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WillowOne's Positions

Demons, Possession and Exorcism

My Positions

  1. I do not hold that demons exist. No case of "possession" has ever been shown to involve anything other than mental illness, neurological disorder, suggestion, or performance.
  2. Exorcism is not a harmless ritual. It has killed people, mostly children and women, and it delays treatment for conditions that can be treated.
  3. Where a religious body performs exorcism on a person with a diagnosable condition, it should be treated like any other practice of medicine without a licence.

Notes

  1. Possession is the pre-scientific model of disease. The boy in Mark 9 who falls to the ground, foams at the mouth, grinds his teeth and goes rigid has epilepsy; the text says he has a spirit. The behaviours attributed to demons over the centuries map onto epilepsy, Tourette's syndrome, schizophrenia, catatonia, dissociative disorders, and in many historical cases simple adolescent defiance. The gospel writers can be forgiven for not knowing this. A church that runs training courses for exorcists in the twenty-first century, as the Vatican has done since 2005, cannot.
  2. The symptoms follow the script. Possession looks different in every culture, and it looks the way the culture expects: Catholic cases produce aversion to crucifixes and holy water, Pentecostal cases produce thrashing and shrieking, cases in Hindu or West African settings produce something else again. Claims that the possessed speak languages they never learned (xenoglossy) have never been verified by a linguist, and the handful examined turned out to be gibberish with the cadence of the expected language. A demon that only knows what the patient knows, and only does what the audience expects, is a patient.
  3. The body count. Anneliese Michel, Germany, 1976: epileptic, 67 exorcism sessions over ten months, died of starvation at 30 kilograms; the priests and parents were convicted of negligent homicide. Terrance Cottrell Jr, Milwaukee, 2003: eight years old, autistic, suffocated under the weight of a pastor during a prayer to drive out his demons. Victoria Climbié, London, 2000: eight, tortured to death by relatives who believed her possessed, having been taken to a church for deliverance rather than to a doctor. Kristy Bamu, London, 2010: fifteen, drowned after days of torture for "witchcraft" by his sister and her partner. The Metropolitan Police maintain a dedicated project on faith-based child abuse because the problem is large enough to need one.
  4. The devil is a media product. Requests for exorcism rose sharply after The Exorcist (1973) and again with each remake and "based on a true story" release. The symptoms displayed by the possessed also updated to match the films. This is not the behaviour of an ancient enemy of mankind; it is the behaviour of a cultural meme.
  5. The epistemics. The demon hypothesis adds an entity and explains nothing that the medical account does not already explain, so it fails Occam's Razor - Principle of Parsimony. It is asserted without evidence, so it can be dismissed without evidence (Hitchens' Razor). Where it differs from a harmless belief is that it is applied to the most vulnerable people available, by people with authority over them, in place of treatment. That is where I would draw the line that the law draws for every other healer.

Sources

  • Goodman, F. D., The Exorcism of Anneliese Michel (1981), and the Klingenberg trial judgement, 1978
  • R v Bikubi and Bamu, Central Criminal Court, 5 March 2012
  • The Victoria Climbié Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Lord Laming (2003)
  • Thomason, S. G., "Past Tongues Remembered?", Skeptical Inquirer 11 (1987), on xenoglossy claims
  • Metropolitan Police, Project Violet, on child abuse linked to faith or belief

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