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From: jimdbb@aol.com (JimDBB)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Date: 20 Feb 2002 16:43:09 GMT
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Subject: Demons and Delusion      ( How about Body thetans)
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Demons and delusions 

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Feb. 17, 2002

By GAYLE WHITE
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer

What could make mothers kill their children?

When Andrea Yates goes on trial Monday in a Houston courtroom for drowning her
five children, Jerry Evers expects to experience disturbing flashbacks.

Since the Yates case first made the news, Evers, 44, police chief of Enigma, in
South Georgia near Tifton, has been reliving Jan. 2, 1980, the day sheriff's
officers came to tell him his three children were dead.

"Basically, the situation in Texas is just a remake of my case," said Evers,
who has since remarried and has another family.

Yates, 37, admitted killing her four sons and daughter, the oldest 7, the
youngest 6 months.

Like the Yates children, Evers' little girls died in a bathtub at the hand of
their mother. As relatives played checkers in an adjoining room of the Everses'
home in Leesburg, Fla., Dianne Evers held her children's faces underwater.
Twins Sherrie and Carrie were 4. Baby Mandy was 2.

Both cases are full of religious undertones that raise questions about faith,
madness and even Satan himself.

Andrea Yates and Dianne Evers had histories of psychiatric or psychological
treatment and connections to strict, fundamentalist Christianity. Yates and her
husband had as a religious mentor traveling preacher Michael Woronieck, known
for the publication Perilous Times. Evers says he and his wife were part of an
independent Baptist church in Leesburg that "promoted some real strong . . .
hard-hearted beliefs" about children and discipline. 

By performing her perverse baptismal rite, Yates reportedly believed her
children would go directly to paradise. As her uncle attempted to pull her
children from the water, Dianne Evers screamed, "They are better off with God."

Both women also expressed some desire to be executed -- Yates to be freed from
the evil inside her; Evers to join her children in heaven.

Dianne Evers, then 23, was found not guilty by reason of insanity in a
three-hour nonjury trial. Psychiatrists testified that she was severely
schizophrenic and had delusions that she was Mary, the mother of Jesus, and was
hearing voices telling her that her children would be better off outside this
world.

"It was like she was more like a robot than a person at that time," psychiatry
professor George Barnard of the University of Florida testified after examining
her. The case dominated the news in Central Florida but never gained great
national exposure.

In the highly publicized Yates case, as in the Evers case, a court must
determine the legal issue of whether the defendant was mentally capable of
taking responsibility for her actions. Yates, like Evers, has pleaded not
guilty by reason of insanity -- a defense many legal experts say stands little
chance of succeeding.

Her lawyers blame a severe case of postpartum depression. But Yates herself
raises another, much murkier issue -- the possibility of demonic possession.

She told doctors she wanted her head shaved to expose "666," the mark of the
Antichrist, on her scalp.

Jerry Evers says a similar force of evil might be responsible for the deaths of
his children. "I really believe it's a satanic delusion that Dianne had come up
with."

That idea in itself might seem insane to many people, but others consider it
credible. Americans are evenly split on the question of whether humans can be
possessed by the devil, according to a 2001 Gallup survey. Forty-one percent of
Americans questioned said yes, 41 percent no, and 16 percent said they were not
sure. The rest gave no answer. A majority of people who said religion is "very
important" in their lives -- 55 percent -- accepted the possibility of demonic
possession.

The Yates and Evers cases "could be mental illness, could be demonic
involvement and could be overlap," says Fred Dickason, retired chairman of the
theology department at the evangelical Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.
"Demons can fake anything. The problem is in our Western society, we have so
discounted the spiritual world that we haven't given it proper weight in the
recognition of maladies."

Religious delusions can be considered along with any other evidence when a
court evaluates an insanity defense, says Bob Wilson, a former DeKalb County
district attorney who is now a lawyer in private practice. "A delusion that you
are the Virgin Mary or that you are possessed by the devil is . . . viable, or
valid, for evidentiary purposes." 

What matters, he says, is whether delusions are so overpowering that people are
not in control of their actions. "We don't punish people for wrongdoing they
were mentally incapable of fostering or knowing about," he says.

During his career, Wilson said, he has seen "a guy who thinks he's being
controlled from outer space, one who believed the baby being born to his wife
was the Second Coming, people who believed they were Jesus and people who
believed they were possessed by the devil himself."

Wilson, an elder in the mainline Presbyterian Church, does not rule out the
possibility of a demonic presence in some cases.

"There have been a few instances over my career -- and I'm not the only one
that would tell you this -- that I can remember coming eye to eye with a
defendant and I knew at that very moment I was seeing the personification of
evil, call it what you will, the devil or Satan," he says. "I've seen the
absolute bowels of hell in the eyes of some people. It was so overpowering as
to be something you could feel down to your very soul. It's scary but it's
real."

Jerry Evers, who was separated from Dianne at the time of his children's
deaths, has no doubt that evil -- beyond his wife's psychiatric problems --
played a role.

An active Southern Baptist who started a ministry with fellow law enforcement
officers, Evers forgives his former wife, but cannot excuse what she did on the
grounds that she was rushing her children to the hereafter. 

