I recently came across the news story Updated: Vatican steps back from Discovery's 'Exorcist Files' by T.L. Stanley, Los Angeles Times, January 10, 2011, according to which:

"Aside from the priests, experts like Richard Gallagher, a faculty member at Columbia University's Psychoanalytic Institute, will be part of "The Exorcist Files." So will ( Read more... )

In the Mystic Wicks forum I saw a post about The New SRA Revival... by Bryon Morrigan, who also has a website and a blog. On his blog, a post titled Intolerant of the Intolerant contained a very interesting ancient Roman quote about Roman pagan rumor-mongering against Christians, reminiscent of today's "Satanic Ritual Abuse" scare. Among other ( Read more... )

One of my heroes is Brad Hicks, who was one of the earliest activists against the "Satanic Ritual Abuse" scare back in the 1980's. (He discusses this briefly in the following posts of his here on LiveJournal: Wicca Lies (part 3): Hierarchy and Wow, I Haven't Been Threatened for My Writing in More than a Decade.) He was president of the Alliance ( Read more... )

In one of my replies in the thread Grandmothers arrested over 'satanic sex abuse' on "satanicnews," I wrote:
I do not deny that human sacrifice exists. However, it exists in the context of religious and magical worldviews that are largely (though not completely) extinct (unless you stretch the definition of "human sacrifice" to include things like ( Read more... )

Just yesterday I got a LiveJournal account and began exploring here. Among other things I joined a few "communities" that looked relevant to Satanism. One of these was satanicnews ("Satanism in the news"). At first I assumed -- wrongly, it turns out -- that the owner of this community was a Satanist with an interest in keeping tabs on our ( Read more... )