Weak attempts to link the Connecticut shootings to Devil worship

Tabloids, Christian websites, and YouTube auteurs are attempting to link Newtown, Connecticut, killer Adam Lanza to Satanism - on the softest evidence you can possibly imagine.

A Daily Mail article quotes Trevor L. Todd, a "former classmate" of Lanza, as saying that Adam once had a "Satan worshiping" web page with a banner that featured the word Devil in a red, "Gothic-style" font. This vaguely-remembered website supposedly created by a middle school student is the only evidence presented to suggest that Lanza was a Satanist. To date, the web page's existence hasn't even been confirmed.
The article goes on to claim that FBI investigators "strongly believe he made use of devil-worshiping and suicide sites and boasted of his murder plans on message forums". No source is given for this information.

World Net Daily doesn't have any more solid information than the Daily Mail, but the writer of this article attempts to give the story some teeth by throwing in references to other murders committed by "Satanists". Aaron Klein even speculates about a possible Satanic conspiracy:

"Was Lanza part of a larger Satanic or ritualistic subculture locally or online in which he could have revealed his plans or could have even received support in preparing for the killings?"

Then he takes other media outlets to task for failing to report on the Satanic angle of the Aurora, Colorado shootings. "Although largely underreported, Satanic subculture and so-called devil worship has been a factor in numerous other mass killings, including the recent Batman shooting massacre."
At this point, Klein is forced to  concede that James Holmes wasn't actually a Satanist; he just liked the Joker as played by Heath Ledger a lot, and the Joker had Satanic attributes. You know, like every supervillain in every comic book ever.

Klein goes on to educate WND readers about other infamous "Satanic" murders, starting with the Manson Family killings:
"According to reports, Tate was originally selected to play the main character in her husband’s Rosemary’s Baby, a film about a pregnant woman who fears that her husband may have made a pact with neighbors to use her child as a human sacrifice in their occult rituals. Actress Mia Farrow ultimately got the role, while Tate did make a brief appearance in the film."
This is wrong on just about every level. Sharon Tate was never considered for the role of Rosemary in her husband's film. The film itself has absolutely nothing to do with the murders; the Tate/Polanski residence was targeted by Manson and his followers because Polanski and Tate were subletting the house from music producer Terry Melcher, a man Manson deeply resented for failing to turn him into a recording superstar.

Richard Ramirez is the next "Satanic" killer on the list, and he's the only one who really qualifies for inclusion. Ramirez did identify himself as a Satanist.
But Sean Sellers, the teenager who converted to Christianity in jail after murdering his parents? He may have promoted himself as a "reformed Satanist" who killed only because he was under the Devil's influence, but an examination of his criminal appeals tells a different story. Sellers was so desperate to escape the death penalty for crimes he admittedly committed that he pled diminished capacity due to demonic possession, and later claimed to have Multiple Personality Disorder. Sellers was a shrewdly manipulative man who knew exactly what he was doing at all times.

The last case Klein cites is the murder of Steven Newberry by a trio of teens, led by a charismatic thug named Jim Hardy. The killers practiced some rudimentary form of "Satanism" that mostly revolved around torturing and killing cats. The murder of their "friend" Newberry was a thrill killing that would have been committed with or without their childish attempts at devil worship.
Klein's efforts to lay the blame for Adam Lanza's crimes on Satanism are baseless. To call Lanza's evil deeds "Satanic" because he allegedly expressed interest in the Devil in his teens is just as absurd as labelling a murder "Christian" because the killer was once an altar boy.

Some Christians don't want to stop at blaming Satanism for the massacre, though. They also want to blame the victims' parents and even God himself, arguing that mass murder of 6-year-olds is God's just punishment for "kicking God out of schools". In the video below, Christian rapper Tireo tells us that God granted Satan permission to "demonize" Adam Lanza so that he would murder children, but the media won't disclose this because Adam was white. Also, the victims were handpicked (by God?) because their parents "had sin in their lives."

