Exorcism in Texas: American Kindoki Kills Another Child

There's been yet another exorcism-related death in the US. This time it's in Henderson, Texas where a couple of 18 year old parents beat their 13 month old child to death with a hammer and possibly several other blunt instruments in an attempt to "drive the demons out." Oh, and they bit her at least 20 times, too.

Couple Bit Child More Than 20 Times in Fatal Exorcism

by Kenneth Dean

They claim they were trying to drive the demons out of the 13-month-old, but law enforcement officers say the bottom line is a Rusk County couple bludgeoned the little girl to death with a hammer and other objects and bit her more than 20 times in the most grotesque murder the seasoned officers can remember.

Blaine Keith Milam, 19 and Jesseca Bain Carson, 18, both of Henderson, remain jailed on $2 million bonds each. They are charged with capital murder for the Tuesday morning death of Carson's daughter Amora Bain Carson...

"They had multiple stories they went through before they told us they had beaten the child to death," he said. "It is their version of the truth."

Humber said the couple then told deputies the child was possessed and they were trying to rid her of demons.

An arrest affidavit states Milam performed an exorcism of the demons possessing their child. The affidavit continues to state after Milam killed the child with Carson looking on the couple "drove to Henderson to pawn some items to pay for an exorcism."

Officials said Milam and Carson told detectives they decided to hire a priest after the exorcism went badly...

Milam also has a previous criminal record of assault on a child and domestic violence.

This is no different from the kindoki mass panic going on in Africa. It's not even that uncommon that forceful exorcisms occur in Texas, a state whose Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that churches can't be sued for conducting these barbaric rituals. How many more children are going to die as the result of a parent believing in demonic possession? Children are being beaten to death, strangled, and stabbed. Rather than try to stop it, organized churches — the Catholic church in particular, but by no means only the Catholic church — continue to propagate the superstitious belief in evil spirits, adding only the caveat that only their clergymen are qualified to perform the gibberish rites to remove the nonexistent spirits.

Until religious officials stand up and admit that all their bullshit about possession and demons is exactly that, this is going to keep on happening. It will happen again and again and again so long as Evangelicals put forth their deliverance ministries and the Vatican trains exorcists and religions keep telling people that they can be possessed.

It's a lie. It's a fairy tale. It's fraud. Every pastor, every priest, every one of them, is complicit in these deaths. If not for them, the very circumstances that fosters this insanity would ultimately cease to exist. That should have happened centuries ago.

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Kindoki: Exorcism and Abuse in Africa, America and the UK

A new vocabulary word for non-African readers today: kindoki. That word embodies the belief now prevalent in many parts of Subsaharan Africa that children are demon-possessed witches. It's a pernicious idea being spread by Pentecostal Christian preachers that is resulting in a crisis for African children who, when accused of kindoki, find themselves abandoned by their families and sent to religious camps to be exorcised. The practices associated with this are horrible and a direct consequence of a religious fervor stoked by the preachers for their own benefit at the expense of children and families in countries like Congo, Angola and Nigeria.

Persecuting the African child

by Olusegun Fakoya, Nigerian Tribune

Africa abounds with various forms of child abuses, arising mostly from prevalent poverty and ignorance. This notwithstanding, the paramount role of the child in the African setting has never been in question. However, the traditional African belief and attitude to children has been successfully fractured by those who have deliberately perverted traditional belief and infused it with a distorted dose of Christianity...

...In the Congo Republic, a surprising number of children are accused of being witches, and thereafter, beaten, abused or abandoned. Child advocates estimate that thousands of children living in the streets of Kinshasa, Congo's capital, have been accused of witchcraft and cast out by their families, often as a rationale for not having to feed or care for them. There are over 50,000 homeless children on the streets of that lawless city...

...a shockingly high proportion of these children are on the streets because of the mushrooming influence of the new revivalist churches who have comfortably carved a commercial niche for themselves in the business of "child kindoki"... In 2006, Congo's Social Affairs minister, Bernard Ndjunga, estimated that as much as 50,000 children might just be illegally detained by churches specialising in the removal of kindoki...

...Congolese pastors invaded Angola, bringing with them the message of kindoki and further destabilization of an already fractured society. In 2006, it was officially estimated that one northern Angolan town had over 400 abandoned and abused children stigmatised as witches... it was easy for the notion of child witches or kindoki to gain a firm foothold in Angola as in many other African nations, as one of the key African beliefs is that of the potency of witchcraft. It is commonly believed that witches can communicate with the world of the dead or other such supernatural plane, and usurp or "eat" the life force of others, bringing their victims misfortune, illness and death. Adult witches are said to bewitch children by giving them food and then using them to achieve their nefarious goals by bringing misfortunes to their families, causing illness, bad luck and death. In retaliation, gory tales abound of the atrocities committed against children in the fight back against child witches. Two cases were particularly significant. A mother blinded her 14-year- old daughter with bleach in an attempt to rid her of evil visions, while a father injected battery acid into his 12-year- old son's stomach because he feared the boy was a wizard...

One of the notable propagators of kindoki in Congo DR is Prophet Onokoko who as at 1999, had over 230 children on his book, all accused of witchcraft. He employed what he termed "vomit up the devil system" to exorcise children of kindoki. This is the regurgitation of strange objects after these kids have been forcefully made to drink bizarre concoctions. There are other sects involved in these unwholesome practices in Congo, chief amongst which is the Combat Spirituel Church with its headquarters in Kinshasa and numerous branches all over the country and outside, United Kingdom inclusive [NOTE: this same church does have a US branch in North Carolina] ...

...the current situation in Akwa Ibom State and other parts of the Niger Delta remains a shame. For as long as it is allowed to continue, it remains a stigma on Nigeria. For as long as it flourishes without restraint, for so long will it remain a blur on the conscience of the Christian Association of Nigeria and all those who at daggers drawn in defence of the impeccability of modern-day Pentecostalism. For as long as this unchecked instances of child abuse reign in Nigeria, for so long will men and women of good will and clear conscience the world over, continue to confront the problems created by a nation that has allowed its territory to become a nightmare for innocent children...

...The United Kingdom abounds with Nigerian-oriented churches practising the Nigerian version of Pentecostalism with its prejudices and notable flaws. This is said with reference to the unwholesome impact of non-Nigerian sects like that of Pastor Gilbert Deya and so many others from the African continent. In essence, Britain remains like a microcosm of Africa with our blemishes and impurities fully represented. The practice of kindoki is strongly rooted in the Congolese communities in the United Kingdom. Cases abound where parents have attributed ill luck in the UK to kindoki in their children. Often times, such children have been returned to the Congo for exorcism, some not to be seen again...

Governments of the world need to come together in action and in deeds to tackle the menace posed by the phenomenon of kindoki or child witches. Africa as a continent can only become further impoverished by the sustenance of this retrogressive practice. In this age and time, what Africa needs is not the concept of child witches but technological advancement, economic, social and political emancipation. Africa needs enlightenment and not the concept of child witches...

Here in the US, of course, we've already seen one political candidate who almost certainly buys into kindoki and stood on stage with an African religious figure, Thomas Muthee, to get his protection against it:


The ignorance isn't confined to economically and socially struggling African countries; we've got our own child exorcisms in the United States. There's more than enough superstitious, ignorant nonsense to go around and we've certainly got our share here in the states.

...Maxwell, pastor of The Theatre Church, The Sword of the Spirit Christian Church Ministries, a Bible-based ministry, performs what is known in charismatic Christianity as deliverance ministry, in which people are not possessed, but feel they are oppressed, controlled or influenced by evil spirits or forces...

...In more than 40 years of ministry, Maxwell said he has cast evil spirits out of more than 250 people, and many more still seek his help...

Deliverance and exorcisms have seemingly increased during the past 30 years due to the growth of cults, satanic masses and the worship of and interest in witchcraft, said the Rev. John Wassell, a priest for the Archdiocese of Newark. "The lessening of Christian culture and the interest in other spiritual cultures have increased these problems," Wassell said. In the Catholic Church, deliverance ministries are also offered. "The church does everything to rule out possible psychological problems," the priest noted...

