boring thing to write about, there is no challenge there and if you put a being like that into a more... interactive setting, it becomes really hard to justify the character as a good guy when you look at the things in the bible that he either did or allowed to happen. Making the character flawed or limited justifies those things and allows you to make a sympathetic character if you want.
And if god is an asshole, or flawed, or even if we just think he is, then does Lucifer really have to be a villain?

Anyway, I like seeing interpretations of this stuff, and if Lucifer(the show) is more likely than not to wuss out and go with "mysterious ways" for god, at least it is giving me a fun and interesting devil.