On Angels and Demons

God is a bastard. Angels are like white blood cells.

The armies of the Almighty cleanse any infection that might threaten the whole of the planet. In doing so they stir the flames of doubt and fear. What God would allow such a thing to happen?

Angels are robotic, and think of nothing but eliminating anything that creates a problem for the rest of the body, the body being humanity. In fact, if you look at it, the MOST holy thing for them to do is to kill anyone who doubts, as well as kill anyone who met that person. An angel sees doubt and blasphemy like a white blood cell sees infection.

You need to destroy it and keep it from spreading, even if you have to destroy a relatively small part of the body in the process. It's better to amputate and stop the infection than it is to keep a full body that is crawling with disease and infection. That's what an angel does when it destroys cities, cleansing them from the planet with divine fire.

That's what makes them so scary. They're the embodiment of all that is GOOD in the world, and nothing they do is wrong. Even if they kill billions of innocent people, because the individual is nothing to them. In fact, they literally surpass good and evil in that they are capable of doing monumental amounts of good by doing incredible evil. If a new messiah comes into the world then the most good would be to kill it before it ages, to smother it in the womb or the cradle and to kill it's mother and father and wetnurse. To keep the infection from spreading. Quarantine. Amputate. Cleanse.

A demon, on the other hand, that's something that has feelings, something that's learned the difference of right and wrong, something capable of more than cold, biological pragmatism. A demon is 'fallen', but what is it that they've fallen from? Oh, far too often a demon will go too far, a demon will fall from being the implacable, unremorseful thing that an angel is and go straight in the other direction. Overcome with the sensations of the lives of mortals--a life of sinning, winning, uncertainty, great pain and great pleasure, a life that is so full of pain and hurt and joy and bliss--a demon will go too far. In becoming more human they instinctively amplify their negative traits. So many demons hate what they were before, what better way to get back at their former colleagues than to become everything that they hate and stand against. But those that don't, those that fall just far enough to know what it's like to be human, those are the ones that hurt the most. It's far easier for anyone, even a divine being, to grow darkness in their own hearts than it is for them to slay the darkness in the heart of another. Those that go halfway, falling enough to live and learn and laugh and cry and hurt, they're willing to protect humanity from their brothers and sisters, both the other demons and the angels.

Even those that fall halfway, the ones who do their best to be good and don't hurt anyone, even the demons who protect humans and extol the virtues of faith hope and goodwill... even the most just demon is seen by an angel as a beacon, a beacon of something that needs to be cut out, destroyed before it can spread to the rest of the populace and infect them with their nature. A nature of something that is what it should not be. And that puts everybody that they know or who knows them in danger, all because angels are cold and pragmatic.