Thanks for helping and being supportive Abbadon.
Here are more reasons I came up today about why demons don't exist:
1. Christian people believe that a magical invisible being made the world and some of them say god speaks to them. This explains it when Christian people say they hear demons talking...they are nuts.
In my opinion, this is hearing in tongues just like the whole "speaking in tongues" malarkey that some christian sects carry on with. None of those stop to ask whether the outpourings are an actual language at all.
2. Since I don't believe god is real, demons would have to be an immaterial consciousness and that doesn't sound possible.
There is no evidence for the existence of any discarnate consciousness of any kind.
3. All those people that get "scratched" by demons, if these immaterial conscious beings that can affect matter aggressively attack people why don't they just go around slaughtering people for sport? That has never happened ever. Unlike humans, who slaughter animals for sport.
I once severly scratched my own forehead in my sleep so badly that everyone in the office asked if I had been assaulted. I had to sheepishly respond that I did it to myself in my sleep. It would have been way cooler to blame it on a demon, but that would have been a lie. Oh, and how did I know it was myself? The blood under the fingernails was a bit of a giveaway.
4. People calling upon the name of Jesus and the demon flees....or they just feel safe and their flight/fight response turned off.
Kind of easy to claim a thing is no longer present which was not present in the first place, no?
5. What the hell do demons eat. (Oh no, don't tell me, they eat your fear....) Fear is cortisol, adrenaline, and the flight or fight response. Christians tell me they feed off of fear. So they eat cortisol and adrenaline? LoL!
Not going to work. That which is incorporeal obviously does not require material sustenance. However, demons living off fear is as realistic as unicorns being responsible for rainbows by means of their farts. It is the very same level of absurd claim.
To see this in action, consider the Church of Pastafarianism and the Flying Spaghetti Monster (bless his noodly appendage)
here. Total parody, yet eerily similar to actual religion.
6. Most of the people that believe in demons apparently see demons everywhere. After reading most of their stories they talk about demons appearing left and right. They have cameras don't they? Why don't they record anything.
If one posits undetectable entities, one is free to assign any action or attribute to them after all, they are undetectable, right? Thus, if I got up in the morning and my car wouldn't start, it is easy to blame a demon rather than mundane mechanical failure. Where this all breaks down is that the claim becomes that the believer actually can detect these undetectable entities somehow, so now the demon is simultaneously detectable and undetectable. This is, of course, merely the beginning of the rampant inconsistencies involved
7. Demon paranoia comes from the middle ages when people got sick and they blamed it on demons. Also, people had epilepsy and a whole host of other psychological problems as well as sleep paralysis so that's why people believe in demons.
This is the god of the gaps reasoning. For any given gap in knowledge, rather that seek a rational explanation, simply claim "godiddit" and enquire no further. Were we all to simply accept such a non-explanation at face value, we would still be in the middle ages, so it is just as well we don't. The "god of the gaps" argument still exists but given the advance of science over the centuries, the "god of the gaps" is becoming constrained to ever fewer and smaller gaps.
8. Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon wouldn't be afraid of demons, so why should I? Do you think a fish is afraid of demons? No. So I shouldn't be either.
Interesting one. There is at least some evidence that both had some form of belief system. Those are so far removed in ancient history that it is difficult to have any certainty about what they might have believed. Neanderthals appear to have buried their dead with at least some kind of ritual. What that ritual precisely was or what they considered it to signify is anyone's guess and we are unlikely to ever find out barring an unlikely archaeological find.
