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OT - Are exorcisms real?


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I'm not religious, so, it's kinda hard for me to buy into exorcisms. But I have a friend, he's 20 years older than me and he is Catholic and a very solid individual and not the type to lie. I need to contact him and ask him about this but I remember him telling me one time that they are very real, indeed. And that it'll scare the beejesus out of you. He had a priest let him go on one and I recall him telling me it was beyond belief. Anyone have any knowledge?

 

There was a 20-20 like show with a piece about exorcisms just on but I didn't get to watch it.

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Exorcisms are very definitely real and part of Catholic (and other) practice.

 

 

Whatever they are exorcising is, however, open to serious question.

 

But, like many treatments that have a psychological component, there may well be a placebo effect.

 

If I recall my fleeting familiarity with the literature of exorcism, such rituals often are perceived as having an immediate effect but when one looks at the case histories, there are often (but not always) ongoing, subsequent pyschological troubles similar to those that provoked the exorcism in the first place.

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morning - (bear with me while I enjoy a sip of coffee) -- ahhhh

 

anyway -

 

there's an entertaining book recently published on it

 

The Vatican's Exorcists: Driving Out the Devil in the 21st Century (Unabridged)

By: Tracy Wilkinson

 

 

 

anyway, haven't finished it, but it seems decently balanced and factually consistent without being a dry account of the subject.

As it's dealing with a religious topic, there are always going to be those crying foul from all sides, so you'll probably see bimodality in the reviews

 

 

The print is abt 200 pages, which puts the audio at abt 4.5 hours - so it's a good raod trip length for those not used to audio

 

(I'm one of those audiobook weenies - I like them for doing dishes and such. I grew up near the American Printinghouse for the blind, so I suppose I'm used to holding my attention on the audio, so I don't get that "my attention drifts" effect)

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As with most accounts of the supernatural/mystical/miraculous, there is a core of unanswerable events buried in a mass of phony/exaggerated/psychosomatic/delusional events and reportages.

 

Following the Jesus Movement of the late 60's, early 70's, many people involved in the "charismatic" subgenre of the ongoing Protestant Revival dallied with "Deliverance" ministries, which were exorcism-based. A bunch of newly self-appointed experts appeared and drew crowds for a few years.

 

I have a number of friends from that era who saw/heard/experienced truly remarkable and unignorable events in that context. Personally, I thought the "Deliverance" ministries attracted the insecure, neurotic, and "thrill and power" contingent, and I felt the eventual failure and discredit of that particular phase was justified. Some real damage was done in some instances.

 

But still, within the sum of totally off-the-page things that happened, for some people some good things happened, borne out by long-term positive effects, seemingly beyond the scope of the placebo effect. But this is a realm where the results don't necessarily prove that the practitioners know WTF they're doing.

 

I need to queue up The Exorcism of Emily Rose on Netflix - according to Ebert's review the movie highlights the very tricky line between fantasy and reality, materialism and spiritualism, that is so dramatically evident in serious approaches to exorcism.

 

Life is such a mystery.

 

nat whilk ii

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Exorcisisms real the way UFO meetin's real.

 

Crazy people really get together and do this wack kind of {censored}. Thats true. That happens.

 

But wether theres actual "excorcism" takin place or whether theres actual "UFO" floatin by's another story altogether and one thats totally false. Theres no actual devil ghost being scared away by hocus pocus and theres no little spaceship flying around from another universes that happen to look lika frisbey. But there is people gettin together and makin coffee and havin their excorcisms and ufo meetins and convincin themselfes of just about anything they want.

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I have no idea whether they are real or not, and how much of it is a function of psychological etiology. But it's interesting, whatever it is, and like a lot of things, I'll keep an open mind about it, and if necessary, use it in my recording studio! :D

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I'm not religious, so, it's kinda hard for me to buy into exorcisms.

 

 

I think I might have (still might) be misunderstanding the question

 

With "Are exorcisms real?"

