Abuse and Heresy

Slacktivist is on a roll at the moment. This is what he has to say about the Satanic Ritual Abuse myth propagated by some fundamentalists, which hit the headlines a few years back and caused a lot of genuine human suffering, not just in America, but in Britain too.

The strange thing about believers in "Satanic Ritual Abuse" is not just that their belief persists despite an utter lack of evidence, but that they seem so eager for these things to really be true. They seem to want it to be the case that a vast, secret, predatory network exists that abducts, abuses and murders tens of thousands of children every year as part of its ritualistic worship of Satan.

This is not a healthy thing to want to believe is true. And yet, despite the fact that no actual practitioners of Satanic Ritual Abuse have ever been found, thousands of people believe in it because they somehow want it to be so.

I suspect some of these fundamentalists have fallen into the heresy of Dualism, their worldview, especially the obsession with sex, seems very, very Manichean. It also ties in with the Premillenial Dispensationalist heresy which circulates in the same circles.

And these people, holding beliefs I consider to be deeply and dangerously heretical, are the first to screech "Heresy!" whenever a mainstream cleric suggests that some detail of The Bible might be interpreted metaphorically rather than literally. What was that line about motes and beams again?