Sympathy for the devil?

I recently saw the leaked pilot for "Lucifer", an upcoming FOX series.

It's based on a Vertigo comic that was itself a spinoff of Neil Gaiman's critically acclaimed "Sandman" series.  

In the "Season of Mists" storyline, Sandman/Morpheus, the king of dreams, resolves to go to hell to confront Lucifer.   
He aims to secure the release of his beloved, who has been wrongfully imprisoned there.  

To his great surprise, on his arrival, Lucifer basically informs Morpheus that he's had enough of demons and punishing of damned souls and we just won't do it anymore.  
He's quit!

[CLICK IMAGE TO EXPAND]

Try to imagine what a mind-bending concept this was for a sixteen year old catholic boy.  That one day, the devil could just pack up shop, open the gates of hell and say:

 "No more, I'm done, I'm leaving."  

It wasn't something that you had ever considered before, and it was totally not where you expected the story would go.  The TV series loosely adapts a similar concept.

Watching the pilot just got me thinking about the original Bible story, and i posed the following questions to my friend Andy: "Would you want a woman to stay with you just because of fear or that she doesn't know any better, or would you want her to stick around because she truly loves you?", I asked.

In the first case, won't you worry that one day she's going to wake up and gain the courage to run away?

Similarly, consider the relationship between God and man:

# 1 - God doesn't want to force anyone to hang with him.

# 2 - People need to be tempted by evil, as the darkness gives balance and greater meaning to the light.
(How do you define "good" without experiencing what's not good?)

# 3 - God doesn't want to do the tempting himself so he delegates responsibility to someone more suited to the task.

After all, a good manager makes the best use of the resources that he has. And Lucifer was reportedly the greatest of the angels, he just had a problem with authority.

So, you give him his own Branch to run, where he is still serving the company objectives!  
Makes sense to me.

As the saying goes, "It's a dirty Job, but somebody has to do it." Doesn't Lucifer have the right attitude and the right pedigree?  He was the head Angel, after all...Now, he gets his own thing, with little interference once he plays by the rules.

"Maybe its a classic "Win-Win" situation?", I wondered.

Here's how Andy responded to me:

"That's interesting...one could say that Lucifer had the right attitude for the job.  Maybe sometimes in life, it's not so much that we have the wrong attitude. It may be the wrong one for the job we currently have, and it's just that we haven't yet found the right job for our attitude."

I liked the way Andy put that. It's probably much more productive to take responsibility for finding an occupation that is a better match for our talents than trying to start a revolution like Lucifer did in the bible.  Food for thought?

I think that Gaiman's Lucifer would actually agree.  In the scene included below, he lamented how many mortals blamed him for their issues:

[CLICK IMAGE TO EXPAND]

There's some truth in that. 

We make our own choices.  Whether it is a physical location, a life situation or a negative mental mindset, we don't have to stay anywhere forever.  At any point in time, we are free to choose to leave.  

That's my BS, and i'm sticking to it. :)

What do you think?

Leave us your comments below, and check out this video from the end of the Denzel Washington movie "Fallen".  

It may not be his finest work, but the ending credit music is classic!