— Source: Dealing with Demons, The Montclair (New Jersey) Times, Nov. 13, 2008

Kindoki is kindoki is kindoki, and whether we call the reaction to it exorcism or deliverance ministry makes no difference. That there still exist institutions that teach true-believers that evil spirits are real, that they somehow take control of and manipulate real people, and that only supernatural means can combat them is the point. It's tempting to look at what's happening in Africa and say to ourselves something about those backwards people way over on the other side of the world, but what then do we say about people like Sarah Palin and Elbert Maxwell and John Wassell, not to mention the millions upon millions of Americans who believe in this stuff?

We should make no room in this world for this fear. All people are entitled to live their lives with a degree of knowledge sufficient to understand that there are no evil spirits and, for that matter, no spirits at all except in the metaphorical sense. All the evil in the world is done by human beings to human beings at their own discretion, not because some devil is whispering into their ears or guiding their hands. Until we arrive at that point, there will always be periods of history in which the belief in superstition eclipses reason to the extent that what amounts to torture, slavery and murder seem justified as means of combating the forces of darkness and so become the real forces of darkness, all-too-real evils that afflict nations from India to the UK to Nigeria to America.

Every time a purveyor of satanic hocus-pocus takes a stage, any stage at all, he or she should be shouted down in derision. We have got to cast off these fictions, whether they are espoused by a candidate for political office, a Catholic church official or an African Pentecostal child abuser. These beliefs are due no respect. They're poison and should be treated like toxic waste left over from a dark age — because that's all they are.

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Wooful Witch Employment Available in Sweden

A Swedish purveyor of online and telephone witchy-woo has opportunities available for 20 witches/psychics/professional storytellers!

Häxriket i Norden, based in Åhus in southern Sweden, is currently seeking to place five witches each in four separate locations around the country, the Skånska Dagbladet newspaper reports.

According to the company's advertisement on a listing maintained by Sweden's Public Employment Agency (Arbetsförmedlingen), qualified candidates should be well-versed in "contact with the other side, runes, tarots, crystals, herbs, rituals, exorcism, meditation, personal coaching, and more".

— Source

Those are some high experience standards to meet! Runes, tarot and crystals, along with exorcism? Considering that an average human being weighs around 150 pounds, that seems like an awful lot of credulous nonsense to cram into such a small space.

But wait, there's more:

The job also requires having a fixed telephone line and an internet connection, as most of Häxriket's services are delivered online or over the phone at a cost of 19.90 kronor ($2.45) per minute.

Exorcism over the Internet! "The power of spam compels you! The power of spam compels you!" How many emails for penis-enlarging pills and fake Rolex watches can one demon take?

Sadly, the opportunities have been created by the firing of the last bunch of woo-peddlers. Their employer got rid of them because they got caught defrauding clients:

The sudden wave of new hires comes following an internal shake up at the company in which a number of Häxriket's former witches were let go for violating the telemarketing ethics code put in place by the Etiska Rådet för Betalteletjänster ('Trade Ethical Council for Telemarketing') – ERB...

"We've really cleaned house," said Qinna Blomgren, who refers to herself as the "top witch" and is partial owner of Häxriket, to the newspaper.

See, you have to be an honest liar to work as a phone witch, and if you get caught lying dishonestly, a "top witch" will turn you into an unemployed psychic. Poof.

Blomgren is quick to dismiss critics who question the legitimacy of Häxriket's operations.

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. If I like cinnamon buns with cardamom, it doesn't mean that I can claim it's the only correct path," she said.

Well, there's an intelligent analogy, no?

Yes, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I'm entitled to the opinion that there's nothing wrong with picking people's pockets, but it's still both dishonest and illegal. Using a telephone or the internet in conjunction with ignorance and superstition to pick people's pockets is still picking people's pockets, whether or not the "top witch" agrees that picking pockets should be a crime. Fraud is fraud, and fraud works best when both the one committing it and the one against whom it is committed buy into the scam. Any good con-man can tell you that. In fact, "top witch" Blomgren just did!

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Texas Exorcism Case May Go to Supreme Court

Following up the case of Laura Schubert, the former Texas woman who was subjected to an involuntary exorcism by a fundamentalist church, the Fort Worth Star Telegram reports that the Schubert family is going to attempt a hearing before the Supreme Court:

Family resolves to take fight over exorcism to Supreme Court

By MAX B. BAKER

...The 1996 episode left her physically and emotionally scarred, and "this stuff is still hard to talk about," Pearson told the Star-Telegram after the Texas Supreme Court dismissed her lawsuit against the church June 27. The majority said the courts can't get involved in a religious debate over church doctrine...

After the exorcism, she dropped out of high school her senior year, began to cut herself as many as 100 times over several years, and refused to leave the house. Pearson slit her wrists with a box cutter.

Her father, a former missionary and minister, became an agnostic.

But Pearson and her parents, Tom and Judy Schubert, say they are willing to go to the U.S. Supreme Court in their fight against a church they once loved.

As the parents see it, Pleasant Glade members abused their daughter in the same way a husband or a boyfriend abuses a wife or a girlfriend — and all under the guise of serving the Lord...

Too bad her father wasn't agnostic before a bunch of superstitious yahoos forcibly attempted to drive boogeymen out of his daughter's body. Lawsuit or not, this kind of lunacy never has to happen to anyone. Laura Schubert's own recounting of how events unfolded goes into more detail about just how superstitious and how irrational the members of this church became than did the article linked here last month:

...Pearson and her brother, Joseph, had been left with their older sister, Amy, while their parents went on a fundraising trip in Indiana. She was going to hang out with the church youth group and work at her part-time job. On June 7, a Friday, Pearson went to the church to help the youth group prepare for a garage sale. At about midnight, one of the teens rushed in saying he had seen a demon in the darkened sanctuary.

Rod Linzay, the youth pastor, urged everyone to anoint the sanctuary with holy oil. They rapped on pews. They prayed. They propped a cross against the doors to keep demons out or drive them out. They were up until early morning.

"I had been around [the church] all of my life, but I had not experienced anything of this sort.  . . .  After being up all of those hours and involved in all of that, it was easy to believe what was going on was real," she said.

Exhausted, Pearson went home and then to work but was unable to sleep that night. By the time she returned to the church on Sunday evening, she had been up for 72 hours.

It was then that people believed demons had possessed her and the first exorcism was performed. Pearson said she collapsed on the floor out of exhaustion. During the trial, doctors suggested she was hypoglycemic. She clenched her fists, gritted her teeth, made guttural sounds, cried and yelled.

"I was moving my head back and forth, and I hear people saying things are wrong with me and the youth pastor's wife saying it was the demons," Pearson said. They held her down, but after the thrashing stopped, Pearson was allowed to get up after saying the name Jesus.

On Wednesday, Pearson returned to the church. After hearing a sermon about "putting on the whole armor of God to fight off the devil," Pearson said she went off to a corner, curled into a fetal position and prayed.

When another youth asked to pray for her, Pearson refused. Eventually, she was held spread-eagle on the floor. She fought those holding her and asked to be let go. They said "it was the devil talking," Pearson said.

McCutchen then entered the room. He tried to calm Pearson and told her to "just say the word Jesus." Eventually, he called Pearson's parents, who came and took their "dazed" daughter home. Later they saw the bruises and carpet burns. Soon she began having nightmares about hands and faces coming out of her bedroom walls to grab her...

I don't fully understand why she went back to the church, although the fact that her parents had initially left her in that organization's care and that she had been brought up to believe in this stuff to begin with might have a good deal to do with it.

The idea that some teenager's panicked assertion that he'd seen a demon in the place could touch off this kind of sorcerous nonsense — splashing magical oil about and rapping on wooden benches to drive away evil spirits — indicates to me a level of sheer foolishness and ignorance that I wish I couldn't believe was still with us in 21^st century America. These people shouldn't be role models held up for praise of their values, they should be laughed at as backwards relics of a time when fear born of the shadows from mankind's childhood hadn't yet given way to the daylight of reason. That this moldering mind-junk, this kind of superstition-fueled melodrama, is repeated every day all over the country, that it's broadcast on television (ever seen Rod Parsley? I watched some of that last week), should be seen as a disgrace to a nation that once led the world in scientific progress — and now is losing that edge. Could there be a connection between this latest superstitious revival and America beginning to lose its edge in scientific and technical leadership? Ya think?

