How Demons Became Political Weapons in America | Dr. Michael E. Heyes

So a few things sort of before we start, right? I'm gonna call these kinda foundational principles, if you will.

The first thing is that- I tend to be agnostic about the existence of demons.

If you believe that demons exist, I'm fine with that.

If you don't believe demons exist, I'm fine with that, too.

When I'm using the term demons here, what I mean are ideas about demons.

That is, I'm treating this from a historical vantage point, not from a theological vantage or a deliverance ministry vantage or anything like that.

So when I use that term, I mean people's ideas about these entities.

So with that being said, we can kind of acknowledge that demons are not fixed historical points.

That is, when we look at this history of how we develop ideas of demons, there isn't sort of one similar thing, and then we cross all this span of time looking at this similar kind of thing.

Instead, we have similar kinds of principles as demonic bodies change.

So, um, what we, what we can kind of say is that there are similar kinds of principles that people deal with demons with.

And one of the things that, that for me is most interesting is that we tend to see other people's communities.

We tend to see people that we don't agree with.

We tend to see the traits of different religious groups, things like that, grafted onto demons, their bodies, their ideas, their ways of looking at the world.

The trouble there is that demons also typically represent for a lot of communities a kind of unrepentant, a kind of unredeemable evil.

And so when we make the association between the demon and the actual human communities, it becomes that much more difficult for us to link up together as human beings and see the similarities that we have together.

It impedes communication.

So that's a kind of quick caveat about how I am looking at these phenomena over time.

Now, there's a lot of time here.

That is, there is a lot, a lot of information that we could potentially look at.

So to kind of give this a sense of uniformity, a sense of kind of systematic kind of way of, of looking at things, we're gonna look at the idea of demonic bodies, which I find fascinating.

A lot of people go, "Do demons have bodies?" So [chuckles] yes, generally speaking, they do.

And we'll look a little bit about how those things have been constructed over time.

So what are they? What are they composed of? How do they interact, if at all, with the human body? So I've chosen to give you guys a section of text, the words of authors that we're looking at as we move from one section to another, and these are sort of representative of the thing that we're gonna talk about in that section.

So we wanna start with biblical demonology, or arguably sort of earliest idea of demons.