Exorcisms Kill Children

The title of this article, Exorcisms Kill Children, is a fact. The above picture is of a four-year-old innocent and helpless little girl, Jessica Mast. She was killed by Bible-believing Christians through an exorcism. The Christians, Jessica's mother and father along with two fellow Bible-believing Christians, believed Jessica, a beautiful gift from God, was possessed by a demon. In order to exorcise the Bible-based imaginary demon, they repeatedly beat helpless Jessica. Ethan Mast, a coreligionist of Jessica's parents but not related to them, took Jessica outside and dunked her in freezing cold water in a pond behind her parent's house. Jessica died from this faith-based exorcism.

If you want to permanently solve a problem, you must strike it at its root. The problem that caused Jessica Mast to be cruelly and brutally murdered was the irrational superstitious/religious beliefs of her parents. They were a faith-based Christian couple who believed, based on "faith", that the Christian Bible is the Word of God. Since the Christian Bible teaches that Satan and demons are real, and that Jesus exorcised demons, in their faith-based minds it was easy to accept the belief that a demon had possessed their daughter. Once they accepted this irrational belief, it made sense to them that they should exorcise the demon from their daughter.

To go further to the root of the problem that caused the death of Jessica, and the deaths of many other people who were killed while an exorcism was being performed on them (here is a page with 15 cases of people who were killed in an exorcism), we need to realize and address the reason why Jessica's parents believed the Christian Bible is the Word of God. If the Bible can be shown to not be the Word of God, then there is no reason for Jessica's parents, or for anyone else, to believe in Satan and in demons. If people no longer believe in these imaginary creatures, which the clergy made up to better control people through fear, then there will no longer be children and adults being harmed and killed through exorcisms.

Is your belief in God based on hearsay or reality?

Christians, and all people who believe in a "revealed" religion, need to ask themselves if their belief is based on hearsay or on reality. Everyone who believes in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism or Baha'i, the Abrahamic "revealed" religions, have beliefs that are based on mere hearsay.

In The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine summed it up well when he wrote:

"Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say that their Word of God came by divine inspiration: and the Turks say that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all."

Paine went on to explain that if God communicated something to one person, that would be a Divine revelation. HOWEVER, when that person tells it to another person, and that person tells it to yet another, it ceases to be a revelation and becomes hearsay. Paine wrote:

"No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if He pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it."

By believing in any of the "revealed" religions, people are not putting their trust in God, they are putting it in the men who are claiming to have received Divine revelation. Once sincere people who are currently under the influence of a "revealed" religion realize this fact, they are empowered to use their gift from God of innate reason to break free of the "revealed" religions. Once they do that, they will never believe in Satan, demons and evil spirits, which means children will be safe from being harmed or killed through exorcisms.

Deism promotes the reality that our innate gift from The Supreme Intelligence/God of reason, if we use it, will protect us from all bad and/or dangerous ideas and beliefs. This includes bad ideas found in non-revelatory religions/philosophies such as Buddhism. Buddhism teaches belief in evil spirits and demons, such as the demon Mara. If these superstitious beliefs in demons, whether from a "revealed" religion or a non-revelatory religion/philosophy such as Buddhism, were objectively examined using reason, it would be evident that they are not real and not to be feared. The famous chemist Marie Currie gave us all great advice regarding anything and everything that is intended to cause us to be fearful. She wrote:

"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."