"The woman is definitely sick," he says, "but to use that as a defense to
commit murder, especially of a harmless child . . . that's a slap in every
Christian's face."

Visions and voices

Because religion and science often operate in different realms, mental health
professionals may be ill-equipped to discern when faith moves into madness.

"There are no clear clinical guidelines to distinguish between 'normal'
religious beliefs and 'pathological' religious delusions," says Dr. Joseph
Pierre, a psychiatrist at UCLA's medical school.

The split between religion and the behavioral sciences begins with the lexicon,
says Ralph Hood, professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee at
Chattanooga. A psychologist may call a "hallucination" what a religious
believer would call a "vision" or an "apparition," he says. 

While eyebrows in some circles might rise at claims of divine visions and
voices, belief in those phenomena "is certainly not, in any basic sense,
abnormal," says Hood, who has written extensively about religion and
psychology.

The concept of a deity with an active role in daily affairs, intervening and
answering prayer "is the everyday meat and potatoes of mainstream religion," he
says. "Our culture is just not very good at incorporating these experiences
into the general dialogue, so that people tend to be private about them."

This does not mean that religious people never become psychotic.

If a person is religious in "normal" life, Hood says, then "that's going to be
the framework in which you experience your madness." 

Yates, Dianne Evers and other people who express forces of good and evil in
religious terms are simply using the "ultimate metaphors" of their culture,
says Jack Felton, a licensed therapist, ordained minister and head of the New
Hope Christian Counseling Center in Huntington Beach, Calif. "If they lived in
Greek times, it would be Zeus or Hades."

In identifying with the Virgin Mary, Evers was trying to be "above reproach,"
says Felton, co-author of "Toxic Faith," a book about destructive religious
systems.

The fear of having their children possessed by Satan could be very real to the
women, he says, "but it's moved out of the real world and into insanity."

Several branches of Christianity acknowledge the possibility that the devil can
insinuate himself into the lives of mortal men and women.

The Roman Catholic Church, the world's largest Christian denomination, has a
long tradition of exorcism. 

"The church holds that people are subject to demonic influences," says Mark
Jordan, a Roman Catholic professor of religion at Emory University. Three years
ago, the Vatican introduced the first new ritual for exorcism since 1614,
urging, for the first time, that church-approved exorcists consult medical
professionals, such as psychologists or psychiatrists, when appropriate.

'Demons do walk this earth'

Dickason, an evangelical minister, says he has participated in more than 600
exorcisms. In his book "Demon Possession and the Christian," he recounts how he
evokes and confronts evil spirits, asking, "What do you think of the Lord
Jesus?" and other religious questions. 

Dickason and the Roman Catholic Church have similar lists of symptoms of
demonic possession, or "demonization" as Dickason prefers to call it. The
characteristics include superhuman strength, speaking in unknown languages or
strange voices, fits of rage, sudden changes in personality, fear of crowds and
resistance to religious or spiritual names or symbols.

Strong tendencies to suicide or violence may also be present.

College Park grandmother Mildred Mack is a believer. Earlier this month, she
took her 11-year-old granddaughter to a Church of God of Prophecy for an
exorcism after the child had trouble sleeping and talked in a strange voice,
threatening to kill relatives and "take them to hell." 

"She would have killed herself," Mack said. "I knew this. . . . Demons do walk
this earth."

Michael Cuneo, a professor at Fordham University in New York and author of
"American Exorcism," calls it "a burgeoning, booming business in the United
States." Satanic involvement relieves people of the responsibility of their own
thoughts and actions, he says. "We're a culture of victimization. This is a
moral cop-out."

Yates may sincerely believe she is possessed, he says, but "overwhelmingly what
people are suffering from is some neurological, psychological or psychiatric
disorder, or, in may cases, they've taken their cues from the popular
entertainment industry."

Cuneo observed more than 50 exorcisms for his book -- Pentecostal, charismatic,
evangelical and Catholic both officially sanctioned and "bootleg." 

"What I saw in many cases were troubled people, confused people, desperate
people, people who wanted to believe they were demonized and that exorcism
would cure them of their illness," he says. "In every case I could account for
what I saw in nondemonic terms."

Evers says he attempted to have his former wife committed, but mental health
professionals sent her home. Andrea Yates, too, has been in and out of
treatment.

Today, Dianne Evers remains in the Florida State Hospital at Chattahoochee
under high security.

She still has "religious delusions," says Bill Gross, the assistant state
attorney who has argued against her release. Before one hearing to appeal for a
furlough several years ago, she attempted to saw off her arm. In 1995 she
married a former patient at the mental hospital where she is confined.

"Every six months or so, we get a report on her condition," Gross says. "The
last reports have indicated she is still unstable."

After a string of law enforcement jobs, Jerry Evers began work in Enigma a few
months ago. He and his wife, Dorrie, have three children -- Jessica, 12, Jerry
Jr., 10, and Rebecca, 8.

As for his former life in another family, it makes little real difference to
Evers whether the devil, insanity or cruelty caused his wife to kill his
children. All that matters is that they're dead and the horror of how they
died. 

Says Evers, "It's something I have to deal with every day."

http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/metro/0202/0217insanity.html