From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2007-07-19T08:41:26+09:00
Subject: [OT] Re: Religion (was: god 0.1.0 released)

Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 19, 2007 at 05:55:51AM +0900, Hal Fulton wrote:
>> Marc Heiler wrote:
>>> SPS: btw "daemons" is not the same as "demons" 
>> What do you mean? How is the spelling significant?
> 
> The term "daemon" is primarily a variant of "daimon", which is (in the
> words of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language) an
> "inferior deity", or an "attendant spirit; a genius".  Meanwhile, a
> "demon" is (in the same dictionary) an "evil supernatural being; a
> devil".  There's some vagueness in the delineation, however, because of
> the fact that the term "demon" grew out of the early Christian tradition
> of turning good things in "competing" religions into terms for bad things
> in Christian religions.  Just as Baal, a term that essentially meant
> "lord", and Ba'al, which referred to the lord of heaven, was in Christian
> tradition turned into the name of a duke of Hell, so too did "daimon" get
> turned into "demon", and become synonymous with "devil", in Christian
> terms.
> 
> I refer of course to the cultural history of these terms, and in this
> case suggest no value judgments about the various involved religious
> philosophies themselves.
> 

Certainly correct. But it's a question of meaning and usage.

"Daemon" was an older spelling of "demon"; any modern attempt
to ascribe different meanings to the different spellings is
strictly arbitrary in my book.

Hal