Why God created the Devil

My friend Armando Fuentes Aguirre says that God created the Devil so that people would have someone else to blame besides God when things didn’t go exactly the way folks wanted them to. Apparently it worked pretty well for awhile and people got into the habit of thanking God for all the good things in their lives and blaming the Devil for everything that went wrong. By and by the Devil realized what had happened and he became very burdened by the fact that the sole purpose of his existence was to receive blame and he asked God why he had to receive all of the blame and not have anyone to share it with. God thought that was a reasonable question and said, “You know, Lucifer, you make a good point. I guess that is because I made you so smart to begin with. People are naturally reluctant to blame me and so they blame you for every little thing they don’t like. To be fair about it, the people ought to have a choice on whom to blame without any fear of retribution”.

God thought about this for what would seem like several centuries to us but for God it was only a few milliseconds and He came up with a brilliant solution. He created the Government so that people would have something else to blame besides the Devil. Well, things went fine for awhile and people were content to praise and thank God for all the good stuff and blame either the Government or the Devil when things went wrong according to how they were so inclined. By and by, however, the Government decided that it didn’t like being thrown in with the Devil by association because someone in the Government was always being blamed when things went wrong. The higher up in Government you went the more likely you were to receive all the blame. After all, the Government is supposed to be "of the people, by the people, and for the people"…right? Shouldn’t the same people who elect you to public office share the blame?

About a hundred and fifty years ago the Government found a way to ameliorate its blame problem and decided to charter Corporations. The Corporations consist of individual investors and other Corporations and the Government, not being as smart as the Devil but almost as crafty, arranged it so that no matter what a Corporation does, the individual investors are free from responsibility and thus free from blame and other than losing their money they can wash their hands of any culpability just like Pontius Pilate. You can blame the Corporations all you want but nothing can ever happen to them because they are mostly just smoke and mirrors. Things get shifted around a bit when something goes wrong but they really never die. This is because it just so happened (and to this very day nobody really knows exactly how) the Government gave to the Corporations more rights than to individuals. Some say that this was in return for a promise of campaign contributions and other monetary considerations. Anyway, the result of all this is that these days, in addition to having the Devil and the Government to blame, we have the Corporations to blame, and we can personally avoid blame altogether…unless perhaps we are a Pope, a Potentate, a President, a Prime Minister, or a World Cup Fútbol Coach.