"Are rites known as exorcism ongoing in the modern world?"

 

Or

 

do you mean to ask about the existence of "extra-natural" (for lack of a better term..."diefic"? is that even a word?) dynamics going on?

 

 

option A could give us a chance to look at history and cultural anthropoly

Option B ... welcome to planet controversy! As with those sorts of questions, I doubt you'll get much that is definitive

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I don't (liguistically) understand

 

 

14th century alpine English!

 

drive out

 

verb

1. force to go away; used both with concrete and metaphoric meanings; "Drive away potential burglars"; "drive away bad thoughts";

 

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/deserve

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/drive%20out

http://www.reference.com/search?q=bad%20habit&r=d&db=web

 

The singular "they"/"their"/"them"/"themselves" construction

These files contain a list of over 75 occurrences of the words "they"/"their"/"them"/"themselves" referring to a singular antecedent with indefinite or generic meaning in Jane Austen's writings (mainly in her six novels), as well as further examples of singular "their" etc. from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and elsewhere. While your high-school English teacher may have told you not to use this construction, it actually dates back to at least the 14th century, and was used by the following authors (among others) in addition to Jane Austen: Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, the King James Bible, The Spectator, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Frances Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Fielding, Maria Edgeworth, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, William Makepeace Thackeray, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot [Mary Anne Evans], Charles Dickens, Mrs. Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, John Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walt Whitman, George Bernard Shaw, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, W. H. Auden, Lord Dunsany, George Orwell, and C. S. Lewis.

http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/austheir.html#X1a

 

Okay?

 

.

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And what would be the position of "deserve" in a grammatically correct sentences?


.

 

 

I was/am confused at the syntactic construction as opposed to the grammatic form

 

It's not a criticism of your language (it's probably perfectly valid, perhaps just stylistically different than what I'm used to - I take it you aren't USA English native speaker? - that's my native ) , I was just trying to understand what you were saying

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okay, now tell me the correct syntax

 

 

It's not a "correct/incorrect" question (oh sure, there are gross syntactical errors, but I doubt this was one of them) -- rather, I was/am unsure as to what the setence was trying to express (specifically how "deserve" is meant to function in that context)

 

again, it's not a criticism of accuracy or correctness, it was a question to clarify meaning for my own benefit (and to respect your input enough to take the time to understand it)

 

 

Guess : would you happen to be German or Austrian ?

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But wether theres actual "excorcism" takin place or whether theres actual "UFO" floatin by's another story altogether and one thats totally false.

 

 

You seem awfully certain of this. How do you know?

Maybe Alien close encounters and demonic posession is real and you just haven't seen it?

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But it's interesting, whatever it is, and like a lot of things, I'll keep an open mind about it, and if necessary, use it in my recording studio!
:D

 

It's been done. Haven't you ever played Stairway to Heaven backwards? :D

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Oh hey, I think I see where the problem might be in

 

We live together with tons of folks on this planet who deserve that we drive out their bad habits...

 

 

it's been decades, but I think it might be a grammatical thing leading to the "checksums" (the agreements) in the syntax not adding up!

 

I'm totally going to mess up the terms, but I think, in this sentence we've got a compund transitive verb with the wrong (in American English - or it might be one of those style deals where it's technically correct, but isn't in common usage) auxillary and the wrong object form

 

so maybe it should be...

 

We live together with tons of folks on this planet who deserve to have us drive out their bad habits

 

yes? no?

 

I'm assuming that's what the sentence means though.

 

I think that's where the confusion is - it reads maybe a little odd (it does sound kind of German or maybe Norwegian in construction, though I'm not sure it's incorrect ) so maybe that's the rub

 

 

FWIW - verbally, I have the habit of following the "proper latin" form of keeping the preposition prefix or infix ("of what are you speaking?" and like that) got marks off on a paper once in college for it with the note "style : stilted"

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