Once upon a time, there was a chap named God. He lived in some cloudy place that, although positively heavenly, was also quite boring. So one day he decided to create Earth. It only took him about a week, although it was possibly only a figurative week and might have actually lasted millions of years. Earth was a pretty exciting place. It had light and trees and mountains and polar bears and lots of other cool stuff. Lastly God made people, and the rest, as they say (as they say), is history.
Well, sort of. You see, Earth was designed as a sort of rat maze thing, like the ones scientists make. Except rat mazes and scientists hadn't been invented yet. The idea was that God would send all his spiritual children onto Earth and let them live and love and get eaten by polar bears and stuff. He just wasn't sure of the exact details at first. This is where our hero comes in.
Satan, or Lucifer, as he was called then, was the oldest of God's sons. The second one, obviously, was Jesus. God asked Lucifer and Jesus for ideas on how to send the rats through the maze. Lucifer quite liked all of his spiritual brothers and sisters, and he wanted them all to make it through the maze, so his idea was that he would go down to Earth with them and tell them all exactly what to do (he was kind of bossy). Naturally, he believed in giving credit where it was due, and so he wanted the glory for his plan. Jesus's plan was a bit different. He proposed giving the rats something called "free will" and basically letting them do their own thing, even if it meant running around all willy nilly like headless chickens and getting themselves eaten by the largest and coolest extant land predators. Also, being a bit of a suck-up, Jesus said that all the glory would go to God.
As everyone knows, God opted for Jesus's idea. This... didn't go down wonderfully with Lucifer and his followers. They quite liked the idea of not being eaten by bears, and asked God to reconsider. He told them to go to hell, and then he sent them down there. At this point, Lucifer sort of fell to the dark side, and became [i]Darth Satan,[/i] ruler of Hell and stuff. The people who sided with Jesus were sent down to Earth with their new-fangled free will, and the guys who were sort of on the fence were turned into black people as God's outdated idea of "punishment". It sort of backfired, and the real victims were the people who don't like rap music.
Meanwhile, Satan was trying out his new Sith powers which included taking possession of snakes. At that point in time, snakes still had legs and were pretty much just like lizards but with dislocate-y jaws that must have made eating a real pain. Because of this, they were all kind of insecure (similar to how Canadians are insecure about being mistaken for Americans). Anyway, one day Satan took control of a snake and tricked a nudist into eating a fruit that, like snakes and Canadians, was insecure of how similar it was to apples, and in fact even today people make that mistake. Eve, the nudist, took a bite of the fruit and then got her nudist boyfriend to try some. They realised that they looked like nutters and promptly put some clothes on. God, in another bizarre act of punishment, took the snake's legs away, thus making snakes one of the coolest and scariest creatures that aren't polar bears. Naturally, the snake was quite chuffed with this new development, and he slithered off into the sunset, no doubt giving any lizards he passed one of his signature dislocated-jaw-grins, the biblical equivalent of the troll face.
Over the next six thousand or sixty-odd million years that passed, Satan stewed in Hell and built up quite a bit of resentment towards his dad. In his spare time he invented dinosaurs, and spread their bones across the Earth as a sort of scavenger hunt for people ('cause, deep down, he still loves his spiritual family). When Jurassic Park came out in the nineties, Satan made quite a bit of money in royalties, which he invested into Apple. And, even today, he still tries to convince people to go and join him down in Hell.
The point is, Satan really isn't a bad guy. He's just has issues. Which, really, is quite understandable. Distant father, absent mother, annoying younger brother... he's got a lot of stuff to deal with, and the hate he gets really doesn't help. What he needs is some support. Not, like, worship and goat sacrifices and stuff, because that's just weird. But maybe a phone call once in a while or a birthday card or something, just to show him that people care. Maybe even one day his dad will make up with him.
Because the strongly-debated amount of time since creation is a [i]really[/i] long time to hold a grudge.
[b]tl;dr: polar bears are cool, the Devil has daddy issues, and Soylent Green is people.[/b]
I don't really understand why God wouldn't just waste his ass, unless there's some "maintaining balance of good and evil" mumbo jumbo. He's omnipotent, he should turn him into a frog and poop in his mailbox. That'd be funny as hell.