what is your definition of a demon?

Demons are idiots who spout pseudoscience and religious proselytizing on a science forum.

Does this mean I'm superstitious if I believe there are idiots spouting pseudoscience and others who proselytize here?o_O
 
Idiots who spout pseudoscience and religious proselytizing aren't people, they're clothed apes.
 
I don't believe in 'demons' in the conventional sense. The term usually conjures imagery or ideas of 'evil spirits' in league with some powerful, 'evil' force or entity. I don't believe in any such being, nor do I believe in any kind of objective 'evil'.
I believe that some spirits are malicious. In the same sense that some people are malicious; doesn't necessarily mean they deserve their own category, like they're some entirely different creature. And I believe that some spirits carry out a natural function that may be hazardous to people, but that doesn't make them bad; the natural world is a hostile place, and spirits that personify natural things aren't subject to human whims and notions of good and bad.

Now, in antiquity, the terms originally derived from Greek 'daimon', which broadly meant any kind of spirit that had an effect on the world but had no describable personality or standard form. Any kind of spirit that wasn't a god, who had discrete personalities and were conferred a generally-agreed upon form in the human imagination. These spirits I do believe in, though I'd rather refer to them by the Roman term numina.
 
Definition:

Confused thinking.

Life forms bring this concept into the being. Without life the concept of demon would not exist.
 
If your definition better suits your understanding, so be it. Within the Christian realm, demons are fallen angles who work towards spiritual corruption.
How dumb does that make God? A being who creates His own enemies, and keeps them around.
 
What is your definition of a demon?

In the Greco-Roman period, a daemon was a lesser divine figure, similar to Christianity's idea of an angel. Many people believed that they had particular benevolent daemons watching over them, an idea that was later adopted in the idea of guardian angels. People also believed that accidents, disease and misfortune were sometimes the work of malevolent daemons.

After the triumph of Christianity, Christians on the street didn't usually deny the existence of the older religions' gods. Instead, they dismissed them as lesser supernatural beings, still powerful and still capable of mischief, but far beneath the Christians' new heavenly regime of God, Jesus, Mary and the pantheon of the Saints, with legions of benevolent angels doing the divine work beneath them. Salvation and protection was the specialty of the Christian mythical figures, while evil, disease and misfortune were the work of the lesser daemons-turned-demons, who were now imagined as servants of Satan.
 
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The story goes that they were cast out of heaven. Why they were sent here, I don't know.
A better question would be why they were in heaven in the first place. Did God create them for the purpose they fulfill? Or didn't he know which direction they would take? Either way, Christian theology seems a little thin.
 
A better question would be why they were in heaven in the first place. Did God create them for the purpose they fulfill? Or didn't he know which direction they would take? Either way, Christian theology seems a little thin.
They needed something to explain why bad things happen to good Christians.
 
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