At least one person has learned the correct lesson from what happened to Laura Schubert, though:

[Laura's father, Tom] Schubert has lost his faith, while his wife and daughter continue to believe.

"I do not hold the religious views I once held," Schubert said. "I don't know what is out there. I don't think what is out there is what I thought was there in the past.  . . .  I don't believe in demons and such.  . . .  I doubt that God exists."

Good morning and welcome to rationality, Tom Schubert. I hope the rest of your family — and the rest of mankind — catch up with you very, very soon.

There is simply no justification at all for there to be exorcisms. There are no evil spirits to be cast out, no boogeymen hiding under our beds, no monsters in the closets (unless you count Fred Phelps), no ghosts, no vampires, no djinni, no mermaids. If an adult were to tell us of his fervent belief in unicorns, we would think him strange. For some reason, though, there are still people who are commended for their belief in maleficent spooks that can leap in and out of bodies and can be removed by old men chanting in dead or invented tongues while sprinkling water imbued with magical essences about the room. There are people who believe more that they can keep said spirits out of a room by propping a crucifix against a door more than they believe the word of a woman who tells them to leave her alone, that she's not under the command of some infernal, goat-headed hobgoblin dreamed up by some agrarian imbiber of suspect grain products a millennium prior. This is not how adults comport themselves. Even most children know better.

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Pope's New Exorcize Program: American Franchise

As if on cue, a story has appeared on the WPTV (West Palm Beach, Florida) website about an exorcist working in Florida. His name is Tom Euteneuer, he's a priest, and apparently he's having a five-year episode of "brief psychotic disorder" that has led him to a strong belief in the literal reality of demons.

Interview with an Exorcist
Reported by: Eric Glasser

...Father Tom Euteneuer says he has faced the devil. That he is real. And that he is among us.

"The manifestation of demons can be very frightening, but you never have to be afraid of the devil because we always have the power of Christ to deal with him."

Father Tom, a member of the Palm Beach Diocese, a man raised in Boca Raton and priest who still calls South Florida home, says he has been performing exorcisms for the past five years...

Why, then, was Sergio Aguiar's belief in demons a possible symptom of a mental disorder when we have here someone attaining a degree of celebrity for believing exactly the same thing? Why is it a delusion when a supermarket clerk believes it but a matter of spirituality when it's sanctioned by a church? If the devil and demons and exorcisms are real, then there is no way to preclude the possibility that Aguiar was correct in thinking that his child was possessed even if one disagrees with how he acted upon that knowledge. The only argument against this would be one from authority; the pope and/or Euteneuer are qualified to believe in demonic possession because of their office, Aguiar wasn't. That's pure fallacy, but as there's no empirical evidence for the existence of demons (how tall are they? How much do they weigh?), there's no other basis upon which one can argue this point.

...Pope Benedict XVI has announced his intention to drastically expand the use of exorcism in a way the world has not seen in centuries.

"The Pope isn't inventing anything new," says Father Tom. "And he's not actually bringing anything out and dusting it off. It's always been there. Maybe less practiced than it could be - or should be - but right now he sees that there's a greater need for it..."

Translation: there may be witches hiding under your bed! Welcome back to the 13^th century, kids. Lots of things have "always been there" that are wrong, even terrible. Human sacrifice is certainly a time-honored tradition, so much so that the Vatican promulgates an abstracted form of it as core doctrine. The Aryan Heresy, which maintained that Christ was purely divine was suppressed by the early church precisely because doctrine requires the sacrifice of a human being. Transubstantiation is a continuation of this principle; that blood and flesh is from a human being, too. For sane people living in the modern world, though, human sacrifice is an abhorrent thought. The appeal to tradition is also fallacious. Just because it's old doesn't mean that it's right. Exorcism isn't right because it's old; it's wrong because it comes from a rejection of what's known about the world and the substitution of a superstition that asserts the reality of malicious spiritual beings.

Pope Benedict's plan to expand the ancient ritual also has its critics who worry that many people suffering with mental illnesses may be mis-diagnosed. To that end, a spokesman at the vatican's university says a ten-week course would be offered for priests who want to learn how to conduct exorcisms.

The classes would include sessions on rites, how to talk to the devil, and how, they say, to recognize the 'tricks' he uses.

Students would also attend psychology classes to help them distinguish between what the church calls genuine cases of possession and psychiatric disorders such as Tourrettes Syndrome, Bipolarism and schizophrenia.

Wow, a ten-week course that includes a few classes on psychology! How modern and scientific and advanced. Priests must be the smartest people in the world; they can learn enough about psychology in a ten-week course that includes psychology classes to make the decision to reject mental illness as a cause for erratic behavior and subject someone to magical ritual instead of medical treatment. Some people have to spend years in concentrated effort to be considered qualified to diagnose mental illness, but not these black-cassocked geniuses. Ten weeks is all it takes!

We normal folk can't even get a certification to repair air conditioning systems in office buildings in ten weeks. Priests can be qualified to drive the Prince of Darkness out of people's heads in that amount of time. So much for the value of human life.

The man in charge of the Papal Exorcize Program, Gabriele Amorth, claims to have performed 70,000 exorcisms. Jeremy Davies, the leading exorcist in the UK, claims to have performed thousands more in the London area alone. If we extrapolate such figures over the past 100 years, we're left with the stark contention that many millions of people have been possessed in Europe alone. The claim, then, would be that some huge number of people were diagnosed as having something other than a mental disorder and passed on to an exorcist to drive out the demons. I'm not familiar with literature in the field of psychology, so somebody please point out a few published papers or case studies by psychologists in which the conclusion reached is that a patient had been taken over by immaterial entities from hell. Surely such things must exist in peer-reviewed literature with all these millions of cases that Amorth and Davies and Enteneuer have been called in upon.

"Actually, we're in a better position than in all of history to discern and determine what is spiritual and what's not spiritual," says Father Tom.

Based on what, exactly? What empirical evidence exists that demons exist, that they can hop into someone's body and take over their nervous systems? Enteneuer's statement implies that something other than spectral evidence exists for any of this. Even if we take for granted that demons exist, for them to be able to take over someone's behavior necessitates that they change that person's neurology somehow. We could certainly measure such changes. For that matter, if a demon is hanging around in someone's body then that person should weigh more before an exorcism than they do afterward. It should be no great difficulty to determine the average weight of a demon and to quantify the neurochemistry of possession. Has anyone seen the literature published on these studies, or is ol' Father Tom simply blowing smoke into dark places here?

Pope Benedict XVI, say those closest to him, believes believes the devil's influence has grown in recent years through rock music, children's literature, even the internet...

It's a good thing that Papa Benny hasn't found out yet about pistachio ice cream or I'd be out of business! Instead of reason, what do we get from Der Pope? "OH NOES! Kurt Kobain putted hiz demons in teh intertubes!" If this statement had been delivered by a disheveled woman with a dozen cats in her apartment, we'd be suggesting a course of anti-psychotic drug treatment. The fact that men in dresses and funny hats say it is enough for a scarily large number of people to believe in it, too. We're right bak to "rock 'n roll is the devil's music" again.

"When a society doesn't believe in demons, it therefore doesn't believe in exorcism. So, it's really only people of faith who will understand this for what it is..."

No, people of faith believe in it without understanding it. That's why it requires faith. Understanding is knowledge, not faith. In fact, it is only people of knowledge who understand exorcism for what it is — a relic of a time before the dawn of reason and natural explanations for natural phenomena. People of faith are simply the ones most likely to swallow uncritically the assertions of a spiritualist who scares them with tales of the boogeyman.

Institutional crazy is still crazy, and bullshit is still bullshit when it's delivered by a man in uniform.

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Sergio Aguiar: Exorcist Baby-Crusher Wasn't on Drugs

The toxicology report on Sergio Aguiar, the California man who turned his two-year old son into pulp on a road near Turlock while telling witnesses that the child had demons in him, has been released. No drugs were found in his system. This confirms the prior observation made by investigators that no drugs were found on his person nor in his home or truck.

Dad who killed toddler wasn't on drugs, report says
Toxicology tests negative; behavior still unexplained
By ROSALIO AHUMADA

Toxicology tests came back negative Thursday for the Turlock man who beat his young son to death last month, adding to the mystery of why a father would commit such a heinous act.