In the News

People often ask me, "But haven't you ever come across a real case of ritual abuse?". The answer is yes, I have. And I can tell you this: Almost without exception, that ritual abuse has involved small Christian cults, rather than international Satanic ones. For example, the Hosanna Church cult in Ponchatoula, Louisiana, was originally branded a Satanic cult that ritually abused children, but victims who testified at the trial of pastor Louis Lamonica Jr. mentioned only ritual abuse committed in a Christian context.
Now we have even graver allegations being made against a young Bible study leader in Kansas City, Missouri. Micah Moore, 22, has been charged with the murder of nurse Bethany Deaton, 27, and claims that he was persuaded to kill her by Bethany's own husband, Tyler Deaton. Tyler is an "ex-gay" who has headed a small, tight-knit Christian group for the past several years. Some members are so devoted to Tyler that they followed him from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas, to his current home in Kansas City. Tyler and Bethany had been married for just three months when she died. Bethany's death on October 30 initially appeared to be a suicide (her body was found in a van parked near Longview Lake, a plastic bag over her head). No one suspected otherwise until Moore turned himself in earlier this month. He told police that Tyler has been engaging in "spiritual sex" with several of the young men who share his house, and that he routinely drugged Bethany so that his followers could rape her. Moore even claimed to possess video footage of these sexual assaults. Fearful that Bethany would tell her therapist about what was going on, Tyler approached Micah with the idea of murdering her and disguising her death as a suicide.
At this early stage, it's possible that Moore's story will turn out to be false. Maybe he killed his leader's wife on his own and pinned the blame on Tyler. However, at least three of the Deatons' four roommates have confirmed that Tyler was having sex with them and that he termed these relations "spiritual". The fourth roommate feels he was being groomed to become one of Tyler's sexual partners.
In Texas, Tyler felt that the official student clubs at Southwestern University weren't hardcore enough for him, so he formed his own independent group. Members would spend hours of every day in the campus chapel, praying and singing under Tyler's direction. They also engaged in "holy laughter", and attempted faith healing of severely disabled people on at least two occasions. Tyler preached to his group about the evils of homosexuality, claiming he "overcame" his own gay orientation through the power of Christ. By the end of the 2008-2009 school year, Southwestern administrators were so troubled by the group's activities that they denied Deaton further use of the chapel. That's when Tyler, Bethany, and several young men decided to relocate to a more sympathetic school, the International House of Prayer University in Kansas City. In Missouri, Bethany and Tyler attended Forerunner Christian Fellowship Church. They married in August of this year.
If the allegations made by Micah Moore are true, then a murderous Christian sex cult has been active on the campus of a Christian university for the past three years, engaging in ritualistic sex and rape under the direction of a charismatic but deranged leader. Will we call this group's practices "Christian ritual abuse"? Or will we continue to insist that abusive sexual practices are the exclusive domain of Satanists, when all evidence indicates that Satanic crime is, in fact, far less common than Christian crime? When you think about it, this makes sense. There are far fewer Satanists in America than Christians, so the rate of crimes committed by Christians should be much higher than the rate of crimes committed by Satanists. This includes sexual abuse and murder.

Another Forerunner was in the news this week, when 19-year-old Two and a Half Men star Angus T. Jones declared in a video produced by The Forerunner Chronicles that he feels terrible about being on a show that is "filth" and might even be contributing to Satan's plan to subvert humanity. He urged Americans to avoid television altogether, in fact. He has since qualified his remarks, stating that he has a lot of respect for everyone who works on the show; he considers them members of his family. He has not attempted to explain how a program produced by such good people can be a tool of the Devil.
The man who appears beside Jones in the video is Christopher "Forerunner" Hudson, a YouTuber who believes that Jay-Z is a Satan-worshiping Freemason. Hudson also buys into and promotes a broad range of conspiracy nonsense: The death of Osama bin Laden was faked, Michael Jackson's death was engineered to distract the world from the Pope's plea for a New World Order, etc. 

Charisma magazine is the most popular Christian magazine in the world. Despite its conservative slant, the articles featured in it are usually timely and concisely written, with little of the bombast you'll see on TV programs like The 700 Club or Jack Van Impe Presents. What, then, shall we make of a recent article titled "Can You Be Raped by the Devil?", which claims that the Medieval notion of succubi and incubi invading our bedrooms at night is valid, and that the content of our dreams can be influenced by these demons? The article, which relies heavily on the anecdotal accounts of one former stripper, even suggests that sexual orientation can be altered by sexual demons. Does ancient superstition such as this really belong in the world's foremost Christian publication, read by millions? What is this teaching the younger readers of the magazine - that every wet dream they experience in adolescence is actually a visitation from a demon bent on making them gay?

Pat Robertson and the "Demonic"

Media Matters has a story on Pat Robertson's growing catalogue of things that are "demonic", which includes (but is certainly not limited to): alien abductions, anything having to do with Eastern religions or cultures, homosexuality, and the Twilight franchise. I can't really disagree with him on that last one.

Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network is still the number one Christian network in the world, and its flagship program, The 700 Club, is watched by about a million people every day.

The West Memphis Three are OUT!

This is a beautiful day: The day that I remove the "Free the West Memphis Three" posters from my blogs. After spending the entirety of their young adulthoods in prison, Jessie Misskelley, Jason Baldwin, and Damien Echols have been freed after a plea deal. Sadly, the deal prevents them from suing for wrongful prosecution or anything else related to their false convictions, and it is incredibly unlikely that West Memphis investigators will ever admit their mistakes and search for the real killer or killers.
Not just three, but six boys' worlds were destroyed by the murders of Stevie Branch, Michael Moore, and Christopher Byers. Now that the West Memphis Three have some justice, let's see some justice for the three boys who lost their lives. Enough time has been wasted.

