Your worldview is completely dualistic. You seem to believe that there is actually some entity which is an "anti-God" attempting to steal humanity's soul. There may be humans like this, people who are very lost and want to drag others into their chaos. But the Serpent must be understood as a divine potency, the creator of the dialectic of temptation which allows those who wish to the possibility to triumph over it. Or not. We are also quite free to wander in Samsara, if we are attracted to Samsaric pleasures.
If there were no so-called "fall from grace", none of this would be. Everything would be a kind of unmanifest elemental innocence, our souls would have consciousness like that of a plant, innocence without experience. Only innocence with experience is true innocence, and that's why we have to go through all of this.
It seems rather purposeless that Deity would permit some being to try to steal the souls of all humanity, condemning them to "eternal damnation" for no purpose other to save those who chauvinistically recite some particular creed.
Wow, I never thought I would read an essay defending the serpent of Eden. Lol.
You seem to be under the impression that Eden is a metaphor for non-corporeal existence, and that The Fall was some sort of necessary and inevitable adventure into the physical world, without which, we humans would have no purpose. What if I were to tell you, that Eden DOES exist. It existed then, and does now, and is simply a higher vibrational plane. If you look at the kabbalah map, it is the 7th sephirot called Netzach (Victory), and when humans were first created, they resided there. They were familiar with only positive energy, bc that's all they came into contact with. When they learned about Evil, that negative energy was ingested, became a part of them, and it brought down their overall vibrational energy, and they couldn't stay in Netzach. When the humans fell down/out, they landed here, in Tifareth (Beauty/Balance). All of the matter here, including our bodies, is denser, heavier, and the physical sensations, such as pain (and maybe even pleasure?) are more intense.
That is what Samsara means, and when the sages discuss dukkha and cessation of suffering; the whole point of yogic and Buddhist meditation (and even some forms of prayer, if you think about it) is to reestablish that connection with the 7th plane, to shrug off the heaviness of this dimension, if only for a fleeting moment. That is what they mean when they describe a master as having Ascended: that he can mentally exist in that plane and this one at the same time, for more than a few seconds, at least.
The concept of Heaven is embodied in this 7th plane, (and the 4th, even higher level, but that's another discussion.) When we die, some of us get to go there, but only if we deserve it. If we are blessed enough to have loved ones who watch over us after they pass away, that's where they do it from. They and other higher entities (like angels and stuff) work together there, to send positive energy here, to keep our dimension in
balance, as a counter-weight against all the evil sh*t that pours in from the Other Side. (5th sephirot, Gevurah or Severity (Hell) and , to a lesser extent, Hod, the 8th sephirot. (It translates to Splendor, and is where energy shifts densities/forms-- it is where the magicians pull power from) That CERN doorway they ripped open between dimensions? Yeah, that's where it leads--straight into the hell next door.
So no, the Adam & Eve story is not just a story. There is an essence of truth to it so grand and complex that we humans will never truly comprehend it, and so it was passed down in simplified language and with simplified imagery so people would remember just enough of their inheritance to reach for it again. Twisting the story to make the bad guy seem good and the Lord of All Creation seem like an enemy of the humans He created with love makes no sense, either terms of this particular story, or just in general.
We all know who loves doing that--twisting what's real, what's true, to fit an opposing narrative. You better choose, if you want to work for him, or work for Him.