From: David.Rice@ofa123.fidonet.org
Newsgroups: alt.atheism
Subject: Religion & Crime / "Satanic Conspiracy"
X-Sender: newtout 0.02 Sep 21 1992
Date: 26 Sep 92  18:05:12

<part 4 of 4>
 
Catherine  Gould,  who  treats  ritual-abuse  "survivors"  in  the  San
Fernando  Valley,  said she had seen 15 children who have been ritually
abused in day-care centers.  She  denies  that  the  stories  could  be
planted.
 
"I  can  certainly  tell  you it usually goes the other way," she said.
"The therapist has to struggle to believe."
 
In the widely-publicized McMartin Pre-School  case,  Satanic  practices
and  ritual  abuse  were  alleged by some children, but no-one was ever
convicted. [NB: the therapists who examined most of the  McMartin  kids
were linked with a "Ghostbuster" ministry in Orange County, CA...Need I
say more? --.\\<-H--]
 
At  a  1989 conference sponsored by the National Center for Child Abuse
and Neglect, a federal agency, Dan Sexton,  director  of  the  National
Abuse Hotline, said: "I don't need to see evidence to believe."
 
Bennet  Braun,  who  operates a clinic in Chicago that treats purported
Satanic abuse victims, said of Satanists in  a  1988  speech:  "We  are
dealing  with  a  national-international type organization that's got a
structure somewhat similar to the communist cell structure."
 
Critics say some therapists are helping to cause the problem.
 
"What has happened is a  number  of  therapists  [who  ya  gonna  call?
Ghostbusters! --.\\<-H--] have chosen to take one side of the issue, to
assume  everything  a  patient  remembers  must in fact be true," Emory
University's Gannaway said.
 
Writing  in  a  professional  publication  in  1989,  Ganaway  said   a
suggestion  from  a therapist can create "an entire belief system" in a
patient.  He said he has encountered "memories"  that  included  having
one's heart removed and replaced with an animal's.
 
Other  skeptics  say  reports  of  a  Satanic  conspiracy  are neurotic
fantasies conjured up in stressed-out communities that  want  a  simple
explanation for everything from drugs to moral decline.
 
"The  Satanic  legend says, in symbolic form, that our moral values are
being threatened by evil forces beyond our control, and  that  we  have
lost  faith  in  our authorities to deal with the threat," said Jeffrey
Victory, the Jamestown Community College sociologist.
 
This is not the first time that stories of human sacrifice were  widely
believed.
 
Romans  accused  early  christians  of child sacrifice. [christians, in
turn, accused the Druidic Clergy of the Keltoi tribes and later Jews of
the same thing.  In the case of Jews, the "blood libel" continues  even
now  in rural Eastern Europe and in some enclaves in Islamic countries.
--.\\<-H-- ] Today's Satanic stories  resonate  eerily  with  something
that happened  in  1836.  A woman named Maria Monk stirred fears in the
United States and Canada with a book  recounting  her  supposed  escape
from a cult that bred babies for sacrifice.
 
The  cult,  Monk charged, was the Roman Catholic Church; her tormentors
-- priests.
 
Monk's "Awful Discoveries of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of  Montreal"  sold
300,000  copies  and  prompted  incensed  Protestants  to  ransack  the
monastery.  No evidence was found.  Even so, said Penn State folklorist
Bill Ellis: "Other women came forward  and  claimed  to  have  been  in
similar  convents and corroborated her stories of sexual orgies and the
killing of children."
 
Jeffrey Burton Russell, a historian at UC Santa Barbara who has written
a four-volume study of the idea of the devil, sees a  parallel  between
fear  of  satanism  and  witch  trials  of  the  past,  "brought  on by
hysteria."
 
Of modern Satanists, he said: "I know they exist, but I tend  to  think
they  exist  less  than  the  media or law enforcement or psychologists
think they do.
 
"My one wish is people would play this down and it will go away."
 
*****
 
(End of  article,  published  originally  in  the  Los  Angeles  Times,
Tuesday, 4/23/91.   Article (c) 1991 The Los Angeles Times/Times Mirror
Corp.  All Rights Reserved under domestic  and  international  law  and
convention.)

--- Maximus 2.00