Sergio Casian Aguiar, 27, had no drugs or alcohol in his system that might help explain his behavior, said Kristi Ah You, Stanislaus County chief coroner...

Investigators and co-workers said Aguiar had no criminal history or signs of mental illness, though witnesses on the night of the attack said Aguiar spoke of "demons" within his son...

Phil Trompetter is a psychologist who spent 30 years working with law enforcement agencies in Stanislaus County, providing police and forensic psychology...

Trompetter spoke Thursday about the case, but emphasized his hypothesis on Aguiar's actions was based on media reports.

"I don't want to sound like I'm diagnosing this guy," he said. "But it sounds like brief psychotic disorder ... a delusional belief that his son was possessed by demons..."

Trompetter, however, could not recall a case of the disorder resulting in someone committing "such a heinous act of violence."

Brief psychotic disorder? Maybe. How about a long-term psychotic disorder — belief in demons in the first place. As Trompetter notes, people afflicted with brief psychotic disorder lose touch with reality by definition, but this doesn't normally result in violent acts. It typically results in delusions. Adam Weir-Perry spent decades working with people who suffered from the disorder and wrote about it in his Roots of Renewal in Myth and Madness. When religious delusions manifested as a result of these psychotic breaks, the victims typically believe themselves to be a figure of religious importance, but they don't kill others based upon that.

Aguiar may well have suffered a break, but it was as underlying belief in the reality of demons that led to the brutal murder of his son. He might have lost his self-control, but this is what he stopped controlling. Belief in demons isn't the result of a brief psychotic episode; it's a part of established belief in many religions. It's a long-term psychotic delusion endorsed by the officials and leaders of those religions. Sometimes it's the basis of a religious career. It is disingenuous in the extreme to state that a belief in demons is so unusual that it must be the product of the sudden onset of a mental illness that previously showed no signs of having existed. Just ask the Texas Supreme Court; exorcisms are increasingly common, so much so that special laws protecting them have to be enacted and reviewed.

This story has been quietly slipping from attention. It shouldn't. This is an extreme case in terms of the result but not in terms of the underlying beliefs. As long as people keep concocting and believing in spirits that avoid confronting man's sole responsibility for the evils that exist in the world, we'll see horrors like that of Sergio Aguiar. It's not that rare. There are cases of death-by-exorcism reported every year in the United States and almost certainly at least as many in which the role of supernatural belief goes without notice.

Belief in demons is no different from children blaming the messes in their rooms on their invisible friends. It's time for humanity to grow up and discard this nonsense. We should hope for a day when nobody knows what words like "demon" and "angel" mean anymore.

There's no real mystery as to why Sergio Aguiar murdered his son. He gave his reason. He had to get the demons out. What's so mysterious about that? Priests say the same thing every day and nobody wonders about why they believe in such things and why they act upon those beliefs.

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Witch Trials and Exorcism Get Green Light from Texas Supreme Court

In 2002, the family of Laura Schubert sued the Pleasant Glade Assembly of God Church for an incident that occurred in 1996. The church's staff had decided based upon the accusation of one of its younger members that Schubert was possessed by a demon that he'd seen. They forcibly held her down and performed an exorcism on her against her will. She was injured both physically and emotionally and her family won the suit. The church appealed to the Texas Supreme Court.

Yesterday, the court reversed Schubert's award in a 6-3 decision, ruling that church's can't be sued for performing exorcisms — even when they do so without the consent of the person being exorcized. Even if that person is injured. Churches can now perform these archaic, bizarre rituals without any concern for the well-being of their victims, because the state's Supreme Court has effectively ruled that a church's freedom of religion trumps an individuals protection against false imprisonment. According to this ruling, a church could feasibly hold a person against their will for as long as it deemed necessary, physically restrain them in any way they thought appropriate, withhold food and water, and do whatever they believed necessary to drive imaginary boogeymen from real flesh-and-blood.

Texas Supreme Court rules church can't be sued in exorcism
By MAX B. BAKER (maxbaker@star-telegram.com)

A divided Texas Supreme Court ruled in favor of a former Colleyville church Friday, saying church members who were involved in a traumatic exorcism that ultimately injured a young woman are protected by the First Amendment.

In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that the Pleasant Glade Assembly of God staff's efforts to cast out demons from Laura Schubert presents an ecclesiastical dispute over religious conduct that would unconstitutionally entangle the court in church doctrine.

Schubert described a wild night in 1996 that involved casting out demons from the church and two attempts to exorcise demons from her. The incident left Schubert physically bruised and so emotionally scarred she later tried to commit suicide. She was 17 at the time.

Justice David Medina, writing for the majority, said that while Schubert's argument regarding physical injuries might be tried without mentioning religion, her case was mostly about her emotional or psychological injuries from a religious activity that was sanctioned by the church.

For the court to impose any legal liability for engaging in a religious activity "to which the church members adhere would have an unconstitutional 'chilling effect' by compelling the church to abandon core principles of its religious beliefs," Medina wrote.

"Religious practices that might offend the rights or sensibilities of a non-believer outside the church are entitled to greater latitude when applied to an adherent within the church," Medina wrote.

He went on to say that when claims involve "only intangible, emotional damages allegedly caused by sincerely held religious belief, courts must carefully scrutinize the circumstances so as not to become entangled in a religious dispute."

Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson, in a stinging dissenting opinion, wrote that the majority opinion is at times "imprecise and overbroad" and imposes an "erroneous standard" that would allow a church to simply claim a "religious motive" to avoid being sued.

He wrote that this "sweeping immunity" is inconsistent with U.S. Supreme Court precedent and that the First Amendment "guards religious liberty; it does not sanction intentional abuse in religion's name."

"This overly broad holding not only conflicts with well-settled legal and constitutional principles, it will also prove to be dangerous in practice," Jefferson wrote.

"Texas courts have been and will continue to be confronted with cases in which a congregant suffers physical or psychological injury as a result of violent or unlawful, but religiously sanctioned, acts," he wrote...

Schubert's account of what happened over several days at the Pleasant Glade church in June 1996 is harrowing.

Schubert and her brother were involved with church activities while their parents were out of town.

On Friday evening, during preparations for a youth group garage sale, the atmosphere became "spiritually charged" when another youth said he saw a demon.

Under direction of the youth minister, the youth frantically anointed everything in the church with holy oil until, at 4:30 a.m. Saturday, the minister told the exhausted youth that they had finally been successful.

At the Sunday evening worship services, Schubert collapsed. Church members "laid hands" on her and forcibly held her arms crossed over her chest, despite her demands to be set free.

She reportedly cried, yelled, kicked, sweated and hallucinated while also making guttural noises.

She was released after she calmed down and replied with requests to say the name Jesus.

The following Wednesday, during a weekly youth service, Schubert reportedly began to act in the same manner. She curled into a fetal position and asked to be left alone. Church members thought she was in distress and held her down in a "spread eagle" position with youth members holding down her arms and legs.

During the incident, she suffered carpet burns, a scrape on her back and bruises on her wrists.

Her father, Tom Schubert, himself an Assembly of God pastor and missionary, questioned what happened at the church.

His daughter experienced angry outbursts, weight loss and self-mutilation and eventually dropped out of high school her senior year. She was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder...

A jury found the church and its members liable and awarded Schubert $300,000 for mental anguish, but the 2nd Court of Appeals in Fort Worth cut $122,000 from the verdict for loss of future income.

In the church's appeal to the state Supreme Court, it raised the question of whether the Fort Worth appeals court erred when it said Pleasant Glades' First Amendment rights regarding freedom of religion do not prevent the church from being held liable for mental distress triggered by a "hyper spiritualistic environment."

Justice Medina said that the court does not mean to imply that "under the cloak of religion, persons may, with impunity," commit intentional wrong, such as sexual assault or a minister having an affair with someone in marriage counseling, and get away with it.

"Freedom to believe may be absolute, but freedom of conduct is not, and 'conduct even under a religious guise remains subject to regulation for public safety,' " Medina wrote.

Pruessner, the church's attorney, agreed, saying that church members were simply trying to help Schubert and that there wasn't any evil intent.

