Devil's in the details, er, demons

(new article this evening)

“If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.”--Tennessee Williams

“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.”—William Faulkner

“The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.”--Edgar Allan Poe

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Much of the New Age plot behind the “modern versions” of the Bible is accomplished through either omitting or changing God’s use of phrases and words—including the connotations of words—to make verses support Satan’s cause.

One of hundreds of great examples is the change of the word “devils” to “demons” in the New King James Version, along with the other corrupt bibles published since the King James Bible.

In Webster’s dictionary, “demon” is defined as “a tutelary divinity,” while the word “devil” comes with the explanation, “In Jewish and Christian theology, the personal supreme spirit of evil and unrighteousness.”

Madame H.P. Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society and recognized as “the mother of the New Age Movement,” once wrote:

“[T]he Church is wrong in calling them Devils. . .[T]he word demon however, as in the case of Socrates, and in the spirit of meaning given to it by the whole of antiquity, stand[s] for the Guardian Spirit or Angel, not a Devil of Satanic descent as Theology would have it. . . Demons is a very loose word to use, as it applies to. . . minor Gods;. . .there are no devils.”

Indeed, in The Theosophical Dictionary, demon is said to have “a meaning identical with that of ‘god’, ‘angel’ or ‘genius’. Under the word “demon” in The Encyclopedia of Occultism & Parapsychology, Socrates is quoted as saying, “[A] voice has been heard by me throughout my life. . . I call it a God or a daemon.”

To the Greeks, the word “daemon” meant “demigod” and Socrates taught that a daemon was a “spiritual something that put him on the road to wisdom.”

In her 1993 book, New Age Bible Versions, author Gail Riplinger writes, “All of the world’s religions, except biblical Christianity and Judaism, believe that those entities which the Bible calls evil spirits are demigods, worthy of veneration or placation.

“In the West, New Agers are told that Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘ascribe[s] some measure of importance and success to his prompt obedience to the wise Daemon’s direction.’ Eastward, Buddhists tell of ‘good demons,’ mosri sho shu and mischievous demons, nushi sho shu. . .

“By switching to the globally acceptable ‘demons’, new ‘International’ versions follow their admitted philosophy of choosing words which ‘allow each reader to decide for himself’ what a verse means. God, however, has already decided. . .

“(New Testament) Greek dabblers may jump to the floor with reference to the Greek’s use of both diabolos and daemonium to refer to Satan and the devils, respectively. Any objection to translating two different Greek words as one English word fails disastrously since new version editors themselves translate two different Hebrew words, shed and sair, as one word ‘demon’.

“Scholars who live in glass houses should refrain from throwing ‘original language’ stones, particularly when their house of cards appears to have been designed by a New Age architect.”