Demons

My Senior year of High School, I worked for about three months at Meijer. One day, one of my coworkers—a self-described "pagan"—went around asking people whether they believed all demons were evil. Most of the self-described Christians, agnostics, and atheists who worked there gave a tepid "I guess" or "I don't know." She smugly pointed out that they hypocritically condemned what they did not understand and did not understand what they believed. When she asked me, I did not know yet that she had asked my coworkers for their thoughts, or what answers she had received. Our conversation went a little like this (not word for word—it has been four years):

PAGAN: Do you think all demons are evil?
ME: Yes.
(PAGAN descends into sputtering rage at my certain and confident answer, babbles about being self righteous)
ME: Wait a minute... what do you mean by "demon"?

At this moment, I realized that she and I did not agree on our terms. I took demon to mean fallen angel. It's very definition meant that it was a being which saw God in all His glory and turned against Him. She did not have the same definition, as her answer demonstrated:

PAGAN: Any kind of demon!
ME: No, I mean...
PAGAN: Take a succubus for example. It has drains the life out of humans by having sex with them. Is it evil?
ME: If such a thing really exists; yes.
PAGAN: How can you say that?!? It's only doing it to survive! That's like denying a person the right to eat!

Here, again, we were hitting a wall in our conversation. One from which it did not recover, as I was called away shortly thereafter to do my actual job. However, I know how I would have responded: Angels, fallen or otherwise, are eternal beings. They don't die. Demons, therefore, do not need to feed to survive, whether on libidos or Fritos. It would be ludicrous for a Christian to respond any other way to her questions.

I suppose I'm thinking of this because I've been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately. (I just finished Season 6, and haven't seen it before, so please no one who reads this ruin Season 7 for me.) It's gotten me thinking a lot about different things: occult, demonic, magic, and mythic. I've done a lot of considering lately. Most of my thoughts are unimportant, and I will keep them to myself for now. I may have follow-up posts, however, wherein I discuss individual ideas in greater depth.