"This was clearly a religious controversy, and I don't see how anyone can argue that they were seizing on religion as a get-out-of-jail-free card," Pruessner said. "I disagree vehemently with the spiritual beliefs of the church and how they handled it; it doesn't mean they are legally liable..."

Somebody needs to screen Justice David Medina for possible use of crack, because it's more than a little opaque as to how he thinks that churches are still regulated for public safety if someone can be held against their will and physically abused as was Schubert. AT what point does the supposed regulation kick in? A 17 year old was held against her will, restrained and injured; apparently that's not enough in Texas. Would it have been enough if Laura Schubert's bones had been broken? If she'd been pressed beneath stones? If she'd been hung by the neck until dead? What happened to Schubert is alarmingly reminiscent of the Salem Witch Trials of the late 17^th century.

Look where Goodwife Cloyce sits on the beam suckling her yellow bird between her fingers!

— Ann Putnam, 1692

The First Amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In Texas, that now means that as long as some bunch of demon-haunted yahoos claims religious motivations for their actions, they can get away with anything they deem appropriate as a response to one of their own pointing a finger at someone and shouting "Witch!" I suppose that the Texan Supreme Court will next be taking up the thorny legal issue of whether angry mobs have the right to bear torches and pitchforks.

Perhaps if Sergio Aguiar had driven to Coleyville, Texas instead of Turlock, California before smashing his son to a pulp against the asphalt he'd be alive and free today. Anything to get those pesky demons out.

What is happening here, people?

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Prominent British Witch-Doctor Warns of Pandemic Possessions

Watch out, folks! Your yoga instructor is an agent of Satan. The gateway to Hell opens through the pages of your local newspaper. You may think you're having a nice back rub, but in reality that masseuse is injecting tiny demons under your skin. Won't somebody think of the children?

Yoga and horoscopes can lead to possession by Devil, claims Cardinal's exorcist
By Jonathan Petre

...Father Jeremy Davies, exorcist for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of Catholics in England and Wales, says that activities such as yoga, massage therapy,
reiki or even reading horoscopes could put people at risk from evil spirits.

In a new book, he also argues that people with promiscuous lifestyles could find themselves afflicted by demons.

And he says that the occult is closely linked to the scourges of 'drugs, demonic music and pornography' which are 'destroying millions of young people in our time'.

The 73-year-old Catholic priest, who was appointed exorcist of the Archdiocese of Westminster in 1986, was a medical doctor before being ordained in 1974.

He has carried out thousands of exorcisms in London and in 1993 he set up the International Association of Exorcists with Fr Gabriel Amorth, the Pope's top exorcist.

In Exorcism: Understanding Exorcism In Scripture And Practice, which is published by the Catholic Truth Society, Fr Davies compares militant atheists to rational Satanists, and blames them for a rise in demonic activity...

I have to admit that I write this blog because I'm on Beelzebub's payroll. Every electron streaming onto your monitor as you read this article has a very small imp riding upon it at the speed of light. They jump from the screen to your eyes and ride your optic nerves straight into your brain and wham! that's another 50¢ commission check from Tarterus in my bank account.

As long as we're on the subject, I feel that I, as a master of the Black Arts, should reveal to you a few ways that Father Davies probably doesn't know of by which you can be possessed. You've already traded in your soul by reading this blog and it's only fair that you get some value out of it.

• If you listen to Judas Priest's 1979 album Hell Bent for Leather (Buy it at Amazon), you instantly become Beelzebub's plaything.
  
• If you walk backwards under a ladder while swinging a black cat around your head on a Thursday, you will become possessed by Phalgrenazoth, the demon who makes people point and laugh at his victims.
  
• Ever noticed that pistachio ice cream doesn't taste much like pistachios? That's because there aren't any in the stuff. It's green because of the slime oozing from the skin of the demons it contains. You know those softish chunks in pistachio ice cream? Those are the demons. One lick of that unnaturally green ice cream cone and Lucifer has reeled you in by the short-and-curlies.
  
• Tivo is the tool of the devil. It's OK to record on it, but if you don't want to get possessed then you must never, ever watch anything you've recorded. That little clicky-beepy sound it makes, when recorded and slowed down to 1/8th speed, is revealed to be a snippet of the Lord's Prayer in Latin being recited backwards. Of course, anyone who has ever tried doing this has listened to something recorded on Tivo and so has become possessed and will never tell you. I'm an insider and I know. That's why I don't own a Tivo. I'm only in the soul racket for the money.

There you go, dear victims readers; four ways to get possessed that nobody else is ever going to reveal to you. Of course now that you've read this, you're already possessed, so really, who gives a flying Mongolian cluster-hump anymore, right?

Time to go play some Priest for grandma, boils and ghouls. Rock on!

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Deer in the Headlights: Sergio Aguiar Probably Not on Drugs, Had no History of Mental Illness

An article appears in today's San Francisco Chronicle that focuses on the reaction of witnesses to the beating death of the "demon-possessed" son of Sergio Aguiar. A couple of law enforcement people and others talk about the inability of witnesses to the crime to intervene due to their being in a kind of shock. It's a good point; I've noticed a lot of internet people faulting witnesses for not doing more than calling authorities and these same people are particularly fond of bragging about what heroes they would have been in the same situation.

More interesting to me, though, is that authorities themselves appear to be having some trouble with Aguiar's motive in this atrocity. The perpetrator stated his reason for beating his son to death; the boy had demons in him. So far, there has been no evidence that Aguiar was on drugs. While toxicology test results are still two weeks away at least, the article states that no evidence of drug use was found either at Aguiar's home or in his truck. People who knew Aguiar and had interacted with him right up until the time of the murder didn't see any changes to his personality and, again, he hadn't ever been treated for mental illness nor been arrested before.

Inaction in boy's killing called justified
Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff Writer

...Sheriff's investigators are still trying to determine why Aguiar, a grocery store worker who recently split up from his schoolteacher wife, killed his son so savagely. The boy's name still has not been released.

Investigators have learned that Aguiar left his home near downtown Turlock before the beating, but they don't know why he drove about 10 miles into an area of cornfields and dairy ranches, Singh said. He said investigators had found no evidence of drug use at Aguiar's house or in his pickup, though results of toxicology tests have not yet come back.

Aguiar's wife, who was in Southern California at the time of the slaying, and others have told investigators that Aguiar "wasn't acting differently than how he normally acts," Singh said. Aguiar's family members, who live in Mexico, were traveling to Stanislaus County to talk to deputies, Singh said.

"As of right now," Singh said, "nobody's saying he was having problems at all. It's baffling. It sounds like there was nothing anyone could have done."

I would consider belief in demonic possession itself a form of mental disorder, but since mental illness is to a large degree a product of cultural definition and the culture in which Aguiar committed his horrific act of brutality is currently in the throes of the Disenlightenment, there are a lot of people — perhaps a large majority — that would disagree with me on that point. Surely cling2Christ, a commenter on the Modesto Bee website whom I cited previously, would disagree. Here's another True Believer, this time from that bastion of spittle-spewing madness known as Free Republic, who also disagrees:

After being in the ministry for over 10 years and leading hundreds of deliverances, I can tell you for an absolute fact that demonic oppression and possession is unfortunately very real. Demons are nothing to be afraid of if you are a born again Christian (1 John 4:4, Luke 10:19), but are very scary to those who haven't asked Jesus Christ to live in their hearts as Savior and Lord. They are simply fallen angels who serve Satan and do all they can to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10) from God's highest creation - mankind.

There are many instances of the Lord Jesus casting demons out of people. One example is found in Luke 13:10-17. In this passage a woman was afflicted for 18 years by a demon of infirmity sent from Satan. You can't get much plainer language than what. Jesus prayed for her and the woman was instantly healed.

May the Lord bless you and keep you!

— Lions Gate, June 16, 2008

So maybe Aguiar was right; clearly his two-year old son hadn't been "born again" and couldn't have "accepted Jesus in his heart." The religious right and affiliated sorts often like to protest that, for example, public education is a form of indoctrination and that there shouldn't be laws about corporal punishment of children because parents know what's best for their offspring. How would anyone who believes in possession and these other things as well even begin to go about making an argument that Aguiar's child wasn't possessed by demons and that Aguiar, as his father, could tell? Many of these same people are making the assertion, after all, that Sergio Aguiar was possessed. The only justification that seems to be used for doing so is a revulsion over the crime itself.

