a giant tarp/tapestry painted with a big, red Star of David.Mötley Jü fans, obviously.
I deny it. I've heard multiple times that the FBI won't confirm any actual instances of satanically motivated or ritualistic crimes. I could certainly be wrong, but I've never seen a cite for a real satanic crime (though presumably this excludes crazy people claiming Satan told them to do it).Well, that's the trick. "Satanic Ritual Abuse" wasn't about people who claim to be Satanists ritually abusing kids. It was about people abusing kids with Satanic Rituals.
A singular instance of the epidemic fear of witchcraft occurred at Lille, in 1639. A pious but not very sane lady, named Antoinette Bourignon, founded a school, or hospice, in that city. One day, on entering the schoolroom, she imagined that she saw a great number of little black angels flying about the heads of the children. In great alarm she told her pupils of what she had seen, warning them to beware of the devil whose imps were hovering about them. The foolish woman continued daily to repeat the same story, and Satan and his power became the only subject of conversation, not only between the girls themselves, but between them and their instructors. One of them at this time ran away from the school. On being brought back and interrogated, she said she had not run away, but had been carried away by the devil; she was a witch, and had been one since the age of seven. Some other little girls in the school went into fits at this announcement, and, on their recovery, confessed that they also were witches. At last the whole of them, to the number of fifty, worked upon each other’s imaginations to such a degree that they also confessed that they were witches—that they attended the Domdaniel, or meeting of the fiends—that they could ride through the air on broom-sticks, feast on infants’ flesh, or creep through a key-hole.posted by benzenedream at 2:04 PM on November 16, 2010 [4 favorites]
Note -I know pagans and witches and the ones I have run across are as harmless as fleas. I am not talking about those sorts of folk. I am not accusing them of anything.I think the difficulty that most people have -- when dealing with Satanic Ritual Abuse panic -- is the disagreement about where attention is being focused. You are not accusing "harmless pagans" of abusing kids, but the emphasis on Satanic Ritual Abuse "research" in the 80s and 90s was very explicitly to study their beliefs and rituals -- and sometimes to invent fantastical versions of them -- and treat them as proof of criminal behavior.
I don't think we can separate the fact that Ramirez was mentally deranged from his invokations of Satan, which you seem to want to do. To me, it doesn't matter what Ramirez claims to be influenced by - whether it's Satan or God or the Easter Bunny.To be clear, this is also why I think it would be dangerous to train police officers in Catholic dogma and ritual "to protect kids from pedophilia." Even though there is actual evidence that the current pope actively conspired to hide evidence of ritual sexual abuse to protect members of his religious order, I do not believe that equating Catholicism with sexual abuse, or studying the elements of Catholicism is particularly helpful in preventing future abuse.
Just to be clear, I am in no way denying that Christian ministers (or as I would term it so called Christian ministers) have abused people. I have a dear friend who was molested by her Baptist pastor.Agreed, Alia -- and I had to think hard before mentioning that angle because I don't want to turn the thread into some kind of "Oh yeah? BAPTIST RITUAL ABUSE!" derail. I'm less interested in throwing Christian abusers in peoples' faces than pointing out the dangers of starting with peoples' religious symbolism as the central focus of investigation and suspicion.
As to some people thinking that just because the great Satan freakout of the 80's has mostly turned out to be ridiculous, that my friends did not experience what they shared with me? No, I'm gonna believe the victim.I believe they were abused, and I have no problem saying that. It's still going to take a hell of a lot more for me to re-open the books on "SRA" than your friends having Christian symbols as trauma triggers. I'm sorry if that is callous, I'm sorry if that is harsh, but you are conflating believing that a victim was victimized with believing an already-debunked wave of religious hysteria. You don't get to do that, no matter how traumatized your friend was.
One -a devout Christian-could not go to church for years because crosses, etc were a trigger. The SOBs that abused her used Christian symbols in the ritualistic way she was abused.That sounds like Christian Ritual Abuse.
I watched people I knew and respected get up in front of groups of other believers and announce that Satanists controlled local governments, state and federal governments, and the National Education Association. That Satanists sacrificed thousands of babies a year, and used their networks of power to escape detection. As it became clear that more and more "repressed memories" being trotted around were fabrications, I watched them announce that the psychiatric community was in on the Satanic coverup. As "spokes-satanists" like Mike Warnke were exposed as frauds, I watched them announce that, sure, there might have been some exaggerations, but the essence of his stories was true.I forgot the second part of that: following those claims about the Satanist conspiracy, I discovered that the same Christians I respected had been working together to conceal the fact that a respected Christian leader from our house church had been sexually abusing children for several decades. That he had been using his position as a leader in a Christian organization to prey on inner city children. That he had been using his reputation and his position to keep himself above suspicion, and that they had known there was a serious problem, though not the full extent, for many years.
FFF, by strict definition, every single person ever abused by anyone is satanically abused. All we are talking about here, really, is the capacity for evil. Evil comes in many flavors.I'm not trying to be nitpicky, and I'm not trying to deny that your friends were abused monstrously.
Your 'strict definition' of 'satanic' to mean 'anything bad' is the opposite of the actual definition of strict. You can't say that your friends' trauma was both an incredibly specific form of meticulously planned abuse following a regulated series of tropes and activities, and then say that every abuse ever falls under that same category. This is one of those 'words have meanings' moments.This is actually reminiscent of a conversation with a family member, in which she discovered that a friend of mine was a Wiccan. She announced that she felt it was dangerous to associate with a Satanist, and I had to take a moment to explain the difference between a Satanist and a Wiccan. All issues of safe-association and evil-by-contact aside, conflating fundamentally different belief systems is a recipe for embarrassment, confusion, and the sort of fundamental laziness that leads to Joel Osteen being a bestselling author.
Any PC built after 1985 has the storage capacity to house an evil spiritAlso, to be clear: the article that's being passed around seems to date back to a clipping from The Register in 2000. The only source it cites is The Weekly World News.
"Say, did I ever tell you about the time I was in a Satanic cult, and we dined on delicious babies and bacon for breakf.... wait just a minute. Did I just hear that guy on Arsenio say, 'I feel your pain?'"You think you're kidding, but you're not. I reviewed Christian novels at the time -- like, novels by the pound from the three major publishers in that genre -- and watching the Zeitgeist in action was amazing.
Supposedly some ancient "pagan" religions involved this kind of human sacrifice. I don't know history well enough to know if there is solid evidence that this actually happened. I know a lot of ancient groups were accused of doing so in records written by their enemies.AFAIK, this is pretty well established. People have sacrificed other people to Gods, historically. Even the Bible includes isolated incidents of good believers sacrificing loved ones (or being willing to do so) for God.
I am all for whatever would help an innocent person not be hurt or killed.Agreed, wholeheartedly. That's why I call the 'Satanic Panic' crap on the floor whenever I see it: we know, without a doubt, that it consumed inordinate attention, resources, and bandwidth from child protection services, law enforcement officials, religious groups, etc. And it consumed them in a profoundly fruitless fashion: there was no grand conspiracy, there was no Satanic coverup, there was no wave of pagan sex rituals sweeping the nation.
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posted by theodolite at 10:58 AM on November 16, 2010 [5 favorites]