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TIL they still do exorcisms - Burnt-out Catholic exorcists complain they face long lines of 'possessed' people, and little support from bishops
- Thread starter mbpm
- Start date
I wonder now if other religions have a concept similar to that of possession and exorcism as in Christianity, and more specifically Roman Catholicism.
Most do. Demons and possession are hardly a Christian monopoly. Jews have the dybbuk for example. You can see an example of a Korean exorcism in the film The Wailing.
Christian intellectual property, please do not steal under penalty of crusade.
Didn't pan out in the past, they're better off trying an UberExorcist or Exorcyst, where thy farm it out but take in a majority of the profits
Yes thank goodness for modern psychology so we can now know if someone is really infested with a demon.
The hometown Catholic church I went to as a kid has an exorcist working there. These people are out of their minds:
This parts cracks me up on how they know if someone isn't faking it:
Now they know the cheat codes to get a free exorcism. 😄
What the hell is extreme knowledge?
"Yo this guy is smart as fuck. Must be demons."
"Hmm... Frank knew Pi to the twentieth decimal, but demonic possession starts at the twenty first. Maybe he's not really possessed?"
One of the craziest courses I took in college focused a lot on modern day exorcism in the Catholic church. I'm disassociated from the Catholic Church these days, but at least in the mid-2000s, the Church really wanted to avoid the association with exorcism but it was still a technical part of the theology, and most/all diocese had a priest whose duties included being the diocean exorcist, even if he never participates in one. In the process, they also heavily refer potential victims of possession to psychological services, and usually don't even consider one unless -- according to the host or some other loved one -- all other avenues ... psychological treatment, medical treatment, etc, have been exhausted. This is somethign that the movie, The Exorcist, actually does pretty well. The first 30+ minutes are of Reagan getting all sorts of medical treatment from well-to-do doctors and the medical establishment. And finally like ... they're all out of ideas, oh, it's a demon who is targeting the priest all along.
Knowledge of things that somebody should just not have that sort of knowledge of.
There's this book I read when I was really into this stuff, Hostage to the Devil, which is sensationalistic anecdotes of actual exorcism processes, written by an ex-Catholic priest who dropped out of the Catholic Church because he thought the church was too liberal, and so take what he wrote as fiction or whatever, but one of the anecdotes of transcripts from an exorcism was a young person who knew intimate details of an elderly priest's life from when the priest grew up in Ireland many decades earlier. As an atheist skeptic I don't believe in any of it, but think of it the same way of aliens or ghost stories, and at least from the perspective of the book, that's "extreme knowledge."
I don't believe in god, or many of the beliefs that follow from that, but I also think the brain and perhaps all of our brains together, are weird complex organs that exhibit phenomenon that we've never been able to explain with contemporary understanding of the brain.
Knowledge of things that somebody should just not have that sort of knowledge of.
There's this book I read when I was really into this stuff, Hostage to the Devil, which is sensationalistic anecdotes of actual exorcism processes, written by an ex-Catholic priest who dropped out of the Catholic Church because he thought the church was too liberal, and so take what he wrote as fiction or whatever, but one of the anecdotes of transcripts from an exorcism was a young person who knew intimate details of an elderly priest's life from when the priest grew up in Ireland many decades earlier. As an atheist skeptic I don't believe in any of it, but think of it the same way of aliens or ghost stories, and at least from the perspective of the book, that's "extreme knowledge."
I don't believe in god, or many of the beliefs that follow from that, but I also think the brain and perhaps all of our brains together, are weird complex organs that exhibit phenomenon that we've never been able to explain with contemporary understanding of the brain.
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Most do, absolutely. But the Catholic Church has like ~1600 years of philosophy/theology around demonology/angelology, and then the thousands years prior inherited from other religions, and a lot of it isn't that different from intro to metaphysics. Academic theology/philosophy publications that, at least internally, try to take this seriously:
Augustine and Aquinas on Demonic Possession: Theoria and Praxis - Volume 90, 2016
Augustine asserted that demons (and angels) have material bodies, while Aquinas denied demonic corporeality, upholding that demons are separated, incorporeal, intelligible substances. Augustine’s conception of demons as composite substances possessing an immaterial soul and an aerial body is...
www.pdcnet.org
OP
OP
Yeah I assumed this was a part of things from the movie. Impossible things to know. Of course just like modern psychics, presumably someone could use the help of the internet/global information indexing to help fake sone things
Hey they need to keep people believing in some higher power(who's always broke) instead of modern science/psychology
Yeah, a difference between psychics, conmen, etc, is that typically people who might be candidates for an exorcism are not trying to sell someone to be exorcised, and the church (at least North American and European Roman Catholic church) typically wants to completely avoid exorcisms... It's expensive, embarrassing for the church, super risky legally/insurance-wise, and in the handful of documented modern cases in industrialized countries, usually traumatic for the exorcist (priest) and the person undergoing the rite. That's also one of the few things that I think the Exorcist 2 and future ones (and fucking poor Linda Blair) also got right... like, exorcisms fuck up the exorcist and the victim, and the sequels to the exorcist that have Regan in them did a good job with that IIRC. I kinda forget the plot to the sequels, where I've seen the original a million times and it's one of my favorite movies.
It's not like the local priest sees a kid run off a random fact from wikipedia and then refers him to an exorcism.
At least not in the American RCC... I think it's different in Latin America, Africa, and SE Asia, where individual dioceses might be more Pentecostal / charismatic than what you have in North America.
Mental illness, one area that has not received enough attention in terms of how destructive religious people are.
I knew an exorcist who worked for a diocese. In 20 years as an exorcist he never performed an exorcism but did convince hundreds of people to seek psychiatric help. If someone thinks they're actually possessed by a demon, sometimes a priest is the only person they'll listen to so that person can actually get the help they need from medical professionals.