Luckily for the rational segment of American society, the assignment of guilt for a crime is assigned based upon evidence and not upon beliefs. Still, I shudder to think of what would happen to our legal system were those who believe in demonic possession ever to have their way with it. Sometimes it seems to me that we may find out one of these days.

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Exorcism Death in Turlock: Identity of Killer and Child Victim Released

More details have come out about the beating death of the toddler in Turlock. The perpetrator was the victim's father, Sergio Aguilar. The victim was his two year old son, and it appears certain now that the motive was exorcism. I am surprised to hear that Aguilar had no previous criminal record and no mention is made of prior treatment for a mental disorder in the latest update. This one comes from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Father in stomping death said he had to 'get the demons out' of boy
Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff Writer

(06-16) 14:47 PDT TURLOCK (STANISLAUS COUNTY) -- A man who police say punched and kicked his 2-year-old son to death on a country road outside Turlock calmly told motorists who stopped at the scene that he had to "get the demons out" of the child, a witness said today.

The man, a 27-year-old Turlock resident, told people who tried to stop him that the boy was "trash," said Lisa Mota, 23...

What prompted Aguilar to carry out the attack is still not known. Authorities do not know whether he was drunk or on drugs, and toxicology reports on him and his son will not be available for three to four weeks, said sheriff's spokesman Deputy Royjindar Singh.

Aguilar had no criminal history, Singh said. "From what we can tell, he's never been arrested," Singh said...

"He wasn't acting like a crazy person, running around or screaming," Mota said. "He said, 'I've just got to get the demons out of him.' He was very calm.' "

The boy was beaten beyond recognition. His name has not yet been released. DNA tests will be conducted on him, Aguilar and the boy's mother to confirm their relationship, Singh said.

The mother was out of town Saturday night when Aguilar killed his son, Singh said...

I wish I could say that this sort of thing is unheard of, but it isn't. Some readers may recall that a similar incident occurred in Phoenix, AZ last July, for instance. In that case, a grandfather strangled his granddaughter while her mother helped out. A year ago almost to the day, a woman in New Port Richey, FL stabbed her two year old son to death in an attempt to get the demons out of him, too.

These are only the incidents that I've personally run across in the year-and-two-weeks that I've been keeping this blog. The sad fact is that the killing and near-killing of children by exorcism happens with alarming frequency. It's equally alarming, at least to me, that people believe in demonic possession in the first place. Those who believe in such things are, I think, suffering under a form of delusional disorder and pose a danger to those over whom they have some degree of control.

It is my greatest hope that someday this bizarre and pernicious belief in possession will wind up on the trash heap of history where it should have landed at least 300 years ago. It is a belief that helps no one, harms everyone involved with it, and leads to tragedy time and time again.

There aren't any demons other than the ones certain backwards and ignorant segments of society convince themselves exist. They're voices in people's heads. Demons are a mental illness, not some independent metaphysical force. The evil in the world is the product of humans, not that of some infernal factory floor. It's far past time that civilized, enlightened, educated society stopped making room for this nauseating mythology. It deserves no respect and those who believe in it need treatment, not our assent — silent or otherwise.

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Man Beats Infant to Death: "Demons Were in the Boy"

A horrific story is developing out of a rural section of California. A man in Turlock, in rural Stanislaus County, pulled his truck to the side of the road, took an infant from the passenger seat, and proceeded to beat and stomp the child to death even as onlookers attempted to intervene. In the end, police officers shot the man to death, but not before he beat the toddler literally to a pulp. Officials will attempt to identify the child based on DNA and are not releasing the name of the man and his relationship to the child.

The story is made just a little bit more awful (as if anything could) by a statement made by the man to the effect that he thought the child was possessed.

Officer kills man who beat toddler to death
Witnesses couldn't stop roadside attack
Dana Hull and Kelli Phillips, Bay Area News Group

As eyewitnesses watched in horror, a 27-year-old Turlock man punched and stomped a toddler to death on a darkened country road Saturday night in Stanislaus County before a police officer shot and killed the attacker.

Eyewitnesses tried to stop the man, who swung and slammed the child into the asphalt behind his parked four-door Toyota pickup.

Investigators spent Father's Day trying to understand and cope with the savage attack on Bradbury Road, 10 miles west of Turlock near cow pastures and dairy farms...

Robinson jumped from his vehicle and confronted the man, who lunged at him. Robinson said the man wasn't screaming and wasn't loud, but was forceful, saying "demons" were in the boy.

"Give me the knife. Give me the knife," the man said as he grabbed for a pen in the fireman's front pocket.

"There was a total hollowness in his eyes," Robinson said, "like I could see right through to the back of his head..."

The man ripped the child out of a car seat in the back of a pickup truck, threw him to the ground and kicked and stomped him against the pavement, witnesses told deputies. At least three people yelled at the man and attempted to pull him off the boy, but were brushed back by the attacker.

Coroner's deputies believe they know the boy's name, but "due to the severity of his injuries making a visual identification is nearly impossible," Singh said...

A second report on this incident also makes mention of a possible religious connection:

Isabelle Thomas, who lives a few hundred yards from the scene, was working at Emanuel Medical Center, a nurse in the surgical unit, when her son called her with word something bad had happened. Soon she heard of the little boy who died 500 yards from her front door.

"I couldn't go to sleep. I couldn't rest without seeing it and all that blood. I couldn't believe all that blood," she said.

Sunday morning, she watched a tow truck haul away the pickup. The inside cab, she said, was smeared with blood. A rosary swung from the rearview mirror...

— Michael Shea, The Modesto Bee

For those of us who embrace rationality and reject the notion of supernatural agency in this incident, the most likely scenario for such a brutal event is that the perpetrator was delusional and the child an innocent victim. No demons were involved whatsoever for the simple reason that there are no such thing as demons. It's an all-too-human horror, a very material tragedy, likely brought on by some profound mental disorder. When the identity of the man in the truck is revealed I fully expect that it will be accompanied by a revelation of previous acts of violence and treatment for a psychopathological condition.

On the other hand, there are also people who see in this evidence for demonic possession — of the perpetrator. In comments on this story appearing on The Modesto Bee website, an author using the ID "cling2Christ" states:

The Last Days

This is horrible, and Jesus warned us that as "the day" approaches, things will only get worse and worse until the end comes. This man thought the baby had demons, the article says, but in fact, most likely the man himself was demon possesed. "This know also that in the last days perilous times will come. For man shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, WITHOUT NATURAL LOVE, UNFORGIVING, slanderers, WITHOUT SELF CONTROL, BRUTAL, despisers of those that are good, traitors, HEADSTRONG, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God." 2Timothy 3:1-4

cling2Christ wrote that comment just before 1 AM. In the five hours between that time and the time I write this entry five reviewers have rated the comment, all of them giving it a 5 out of 5 — an indication that they are in agreement with cling2Christ's assertion of demonic involvement. Cling2Christ has no more evidence that the perpetrator was possessed than the perpetrator had that the infant was "full of demons" and is no more rational than the perpetrator himself.

After all, we've been told recently by a Catholic church official who has himself performed over 70,000 exorcisms that "Everybody is vulnerable to the work of Satan." In light of statements like this one by Gabriele Amorth and that made by cling2Christ, could it be said that the infant wasn't possessed by demons once we'd accepted the premises put forward by them? Perhaps the infant, the man in the truck and the officer who shot him were all possessed. Perhaps it's all some Satanic conspiracy to shock us all. I certainly feel a bit like screaming and drawing my limbs into my body like a tortoise draws its limbs into its shell after reading about this. Once supernatural, untestable factors are thrown into the mix, things for which we can't hope to find empirical evidence (I think with very good reason), we can say anything and determine nothing.

Perhaps in the end the thing that separates Amorth and cling2Christ from the lunatic in the truck in Turlock isn't reason — none of the three are rational — but a propensity toward carrying out violence. Not all delusional people are violent and not all violent people are delusional. When the delusion is demonic possession and the like, though, they all bring a little more fear into the world to pile on top of the occasional real terrors it already holds.

