Not sure I took the devil seriously even as a Christian. The way I looked at it at the time, if Satan can do nothing unless we "give place" to him ... then we're in the driver's on that one. I never understood all this superstitious fear and loathing of Satan, this cleansing of houses and binding of spirits and so forth that some fundamentalists get into. Those people tended to talk more about Satan than about Jesus, and thus, to believe more in Satan.

Of course Satan and Jesus are equally fictitious (well if the Jesus mythos is based on a real person, Satan is even MORE fictitious) so ...