Is Satan Pretty Much Misunderstood?

As you already might have guessed, I have drawn some kind of sympathy towards this guy, Satan. Guess it all (sympathy) started since my early teenage days, but it has gained gravity recently.

In my school days, while leafing through Macbeth's characters of the three witches and their queen Hecate, I could somehow decipher that they perhaps had a greater motive in their life, other than just being wicked. And, at length, that's what it turned out to be. Macbeth was a person who had always craved for power and he became a beast with the passage of days, and as and when he got the exposure to more power. Macbeth himself chose to dig his own grave, and was buried it in.

Again, consider Lucifer, a fallen angel. He is referred to as the ‘devil' whom we think of as the worst possible being on earth, heaven and hell. Yet, he shouts at the top of his lungs, trying to explain to people that he isn't the actual evil, in fact he is the punisher of evil. But we hardly care. Do we?

Now when I read about ‘Satan’ in Orhan Pamuk's Noble winning ‘My Name is Red’, I got some solace. There is a separate chapter dedicated to Satan, where he mentions about how he has been misunderstood by folks. There is a line where he even mentions that no matter what he says, us (the readers) would consider the opposite, just because it was coming from him.

While reading more about him, I got to know one of the main reasons, he is considered to be the bad guy as he refused his obeisance to man. Citing reasons that he was born out of fire, and man that of mud, thus there is no possibility of him bowing down before man!

Truly and analytically speaking, this comes to think of it. In our daily lives, there are many such instances where we refuse to bow down in front of our bosses, let alone someone junior to us. Does this mean we are bad people at heart??

Same must have happened with Satan too. He had a point of view and that isn't wrong under any circumstances. Instead of drawing into conclusions, what if we try to decipher a little? Maybe then my headline would be end in optimism!