Yeah and to clarify myself, I was not meaning to imply that anyone would need my "Get out of Hell Free" card anyway. Based on my own Belief, I better keep it, eh?
In many stories of human struggle and cosmic galactic battles such as star wars, there are often some pretty impressive plot twists.
The characters who should receive the answers sometimes do not, whereas the characters whom no one thinks will survive do occasionally survive. C.S.Lewis says that the Bible has just enough of a plot twist to make it a plausible truth as opposed to a work of fiction. Lewis also says this about the question of whether he believed in the Devil:
The commonest question is whether I really "believe in the Devil." Now, if by "the Devil" you mean a power opposite to God and, like God, self-existent from all eternity, the answer is certainly No. There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite. No being could attain a "perfect badness" opposite to the perfect goodness of God; for when you have taken away every kind of good thing (intelligence, will, memory, energy, and existence itself) there would be none of him left.
The proper question is whether I believe in devils. I do. That is to say, I believe in angels, and I believe that some of these, by the abuse of their free will, have become enemies to God and, as a corollary, to us. These we may call devils. They do not differ in nature from good angels, but their nature is depraved. Devil is the opposite of angel only as Bad Man is the opposite of Good Man. Satan, is the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.
C.S. Lewis was a great intellect, and yet he was a believer in the reality of Jesus. He defends this in many ways, most notable:
However, if you ask yourself why would a group of first century men and women conspire to propagate a lie about a little known preacher being God, then the above argument becomes stronger. What would it gain the disciples? It went against Jewish belief that a man could be God. They were persecuted, tortured and killed for their beliefs. What caused and empowered a bunch of uneducated, blue-collar workers (i.e. fishermen, tax men and carpenters) to turn the world upside down in the space of a couple of generations?