Exorcism...better go see a psychologist.

Just watched a show on the Discovery Channel...it was called "Exorcism, is it real?"

Well, the obvious answer is, NO, but it was interesting all the same.

You had images of poor, gullible, emotionally damaged, and in some cases obviously mentally disturbed people, being scammed by preachers preying on the victims mental state. There were even what was obviously stage hypnotism going on, perpetuating the "demon possession" they believed they had.

The disturbing part was that these troubled people were being treated as if anything that was happening to them was nothing to do with their mental state..."it's the demons", or the old mainstay, "the devil made me do it"...nothing was actually done to address the base problem that these people had. They were being told that whatever pain they were going through, whatever problems they had, it's OK, simply let the preacher lay on hands, let him mumble a bit of pig-latin, let him sprinkle you with some water, and the nasty demons will go away. Well, until next week...oh, and bring money.

Exorcism is based in an ancient world view from the middle ages, when people knew nothing about mental illness, knew nothing about mental disorders, and basically had no idea about how the mind worked. Must be demons. This was perfectly understandable in those times. But now we understand things a lot better...there should be no need for hokey ideas like demons possessing people.

One of the ideas that seemed to come through is that believers seem to want to blame demons, blame satan, blame anything.
The main thing they don't want to face is that humans are capable of true evil...inside every person is a little mental governor, like a rev limiter on a car engine. The comedian Tim Allen puts it best when he says we all have a little lunatic inside us...most of us easily ignore the lunatic, letting him come out sometimes when we do something foolish, but most of us keep the lunatic in control. However, some people, truly evil people, have no idea how to control the lunatic, and let him have free reign.
Most people don't want to face the fact that people like Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Ted Bundy, and other evil people great and small, are all just ordinary guys, who have let thier inner lunatic run wild...people don't want to really admit that one step away from thier ordinary everyday life, inside thier very head, lives a true demon who, given it's head, would be capable of evil of a biblical scale.

It was said a while after September 11th that the "Middle East" (pretty broad term...) is very lucky that they didn't do something to truly offend strongly the whole of the Western world, something which had produced a very tiny number of protesters in the west...something like, say, parking a nuke in the middle of London or New York or Rome and destroying those cities utterly...they said that if the right "push" of an extreme enough scale were given, the right "let's just take all those idiots out once and for all, lets do it and the hell with the laws of war", that civilised western man, with all of his technology behind him, could if he wanted to unleash hell on a scale unseen before...religious suicide bombers would have nothing on an angry West, backed by modern science of all sorts, using the full resources of biological, mechanical, and tactical knowhow, all turned to one purpose, the extermination for once and for all of any who stood in thier path. It is a frightening thought what we could be truly capable of if we forgot about our restraint, if we let the lunatic inside do what he wanted to.

Commentators who spoke this disturbing idea might have been on to something...westerners might like to think we are rational, reasoning beings, far above the evils and excesses of those we call our enemies, but just below the surface, waiting for the right trigger, lurks that primitive man sitting around the campfire in a cave hoping the gods bless the hunt tomorrow.

It is up to us to realise that we have progressed beyond this, think rationally, and not look to gods, demons, and the devil when things go wrong.