I'm dismayed by some of the media coverage of this. For instance, ABC News posted a video with the sub-headline "Three men convicted of killing three boys in a satanic cult ritual are set free." Really? The prosecution couldn't present any evidence of a Satanic ritual, because there wasn't any. At all.

Two Recent Films that Promote Satanic Panic

Jeremiah Films has released a documentary entitled PopCulture Paganism, taking a right-handed swipe at the teen vampire trend, which they call "Neovampirism". The filmmakers try to lump it in with Paganism as well as New Agey stuff like The Secret. The PopPaganism page features a glut of links to crimes and outrages that have pretty much nothing to do with the topics of the documentary. This film is apparently unconnected to the 13 other anti-Pagan films J.F. has made.

As you probably know, Jeremiah Films is the low-budget Christian Right/conspiranoia production company that churned out The Clinton Chronicles in the '90s. Despite plugs on The 700 Club, the video ended up losing money after J.F. CEO Pat Matrisciana lost a defamation lawsuit. Since then, J.F. has stuck mainly to safer targets: Harry Potter, Mormons, and of course Freemasons.

The other film is a low-budget horror flick about a Satanic cult that ritually sacrifices random folks, aptly titled Satanic Panic. This wouldn't be a big deal on its own, but unfortunately the movie is being promoted as "inspired by true accounts", just like The Exorcism of Emily Rose, The Haunting in Connecticut, and The Fourth Kind (which was really just a hoax). The film's official website explains that the real Satanic Panic of the '80s was sparked by a "rash" of unexplained disappearances throughout the U.S. This is not true. Disappearances played a very minor role in the hysteria to come, and at any rate the disappearance rate was not elevated in any noticeable way at that time. People were simply paying more attention to disappearances after the high-profile cases of Etan Patz, Adam Walsh, and other children.
Besides that, it strikes me as rather inappropriate to base a schlocky slasher film (complete with an ugly hillbilly) on the testimony of unbalanced people who, for the most part, really believed they had been tortured by Satanists as children. Real Satanic Panic ruined many lives, families, and minds. It's not entertaining.

Iowa Press Already Blaming Child Murders on Satanism

The murder of two little girls in Sioux City, Iowa, committeed five days ago, has already been solved.

By the media.

When police responded to the report of a fire at 1420 Nebraska Street on Sunday, January 4, they discovered the bodies of Kendra Suing, 10, and Alysha Suing, 8. Both girls had been murdered. The only other person at the premises was their stepfather, Lawrence Harris Sr., who reportedly told the authorities that the deaths had occurred in the course of some kind of ritual; Harris mentioned something about a dangerous "spell gone bad". He has been charged with killing his stepdaughters.

The Sioux City press doesn't have much more information than this. The autopsy results have not been released; a requested psychiatric evaluation of Harris has not yet been conducted; family members questioned about Harris say they don't know him very well; Harris's religious affiliation, if any, is not known. So the media has turned to a reliable stand-in for hard news: Fanning the flames of anti-occult hysteria.

Yesterday, the Sioux City Journal printed a story by reporters Dolly Butz and Travis Coleman titled "Girls had many questions about witchcraft, pastor says." Pastor Cary Gordon of the Cornerstone World Outreach church, where the Suing sisters attended a youth club for "at-risk" kids, is quoted as saying that a church bus driver fielded lots of questions about witchcraft from the girls.

Why were the girls asking such questions? According to Gordon, "Our bus captain got the creepy feeling that they obviously had a lot of weird stuff going on in their house." However, the article also states that the questions came after a "summer lesson about the sinfulness of practicing witchcraft."

Let's get this straight. We don't know if the Suing girls learned anything about witchcraft at home. We do know that, for some reason, they were being educated about witchcraft at church. (This does not strike me as an age-appropriate topic, but that's another post.) Therefore, it's not at all reasonable to assume the girls' questions were prompted by anything that was going on at home. And it's not at all reasonable for the newspaper to report such speculation. In fact, it's pseudojournalistic, sensationalistic, and irresponsible.

Furthermore, the deaths of these two girls is a reprehensible act, no matter who committed it or why. It doesn't make much difference if the perp was a Christian, a Jew, an agnostic, or anything else. Harris must be prosecuted for his alleged crimes, not for any alleged religious affiliations or beliefs. It disturbs me that prosecutors have already declared that Harris was "practicing Satanism and that the killings were part of a ritual from a satanic bible".

The first Journal article linking the murders to witchcraft was printed on Monday, the day after the murders.

