This is what can happen when you combine Religion, Ignorance, and Fear

[ck4829]

ON NOV. 19, 1987, Geraldo Rivera hosted a national TV special called "Satanic Cults and Children."

"Estimates are that there are over 1 million Satanists in this country," Rivera declared. "The majority of them are linked in a highly organized, very secretive network. From small towns to large cities, they have attracted police and FBI attention to their satanic ritual child abuse, child pornography and grisly satanic murders. The odds are that this is happening in your town."

Just then a rumor began to spread through rural Jamestown, N.Y.

A lot of non-conformist teen-agers -- wearing dark clothes and offbeat haircuts -- had a party in an old warehouse on Halloween.

People said it had been a satanic Mass. The local Humane Society started getting calls about ritually slaughtered cats and dogs. A fundamentalist minister wrote letters warning about the surge in local Satanism.

Teens who had attended the Halloween party got threatening phone calls, and young thugs began to prowl the town, beating up those they suspected of Satanism.

Then, around April 1988, the rumors began to escalate. Jamestown police -- who had been unable to find any evidence of slaughtered cats and dogs -- began fielding dozens of calls warning that the Satanists were planning something awful for Friday, May 13.

And as the date drew closer, the rumors intensified: The Satanists were preparing to kidnap a blue-eyed, blond virgin and sacrifice her on the 13th.

Parents kept their children indoors as the date approached. Young women armed themselves. And then . . .

Nothing. On Saturday morning, all the local virgins were accounted for, and the hysteria was deflated.

But across the nation, satanic panic still surges, fanned by sensationalist journalists, preachers, zealous police and eager psychologists who contend that countless infants are being slaughtered in secret satanic rituals. The numbers offered range from 5,000 a year to 2,000,000.

But FBI agent Kenneth Lanning, the FBI's leading authority on child abuse, sees it differently. After more than a decade spent chasing down rumors of ritual child abuse, Lanning came to the conclusion that "there is little or no corroborative evidence" to support the claims, he wrote in a report last year. Although some Satanists are practicing in the United States, he wrote, there was no reason to believe that such activities are widespread. The hysteria, he contended, was distracting the nation from the real crisis, child abuse being perpetrated by parents and stepparents and boyfriends.

Lanning's reassurances outraged some on the religious right who once applauded his investigations. Lanning, they said, was a secret Satanist out to lull the nation so that Satanism may flourish.

The charge is "absurd," he wrote.

http://www.holysmoke.org/sdhok/sat20.htm

[Melodybe]

1. Many say that Skull and Bones is a satanic cult

I believe them.

[Ian David]

2. Remembering Dangerously

Like the witch-hunt trials of old, people today are being accused and even imprisoned on 'evidence' provided by memories from dreams and flashbacks -- memories that didn't exist before therapy. What is going on here?

Elizabeth Loftus
We live in a strange and precarious time that resembles at its heart the hysteria and superstitious fervor of the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Men and women are being accused, tried, and convicted with no proof or evidence of guilt other than the word of the accuser. Even when the accusations involve numerous perpetrators, inflicting grievous wounds over many years, even decades, the accuser's pointing finger of blame is enough to make believers of judges and juries. Individuals are being imprisoned on the "evidence" provided by memories that come back in dreams and flashbacks -- memories that did not exist until a person wandered into therapy and was asked point-blank, "Were you ever sexually abused as a child?" And then begins the process of excavating the "repressed" memories through invasive therapeutic techniques, such as age regression, guided visualization, trance writing, dream work, body work, and hypnosis.
<snip>
George Ganaway, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the Emory University School of Medicine, has proposed that unwitting suggestions from therapy play an important role in the development of false satanic memories.
http://www.csicop.org/si/9503/memory.html

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

3. I remember that scare

I was teaching in Illinois in a small town, and a lot of folks kept their girls out of school that day, as they thought that the Satanists were going to swoop down there and carry off the girls. At the time, I was just awakening to my spiritual calling, and had some minor hassles for my beliefs, which I learned very quickly to keep to myself to avoid problems.

[hatrack]

4. "Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials", by Wendy Kaminer

Best single book I've read (w. the possible exception of Carl Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World") on the power of irrationality, gullbility, mass hysteria and just plain stupidity.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. I asked Andrew Vachss about this

when he spoke in Portland a couple of years ago.

As you may recall, he's a mystery writer whose day job is advocating for children in abuse cases.

His take on the whole "Satanic ritual abuse" hysteria was that yes, there are Satanists, and yes, there are definitely child sexual abusers, but that most of the reported cases of "Satanic ritual abuse" are ordinary pedophiles who use a little Satanic imagery or costuming to scare the kids into not telling, and the children's imaginations do the rest.

[noamnety]

6. how's this different from the typical bush supporter?

child abuse, child porn ... sounds familiar.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/demopedia/index.php/Republican_Values