I see no reason to believe that demons exist at all, that supernatural entities are vying for metaphysical things like souls, or that brutality occurs due to anything other than the actions of violent people. It's a position that I'll continue to hold until somebody can show me a soul or a demon or even reasonable evidence based upon which one could logically infer that such things exist.

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It's Not Their Fault: The Devil Made Them Do It

At the end of 2007, it was revealed that Pope Benedict XVI was unleashing a wave of newly-trained exorcists against the depradations of Satan. The creaking cleric in charge of the War Against the Devil is exorcist-in-chief Gabriele Amorth.

In a new article, Amorth warns that everybody is vulnerable to being possessed by Beelzebub — particularly political leaders. There's really nothing to be done for it except to keep Amorth and his cadre of Vatican-sanctioned rattle-shakers employed seven days a week performing magical rituals in an effort to drive demons out of people's bodies. Hitler and Stalin? Possessed, of course. In fact, super-duper megapossessed!

Famous exorcist: 'The devil loves to take over those who hold political office'

In an interview with the magazine "Maria Mensajera," famous Italian exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth said, "Everybody is vulnerable to the work of Satan" and that "the devil loves to take over those who hold political office."

The Spanish daily "La Razon" published the interview in an article by Alexander Smoltczyk in which the 82 year-old priest describes what happens in an exorcism. He said he has performed more than 70,000.

70,000 exorcisms? Wow, that's a lot of superstition. That devil really gets around! But if everyone is vulnerable (and as he notes later, he really does mean everybody), then how can all these people be held accountable for their actions? Surely we need to include a plea of "not guilty by reason of Satanic possession" in the options available to the accused in criminal cases. Politicians caught doing unethical things should be allowed to say "The devil made me do it, but a priest sprinkled me with holy water and I'm OK now" and get back to their offices. Free will? Nonsense; the devil makes us believe in such things.

"Evil exists in politics, quite often in fact," Father Amorth said. "The devil loves to take over business leaders and those who hold political office. Hitler and Stalin were possessed. How do I know? Because they killed millions of people. The Gospel says: 'By their fruits you will know them.' Unfortunately, an exorcism on them would not have been enough, since they were convinced of what they were doing. We can't say it was a possession in the strict sense of the word, but rather a total and voluntary acceptance of the suggestions of the devil."

See? Hitler and Stalin were super-possessed. We can tell in retrospect that mass murdering totalitarians aren't simply twisted human beings; it takes supernatural agency to explain genocide. Why not apply this to all cases of human misbehavior? People who kill other people aren't bad people, they've just been taken over by demons. They've been seduced by the dark side, young Jedi. Father Amorth knows this because he's been given the power of divine Monday morning quarterbacking. How many criminals aren't convinced of what they're doing? Amorth's statements could be just as well applied to Charles Manson, Gary Ridgeway, or some young gang-banger who wipes out a rival in a drive-by shooting. The difference between Stalin and any other murderer is a matter of scale, not of conviction. This is some insane prattling by this Amorth fellow.

"I tell those who come to see me to first go to a doctor or a psychologist," the priest continued. "Most of the time there is a physical or psychological basis for explaining their suffering. The psychiatrists send me the incurable cases. There is no rivalry. The psychiatrist determines if it is an illness, the exorcist if it is a curse," Father Amorth explained.

And yet he's personally performed 70,000 exorcisms — just one priest. It's not unreasonable to think that all the Catholic exorcists combined then have done something like ten times that number during Amorth's career, then. This doesn't even include all of the non-Catholic exorcists chasing demons around the globe, so we're almost certainly talking about millions of exorcisms. One must wonder, then, which psychiatrists and doctors are referring their patients to the bone-rattlers. Amorth should release a list of these aberrant healthcare providers so that those of us who have come to the considered conclusion that talk of possession is a manifestation of superstition can avoid patronizing them. It seems they're sending a whole lot of people off to be exorcised; I wouldn't want to be one of them.

Nobody, he went on, not even himself, is "safe from the devil. Everyone is vulnerable." "The devil is very intelligent. He retains the intelligence of the angel that he was."

"Suppose, for example, that someone you work with is envious of you and casts a spell on you. You would get sick. 90 percent of the cases that I deal with are precisely spells. The rest are due to membership in satanic sects or participation in séances or magic. If you live in harmony with God, it is much more difficult for the devil to possess you," Father Amorth stated.

Really? 90% of 70,000... that 63,000 people who have had spells cast upon them. Witchcraft is real, folks. This is oh-so-different from Dark Ages-like superstition how, exactly? In Africa, people are being beaten and burned to death on the same suspicion that Amorth is raising here. According to him, we're all surrounded by people who are casting spells at us! BURN THE WITCHES!

But if everyone, even Amorth himself, is vulnerable to possession, then how is anyone to be held responsible for their actions? It could be a spell or a demon or whatnot that made some CEO embezzle money from their company. By what objective, reproducible, testable measure can we discern who is truly responsible for his/her misdeeds and which of the accused is a victim of overwhelming supernatural deviousness?

"The Pope supports exorcists," he explained, but "satanic sects are proliferating," and for this reason Father Amorth said his calendar for the next two months is full. "I work seven days a week, from morning until night, including Christmas Eve and Holy Week," he said.

Be afraid, be very afraid. Satanic sects are proliferating. I guess that's helped by the fact that, according to Amorth, their members can use magic to control the actions of others, to make people sick, and, I would assume, dry up the dairy cows and hold back the rain, too.

I find it hard to believe that people still swallow this nonsense at this point in history. Devils and demons and possessions and spells... all based on the assertions of people who lived long ago, at a time when they didn't understand how things worked. Belief in these things is the product of ignorance, not of understanding. When this kind of ignorance gets institutionalized, people call it religion instead of the most proper term — superstition. It's pathetic that someone like Amorth exists as anything more than an isolated nut-job, that there are so many people willing to buy into this mumbo-jumbo.

The only difference between a Catholic exorcist and an animist witch doctor is that the Catholic version is better funded.

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Vatican, Pope Benedict Reveal New Exorcize Program

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Middle Ages!

Pope and former Hitler Youth Benedict XVI has revealed a bold new campaign to combat the dominion of Satan on earth by organizing local exorcism squads. These shock troops for DA LAWD will swoop in whenever they're needed in your neighborhood to cast out demons and fight the fight against general godlessness which, as we all know, could only come from god's arch-enemy, the Prince O' Darkness.

No, really. It's all true.

Pope's exorcist squads will wage war on Satan

The Pope has ordered his bishops to set up exorcism squads to tackle the rise of Satanism.

Vatican chiefs are concerned at what they see as an increased interest in the occult.

They have introduced courses for priests to combat what they call the most extreme form of "Godlessness."

Each bishop is to be told to have in his diocese a number of priests trained to fight demonic possession.

The initiative was revealed by 82-year-old Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican "exorcistinchief," to the online Catholic news service Petrus...

"Too many bishops are not taking this seriously and are not delegating their priests in the fight against the Devil. You have to hunt high and low for a properly trained exorcist.

"Thankfully, Benedict XVI believes in the existence and danger of evil - going back to the time he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith." The CDF is the oldest Vatican department and was headed by Benedict from 1982, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, until he became Pope in 2005...

NOTE: The CDF was formerly known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Doesn't it just make you feel all warm and fuzzy to know that the Inquisition is coming to your town? Yay, Inquisition!

Father Paolo Scarafoni, who lectures on the Vatican's exorcism course, said interest in Satanism and the occult has grown as people lost faith with the church.

He added: "People suffer and think that turning to the Devil can help solve their problems. We are being bombarded by requests for exorcisms."

The Vatican is particularly concerned that young people are being exposed to the influence of Satanic sects through rock music and the Internet...

Of course, the Pope is neither a stupid man (he is, after all, infallible on matters of religious doctrine) nor an inflexible traditionalist. Realizing that the church's struggle is not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers of the pneuma, meaning both "spirit" and "air," Benedict XVI has incorporated a new element into the Rite of Exorcism, last updated in 1999. This powerful new element is aerobic dance. My secret sources at the See have managed to smuggle out a video showing the new rite as it will be conducted by the Anti-Satan Blitzkrieg Brigades:



Congratulations to the Pope on his ongoing success in leading his flock boldly into the 12th Century!

