My guess is not as bad as being murdered by your parents.

If your family was anything like mine, you heard a lot about the devil growing up. Things not to do because they would attract the devil's attention, things that were obviously satanic and to avoid, etc. Saying the word "Satan", listneing to "rock and roll", watching "MTV", playing D&D, staying up past my bedtime, were all things would some how give the prince of darkness some kind of evil hard on and were forbiden at one time or another. But that was all pretty harmless, the freaks were the people in the mid 80's flipping out about Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) and basically holding a witch hunt to find those nasty satanist's who were abusing and sacrificing upwards of 60,000 people people a year.

I could write pages on this topic alone but I've got other things to talk about today. Basically it was one of those things that caught on like wildfire and scared the hell out of Sunday Schools across the country until years later when someone had the brains to point out that it was all a hoax, and never really existed. In fact, if you called a police department today to report SRA they'd forward you directly to the guy that deal with elvis, ghost, and alien sightings.

Anyway, enough of that. People freaked because they thought kids were getting killed for Satan. They weren't, people stopped freaking. I want to talk about how this is different from kids getting killed for Jesus. Warren Ellis point to this CNN story about a Georga Couple charged in possible exorcism death. It reads:

"A husband and wife have been charged with murdering a 6-year-old girl whose back was broken in what police said may have been an exorcism gone wrong...

Police said the dead girl, whose body was discovered in a motel room, had been strangled and stabbed, and her back was broken. An autopsy was planned. Based on what the adults told authorities, investigators believe "they were involved possibly in a ritual of some sort," police spokesman John Quigley said. "It may have had something to do with undemonizing the child in some manner."

So. These people killed thier kid in the process of trying to get demons out of her. OK, so, outside of the fact that they are obviously off their rocker, where's the outrage? No need right, just a couple of kooks. A Google search for Exorcism brings up a lot of similar stories, and religioustollerance.org even says:

"Physical abuse during exorcisms occasionally causes serious injury or death. Accidental homicides occur at the rate of about one per year in North America. In the past few years, we have noticed news items about exorcism murders in Ontario, Canada, and in California and New Jersey in the U.S."

That's about one more a year actual cases, of what boils down to Christian Ritual Abuse, than SRA ever found. And that's just the deaths, plenty of kids who don't die sure have to suffer through all kinds of abuse because their parents are psychos. However, I'm pretty sure there's not going to be nationwide sweeps of Christians and anyone who mentions the word "Jesus" to lock up the nuts and protect the kids. Why is this shit, done in the name of an "acceptable" religion almost OK? Sure, they were arrested but if this had happened because of a Muslim ritual, or a Satanic ritual, people wouldn't be writing it off as "a few loonies" they'd be raising hell that the whole religion was to blame. Hell, Doctors can be murdered over religion, and the murderer is a hero to some people.