Existence of Demons (and Angels)

Despite the fact that angels and demons are thought to conflict against one another, I think there may be situations where demons will appear in human form with nearby angels and protect you. When my mother was pregnant with my twin and I, she was afirm believer in angels (she still is.) Some kidnapper in Jamaica-Queens, NY decided to kidnap my mother and hold her hostage. She kept praying while huddled bound in the perpertrator's van, and angels appeared and stopped the man from driving. He let her go, and the case was printed in the newspaper. I'm only 12 years old, but I know what's true. And angels and demons really do exist.

welcome Specter,that's a great story! I hope your mum is okay.If I drink a lot of beer I will see the landscape shaking around me. If I take drugs I will see all sorts of monsters. If I get banged on the head I see shooting stars. when I see these things, I might believe that they're real, but they actually aren't real at all.Have you ever seen anything that you didn't believe in?Mick

I have, of course. (I used to drink a fair amount of beer and whatnot)I have also experienced what I believe to be a supernatural event.
In this case, I heard several voices at once...clear as day. Two others also heard them, and it was established that nobody tricked anybody else.(Unless they were very good at it and have said nothing about it for five years...an unlikely scenario)You cannot say with 100% certainty that such entities do not exist. Science is not the final arbitrator of every event in life.
Humans are logical and emotional.

And not only do I agree, but I might point out that there are more believers than a few freaked out whackos.Again, science is not the only arbitrator in all minds. To some, it is Gospel, however.More power to you...now go invent something!

Hi, Spector....welcome to EvC. We go around and around here on numerous topics...occasionally we even make sense!You said: Tell us more! When was this in the paper? Can we look up the article online??I believe you, by the way. I bet that your Mom has a lot of Faith because of what happened and probably even before that, huh?This message has been edited by Phatboy, 04-12-2005 12:35 PM

Do you remember, Phatboy (no offense), in Daniel ch. 12 where Daniel is praying for an answer from God (he was a prohet, duh!) but it takes a week for the angel to answer him? If you please, read from Dan. 12 and find out yourself what kept him so longKEY: Prince of Persia = Satan & His imps
Daniel = Prophet
Angel = God's angels - The devil has angels, too.(read Revelation & Jude)As you can see, there is a war going on over the souls of mankind. It depends on how we live our lives to perfect our destination. Oh yeah, and by the way; thanks for believing my story, despite the fact that I couldn't recover it on-line. Good hunting, though!This message has been edited by Specter, 04/13/2005 11:39 AM

Okay. In that case I would be 100% certain of one conclusion: you heard several voices at once. If your story is true, then this is the conclusion that I will accept.However, there is no reason for me to think that this is a "supernatural" occurrence. The fact that two others also heard them would in fact make me suspect that there is a natural explanation rather than a supernatural one.

