Does the devil really exist?

"It is perhaps the most successful coup of the devil, the modern and enlightened people of today, to make them believe that he, the devil, did not exist" (anonymous)

 For centuries, people in the so-called Occident agreed that the devil and his demons were doing their mischief here on earth. People are tormented and seduced by them. They are a permitted scourge of God to test and punish people.
   Then the Age of Enlightenment began, the "truths" of the Bible began to be questioned more and more, to free oneself from God and the devil. More and more the own (critical) mind became the yardstick of right and wrong, true and untrue. With the result that today we live in a more or less secular society.
   That someone believes in God is still tolerated, but should, please, remain a private matter. In general, human rights apply and not the Ten Commandments. Evolution is considered a proven fact, only the unteachable hold on to a belief in creation. And in general, if there is this Almighty and kind God, why all the suffering and misery in the world?

If a Christian now refers to the fall of man and his free will in order to explain suffering and misery, he may still be taken halfway seriously and given a wealth of counterarguments.
   But one dares to bring the devil and his demons into the discussion. But then there is an end to funny. "You're not serious now, are you?" There's another mild form of indignation. "you don't have all the slats on the fence" already a somewhat sharper form of indignation, which can take on hurricane force in one or the other chat.
   I would probably be a little more hesitant to bring the language to devils and demons if I hadn't made extensive acquaintance with the latter, at least in 1985:

 What I experienced in Spiritism at that time I would not have thought possible shortly before, although during my school days I also read Goethe's Faust and memorized the sorcerer's apprentice. But that was Phantasy a la Goethe, wasn't it?
    By no means! What I experienced there in 1985 shook me to the core and I owe it solely to the saving grace of God that I can still sit here and write this article.
     And it is precisely those experiences of that time that led me to the conviction: "Whoever talks about God must not remain silent about the devil". For in fact many things would otherwise remain incomprehensible.

Whoever gets involved with evil and the demons lurking behind it in secret does himself no good favor. It is better to change the direction of the gaze: