Do non-evil demons upset you?

Does making a Questions That Don't Deserve Their Own Thread or Strawpoll thread instead of posting whole threads for individual, boring and/or stupid questions upset you?

Whoa, you guys are pretty ornery for Sunday morning.

I played in one game where demons basically good. They did the same thing they do to in most settings. They created Faustian Bargains, tempted people to sin, and convince people to become evil.
Every Faustian bargain was a cautionary tail for others, every person tempted was really a test of resolve, and every person tempted to evil was another soul for them to punish.
And they got the whole evil rep from people in power who made bargains they attempt to get out of.

>Not starting your day with a nice simmering cup of rage

I like the concept of convincing/tempting a demon to become good, but only if it's done right

I'm not sure if Angels and Demons have free will to be anything other than their nature dictates.

what am I looking at?

Being non-evil demons must be the worst torture anyone could imagine. You are made of literally EVIL. Being non-evil demon should make them like a broken rape victim.

That's pretty much what Satan was originally all about. In Jewish mythology, he still works for Gods, and it's his job to tempt people into sin to see if their resolve is strong enough.

In some settings they do, it's just a binary choice. A Demon that ceases to be evil must go to the opposite end of the spectrum entirely, and basically become a Celestial being. Celestial Demons, Fallen Angels, you get the idea.

But demons are just fallen angels. Only God has the power of creation. Either God made Evil on purpose, or it is a corruption of their original design.

As a big Hellboy fan, no.

But do it to much and without reason it becomes dumb.

I don't really want good demons, but I don't mind demons with Machiavellian tendancies - seeming good as part of a greater plan, trying to inspire love among worshipers rather than fear, that sort of thing.

What I really don't get are teiflings. Where are they coming from in enough numbers to form their own race? If it's a curse, why do they all seem to be red-skinned and horned? Can you give them their own culture and identity, or should they be spread around everywhere?

Depends on the setting

Eh, it's pretty easy. Go back a couple of hundred years and you might be the indirect descendent of a great king. The biggest question is how they survive and pass the genes over so many years.

The 4e and later tieflings, which are the type in that artwork, aren't so much the descendants of demons as they are the descendants of a civilization that made a horrible pact to become tieflings.

In the older editions where tieflings were demonblooded individuals, they are all supposed to look wildly different as befit their heritage, and they were exceedingly rare outside of Planescape.

DnD 4e had the easiest ones to explain.

Once upon a time, there was a huge empire.
The empire was at war with the dragonborn.
The empire made a deal with devil/s/demon/s/bad magic dude/ttes.
Royalty, Nobles, and high ranking soldier got turned into Tieflings.
Because this happened empire wide, there are lots of Tieflings to propagate the genes.

>What I really don't get are teiflings. Where are they coming from in enough numbers to form their own race?
Bastards and lesser relatives, who were blanket effected due to relatedness to the original cursed bloodline.

> If it's a curse, why do they all seem to be red-skinned and horned?
WotC wanting to ape the popularity of those goat people from WoW

Personally, I've always preferred the Planescape Tieflings, and bring the varient lineages was one of the few things PF did right

This was terrible. 4e in general had some truly horrible lore and designs.

Faerun actually did it the right way, Genghis Khan style, to explain the higher numbers of genasi and tieflings/aasimar.

But, overall, tieflings were supposed to be rare. Trying to treat them like elves and dwarves is ridiculous.

Usually a pedigree of a foreparent either collapses within six generations, or surviving that, his or her genes will spread and multiply immensely. You can easily be a long-distant descendent of Genghis Kahn, Charlemagne, or any other historical figure without you knowing it. It isn't necessary that ancestor produced many kids. The more time that passes between you and them, the more likely that his genes spread around.

If they're not evil anymore, then they kind of aren't a demon anymore, you know? If an angel can fall, I can conceive of a demon redeeming themselves, but considering it's a being of spirit, it's essential nature would change.

Fall-Grom-Grace had a hard immortal life.

This is something that never made sense to me in Christian Mythology.
Angels don't have free will. And humans did. Which is why Lucifer rebelled.
Except is Angels didn't have free will they COULDN'T rebel.
So Lucifer did exactly what God WANTED him to do, so it wasn't really a rebellion then, is it?

... Sometimes I think Lucifer didn't rebel, and was just selected to do a job. He, and the third of the Host who went with him, are just like a prison warden and it's guards.

Beats me man, my Angelic Conflict theology is pretty weak.

My only stipulation is demons cannot be Good. They don't have to be Evil, bit they cannot be Good. There is no such thing as an altruistic demon. Even those that appear to be always have an ulterior motive. This is the one thing you can trust in demons, that they will be deceitful even when being kind.

>This is something that never made sense to me in Christian Mythology.
To be fair, not even Christians can agree on this, and is one of the issues that resulted in the formation of many splinter denominations.
So you can't really view it as being a singular point in "Christian Mythology", because every denomination has their own stance of the finer details of the matter

The way I see it, if Angels can Fall, and if I remember right something like ONE IN THREE did, then a minority of Demons can Rise.

Unless, like D&D, they are made of nothing but Evil.

That's the interpretation of Paradise Lost. God is omniscient, omnipotent. Lucifer is aware of how everything he does has been prearranged by God. God knows exactly how all of Satan's schemes will fall.

Hell is actually pretty easy to get out of, and Satan slips out to mess around with Earth. The demons are also free to return to God's graces at any time. They simply choose not to.

It made them more playable in every setting instead of just Planescape. If you wanted to play a human with some added bits, just play a Half-Elf instead.

Sure.

I hate good "demons" because it's just contrairian nonsense. Why use the word "demon" when in every case, it has evil or mischievous connotations? It's like calling a lizardman an elf or a lumberjack a blacksmith.

You want your animu succubi? Sure, just call them something other than demons.

The devil is a complicated subject, and while the Milton approach is an incredibly intelligent and eloquent, willful and charismatic angel, the Devil we see in the Divine Comedy is represented as the opposite of God, ever-ignorant instead of all-knowing, powerless instead of omnipotent.

Lucifer's rebellion was less him being willfull, but succumbing to ignorance and turning away from the love of God. It's self-destruction that is completely beyond the Devils control, but the nature of his ignorance lead him to believe that rebellion was a choice that he was consciously making, without comprehending that he was trapped into the choice by his own ignorance.

In his eyes, it was a rebellion, but that's just his own ignorance to God's plan. Ultimately, with God being the only perfect being, the Devil's rebellion was an unfortunate but inevitable product of what happens when something is just short of perfection, a catastrophic collapse.

While the Devil was once second only to God, he lacked a small amount of understanding, and this spiraled into abandoning all truth, with even Milton's beautiful and erudite Devil ending up as foul cretin at the end of the poem.

I'd rather treat them like their own race if I included them - I think they'd make for a nice desert culture, vaguely Persian or Assyrian themed.

You mean Angels?

>Implying that Christianity was not carefully constructed to justify the power of kings as appointed by divine will. Hence all God is perfect, good, omnipotent, omniscient and all of that.

What's more important is this: "Good" angels are being depicted as non-anthropomorphic wheels-within-wheels or other "correct" types, but demons remain red-skinned with tails, horns and pitchforks.

God was perfect back when the Jews were escaping the Egyptians.

Jews don't count. They don't even have heaven and hell. You are just stuck forever in a limbo.

God works in mysterious ways, that is to say, in a schizophrenic manner.

>What the fuck humans I didn't give you free will just so you could use it do disobey me which you only did because I never taught you right from wrong in the first place, get the hell out
>After getting assmad about humans again decides to pull the old "The world floods, everyone dies" trick, but let's one guy and his family live
>Gets pissed again and this time sends a aspect of himself down to earth to get murdered, and then decides not to flood the place because a part of him decided it wasn't all bad for murdering him

>All that stupid shit he did in the old testament that got retconned when they wrote the sequel

The earth was flooded to kill the nephilim.

Which existed because god had his creations with no will of their own fuck humans.

Again we are back to the whole "How does this make sense" angle.

God exist outside of the current flow of time and space.

Yeah, but even if he's atemporal or exists everywhen at once, it's still kind of a hard sell .

I think things have been changing as far as how angels are treated - I think a long time ago, angels did have a lot more free will, since in Genesis some are laying with mortals and producing giants and other monsters and such. So back then, it made total sense for Lucifer - if he was a fallen angel at that point, maybe he was just an evil spirit that was reinterpreted later on - to have free will enough to rebel.

I came here to post this.

A Veeky Forums parody comic, based off of a satirical political comic from the onion.

We are talking about a religion written by human hands with human authors compiled over thousands of years. Even if it were based on a real thing, it is still passed on by flawed human beings writing a "book".

What about Daemon, though? If not for D&D, it literally means 'something between God and man'.

But if you look at shit like the old testament, the writing has changed very little from the oldest specimens we can find, the bible has been through far less and has been almost always more or less "complete" and recorded down from the originals.

Why even call them demons at that point instead of horny sluts?

According to what? The beginning of that story includes "And there were Nephilim on the earth in those days and also afterwards"

Meant for

>Angels don't have free will
Says who?

Where are you getting this idea that angels lack free will?

That might be a bit of because modern-day writers can actually look back at older versions of old testaments and make corrections.

During the Middle Ages, bibles were often copied by hand - and not even full bibles, they'd be separated into various books because how expensive parchment was - and there'd be a number of transcription errors because unfamiliarity with the languages that were being written in, or just being unfamiliar with language and letters in general, and until Charlemagne, illegible script.

No, Daemon literally translates to fighter of the Nightmon,

I'm referring to how the Greeks used it, didn't they make the word?

"Angel" means "messenger". It doesn't imply good or evil, just servitude to a deity.

"Demon" is of Greek origin and means "spirit". Again, it doesn't imply good or evil on its own, which is why the Bible often calls them specifically evil or unclean spirits.

"Satan" isn't a name, it's a job title—"adversary" or "prosecutor", in the sense of a prosecuting attorney. So again, no implication of rebellion against God, just someone playing literal Devil's advocate.

Not that user, but I'm pretty sure it's a Catholic thing.

>There are also, as mentioned earlier, fallen angels, led by the chief of the fallen angels, Lucifer. Lucifer means “light bearer.” He was created good, but chose against God. Literature has attributed to him the battle cry of the sin of pride, “Non serviam,” meaning, “I will not serve.” We often refer to Lucifer as Satan which means “Adversary”.

>Other angels followed Lucifer. We refer to these fallen angels as demons or devils. All the fallen angels were created good but, of their own free will, they chose against God, in an act of radical disobedience prompted by pride and envy. Because, unlike the intellects and wills of human beings, angelic intellects understand reality in one act of apprehension and because angelic wills choose permanently in one act of volition, there is no possibility that the fallen angels will ever repent. Neither is there any possibility that the good angels will ever sin.

hbgdiocese.org/2012/08/06/catholic-teaching-on-angels/

Annah a best. Dat tail.

That is fucking retarded, and I'm pretty open minded about this sort of shit.

'Perfect Understanding'? Unless Catholicism endorses a reflexive and functionally subjective reality schema, perfect understanding means they, rationally, should have either ALL rebelled at the moment of creation, or NONE of them.

This is why I'm glad I'm not catholic.
Nicea was a mistake

So you just want a race of horned sluts, then?

...

Gotta pay the troll toll, to get into the boy's hole.

Everytime we have one of these threads, I understand more, and more why the Japs make Christians a secret evil sect.

