u/Equivalent_Ask_9227

Lucifer is well... A person. He is the oldest of the archangels, and his story is the standard one you might expect. At first, Lucifer was loyal. He sang praise to God without boredom; he kneeled down to worship all over Heaven. He was the living expression of perfect creaturely orientation toward God, a being so thoroughly consecrated to divine presence that he not only performed worship or managed it, he was what both looked like when God decided to give them form. He stood at the threshold between infinite and finite with his wings over the throne, simultaneously the most intimate thing in creation and the boundary that kept everything else at the right distance, a living veil, not an extremely active participant in the cosmic order but the architectural load-bearing piece of it, the membrane, the interface, the cathedral.

But a seed had taken form inside him. He saw the world God, the so-called Omnipotent and Omniscient, had created. It was full of utter imperfections. How could such a great being create such a disgraceful existence? Other than the fact that He wasn’t so great after all. Due to his nature, his faith towards God couldn’t waver, but what if the God he had faith in wasn’t the Almighty Himself but rather the God that Lucifer would have become if he had inherited the throne? Seeing the current God as nothing but a tyrant, he rebelled but ultimately lost once Michael unleashed his rage upon him. And currently, he has a plan. Right now in the story, he is actively, deliberately cultivating Satan. Like a crop. Tending to him. Feeding the parasite that rots all of Creation, possibly including Lucifer, too. Investing in him with patience and precision because he has identified the void as useful, and he intends to use it. That is the kind of entity Lucifer is. He is cruel, the way a surgeon is precise, and the cruelty has a long view. He has goals, history, relationships that are mostly wreckage but still exist, and a self that is fully, terrifyingly intact.

Satan is not that. Satan is not a person at all.

The best way I can describe Satan is that he's a philosophical zombie. A p-zombie. If you're not familiar with the concept, a philosophical zombie is a thought experiment about a being that is externally, behaviorally identical to something with inner experience but has no inner experience whatsoever. No consciousness, no subjective feeling, no "what it is like" to be them. Everything looks the same from the outside. Nothing is happening on the inside because there is no inside.

E.g. If it stubs its toe, a p-zombie would scream "That hurts!" and avoid injury (like a conscious entity), yet there would be no inner feeling of pain, no "what it is like" to be in pain.

Satan is that but for personhood itself. He's not a fallen angel. He's not someone who was corrupted or made bad choices or turned away from something good. He doesn't have a self that could be corrupted. He is the totality of evil, sin, void, privation, not as a description of his personality but as a literal ontological fact about what he is. The substance of him is the absence of everything that makes a self a self.

You cannot redeem him because there is nobody in there to redeem. In the same way, you can't redeem a concrete wall. Lucifer is the only entity in the whole cosmology who even interacts with Satan intentionally rather than just enduring him as an ambient condition, because Lucifer is the only one with enough of an agenda to look at the void and see something to work with.

So is this, like..... Canon-?

Art from: BON'S FUNERAL (Billy Plush advertisement video)

Satan is NOT Lucifer! - Quick Clarification

What is Friend's best SCD feat in your opinion, and why?