(Completely OT, but I’m always pleased when I agree so thoroughly with Der Trihs on something. :D)
Have there been any actual documented cases of “ritual abuse,” ever? Serious question. (Of course I mean in modern times, don’t bring up the Aztecs.)
:smack: Obviously anyone reading this thread can think of at least one substantiated case of murder in which the murder claimed to be motivated by Satanism. Got a little carried away here.
Sure - but as pointed out up-thread, they always seem to be Christians, not Satanists. You do see the occasional “Kid killed in exorcism” court case and the like.
And we can all think of even more where the killer was motivated by “God”, or some aspect of their “Christian” beliefs.
I’m not sure why nobody picked up on “this story only exists because the reporter is a moron” angle I mentioned above, but here’s a bit more to that: Frank Scarcella, the guy who “broke” the story, is now blathering all over CNN about it, and the experts are gently calling him an idiot for believing this dopey teen. Of course you can see what’s in it for Scarcella–he’s been on CNN, the BBC, every channel you can think of. Don’t know what’s in it for the dopey teen, but I guess she figures she’s gonna be in jail for the rest of her life, so she might as well wangle a free trip to Alaska to “help find the bodies” out of it, kind of like Henry Lee Lucas liked to do. I’m surprised she didn’t claim to have killed a bunch of people in Hawaii and Tahiti too.
Noted for when they catch me.
Ah, the old “I buried several people on the beaches of Hawaii, if only I can remember where I put them. Give me some time to look around and think about it” gambit. 
Most serial killers kill their victims in a ritualistic fashion. It’s one of the ways investigators tie all the victims to a single killer. Of course, that’s pretty weak sauce for people claiming widespread ‘ritual abuse’.
YOU ARE A DAFT ONE. I am impressed (and not kidding either)
Now how did you glean that? I am very careful when posting here to remain objective.
I do not consider my faith a flaw. That will never be debatable and is not on the table at any point. But thank you for noticing, that makes me proud.
The only thing I wanted to understand within this thread was to observe how people reacted when the word ‘Satan’ was tied to a murderer. I appreciate all of your responses. I was also hoping to raise awareness that while the panic of widespread ritual abuse is most likely false, I would hope people would not toss this possibility out altogether because BECAUSE if their were victims, and we do influence each other, your words and beliefs matter, if their were in fact victims, they would face a life of isolation and more torment because they could never share what happened lest they be ridiculed. That seems like HIGH INJUSTICE to me.
It pales in comparison to the injustice of the McMartin preschool case, or the West Memphis Three, does it not?
No doubt.
For me, while the reporter might be an idiot, I’m not sure that’s the most relevant part of the story. The story exists, I think, because sensationalism sells; even the folks who are calling him an idiot are interviewing him, because again, sensationalism sells.
The big question, I think, doesn’t even apply here. If we phrase it specifically, the question is: are there documented cases of physical abuse of children in which the physical abuse was performed by caregivers as part of a Satanic religious practice? By “documented,” I’m talking about cases with the sort of physical evidence that is routinely collected in cases of child abuse, including ritual abuse performed at the hands of Christian cultists?
The claims I’ve heard of Satanic ritual abuse are generally so severe that they would absolutely leave signs behaind. It beggars belief that Satanic cultists are so ingenious in their abuse that there’s never been physical evidence left behind.
crap, two there, their, they’re mistakes in one message.
I’m done. :smack:
Here’s the rub: if you set the default to “believe the claims,” then you’ve got folks so starved for attention that they’ll concoct–and believe–claims of horrific abuse to themselves. We do have evidence of this phenomenon, unlike evidence of Satanic Ritual Child Abuse in modern times.
So when someone reports such abuse, certainly it’s inappropriate to ridicule them, if you’re in a position to offer them help. But it may be that the best help you can offer them is to help them figure out why they feel the need to invent stories of abuse and solve that underlying problem.
Fortunately we have your own posts on record here to show that you wanted more than just “to observe how people reacted when the word ‘Satan’ was tied to a murderer.” What we have learned is how much you want these outlandish assertions to be true by reading the outlandish claims you have made about occult parties, celebrities and secret Facebook pages. You can yell out “But what if the stories ARE true???” until the cows come home, but the mounds of evidence we have that it isn’t vastly outweighs the mounds of…whatever it is you’ve got.
DID, dissociative illness. Happens with all forms of severe abuse. I am part of a support network that includes those who claim SRA and they all have DID. Now, these people are VERY sick. Who knows what happened to them, but something is not right. I have no idea if this exists, but I am not going to make any judgements without knowing for sure. Until then, I will stay vigilant about the possibility.
Do you think anyone intentionally hijacked the minds of children and implanted false memories? That’s not how it works. Someone who meant well and wanted only to protect the children asked some questions because they were afraid of Satanic ritual abuse. When the children came to understand what the questioner wanted, some of the children gave it to them. No evil involved unless you think ignorance of psychology and cognitive biases is evil.
Don’t get me wrong; it would be criminally negligent to make the same mistakes now that we know better but there is no necessity to believe that anyone in the recent Satanic panic was intentionally evil.
I think the ones that made up stories and spoke at public gatherings as self-appointed “experts” were evil. They spread distrust and hate where ever they went-in fact, sometimes they were even called on to give testimony in court…and they were believed.
“No judgments”? So you’re equally open to the following possibilities?
- SRA really occurred as the victims claimed.
- SRA didn’t occur, but the victims genuinely believed it did.
- SRA didn’t occur, but Pat Robertson is spending massive amounts of money to pay people to claim it occurred, including paying off EVERY member of the SRA network you’ve joined.
- SRA didn’t occur: it’s all false memories implanted by malicious elves.
- SRA occurred, but interestingly, every person who claimed it occurred is actually a Satanist. Their plan is to claim SRA in cases where there’s no evidence of it, in order to create a false trail; that way they discredit actual survivors of SRA so much that nobody will believe them. The real victims of SRA are, coincidentally, all dead and buried in a mass grave in Bora Bora.
Of course you make judgments, based both on the evidence in front of you and on your understanding of how the universe works. That’s what we all do.
Possibility #2 is the one that is supported by the overwhelming preponderance of evidence. When you are Just Asking Questions, you’re doing so in spite of the evidence in front of us.
Richard Ramirez
Adolfo Constanzo and the Palo Mayombe group
Jim Jones cult
I’ve been trying to think of confirmed stories of ritual abuse by individuals/groups that claimed their purpose to be practices around a deity of some kind of other: Satan, versions of the Gods of Santeria, and Judeo-Christian God, I think, in these cases.
Richard Ramirez case seems closest to the case in the OP. The Palo Mayombe story of Constanza and his gang is the most convincing case of group ritual abuse (not of young children, though); although, many discount it as a cover for drug crimes. Not sure Jim Jones bears on this at all, but just replace everything he did in the name of God, with “in the name of Satan,” and you’d have a Satanic group into organized evil.
Maybe these don’t bear on what we’re discussing, but with some of the questions above I was surprised that particularly Ramirez did not come up.