I agree with this logic. Even if an alien is intelligent and friendly to humans, its way of thinking may be so different that maybe its way of being friendly is not compatible with us. I saw this comedy show where the friendly alien character said that he wanted to mate with human women, and his idea of foreplay was dropping them from 400 feet up in the sky. Another possibility is that they may be so intelligent that they may see humans to be as dumb as insects and try to exterminate us.
Demons. Aliens are interesting. Demons aren’t.
Same here. I’m not even quite sure what everyone here is referring to when they write ‘demon.’ Maybe it’s because I didn’t go to Sunday School or something.
I’m thinking like the demon from The Exorcist.
But I went to Catholic school for 13 years, and still only have vague ideas about what a demon is supposed to be, exactly…
Who’s to say they aren’t one and the same?
ie. Demons are just extradimensional aliens?
But as to the OP, kind of a toss-up. Demons are, by definition, malevolent. But we do have theory and doctrine concerning defeating them.
Aliens OTOH, could be good or evil. But if evil, all our theory comes from scifi writers and usually involves tech we don’t really have, or us just being really really lucky.
I can possess you, and make your non-dominant hand do all kinds of weird scary stuff.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
It would depend on what you fear more; pain and death, spending your last moments paralyzed by terror before being eaten or squashed like a bug can happen with either a demon or an alien, I suppose. Being raised Catholic, I know better than to conjure a demon but I can’t choose where an alien may show up. Still, having read much more about the nature of demons than the nature of aliens, I would have to vote demons scarier for their sneakiness and desire to want to devour your mind and soul as well as your body. An alien may want to control your mind or use your body for a while, but not for eternity, or so I’m told.
If one believes in demons, then keeping one’s soul in tidy order & having faith in Heaven should suffice as a defense.
As for Aliens…I’m allergic to face-huggers.
Good point, but there are still two ugly possibilities (if we are accepting for argument that demons are real).
First, maybe the old “the devil made me do it” excuse isn’t just an excuse. We may be used to the fact that for instance mental illness or serial killers exist, but the thought of being driven mad or compelled to become a serial killer by a demon is pretty scary.
Second, there are plenty of stories in fiction and myth about demons being unable to interact with humans except under certain circumstances. The lack of a known “hostile take-over” to date is comforting in that it indicates that our hypothetical demons have limitations, and we might then be able to figure out how to keep them away. But by “we” I here mean humanity in general – I personally might not have the chance if I accidentally summon a demon by reading its name off an ancient inscription or am standing in the wrong place when the Hell Gate opens.
Orson Scott Card’s novel Speaker for the Dead deals with two cases where friendly aliens brutally murder human researchers who they were on good terms with. I won’t spoil the resolution of this mystery, but the aliens mistakenly believed they were helping the humans. To my mind this is still less scary than real demons would be, but still pretty darn scary. Possibly scarier than being killed by an obviously hostile alien, because the humans involved knew and trusted these aliens.
Demons are scarier because unless they’re some freaky exception they’re always bad. Until proven otherwise, aliens have the same potential for good as bad.
I’m worried about aliens being way smarter than we are, but I’m not worried about aliens making a blunderous foo-bar like sticking their “hello” tentacle directly into our brains and concluding, “oops, guess that doesn’t work on their species.”
Demons could drag us into a hell that is governed by a Satan & God whose rules I may well have run afoul of long ago.
Of course, aliens might have aesthetics we’ve violated too. You eat meat??? You sexually reproduce??? Kill them!
I trust aliens to maintain some anthropological objectivity towards us though.
Clearly you don’t watch a lot of anime.
It would depend on the demons and on the alien. In the fiction/myths about them, there are demons that are either non-hostile or who can be dealt with fairly easily. And there are aliens in fiction who would inflict horrible tortures upon you, and are far too powerful to stop. And the other way around; there are demons that are multiversal threats, and aliens we could stop by peeing on them ( the water-allergic aliens in Signs; “Beware the stream of JUSTICE ! !” as someone said on another forum ).
A gun? Your fists? Something sharp and pointy?
Unless it’s, say, a Babylonian demon; “Sorry, wrong pantheon” says the demon before it eats you.
Now THAT’s interesting.
Is that because your theology regards demons as beings just like ourselves who have refused/been forbidden the ability to develop spiritually by incarnating? Basically, demons as thuggish sub-humans?
Related to this- in the NT accounts, demonized people never seem to be afflicted by “evil genius” Cenobite-types as one would expect of fallen angels. Instead, their afflictions seem self-destructive & subhuman, which makes me think that the NT-type of demon is more a fallen “elemental”/nature entity than a “fallen angel”.
The NT does indeed seem to speak of malevolent higher intelligences (“principalities and powers”) but don’t refer to them as “demons”.
Zombies,they’re familiar but also flesh eating, mobile corpses.
Its the familiarity that makes them so disturbing.
Demons do not exist, and so aren’t scary at all.
Aliens probably do exist; somewhere in the universe it is likely there are extraterrestrial life forms. While it is exceptionally, wildly, so-close-to-zero unlikely any will ever visit Earth. it is at least THEORETICALLY possible they could do so and turn out to be dangerous.
An extremely unlikely threat is scarier than none at all.
I’m not sure. Demons probably.
Aliens are almost certainly exist, and intelligent alien life that has technology more advance than our own is likely. Despite the poo-pooings of some of our more conservative posters on this issue, I think that the Drake equation does a good job of supporting the existence of aliens. presumably they would have to comply with the physics that we do so they have some limits.
Demons on the other hand don’t seem to have to play by any rules if they don’t feel like it. Either that means magic is real, or that they have technology SO advanced that it might as well be magic to us. This is scary because now there is doubt that we understand anything about how to combat them, or the nature of the universe in general. Demons seem to do an awful lot of things that would be impossible by our current knowledge. What bothers me most about them though is that they are often malevolent for no apparent reason.
I can see where I’m going to get the phrase ‘a faceful of alien wing wong’ out of my head in a hurry. :eek:
Do what? Got a cite for the validity of a single parameter in the Drake Guess?