Indeed. And may God’s eternal peace be upon you and your family as well.
My biases come from my early Catholicism, which I still have so much healthy respect for having spent a fair amount of time bouncing around the Protestant leagues.
No religion is perfect, but I frankly crave the evidence that Satan is real as much as you do, and the Catholics have done an amazing job of attempting to compile it.
For me, this brings some sense to the notion of having to be on earth in the first place, inside the presence of the Advocate, but outside of God’s direct glory.
If I can ask your perspective, how do you look at the book of Job? For me, it is a difficult book all around.
I was raised as Lutheran but spent a lot of early life taking Catholic instruction with my Mom who had to take it as she wanted to sing in that church’s choir. I still have my copy of “Father Smith Instructs Jackson” and still re-browse it even today.
I later sang in the Episcopal Church, and so had cut my teeth fairly well on Christian doctrine.
I was always uncomfortable with it though, and gradually drifted into a small synagogue where I spent a full Torah cycle and then some, and have been fairly happy in various shuls ever since, though I haven’t converted.
I guess my take on Job comes from various Talmudic souces who claim it is primarily a fictional account drawn for the purpose of illustration. It does seem sort of odd as compared with Torah where Hell is not really mentioned, and Gehenna takes on a more metaphorical meaning in later books.
I hate to seem short, but I’ve got some stuff I’ve got to take of, even as interesting as this sort of stuff really is for me.
Hopefully later....