Need a Laugh?

Or maybe a good cry, at the stupidity of your fellow man?

Then read the Conservapedia wiki entry on homosexuality. It starts out with all the brilliance you would expect from fundamentalist young Earth Creationists: "In regards to homosexuality research, much of the research that has been in regards to the causes of homosexuality and the effects of homosexuality has been done since the latter part of the 20th century."

And it somehow manages to go downhill from there.

I won't go into all the inaccuracies and other howlers in the entry, because my point (for the purposes of this post, anyway), centers on the captioned photograph that appears about halfway down the page. It's so blatant as to be almost parodic, and for Conservapedia that's saying quite a lot. Beneath a familiar bald head, we read: "The occultist Aleister Crowley was a bisexual and was dubbed in his lifetime 'the most wicked man on earth'. Aleister Crowley stated: 'I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word. I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.'" (Other illustrations include an artist's rendering of the destruction of Sodom and photos of prominent "former" gays and lesbians.) There isn't much I can say about this that isn't blazingly obvious. I'll just add that the entry doesn't contain any information about the bi/homosexuality of J. Edgar Hoover (or a possible link between being deeply closeted and persecuting Communists), Ted Haggard, or Errol Flynn (or a possible link between being deeply closeted and being a Nazi).

On a more serious note, check out Tom Rawstorne's May Mail article "Why no child is safe from the sinister cult of emo", which is not a satirical piece. We see BE and AE (Before Emo and After Emo) photos of 13-year-old suicide Hannah Bond, a fan of My Chemical Romance. The pictures look identical aside from some eyeliner, bringing to mind the Canadian Goth murder newspaper coverage of a few years ago. Rawstorne provides pointers on How to Spot an Emo:

They wear "black, favouring tight jeans, T-shirts, studded belts and sneakers or skater shoes." No, not sneakers! Anything but that! God have mercy on our souls!

Sheesh. But it gets worse.

"Emos like guitar-based rock with emotional lyrics." They particularly enjoy My Chemical Romance and Blink 182, according to Rawstorne, who apparently researches teenage subcultures in his own ass.

"Some describe it as a cult or a sect." Hannah told her bewildered parents that her wrist-cuts were part of an "emo initiation ceremony". She also talked about "The Black Parade", "a place where all emos believe they go when they die."

Once again, the media somehow manages to avoid examining the actual social issues behind a story (undiagnosed depression, suicide) while zeroing in on almost entirely insignificant peripheral matters (crappy music and questionable fashion sense).

If Mr. Rawstorne and his pseudojournalistic ilk want to address a troubling youth trend, why not examine the callousness of those who enjoy mocking suicides and harrassing the families of children who kill themselves? They seem far more emotionally disturbed than any emo.

*Refreshing Subtlety*

That venerable gray lady of the London press, The Sun, has printed a sober and thoughtful piece on a series of Satanic crimes in Russia, titled "Knifed 666 times each and eaten". It explores the nuances of Satanically inspired murders and teenage violence with its characteristic reserve, while conveying only the most salient facts.

"The pals, three girls and a boy aged 16 or 17, were all Goths."

"Locals said they all knew [alleged leader Nikolai] Ogolobyak, whose grandmother revealed he had sung in the local church choir as a boy."

"The dad of victim Andrei [Sorokin] said: 'My son said he had Goths and Satanists among his friends'."

"Moscow alone has 15 [Satanic cults] whose worship is thought to revolve around symbols such as 666, an upturned five-pointed star within a circle and the swastika."

"Devil worshippers believe in putting themselves first and their core values include pride, indulgence, ambition and meeting sexual desires." [emphasis in original]

"In Britain, about 400 people list their religion as Satanism. Followers meet at a “Grotto” for rituals with candles and swords run by witches and warlocks."

Blogger Selwyn Duke at The New American, commenting on the case, warns us not to dismiss the Satanic angle of these horrific murders, as morally relativistic and "philisophically sloppy" people like me are inclined to do. "To them, these are just some bad kids who did a very bad thing. End of story."

Well, yes, it is the end of the story. The Sun and other tabloids may milk it for a few more days, but it's already clear that if these teens are guilty of killing other teens, their Goth sensibilities and half-baked attempts at Satanism had little to do with their crimes. Anyone disturbed and amoral enough to murder others in cold blood doesn't need Satan as an excuse. (Case in point: The "Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs", three non-Satanist teenaged boys, brutally tortured and killed about 20 people just for the hell of it.)
Also, there have been more Christian serial killers and mass murderers than Satanic ones. But plain old Judeo-Christian crime doesn't make suitably lurid newspaper material, just as real breasts on a Sun girl will never do.

And with that thought, I return to The Sun to read their captivating, front-page thought piece on the global implications of Katy Perry's new bikini.