Not sure whose post to answer, but yours seems a likely place to start. I've also had such experiences I'd like to share.The very first was during a couple of years when I was intensely interested in the supernatural, before I became a Christian after being an atheist for most of my life. I'd come to believe in God but didn't understand salvation yet or anything Biblical or Christian. I believe that I became susceptible to demonic influence because of dabbling in the occult during that period -- various kinds of oracles mostly. I had become a believer in God by reading some books by Hindu gurus and it was a couple of years before I was drawn away from all that to Christ.In that period an apparition appeared in my room just as I was on the verge of sleep. This was no dream but in that state you are in an altered state of consciuosness. I "saw" him "through" my closed eyelids. I recognized him. He looked exactly like one of the "street people" in the town I was living in, who was said to have lost his mind in Vietnam, someone I normally went out of my way to avoid because he had once threatened me with a broken bottle as I passed him on the sidewalk. Others assured me he wasn't violent but he certainly had taken a violent dislike to me. This apparition in my room looked identical to him and was coming at me with a rage-filled face as if to do me harm. I felt a sort of electric sensation in the back of my neck, and my hair stood on end. Even in my half-sleep I instantly pronounced a sort of charm a friend who had lived in a semi-Christian cult had given me for protection against just such occurrences, a charm that appealed to the name of Jesus, and the apparition immediately just disappeared. Then I woke up with this prickling sensation in the back of my neck and head.The whole thing was very strange. I no longer believe in the biblical validity of such formulaic charms and believe they belong to the world of the occult, shamans and witches and so on, and not to God, so I think maybe that whole event was a demon-staged demonstration of demon power to keep me in bondage to the occult and away from Christ. But of course I can only guess.I am sure the man in reality was demon possessed and the demon was capable of appearing apart from the man in his likeness (I believe this is what the spirits of "haunted houses" most likely are too, demons who have taken on the appearance of human beings they once possessed). The demon didn't like me for some reason. I thought it must have had something to do with spiritual forces surrounding me as I was heavily into the occult. I had to have been protected by God's own angels too, in spite of not yet believing in Jesus -- I had to be because I encountered many spiritually dangerous situations like that one in those days and managed to survive them at least physically if not spiritually unharmed. So their presence may be what provoked the demon or demons in this man but I can only guess as I never had any contact with him except passing him on the sidewalk.In that same period I was trying to learn how to pray and at one point was lying on my bed in the dark talking in my mind to my very vague idea of Jesus, still without having any clear notion who he was, when I heard a high-pitched voice say "out loud" in a mocking tone "she is praying to Jesus Christ." It is hard to describe this hearing. You are not hearing with your ears but with some other part of yourself, your spirit I guess, somewhere in the region of the head but not the ears. I was alone, but if anyone else had been present they wouldn't have heard a thing. And yet it is a distinct "sound" a distinct "voice."Once a few years later as I was about to pray for a woman who was dying, her name was pronounced so loudly "inside my head" it startled me. To try to describe it, it sounded like a voice spoken inside a huge empty metal-walled space (yeah, I know, jokes about what it's like inside my head and all that), and this spirit hadn't learned to modulate his voice to the right volume. If it had been a physically produced voice in physical space it would have hurt my eardrums. This was also in the dark at night as the first two instances I mentioned were.Another time while visiting at a Christian commune I again had a middle-of-the-night experience, this time the sensation of something trying to strangle me, like hands gripping my throat to choke me. There was nothing/nobody in the room. I said -- out loud I think though I'm not sure -- that I was protected by the blood of Jesus Christ and the sensation went away.Up until the last couple of years I would sometimes "sense" presences around me, in my room at night most commonly. I would just pray very fervently to God to please protect me and none have materialized in any form in a very long time now.I also had other kinds of odd experiences in that same period, some scary, some "beautiful," many in the daytime too, but of a different type, and though I connect them with the occult there weren't any demonic apparitions.If you read books by Hindu teachers you may well run across descriptions of such things as the apparition I describe above, the experience of people appearing in more than one place at one time for instance. {EDIT: Not usually frightening though, I should say, just the phenomenon of one person seeming to be in two places -- or even more than two --at one time} They don't tell you this is demon impersonation, they treat it as something some "spiritual adepts" are capable of (rather than your run-of-the-mill mentally disturbed/demon-possessed Vietnam vets), so it is only from Biblical knowledge that I recognize such experiences as demonic.And before I end this long drawn out account, I want to add that although I had friends who were concerned about my health and asked me if I'd been under unusual stress lately or was taking drugs and all that, I also discovered that since I was so free about describing these odd things, that other people described their odd experiences to me in exchange, which otherwise, when I was the atheist, they'd never have mentioned to me. I heard stories of other apparitions, of a "memory" of an event that happened many years later, of "angels" saving people from imminent danger, and every kind of occultic thing. I'd gone from doubting all those things to believing all of them, so people were willing to tell me about them. I still believe they are all true experiences of something real, but I now view them through the Biblical lens, mostly as manifestations of Satan's kingdom.This message has been edited by Faith, 04-16-2005 10:58 PM

Faith,I would advise you to do some research on hypnogogic hallucinations. It may explain some things to you.

