A woman here in Oregon was couch surfing at another woman’s home. Basically she was staying there for free. Well, this week, the house guest was found with all sorts of strange things, doing some sort of murder/autopsy on her landlady’s cat.
Well, the house guest was arrested, and one of the Oregon reporters went to speak to her in jail.
Ashley, the twenty-one year old house guest said that “My body was there, I was sitting there like this and there was something else doing it. Like it just used me.”
She also said that she loves animals.
Then of course we have those folks down in Chile who burned a three day old baby on a bonfire because they thought that the newborn was the Antichrist.
You know that I believe in absolutely everything. So possession is not outside my realm of belief and understanding. I get it, I believe that it happens, probably more frequently than we might even think.
However…let’s just for a moment consider that it might not be possession. After all, courts can’t do anything about a spiritual possession, thank goodness. Can you imagine how ridiculous our justice system would be if it took into consideration any pseudo science at all?
In fact, I was recently a family minister in a court case where the ex-husband brought a bag full of all sorts of goodies that I had made for his ex-wife over the years, amulets of protection, house blessings, protections for the kids and even a banishing of the ex-husband’s mistress. He poured the contents out onto the table and told the judge that I had caused him to contract a virus, a kidney infection, as well as problems with his prostate through said contents. In each of these medical situations, he had sought medical help and had to be on antibiotics for weeks with each incident. Because of said situations, I should not be allowed to testify.
I know that right now you are imagining the judge’s face, right? Yeah, I know.
Anyway, the judge proceeded to scold the ex-husband, explaining to him that (his word) witchcraft doesn’t cause illnesses, that whether I created those items or not has no bearing in the case and that because I was still the spiritual adviser of his family, I was still a viable witness to what had occurred within his marriage to my client.
Truth is, my workings for the client were never about the ex-husband. Well the banishing was, but none of the workings were to cause him to be sick, cause him to die or cause him to need antibiotics. Because he had known that he was not being a good husband and father, he may have inadvertently caused himself to have illnesses, we know that our emotional state can affect our physical state.
I remember an episode of either Buffy the Vampire Slayer or its spin-off Angel, in which a little boy is possessed and then when they finally get the demon out of the little boy, the demon says that the little boy was so horrific, so sadistic, that the demon itself was terrified, trying to escape from this little monster’s body, mind and questionable soul.
We want to believe that the human soul cannot be capable of such horrors. We want to believe that it is something more sinister, more supernatural, which causes people to behave in a way that is beyond animal nature. We want to believe that those same horrors can be explained, banished and sent away to some inexplicable Hell from whence they came.
Yeah, I do too. I want to believe that this young woman certainly couldn’t have done something like this, with her own two hands, and indeed she must have been possessed.
It’s unlikely.
What is likely is that the same monstrous behavior which took a newborn and tossed it onto a fire, was present when that cat suffered.
The human soul. We are not exempt from such behavior. We can explain it away with psychoanalysis, religion, and even sociological studies, but when it comes right down to it, there is nothing supernatural which causes this behavior. There are no demons which possess our bodies and make us commit cruelties and atrocities. In fact, I’m sure that if we asked a demon, he or she would be appalled by this behavior, after all, we are human.
Then again, maybe the more time goes by and more horrors are committed by human beings, the more demons laugh at us, at our supposed quest for good, our supposed search for redemption and the love of whatever god we might worship. Maybe they are amused and shocked and awed and completely horrified by our choices, by our actions, by our very thoughts.
Maybe they sit there watching us, peeking out at us from behind hands held up in front of their eyes, not wanting to see the entire picture, just watching enough to be scared, to get a little adrenaline rush. Maybe they watch us the way that we watch horror films.
Maybe they laugh when they are blamed for our behavior, maybe they…in unison, cheer “The devil made me do it!” every time someone uses that as an excuse. Maybe they wait, hiding, for the moment that one of them is actually tried in a court of law. Or maybe they are pissed. Pissed that we even for a moment, think that it could be their fault. Pissed that this young woman killed a living creature, pissed that the Chilean mother offered up her newborn baby to the flames of a bonfire, pissed that there are things like this going on all the time, all around us, yet the religious right is still going on about such far from evil things as gay marriage.
Maybe they’re confused as to why the truly evil continues all around us and yet the justice system says that animal abusers will get nearly no jail time at all, rapists will be set free before their victims are even finished with their first rounds of counseling, and child abusers are put on house arrest. Maybe we’ve got their panties in a bunch over how we seem to simply let the true horrors slide, while the imagined affronts seem to spill over and absorb everyone’s lives.
Interesting idea, isn’t it? That the epitome of evil, demons…might just be scared to death by the human soul.
Hellish Behavior 