Ugh, more from the sad, pathetic people at Ministering Deliverance. Unlike most other fundies, I don't feel this lot deserve mockery, only pity and a good dose of psychiatric help. The usual assumption applies that this is sincere and not a bullshit story made up by some forum member to impress the others; even if it were, however, my comment applies pretty well to the entire population of MD, and people like them who need serious help everywhere.
I've long held that invoking all this supernatural mess of Christian theology and just plain made-up demonic posession stuff is a result of a variant of the just world fallacy, a coping mechanism to try and attribute senseless, irrational cruelty and suffering to some higher purpose. It's as if they are trying to convince and console themselves that they were at least important enough to be attacked by higher forces, or that they were in fact, in some way they can't perceive, fairly dealt with. For some poor, desperately delusional people, even the idea that the universe is specifically out to get them is actually preferable to the notion that it doesn't even notice their existence, let alone care whether they're suffering or not, or whether that suffering was deserved.
There are no gods. There are no angels. There are no devils. There are no demons. We're here, on this ball of dirt floating through the void, on our own.
Not everyone has the mental strength to accept this truth; some can't bring themselves even to intellectually contemplate it as a harmlessly abstract notion.
I would be tempted to say, out of compassion, that those who can't face this admittedly harsh reality are welcome to their religious delusions and what little comfort, nonsensical though it be, they can glean from it, were it not for the fact that, so very often, these childish and simplistic delusions warp their perception and decisions to such an extent that they can and do bring harm to others, sometimes even perpetuating the very evils these delusions were supposed to shield them from.
In this particular case, I'm extremely disturbed that, presumably thanks to the twisted, confused version of Christianity these people have latched desperately onto (though I strongly doubt that there is, or ever could be, any version of it that wasn't confused and nonsensical), the victims of the abuse seem to be being denounced for their own response to it, their perfectly natural resentment of their abusers, and accused of being just as corrupted by demonic posession as those who abused them.
This is an excellent example of the primary failure mode of absolutism, or fundamentalism: this variant, and numerous others, of the Christian cult provide comfort exclusively to those who follow its various inflexible directives, in a tribalistic mechanism of self-reassurance through group identity, with the utter rejection, fear and distrust of outsiders that this invariably entails. The trouble occurs when those childishly naive and simplistic directives encounter a complex situation that their author didn't anticipate; in this case, the fact that the abusers of the children were their parents, and thus the childrens' entirely natural and predictable reaction, is in direct conflict with the perceived directive to honour and obey one's parents (any sensible person would naturally assume that this law presupposed parents who were worthy of this, but we're dealing with fundamentalists here and so they won't assume that - they won't actually think about it at all, in fact, and often declare it a virtue not to) - thus, the simplistic system, which the fundamentalist will not allow himself to concede could ever fail, does fail, and the victims themselves are simultaneously classified as evil and corrupted. Needless to say, this produces confusion in the minds of the believers trying to follow the cult's directives: on the one hand, the children have patently been harmed and anyone with a shred of humanity would feel compelled to comfort and care for them, and a great many would also feel a strong urge to punish the perpetrators; on the other hand, they are also seen as having done evil themselves and thus are to be feared and hated, possibly even punished. Worse, presumably because showing compassion to abused children is so absolutely inherent in any healthy person or society, the cult doesn't have a written rule about it like it does about parental respect and, unfortunately, when a fundie is pressed he ultimately tends to favour written rules more than any imperatives he came up with by himself. The notion might even arise to comfort the abusers for perceived harm done to them by their childrens' subsequent rejection of them.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that you could tell an abused child that would possibly be worse for them than that there is something wrong with them, and that it is the same thing that is wrong with those who harmed them, yet that is precisely the message these pitiable, but nonetheless dangerous, people have conveyed. I don't doubt for a moment that these deluded, irrational and very probably mentally damaged people mostly mean well, but that doesn't mean they're any less deluded or irrational than they need to be to be very, very dangerous. I expect they would be horrified if they ever came to comprehend the damage they are doing, alas, that itself would probably only make it harder for them to do so.
