EXORCISTS THINK THEY HAVE THE RIGHT TO DIAGNOSE THAT A PERSON'S SUFFERING IS DOWN TO DEMONS THAT NEED CASTING OUT BY RITUALS.
In many countries, Mexico comes to mind, teenage girls got caught up in a possession contagion. They felt that there was something inside them that did not belong to them and assumed this was the activity of some evil spirit if not the actual presence of someone like that. Note here that the subject of remote possession - a demon sending energy from far away to take away your agency - is something nobody talks about. It is always a case where only the notion of the demon inhabiting the person is assumed. Those who report being controlled at a distance are walked away from. For some reason, you are considered insane if you say you experienced such a thing. And if you think the being is inside you, even if you think it is like Legion from the Bible who Holy Trinity style can't decide if he is one person or many, the Church will contemplate considering that to be the truth.
Logically if you think some force is tampering with your agency, maybe taking over your hand or mouth or body, it is immaterial where it is.
Religion is engaging in a set-up here. It does not care if exorcism is the solution. It only cares that it wants it to be. For that, it needs you to say that the demon is indwelling you. Otherwise an attempt to cast it out cannot be justified. Remote control would just need something other than the exorcism. Perhaps the victim has to break the communication line but no exorcism would be needed for that.
The Church has zero test for whether a demon is in the person or only seems to be but is working from Hell far far away. A person who wants exorcism is going to have to say nothing if they suspect some force is interfering but there is no demon in them.
Exorcism is needed for ideological showmanship.
When somebody wants a supposed demon cast out, they also want their belief that there is a demon there affirmed. They feel important and special paradoxically. They have got this evil "spirit's" attention, attention that Nero and Hitler and Stalin and Mao never got. A person can get a buzz, a feeling of power, by being seen as a receptacle of some evil spirit. Hypochondriacs want to be possessed by an illness so much that they start to feel it is there. It is convenient that nobody seems to be possessed all the time!
Anyway back to the girls who felt they needed a demon's control over them broken or at least reduced. They fell into dangerous hands in most cases. Harm was done for feeling disconnected from something within, from your own body, is quite usual and normal especially if you are a young girl. A healthy girl can be ruined by falling under the influence of girls who are not mentally well. A schoolgirl can develop anorexia then other girls she knows, perhaps girls in her neighbourhood, her school, will be influenced. Soon it is not one girl but ten. Social contagion is real. It is like an epidemic without viruses and without bacteria.
Exorcists diagnosing possession is terrible. One shocking thing is that they have no concern if this is a teenage girl condition that is mistaken by the girl and others for something from hell literally. If a girl reports being possessed by an evil alien the exorcists will not perform the casting out ritual for her which they would do if she said it were a demon or at least that it could be one pretending to be an alien. A system of "care" where you get no help if you don't affirm the exorcists metaphysical cosmology is a system of abuse dressed up as care.
Look at the gospels. Apart from John they tell exorcism stories. It is extremely odd and implausible that Jesus never reported problems with long girls queuing up to him looking for exorcism. He never warned about contagion. It had to have been happening. You would not know it from the gospels for they are lying. Simple.
So apart from getting the alleged victim to diagnose themselves as having a spirit and diagnosing it as evil, how does the exorcist decide if a demon is really there and it is certain enough to warrant exorcism ceremonies?
Usually it is based on the alleged entity knowing things the victim should not. And the entity being able to abuse the body in a way that would be beyond the victim's capacity is another consideration. A victim who imagines she is possessed will react badly to holy objects such as crucifixes etc. It is assumed the entity can be fooled.
What the exorcist does is sprinkle the person with unblessed water and holy water. If they react every time holy water is actually used they know there is a demon there.
See how insane that is? The exorcist will sprinkle with prayer so why is the demon not reacting because of that even if the water is not blessed? The exorcist is clearly lying too. And a demon if it knows if water is blessed should know if it is not blessed either. And as for the knowledge thing, the Church never checks or cares how apparitions of Jesus or Mary say nothing that the witness does not already know.
All these checks are covers for how the exorcist does not care if there is a demon or not for real. He wants you to think there is one. He wants the victim to believe there is one.
A doctor needs to know what a sickness does and what causes it and what it will be expected to do. An exorcist cannot know if the person's own spirit is impersonating a demon. Or if Jesus Christ who the person might invite in as a Christian is doing it. Jesus said one time that he could not use Satan's power to cast out demons otherwise Satan's kingdom would collapse. "A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand". This was a strange argument for Jesus doing a handful of exorcisms would do it no harm. Had he not heard of strategy? And clearly he thought that Satan needed to send his minions to possess people to have a kingdom! That is a change from how he supposedly is the Prince of Evil and getting people to sin is what really matters. The exorcist cannot know if a demon or its power over a person will simply burn out. Many traditions say that evil or harmful entities get their power from people believing in them and fearing them so the exorcism attempts may help keep it active. And an exorcist assumes the demon will stay unless evicted which is another strange presumption.
Mainstream Christianity dislikes the notion that the victim is both possessed and also sinning to keep the demon there for that makes exorcists superfluous. It deprives it of any right to consider the person a true victim.
Jesus was utterly useless when it came to critical thinking regarding demonology so the exorcist industry acting in his name is gravely aberrant.
If Satan is the biggest demon he can possess his demons so that his kingdom will be undivided.
Also, why can't he have the biggest kingdom and allow for lesser ones? What if say Asmodeus runs his faction?
Is Jesus trying to protect a faction by pretending it is not there?
