You know, I always figured, what with those 2 stories in the front of the bible where god makes humans, that we were supposed to be he personifications of good. ^_^
It's harder to write a compelling story where God's active than where Satan's active. God is...well, God. Literally a God-Mode Sue if He is overtly working in the story.
The devil, on the other hand, is an adversary, a villain, that people can work against, so much easier to use in a story.
The reasons for this trope are obvious enough I'm surprised they aren't mentioned
1) Stories need conflict
2) To make the protagonists heroes the conflict they overcome must be evil
3) If a good force overcomes the evil there's nothing for humans (our heroes) to do.
stay golden
The easiest solution is to not make stakes so high. People often have a "Why would God care about a football game's outcome?" attitude. So you could easily have God/angels saving humanity from a plague and lecturing them about how to prevent another in the future while the devil challenges someone to a fiddle duel, taunts someone people while they paint a mural or generally makes a nuisance of himself without causing any real harm (or such to the extent God's intervention can be minimal. "Get behind me slanderer! Listen Jimmy, you are a terrible artist but not a hopeless one. If you keep working on it you will get better."
That's why he wants you to have the money. Not so you can buy 14 Cadillacs but so you can help build up the wastes
Agreed with the above reasons, but there's another reason as well: You have to be very careful to not alienate a religious audience by putting words into their deities' mouths. You can do that to a devil or a Satan, because those aren't the deities that your audience is worshiping. You don't need to care as much about whether you are being perfectly 100% faithful to the Big Bad. Many of these religious denominations even consider the depiction of their gods as utter blasphemy; Christianity (usually only Jesus at that) is a bit of anomaly wrt western religions. That blasphemy can involve punishment in countries that have blasphemy laws, and even targeted killings in countries that do not. It's just safer for writers to portray traditional evil deities than it is to portray traditional good ones; having fictional good deities is the easier route.
Gojirob
What always throws me about some uses of this trope is the way in which the demons or evil forces are pretty much exactly like their traditional depictions and motivations, even to an extent the Buffy/Angel-verse versions. Yet if there is in effect no 'other side' in this struggle, this raises a problem. The depictions and descriptions of Evil beings and their minions is based partly on the same of their opposite numbers. So, in pushing this trope, the creative types are saying that somehow someway the demons and such got to be as we have known them without the eternal conflict that shapes much of their 'super-structure'.
The Go-To For Accurate, Thorough Information about Elfen Lied : http://elfen-lied.wikia.com/wiki/Elfen_Lied_Wiki
Are we really sure the creator didn't make a voice cameo? Was this officially denied by RJ, or is it some fanboy's desperate hope that there can't be a benevolent God-figure in a book they like? I massaged the heck out of Google, but could not find any instance of Robert Jordan officially denying that the BIG OL VOICE IN CAPS in The Eye of the World was the Creator.
I'm not saying it definitely WAS the Creator, I just think the the vehement denial in this article is misplaced, UNLESS it was officially denied by RJ. That's all.
What does it say about Humanity that deceptions of a personified evil are more prevalent than depictions of a personified good?
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