“Demon” heavily depends. Straight Christian theology demons… not so much, they can tempt me, possess me, hell (heh) they may even try to physically attack me. But a good round of a couple Psalms and a Lord’s Prayer for good measure (or an exorcism for the second choice) and I’m back on top. The demons some fiction writers have come up with… no thanks. I would especially not like to get into a tiff with the demons/extradimensional shadow creature entities from John Dies at the End, these things have forms that are utterly ridiculous, only heightening the fear, can reproduce by basically infecting you and making you split into a bajillion pieces (think what a virus does to cells, with your whole body), can only be seen by taking a drug that may or may not turn you into them and if that wasn’t enough they can form a black-hole like thing that WIPES YOU FROM EXISTENCE if you piss them off. No, I don’t mean destroys you, I mean reorders reality so that you never existed, no one will ever remember you again because you were never born. And if you want to classify Lovecraftian “Old Gods” as “demons” then we’re getting even more insane and potentially terrifying.
Aliens, it’s a toss-up. On one hand malicious aliens could theoretically be beaten, even if it was a complete long shot. On the other hand… is it worth it? We’d officially be sitting earthbound licking our wounds hoping that wasn’t just the first wave or their military “B” team. Even if we somehow, through some miracle, reverse engineered their technology and made eons of scientific progress in a short time, we’re now poised on the edge of a universe wonder what ELSE is out there, and how will THEY react? But then there’s benevolent aliens. And to address the “what if their idea of a friendly gesture hurts us.” Well, if they’re truly being “friendly” I don’t think it’s a stretch that a few translators later we’d work to some kind of understanding that whatever their doing doesn’t work on biologic entities structured in our fashion because of whatever reason (i.e. it turns out our brains are just to meaty for the “good will” brain slugs to resist eating even if it makes THEM think better).
Now if BOTH existed at the same time, I’d go with demons, simply because if aliens exist a couple major pieces of Christian (or most human religions for that matter) faith go out the window, like humans being “chosen” or “special” or “unique” in our intelligence or some other fashion. Because of that all bets are off that they’re right on how you beat a demon and you’re presumably left with a big scary thing that has magic powers with no clear way to defeat it.
I don’t really believe in demons, but if the comparison was just a generalized “supernatural beings” versus aliens, I have to go with the supernatural stuff.
If I were to spot an alien spacecraft sitting in a field, I’d be curious. I’d try to move in closer, maybe even make contact with the aliens.
If I were in a ostensibly ‘haunted’ house and saw a semi-transparent figure floating towards me I’d…
A: scream like a schoolgirl
B: wet my Levis, and
C: leave a perfectly Jettboy-shaped hole in the wall as I took off running
Well, I don’t think Dante used those exact words, but I think he did talk about it somewhere… weren’t wooden spits involved?
FTR, I think Aliens are scarier. Demons can presumably be at least fought to a standoff with righteousness and holy water; after all they haven’t conquered the Earth yet (that I know, anyway. Hmm… )
But Aliens (at least ones that showed up here on Earth) would be way more technologically advanced, and in that kind of meeting the less advanced society rarely fares well.
And of course, Christian Demons would indicate that the universe was basically designed around me, and I’ve got an inifinite afterlife coming to me. Big plus for my ego, there.
Wiki-qoute… That’s good enough for me. If one planet in seven around a single star can harbor life, and others have or have had water, it is not a far stretch to concede that among the billions of stars and planets out there life is doing just fine. It’s also not a stretch to give that a small proportion of those planets have intelligent life. What is a stretch is to imagine that it travels vast distances of space just to mess around with cows and poke people in the butt. Most of the criticism of the idea comes from either revisions to the the original numbers which is a nit picking argument that doesn’t refute the plausibility of the idea itself, or plain old fashioned pigheadedness.
There is a historical trend of when two cultures clash, the more advance one goes great lengths towards wiping out the lesser one - whether they intend to or not.
Think about it - friendly aliens show up, suddenly everyone starts focusing on them. Anthropology gives way to xenoanthropology, scientists and engineers stop developing new things and start trying to reverse engineer alien tech, and alien art takes off in a big way. It is possible we would influence their culture, but much less than they influence ours. In time, our culture would be wiped out - which is classed as a form of genocide, or something.
They could accidentally destroy us all culturally.
Demons, OTOH, could never defeat us, not when they are vulnerable to Latin chanting and squirts of holy water. Aliens could NEVER be defeated using water*!
*Outside of any terrible, terrible movies, of course. I’m looking at you, Signs.
Well, Malacandra demands cites to support the validity of Drake’s Equation. The first parameter of the Drake Equation took me as long to find as it took me to type “Drake Equation,” and it appears pretty valid. But, if we’re not allowed to use our solar system as a “historical trend” to extrapolate a rough guess as to how many stars, planets, and moons there might be in the galaxy, then I think it’s risky to assume what the result of an encounter with a more advanced alien civilization would be, with zero prior such encounters to base assumptions on.
Aliens reinforce my belief in a universe where this planet is not the only one that supports life, and that religion is myth.
Demons would prove that religion was rooted in more than myth, and my head would explode. Also, representative drawings of demons are really scary to me.
However, the alien in Alien(s) is pretty damned terrifying.
I’d be thrilled to live long enough to know that other forms of life exist; I’d be devastated to know that demons were real.
Also going with the demons, if real, taking me to hell for a million years, versus a non-religious death by alien ZAP and it’s over.
The trick is to get them to fight each other. Whoever wins is scarier.
(Meanwhile, aliens and demons are both remotely monitoring the SDMB and thinking, “Fuck, these people are seriously twisted! You’d never get me near Earth in a million years.”)
I vote that aliens are scarier. With demons, you know their intentions and end goal. With aliens, you have absolutely no clue. Therefore, aliens are scarier.
Demons usually work in the spiritual realm, so the physical world can seem ‘normal’, which makes it very hard to get external help for the one demonized as no one believes you. In the case of a alien, if it’s something like war between the worlds, at least you can have people to turn to as they can see it too. Also the end goal makes demons worse, to get you to go to hell, while the assumes motives of aliens are to study, enslave physically, impregnate, or eat us.
My take on it is demons are fallen angels, they were suppose to help us, guide us, but tempted us into serving them instead, and they serve each other in a power structure similar to a military one, the pantheistic deities were just higher ranking fallen angels, served by the lesser ones. So IMHO the origins of demons are angels, but they went their own way and deceived us into thinking they are not evil.
So in that respect some angels are already considered evil.