The scribes and Pharisees allegedly said that Jesus was getting demons out by the power of Beelzebub prince of demons. Why was that so pointed? Why not say that he was using black magic to transfer demons from one person to another while pretending this was about overcoming them, freeing the possessed? They were smart people. The story is a lie or solid evidence was showing that like Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet, Jesus at the start had been dabbling in the occult openly. In other words, while Smith had sacrificed a black dog to find treasure Jesus might have been claiming to have Satan as his genie in the bottle. Sacrifice was used in demonic religion to move demons around out of the way. Jesus had to have been accused of doing just that.
The exorcists in Christianity say that when faced with somebody who says they have demons and who are acting like its true, it is best to assume natural causes such as mental illness or even attention seeking. Cautioning that a mentally ill attention seeker may have a demon as well, the protocol is to find if nature cannot explain any of it and then to look for demons as a possible cause. This is admitting that demons have miracle powers! They are virtually gods if they can do magic like that. This fits in with Jesus' warning that the demons can do mighty miracles that would fool the very saints.
A crafty demon will act magically or miraculously instead of manipulating nature so that nature can explain but IS NOT THE RIGHT EXPLANATION. Looking for blatant miracles only encourages demons to hide themselves.
Unless exorcisms don't really work....
Demons don't hide themselves - at least in some cases. Or are the exorcists fooling us and lying that there is a demon there? The demons are not afraid of the exorcists or Jesus or anything if they possess openly. The New Testament has demons provoking Jesus who kicked them out of the victims.
Religionists all admit that assuming demons are at work too readily is going to harm the person and is immoral. It's bad for the exorcist too. But that is unavoidable when you see that a demon can discreetly use nature as an instrument. In that light, it could be finding a way to damage or direct a person's brain chemistry so that it looks like it is just a normal imbalance. The claim then that exorcists are really concerned for the victim does not hold water.
Many possessed people claim a curse did it to them. A demon may say that itself during an exorcism. Can we believe in the curse today? In many faiths, it is held that the curse is real. God calls people abominations or curses in the Bible and speaks of "purge the evil from your midst by getting rid of them". A possession may be linked to a curse. It could be a curse. Many faiths hold that to end a curse and to stop it infecting others you need to burn the cursed thing. Or if it is a person you get them murdered. Make no mistake. Some faiths hold that killing the possessed person is the only answer. It unleashes energy that reverses the curse. Or the curse has made its home in the person so to eradicate it you need to destroy the person. Jesus makes no comment on this teaching. He never says that that exorcism is always about prayers and fasting to get the demon out of somebody.
There is very little talk about the view that if a demon is within a person, it harms either just by being there or more actively. I mean if you have a toxic presence its merely being there is going to harm. Its hate and rage will infect the victim who will make it their own. The Church does not offer exorcism even to people who are exceptionally malicious even if they report a demonic presence. It is only offered when the person shows demonic action such as speaking in other languages or when the person acts as if somebody else has taken them over or has unusual strength. Again this shows exorcists just want their ideological superstition validated. It is not about opposing evil or hate or malice but only stopping the seemingly paranormal activity of the spirit.
If the Church really felt that demons live inside people, it would copy Jesus and use one of his most appalling methods. He got the demons out of the Legion-Gerasene demoniac by putting them into pigs. The pigs then killed themselves meaning the demons went off in search of somebody else. They had somebody in mind when that happened. And the Jews did say that Jesus was possessed...they knew better than anybody today. And Jesus did know his cross was looming and he let people put him on it. Just because the other exorcism accounts don't mention the demon being sent to an animal does not mean Jesus was not trying to do it. He didn't need to say it all the time. Perhaps the girl whose mother he called a dog was cured by the demon going into a cat. Nobody knows for Jesus didn't even go near her. He exorcised at a distance. No account gives anything more than a sketch. The Gerasene account is the best of the whole lot of them for detail.
Jesus did send his disciples out to cast out demons as well. He had them doing what he did in his name. So his exorcisms were an example.
By the way, Catholicism won't do distant exorcisms...not even if the victim wants it that way.
If you diagnose a disorder you have to, if possible, diagnose the remedy too. Jesus left no instructions but prayer and fasting but that is very vague. It is a sign that he had no clue what he was doing but didn't care. As we know, the gospels leave out the details of his exorcisms and the model he gave his own exorcising disciples. We only get skeletal information. Prayer could mean anything and everything. So was he using bad smells to drive a demon away as in the Book of Tobit? Was he using the name of King Solomon as was customary then? Was he sacrificing animals to gain the power to eject demons? Pagan and Jewish exorcists offered animals to demons to bribe them to leave. Different motivations were involved none of which were mutually exclusive. Doing harm to an animal was thought to unleash a malevolent power that could terrorise a demon. Or the demon accepted the abuse of the animal in lieu of living in a person. Or the animal was killed after the exorcist tried to breathe the demons into it so that the demons would be sent back to Hell. We see something like that kind of thinking when Jesus moved demons from the possessed man to several pigs which then went and drowned themselves. We are not saying Jesus set up an altar every time he met a seeming possession case. He could have been doing the rites in case he would encounter somebody needing help. He could have been prepared.
Diagnosis by an exorcist is a many sided issue. Exorcists diagnosing demons is one side. It means they are diagnosing that the person is not mentally ill at least when exhibiting possession signs. Deciding that if the person is mentally ill and this has nothing to do with this means they are making assumptions about the person's illness than only a medical professional can decide. So far they are diagnosing a demon and the limits of the mental illness. Often they think the two are intertwined which makes it worse. No responsible scientific society accepts such behaviour. Exorcists belong in jail. There is every indication that it is not about the victim but about hatred for imaginary enemies and seeking validation for theological nonsense. And remember exorcists are paid ....