Is there an evil, malevolent force in the universe known as the devil or Satan? Does this negative force delight in causing human chaos and wholesale destruction on earth? Are people who commit acts counter to the tenets of their respective philosophies—acts known as sins—transported to a place of unspeakable, eternal torment after death, and are such people in hell right now, prisoners to perpetual damnation? More than a billion people would answer yes to these questions because the teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all monotheistic religions claiming Abraham as their common ancestor, have promoted a belief system incorporating evil, the devil, and hell. The evil we perceive, though, is not the outcome of premeditated acts of the devil or any mythical Prince of Darkness; the author of evil is of human origin, due entirely to our gross misunderstanding of ancient mythology.
This mythological worldview had its beginning not by revelation within these religions but in the teachings of Zoroaster, a Persian prophet who lived from ca. 628 to ca. 551 BCE and was the founder of Zoroastrianism. Zoroaster was the first to proclaim the existence of a dualistic belief system in his account of a struggle between good and evil. This belief system was then transported to Israel by individuals returning from captivity in Babylonia. Subsequently, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic leaders all adopted this belief in a power of darkness opposed to the beneficent power of God, and very few present-day adherents of these faiths know that the root of this worldview can be traced to Zoroastrianism.
For example, Pope Paul VI stressed the fundamental and enduring nature of this belief in 1965:
For a monumental struggle against the powers of darkness pervades the whole history of man. The battle was joined from the very origins of the world and will continue until the last day as the Lord has attested.
The dualistic belief of a struggle between good and evil, God and Satan, was originally an ancient attempt to provide answers to why there was arbitrary suffering in the world such as plagues, natural disasters, and human atrocities, and to afford the victims of suffering the promise of ultimate justice in the afterlife: assurance that bad people would go to hell and good people would go to heaven. This Zoroastrian mythology is now so deeply embedded in the minds of adherents of the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and in both Eastern and Western cultures overall—that even people who in good times deny that they believe in such an erroneous ideology and immoral ethic often default to this dualistic system in times of great stress, such as during violent social unrest or a major health issue, or to justify their actions in disputes with neighbors. Fear of death often has a way of altering our moral perspective.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2013/09/beyond-theologies-of-fear-2/
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