Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
Obasi's eyes. At the trial, she defended her sisters. They were
trying to help her, she said. But hoodoo is not devil-worship; it is a
cross between Catholicism and African-Haitian nativist religion.
(2) Parents beat their child to death because she would not
embrace their brand of Christianity. (3) A child molester justifies
his acts by reading the Bible to his victims. (4) A 14-year-old boy
has his eyeball plucked out of his head in an exorcism ceremony.
His assailant is not a satanist, but a Protestant fundamentalist
minister engaged in religious pursuits. (5) A woman thinks her
12-year-old son is possessed by the devil. After an incestuous
relationship with him, she decapitates him. But there is no satanic
ritual content to the 'possession'.
The second and third cases come from FBI files. The last two
come from a 1994 study by Dr Gail Goodman, a psychologist at
the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues, done for
the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. They examined
over 12,000 claims of sexual abuse involving satanic ritual cults,
and could not find a single one that held up to scrutiny. Therapists
reported satanic abuse based only on, for instance, 'patient's
disclosure via hypnotherapy' or children's 'fear of satanic symbols'.
In some cases diagnosis was made on the basis of behaviour
common to many children. 'In only a few cases was physical
evidence mentioned - usually, "scars".' But in most cases the
'scars' were very faint or non-existent. 'Even when there were
scars, it was not determined whether the victims themselves had
caused them.' This also is very similar to alien abduction cases, as
described below. George K. Ganaway, Professor of Psychiatry at
Emory University, proposes that 'the most common likely cause
of cult-related memories may very well turn out to be a mutual
deception between the patient and the therapist'.
One of the most troublesome cases of 'recovered memory' of
satanic ritual abuse has been chronicled by Lawrence Wright in a
remarkable book, Remembering Satan (1994). It concerns Paul
Ingram, a man who may have had his life ruined because he was
too gullible, too suggestible, too unpractised in scepticism. Ingram
was, in 1988, Chairman of the Republican Party in Olympia,
Washington, the chief civil deputy in the local sheriff's department,
well regarded, highly religious, and responsible for warning
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