People that don't believe the devil exists

The original Scholastic notion of 'hell' was simply the condition of the soul's eternal separation from God. Since an idea as abstract as that wasn't apt to strike much terror into the heart of the average illiterate peasant, it became necessary for the church to recast the concept with a full range of fiery tortures and hideous punishments as inducement for the peasants to behave themselves and show proper submission to church authority (backing up those putative afterlife tortures with grisly real-world ones inflicted on sundry backsliders and heretics didn't hurt, either).

That said, plenty of believers accept this illusion of this Hell as an actual place without much in the way of biblical context to support that belief; and many of them can also quote mouthfuls of scripture out of context to make their own points, perverse or otherwise. 

How about an atheist who as a former devout Christian apologist actually knows more biblical context than the majority so-called Christians who post and run when backed against a corner? Or was this question only intended for your false dichotomy?

Here’s the thing…by “the devil” you’ll need to explain what YOU mean by that because in accordance with the historical context, sociological context, and biblical context, that concept means different things to different believers. Which biblical devil are you talking about? Satan, Lucifer, the Serpent, the Beast, the Dragon, the Antichrist, the false prophets, all of the above (even though they are all different), all of the above (because they are different names for the same thing), some of the above (because some are the same and others are different), or none of the above? You see, “the devil” is a catch all term that is applied to many different things in Christianity - oftentimes based on the interpretation of the believer, as influenced by their associated, denominational doctrines.

For the record, I don’t believe in ANY devils because I don’t believe in anything supernatural. It doesn’t matter which devil you’re talking about or what YOUR interpretation of it is, if it’s a supernatural idea, I reject it. Just like I don’t believe in ghosts, spirits, angels, or demons. These things are not real; they exist only as concepts within the mind. And that’s why the red guy with horns, hooves, and a tail is just as viable conceptually as any other devil. That is to say “fictional”.

This creates a well established paradox. If god is all powerful, then god knows what we're going to do and therefore we don't have free will. Either god knows what we're going to do or doesn't and if they don't, then if god is not all powerful and if they do then there's no such thing as free will. But regardless of the existence of a god or not, every decision we make stems from something that comes before that we didn't determine. So, depending on what you consider free will to be, if you consider it to be the ability to determine fate solely through our actions, we can choose what we do but it all comes down to prior events, fully predetermined or random and we don't have the control of those. So while we have freedom to make decisions, everything we do stems from something beyond our control and thus we're not able to will things into being in the most fundamental sense because we're just a complex cog in the machine of the universe.

If god knew what was going to happen, then how is that different from causing it to happen their self? Where's the free will for those god created? If god decided it all at the beginning, then every choice you make is predetermined by god. God didn't give you the freedom to choose, they gave you the illusion that you feel you're in charge of your choices. The difference between knowing which way the sun will rise and god knowing what would happen is that god would have known it all before it happened and made it knowing all the bad things that would happen. That would give us about as much free will as a character in a book. It would be one thing if god made animals that would need to eat each other if they ran out of other sources of food, but in our reality, animals depend entirely on eating other animals as their source of food. The only choice some animals have to be considered ethical is to starve. So not only can some animals not be good all the time, they must be bad all the time, and they don't have a choice in the matter. If there's an ultimate predetermined fate, then where, in your view, does free will come in? If all our actions are predetermined by the ones that came before, we have the ability to react to our environment and make choices, but all those reactions and choices are ultimately out of our control, so where does free will enter the picture?