A Portales, New Mexico woman tells police she killed her six year old son because he was possessed by the devil. It`s a story that has devastated the small community about 100 miles Northwest of Lubbock.
Just before noon Thursday, emergency crews found 6-year-old Lorenzo Cabral Junior unconscious on the floor of his home. Cabral had a head injury and water in his lungs. The boy’s mother, 24-year-old Teresa K. Gilman, told police she did what she had to do to get the devil out of him.
Police say after Gilman somehow rendered the boy unconscious, she surrounded his body with salt and instructed her 8-year-old daughter to help her pour water down the boy’s throat.
There has been a global surge in exorcisms ever since the Vatican issued a new manual on the ritual in 1999. It’s selling like hotcakes in places like Mexico.
This story reminds me of that movie “The Exorcism of Emily Rose.”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0404032/
I have never seen a movie (or book or anything) that better shows how people can experience the very same event but come up with very different explanations for it, depending on their religious world view.
Yet when Richard Dawkins offers that subjecting children to religious idiocy is tantamount to child abuse, he catches merry Hell.
Reductio ad absurdum applies here. If we, as a society, permit parents to subject their children (who have no say) to treatment founded in the parents’ religious beliefs, then the logical consequent is that we must permit children to be traumatized, physically injured or killed, by withholding medical treatment or subjecting them to “exorcism” and other such moronic horseshit.
Since that conclusion is indisputably wrong and hence, absurd, then the premise that we must not interfere in parents’ subjecting children to religion is also absurd.
But, as with everything else, it’ll have to reach (perceived) epidemic levels before the mental mediocrities that make up the majority of society realize it needs to stop. And by then, as usual, it’ll already be too late to do much about it. I suspect it already is.
And there, in a nutshell, is an object lesson in the biggest drawback to majority rule. The intelligentia (y’know, them thar pointy-headed Godless intylectule know-it-alls) see problems far ahead of the majority, made up as it is of persons of average intelligence.
So, don’t expect this kind of shit to stop.
So the obvious argument we’re going to hear from this story is the fact that the woman did Meth. So let me get this out of the way,
Back in the Day, (we’re talking biblical) food and drink were not up to the standards they are today. What does that mean? well you see that means that nasty thing could get into the food supply and make people sick or in most cases hallucinate. Not only that but many of the old profits and religious clergy thought that this was a gift from God almighty so that we lesser beings could communicate with the divine.
So I guess what I’m saying is the devil is just a figment of a warped mind. And warped minds end up doing sick stuff like this.
So, did the kid get to go to heaven, or what?
Was the mother charged with murder? If not, she should be.
Any jury will find her guilty unless she pleads insanity.
But I guess she won’t plead insanity, because she believes that she did the right thing.
I feel that she has to go to jail for this.
# 2, I agree in principle. Well made argument.
It’s sad that in this time and age where so much information is so readily available, people still believe in God, exorcism, ghosts, goblins, holy stones etc.
Send her to jail? Nonsense. Hire her to perform an exorcism on our combat-dodging “leader” and his cronies. At least, I bet it’s not God he’s listening to when he sends youngsters to the deaths while Halliburton milks billions. We should use this woman to do some actual good in the world.
2: christian science. the followers are permitted to refuse medical attention to their children. a lot of other cults do the same: scientology for instance uses some interesting procedures involving tying people to beds and injecting them with vitamin b12.
it’s murder, of course, but since we are terrified of the religionists, the children die, will die, have always died in their hundreds of thousands in agony.
#2 – C.M. Kornbluth covered the future you envision in 1951, in “The Marching Morons.” In that story, it turned out a hidden “elite” had allowed the morons to prevail, for their own devious reasons. Wow. Sound famliar?
See http://tinyurl.com/y2xf7r (Wikipedia entry) for the Cliffsnotes version.