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Strangle Your Daughter for Jesus: An Exorcism in Arizona

My, but the lethal woo is flying thick and fast these days. Not long ago, we had the incident of a woman in Arizona dying after liposuction performed by a "homeopathic surgeon." Today comes word of an attempted exorcism in the same state which resulted in the death of one would-be exorcist and very nearly in that of his granddaughter... but not even in the arrest of the girl's mother, even though she was clearly an accomplice and assisted in the near-slaying of her own offspring.

Fatal end to exorcism attempt
Man dies after struggle with police checking on girl's welfare

A 48-year-old Phoenix man whom authorities say was choking his 3-year-old granddaughter during an exorcism early Saturday died after struggling with police officers who went into the home to investigate, Phoenix police said.

Police reportedly found Ronald Marquez, of Phoenix, shirtless and choking his granddaughter as her 19-year-old mother, naked and bloody, looked on. The bloodied girl was gasping and screaming as her mother chanted and held a religious picture of some kind, police said...

A relative reported she thought an exorcism was going on at the family home after one was performed two days earlier, police said...

The man held the girl in a headlock with one arm as he was squeezing her torso with his other arm, causing her to gasp and scream, police said.

Investigators later learned the man was trying to "squeeze the demons out of the young girl," Tranter said.

One officer made his way into the room, confronted Marquez and touched him with a Taser, which apparently had no effect...

Tranter declined to identify the girl's mother because she was not arrested...

So, let's get this straight; this wasn't even the first time that these wackos decided that their toddler was possessed by demons and tried to exorcise them. The girl fought for her life as her relative asphyxiated her and her mother helped out in the ritual of squeezing out the demons... but the mother wasn't arrested.

Do I have this right? Am I really seeing this? Is this really happening in 21^st century America? Just what does a three year old have to do to convince her mother that her body is inhabited by fallen angels, anyhow?

This is an extreme form of child abuse. What possible reason there could be for not locking the mother away for this crime I cannot fathom. More to the point, belief in demons and the accompanying exorcism nonsense is increasingly common in the US. This kind of thing probably happens every day somewhere in this country thanks to the rising tide of religious literalism, and one could point to any number of fundamentalist churches that practice some form of exorcism as a matter of routine.

Exactly because of this belief, one founded in ignorance, fear and superstition regardless of who practices exorcism and why, there's a segment of our population who see this incident not as a case of police stopping the murder of a child, but of the authorities impinging on the religious freedom of those performing this disgusting rite. Look, here's one now:

wow! A man is killed by police. what was he doing? He was practicing his constitutional right of Freedom of Religion. (Source: "Brian," comment in The East Valley Tribune)

And the "out" that true-believers use here? Well, the person who died was named Marquez, so he must be an illegal immigrant. A "real" American would never do something like this!

Used to be that America let the finest and most capable people ofthe world emmigrate to our nation.

Now it's any loon who can sneak across the border. (Source: "barns," comment in The East Valley Tribune)

I guess "barns" has never heard of Andrea Yates, who was certainly both an American and a true-believer Christian. As readers may recall, Ms. Yates murdered her five children to prevent them from "stumbling" and winding up going to hell. Note that nowhere in the article is any mention made of the citizenship of Marquez, nor indeed of the mother of the girl.
Then we get the theories that maybe it was the demons that killed Marquez. Woo upon woo!

It is every true parent`s worse nightmare to see their child being possessed by demons whether this child may have them or not. Exorcism is dated back in ancient times during the infancy years of Vatican Church. But I wondered if the demons killed the old man who exorcised them? (Source: "Horror of Horrors," comment in The East Valley Tribune)

There's a little search for justification, no? In this person's eyes, these religious lunatics were doing what was best for the child; better she have her ribs crushed than be claimed by Satan, after all... and Marquez might have successfully driven the demons out and been killed by them. Clearly, we have a real idiot in this case who can't see simple cause-and-effect and has to concoct ridiculous hypotheses about disembodied evil spirits rather than simply acknowledge that police accidentally killed someone they caught attempting to kill a child. Marquez good, police bad! Support your local exorcist, people!

Let's face facts here; for so long as a significant and increasing percentage of America's population buys into the lie of fundamentalist Christianity (or indeed a fundamentalist and literal form of any religion), and for so long as the populations ignorance grows as science, reason and the principles of the Enlightenment are pushed away in the hope of escaping a "trial run" existence for the promise of a utopian afterlife, there will be more and more of this kind of filth. You cannot have a "culture of life" founded upon the notion that something better awaits us after death than what we can turn the world into right here and now. This form of religion is always, always, always anti-life, regardless of the nonsense mouthed to the contrary when it's a question of an embryo or a coma patient. When reason and logic go away, superstition and lethal woo rush in like venom into a snake bite and you wind up with exorcism and geocentrism and attempted homicide in the name of Jehovah... and the police not arresting a naked, blood-covered mother presiding over the smothering of her own daughter.

Will "real Christians" now express their shock and outrage over this "non-mainstream" exorcism? Of course they will!

I would advise anyone with a closed mind to religion to seriously study them from their own perspectives rather than glance at them with a biased perspective. The individuals in this sad case do not seem to be following any mainstream religion that uses exorcism (Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise), so using "religious practices" as a defense may not be applicable. (Source: "Examples of what," comment in The East Valley Tribune)

But, as you see, they'll justify the underlying beliefs that lead to this behavior in the first place so long as the procedure is carried out by an authority in whom they place faith. This is what happens when there is no empirical way to quantify cause-and-effect; anyone can justify anything, and anyone can find an opinion to bolster whatever nonsense in which they've decided to believe.

This garbage is not going to stop until America experiences a new Enlightenment somehow. I hate to say it, but seeing people dying in the name of the nonsense of homeopathy, exorcism, and every falsehood under the sun because they no longer have the ability to evaluate the world around them, and seeing our population becoming more and more superstitious, I think that somehow there has to be a new awakening of rationality in this country. I've become cynical enough in the face of all the Ken Hams and Deepak Chopras whose garbage holds so much sway these days that I have come to believe that we've gone too far now to go back to the old Enlightenment; we must have a new one.

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Of Demonic Possession and Infanticide

Woman fatally stabs 2-year-old son, police say

NEW PORT RICHEY · A 24-year-old woman fatally stabbed her 2-year-old son and cut herself, telling officers later that she was "trying to kill the demons," authorities said.

Police in this Gulf Coast community northwest of Tampa said Jessica Warren was in the hospital Friday with non-life-threatening cuts on her arms after Thursday evening's killing.

When Warren is medically stable, she will be charged with the murder of her son, Jeremiah Oshinkanlu, who turned 2 last month, police said...

According to a Gallup poll conducted in 2005, 42% of American adults believe in demonic possession. More than half of Americans believe in angels, too. Given all of this, is there a good reason why this woman should be tried for committing murder? After all, I have seen exorcisms conducted by evangelist preachers on television. They certainly believe that possession is a possibility.

The question is, then, can these same evangelists prove that their exorcisms are any more legitimate than the one attempted by this woman in New Port Richey, FL, or, alternatively, offer some form of evidence that they are any less mentally ill than she is?

Is there some reason to conclude that those who believe that they talk with Jehovah or angels are any different from those who think they hold conversations with the ghost of Napoleon or that extraterrestrials are beaming messages into their brains?

Is there any good reason it should be held more rational to believe that an omnipresent being is watching one's every action than it is to believe that a network of CIA operatives is doing the same thing?

In our society, we endorse, and even promote, certain beliefs that would be considered a sign of paranoid schizophrenia by the very same individuals in very slightly different contexts. In a logical, empirical system of ideas, one would test these notions against observations of the world as it is. By what context does a religious system decide that some ideas are positive and some negative?

Before anyone thinks that religious beliefs are harmless, they should go back and re-read that story about the woman who murdered her child in an attempt to kill "demons." She's clearly a believer; her motive, even if incorrect, was religious. While I'm not asserting that all those who believe in demons and angels and the like are potential murderers, clearly there are some who are. Given the belief, then, how can one say that this particular believer was incorrect in either her belief or the proper course of action based upon it?

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