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So once upon a time a divinity student was writing his graduate thesis on demonology. He finished editing 12 hours before the deadline, and went to print it out when he discovered that his printer was out of ink. No problem, he went to the store to buy more. Once there he saw that the store no longer carried that kind of ink cartridge. Irritated, he went back to his apartment, saved the file to a flash drive and took it to his schools computer lab. It being finals season, however, all the computers were occupied and reserved for a few hours, and no one seemed in the mood to let him but in just to print.
So, figuring he'd need a new printer anyway, he went and purchased one at the store (making sure it came with ink) and brought it home, only to have his computer not recognize it. He called tech support and learned it would need a driver, which normally automatically downloaded but didn't this time, for some reason. Locating the correct driver, he downloaded and installed it, only to watch his computer crash. When he rebooted, the computer still didn't recognize the printer, so he reinstalled the driver. Another crash, and this time, the computer wouldn't reboot. He called over a tech savvy friend who opened the system up and pointed out a major problem... the motherboard was completely fried, and it might have taken the hard drive with it.
Now panicking slightly, he grabbed the flash drive (which possibly now held the only the copy of his paper in existence) and asked if his friend would just print the paper. His friend laughed, said yes, and they went over to his place, inserted the flash drive, only to learn that everything on it had been corrupted.
The student was forced to apply for an extension on his paper, and learned that both the flash drive and his hard drive were complete losses, forcing him to completely rewrite the paper, which had taken him a month, in four days. His original paper stated that demons were mythological abstracts, anachronisms of a less enlightened time. He is reportedly rethinking his thesis.
Ah... demons. Thanks for writing in, Joey!
Demons... frustrate me. They occupy a strange niche in our culture, a vaguely defined yet definitely present concept in our mythos. The idea of spiritual creatures who can infest us, or the everyday things around us, twisting us or them to evil is an idea that pervades our culture.
In truth, I'd rather do without it. Religious people in general often get it wrong, buying into the idea of a great war between holy and demonic powers struggling for the soul of humanity. The thing is, if you actually pay attention to Biblical teaching, that war has already been won, and fairly definitively, by the holy side. The only power remaining to the truly demonic powers are what we permit them to have.
In the Bible, that was ALWAYS the conceit of demonic possession... the things the tempted are being offered are the things that, in general, they already had. "You will be like God!" the serpent promised Eve... and yet we already knew that humanity was already made in God's image. "All the world will be yours!" But God had already called for us to have dominion over the planet. The devil always won because he had nothing to lose... and what he offered we already had.
My favorite treatise on demonology is probably "Sympathy for the Devil" by the Rolling Stones, and all nicely tied up in one stanza.
"I watched in glee while your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades for the Gods they'd made.
I shouted out, 'Who killed the Kennedys?'"
Because after all, it was you and me."
The very interesting point of the song is that every horrible thing ever attributed to the Devil, or Lucifer, was achieved with human help. And while the showmanship can be fairly impressive, it is hard to see, biblically, that demons have any power of their own at all. The single greatests acts of "demonic" power shown in the Bible, done in the book of Job, are done only with God's direct approval!
So where does that leave us, demon wise? Do I think they existed, or are they just manifestations of misunderstood mental illness?
I'm too much the evangelical to dismiss the concept entirely. While some of the demons were simply dismissed, others actually talked to those who drove them out, so I give credence that something might have been there. Dismissing the Biblical Legion, as, say, multiple personality disorder doesn't seem quite right to me... too literalistic, like trying to build a scientific concept of the Big Bang based off of Genesis. It just doesn't work.
I do think they're out there. I think they can terrifying or tempting, based on what serves their needs, but I also think that we humans can get up to quite enough trouble of our own, on our own. Still, if you feel that maybe you have one of the little jerks messing with you, remember this:
They have no power beyond what you give them. They literally can do nothing without your help. So don't feed the spiritual trolls.
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