#5: I looked up the news stories using Google News and the boy’s name, “Lorenzo Cabral”. The mother was charged with murder, though information in the news articles point to her being either drugged out or otherwise out of touch with reality. I’ll speculate she might be committed to New Mexico’s facility for the criminally insane.
#7#8: I agree with you both, but way too many people believe in things that just aren’t there or can’t be proved.
This is what happens when non-Christians try exorcism. They have no authority to command it to leave, so they do whatever comes to mind — which is often torture. No one else in the world but Christians can command demons to leave and have something happen.
I have disproved that this is power of suggestion by trying deliverance from long distances without the client knowing I am trying anything. Things happen. It’s not occult mind power; I was unable to do anything against them when I was in the occult, decades ago.
Most of the people on this website have had nightmares of demons. Most hear other voices in their minds. Most have experimented with the occult and got unexplainable experiences. But they dismissed these things, based upon Humanist assumptions. If they get desperate enough, go look up a Pentecostal Christian; they are safe & effective.
A good book on the subject is “Occult Bondage and Deliverance” by Dr. Kurt Koch
Oh, Crikey.
Dunno if I wanna Blame the Christians or the Mexicans on this one
I bet the only reason it hasn’t happened in the USA it’s because exorcism wasn’t invented by Pat Robertson.
This has happened numerous times all over the world. Mark Twain used an example when he wrote Huck Finn. Demons can influence those who are under mind-altering drugs to attack people for various reasons.
The story “The Exorcist” was based upon a real account of demonization. It was fictionalized to make the priests lose. Hollywood doesn’t like it when Christians win. In the real, historical account the one priest drove the demon out without any fanfare.
In “Glimpses of the Devil,” M. Scott Peck, M.D. was reluctantly forced against his rationalist position to the conclusion that Jersey had a demon. He contacted a priest who arranged for a team to come clean up his patient. Before his eyes (it was his patient) he watched the exorcism take place and come to a full recovery.
I have a deliverance section on my website that is usable by Christians.
@15 @16, New Mexico is one of our 50 states. Sheesh. @13 Pentecostals are the LOONIEST of the loons.
#11 Yeah, Jerry Springer et al educates the bottom part of the population. 😉
#12 Agree, and unfortunately it won’t change for a good while…
#18 Pentecostals are the LOONIEST of the loons.
Tell me about it… my neighbor is a hardcore Pentecostal nutter.
#17, you have a fantasy, fairy tale section on your site. You deserve to be put away for criminal negligence.
Jägermeister – I’ll see your Pentecostal and raise you one!
When you combine the looniness of the Pentecostals with the bizarre rituals of the Catholics, this is what you get:
http://tinyurl.com/y5a7dg
22. Yikes. Checked the link, I was raised Catholic, now I know why I’m so fucked up. We call ourselves “Recovering Catholics”.
#22
Nice link… just when you thought you’d seen it all… here comes Catholicism on steroids and ecstasy.
Both your neighbors are Pentecostal? One is enough for me… he’s really out there. One day he told me that he had been to the train station and demons flew around a guy (the description he gave sounded like he was one of those Goths… another funny bunch). I stood there listening to him, trying to keep a straight face… 😀
I don’t think he went to heaven but I do believe he is taking a big dirt nap.
#21, Lauren,
Are you trying to put the fear of god in us? Good link though.
#27 –
“Are you trying to put the fear of god in us?”
Nahh, I’m gonna leave that in ECA’s capable hands…
#18 – yes, I’m aware of that, which is why i included the mexican’s in with the christian’s as whom to blame (since the mexicans are to the south, and the christians are to the east).
Hey, exorcisms are very necessary. Demons come from Hell which is very hot. When the demons infest someone here, they exude excess heat. All that excess heat causes Global Warming (TM). We need to get rid of the demons.
I Will have to come back again to http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2007/01/14/woman-says-her-6-year-old-son-was-possessed-exorcism-killed-him when my responsibilities load lets up – nevertheless I am taking your RSS feed so I can read your site offline. Thanks.