Not really, but I'd appreciate a reason for why they're called demons if they're not actually evil or devious since the connotation remains. Even something as simple as the standard Japanese "just a label for non-human races that aren't allied with humans and thus openly demonized" explanation works.

Ofcourse, people keep thinking Fall is a perfectly redeemed Demon. A LG paragon, but she isn't. In her own story; herself and several other people mention she still has a long way to "go." "Go" assumingly meaning good or redeemed.
She's typed as Lawful Neutral
And when put to the question of being redeemed she says there is nothing for her to redeem. Her backstory also heavily implies she's never done any great evil either.

>why the Japs make Christians a secret evil sect.
It's to absolve themselves of the time they tried to genocide all the Christians and Buddhists in their country

Ofcourse Torment, and all planescape products were far more focused on the Law vs Chaos axis and barely paid Good vs Evil any mind. So redeemed from the perception of a pure lawful creature.

Maybe. It's just easy to see how any outside perspective can see it, in that way.

Not at all. I love In Nomine. In that game most demons are just selfish. Like a millennial level selfish.

Except the Shedites. Those are twisted.

Don't think that's really agreed on by all Catholic theologists, as I've seen also positions that Satan would theoretically be able to attone, and would get back into God's grace if he did so, but his own pride prevents him from admitting he may have been wrong.

Angle mode of though working weirdly compared to human is a recurring theme in theology, though. It may be that once chose a course of action they become literally incapable of changing it, as while they can see exactly where the course of action leads, they become unable to perceive alternatives.

No, but calling them by the wrong name when they are by definition ANGELS does sort of strike me as uninformed.

If "demon" is just a job to them, then they need to be something other than demons.

Tieflings, demonkin, make up whatever name you want but if they're functionally humans with cutesy little hair decorations, they shouldn't be called something that implies a supernatural or otherworldly nature.

It'd be like if I had angels everywhere and they were just dudes and chick with clip-on wings.

Nope, the original term was just sprits and such, they were only made evil when Christianity started pushing conversions. Malevolent spirits were certainly still an issue, jus that not every demon was straight up evil.

In my setting demons are basically concept elementals and their experience with everything gets filtered throgh that lens. Devils are a class of 'dark' angels, they handle all the plagues, deaths of firstborn, torment of enemies to the gods, tests of temptation etc. Like most angels in the setting they're barely capable of free will, but immensly powerful instruments for whatever being commands them. Fey are the former angels of a lost pantheon, going crazy from being forced to develop free will to survive but still bound by countless laws and taboos, now taking joy in whatever loopholes they can find.

Depends how portrayed. If demons are simply a type of spiritual/paranormal being then they shouldn't be all evil. If they're based on typical christian definition and are stereotypical horns & hooves variety in the setting when demons are meant to be evil, then there may be exceptions but too often non-evil or even non-selfish demons of that kind seem kinda mary sueish and are annoying.

It's because it's an exotic and strange religion with doctrines and ideas that just are not present in their culture - though I admit, I have more knowledge of attempts to christianize China, so I don't know how Japan fared overall.

But ideas like sins present since birth and other central tenants of Christianity are just not common in eastern thought. Why should they care about why this strange western man died? And think about how it would've been spread - in many Asian countries missionary work was banned for periods of time, so you would have had missionaries working in storage buildings or in their homes, and later building huge churches in foreign styles.

>every case
Depends on the mythology.

They aren't as fun to dominate.

youtube.com/watch?v=TzaVd6zl2bA

She's not redeemed in the traditional sense, hence her choice of name. From the perspective of demonkind she's fallen, not risen.

However, while she's typed as LN, there is a strong argument for her being LG. She's much more willing to criticize an evil TNO, and will even leave the party long before Morte, who's supposedly CG.

The Buddhists genocided the Christians user.

Jews never escaped the Egyptians and slaves were not used to build pyramids...

Them lying with mortals is part of the Apocripha, not the Genesis. It is not considered canon.