Vagus

Yep, lives right about Mach 1 on the meter.

Back in the real(?) world. Demons seem a great way of shifting responsibility for all the bad things that happen in a persons life.

KnightTemplar

The entity known as Satan was first found by Jews who were captives in Babylon and they called it Marduk. What a coinsidence that the name of the God that Babylonians were worshiping at that time was Marduk. They just had to explain why god let Babylon invade Israel. And they found someone to blame. It was not the god but it was Satan who helped Babylon to invade Israel. It is the first time* the war between God and Satan is mentioned. And demonizing your opponent is still a strategy that is used. (First of the omnipotent god religions.)


Though this was also kinda stolen from Persians, Ahura Mazda (King of Light) and Ahura Mainyu (Prince of Darkness) .. Or an example can be give from the Maya s.. Quetzalcoatl (The Good) and Tezcatlipoca (The Bad)..

I am sure there was a The Ugly too but noone could ever find that :Cheeky:

Eldarion Lathria

Tuco, Played by Eli Wallach. One of my favorite movies. "You gonna shoot?, Shoot. Don't talk." :rolling:

Eldarion Lathria

Biff the unclean

The mind is the soul and the breath is the spirit.
Demons getting inside your body can get your soul...then they have to be cast out. Jesus liked the casting them into pigs and drowning the pigs method of curing mental illness.
Lesser demons, or imps, get your spirit when it is outside your body after a sneeze.
So being in a state of grace could save your soul but not your spirit.

I'm sure that once they stop teaching evolution in the US the next step will be to start teaching imp theory in medical school.

Ellis14

Better suited to GRD.

Bright Life

The mother of "someone very close to me" believes in demons. In her mid-twenties, she began to see them. She said they looked like rounded, spikey black bugs running across the floor. This "friend" was aware of her mother's visions and when, in her mid twenties, she began to see similar apparitions, she did what any educated person would do. She went to the doctor and was properly medicated before she went far out into the deep end, like her mother.

Classical

The small baptist church, and later large ones that I attended, believed whole-heartedly in demons, angels, and the whole nine yards.

For awhile I was in a bible study group at a friend's house and I was around speaking in tongues for the first time in my life. After weeks of not being able to do it, I just started mumbling a bunch of nothing while the others writhed on the floor in heavenly bliss. When I reported to my baptist church that I had been baptized by the holy ghost the pastor scolded me: "never go back there again. Speaking in tongues is of the devil!!"

True story. Go figure.

Aravnah Ornan

Don't you just love the way in which one Christian's teaching necessary for salvation is another Christian's damnable heresy?

Anyway, it's interesting that while some demons have managed to microevolve into chemical imbalances in the brain, other demons remain demons. Perhaps there are demons in the gaps, just as there is G-d in the gaps.

DISSIDENT AGGRESSOR

jbernier

Are you so sure that you have not seen the demonic? Don't get me wrong: There is no question that Pat Robertson and ilk trivialize the demonic. A wonderful example is the one cited by Nightshade, in which Dougie says "Also, I have 'confronted' demons a few times, once causing walking sounds on a roof to cease, through prayer."

I think that demon and Satan beliefs, as articulated in Second Temple Jewish literature, New Testament texts and early Christian writings (i.e. the materials that I study), are not about things that go bump in the night but, rather, about principalities and powers. Looking back at the century that has passed so recently, one might be forgiven for thinking that evil has a life of its own. Some human acts and institutions (such as the Holocaust and Nazi Germany) seem so inhuman that one cannot help but think that there were, in fact, non-human powers involved. I think that early Christians had this same experience when facing the power of the Roman empire and, specifically, the Roman imperial cult.

Demon beliefs also seem to include the idea that the demonic is not only that force which resides behind principalities and powers but also that force which drives people outside the principalities entirely, through the act of possession. These ideas are not really that different, as the idea that the institutions which govern human lives are also the institutions that place some people in the centre of society and others on the margin or outside the pale completely.

I would suggest that we all see the demonic all the time. Whenever we see principalities and powers using their authority to compel assent and expel dissenters, we see the demonic.