I studied all that stuff years ago. I know what's real and what is a hallucination, and I myself pointed out that I was in the hypnagogic state in that first experience. I was not in the others. In the one where I was being choked I was awakened out of a sound sleep. In the others I was wide awake.What "science" interprets as hallucination may or may not be. It may be the spirit world. You'd never know as you rule out the possibility a priori.How would you know if the hypnagogic state produces hallucinations or is a state in which a person is more open to the spirit world? Not that it's necessary in either case, as both happen outside that state too. You can't answer such questions by merely assuming the answer.{Edited to clarify}This message has been edited by Faith, 04-17-2005 12:13 AM

Well, we might compare accounts of these experiences, and upon realizing that no two people who percieve this "spirit world" can actually agree on what they're seeing, we would come to the considerably more parsimonious conclusion that these are hypnagogic hallucinations.

OK, but what's more parsimonious about the idea of hallucinations? I think really it's only considered parsimonious to make that choice simply because of the prejudice against the supernatural. It has no RATIONAL basis in other words. There's nothing INHERENTLY more parsimonious or "elegant" about the psychological explanation. No two people have the same hallucinations either and no two people could actually be certain that they ARE hallucinations. Both kinds of phenomena are just about beyond pinning down, in other words, completely unique to the person, with completely idiosyncratic details.If it's the spirit world there are NO guarantees of any kind of consistent content as we're dealing with intelligent beings who put all their considerable malevolent genius into creating illusions to deceive the human race -- even to creating apparent patterns and consistency if they think that's what would deceive us most effectively, even to convincing us it's all really hallucinations.If it IS hallucinations, what kind of consistent pattern would you expect to find there from one person to the next considering the uniqueness of human personality?And again, if in frustration at these facts you give up in favor of the supposedly more parsimonious explanation, I can't see that you have any real grounds for selecting one over the other.I suppose it would be interesting to try to devise a test for these things, but it would have to be a very clever and sophisticated test. I've certainly had experiences of being fooled by my mind. I've also had experiences of "seeing" things that I know are coming from my mind and not outside. There is a definite difference between these kinds of things and what I described above.There are discussions in Christian literature about demonic activity. I've read quite a bit of it, but I haven't been looking for particular patterns in it to establish its reality or try to prove it to anyone, so I don't know how far one might go with that kind of goal from studying such things.

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it's the spirit world there are NO guarantees of any kind of consistent content as we're dealing with intelligent beings who put all their considerable malevolent genius into creating illusions to deceive the human race

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And how do you make that leap? This is the problem many of us have - you have some unexplained which you are trying to bolt your christian framework onto.This message has been edited by General Krull, 17-Apr-2005 06:38 AM

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Despite the fact that angels and demons are thought to conflict against one another, I think there may be situations where demons will appear in human form with nearby angels and protect you. When my mother was pregnant with my twin and I, she was afirm believer in angels (she still is.) Some kidnapper in Jamaica-Queens, NY decided to kidnap my mother and hold her hostage. She kept praying while huddled bound in the perpertrator's van, and angels appeared and stopped the man from driving. He let her go, and the case was printed in the newspaper. I'm only 12 years old, but I know what's true. And angels and demons really do exist.

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So, are you saying that the kidnapper wasn't actually a human being, but a demon?

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You cannot say with 100% certainty that such entities do not exist.

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No, we certainly cannot.However, we can say that up to the present, nobody, anywhere has ever been able to present anything that would constitute actual positive evidence in support of the existence of these entities.So, I have exactly the same amount of evidence for fairies and pixies as I do in demons and angels.

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Science is not the final arbitrator of every event in life.

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No.Only the ones that take place in the natural world.

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Humans are logical and emotional.

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Humans are exceedingly emotional.Humans are notlogical at all.Humans are, by nature, illogical and irrational.We have to be taught to be logical.