Press Release on:
by Shawn
Carlson, Ph.D.
(From Dec 89 BASIS - Downloaded from Skeptics BBS 415 648-8944)
For the last three years, I and several colleagues investigated monstrous allegations of Satanic crime. What we found are pillars of nonsense built on sand. Murderous cults of Devil worshipers are modern folk legends and a few opportunists, bereaved parents and religious fanatics have preyed on the public's imagination to create a lucrative cottage industry of fear. What follows is a press release describing our research. Copies of the 200-page report are available for $10 plus $1.50 P&H from me at Box 466, El Cerrito, CA, 94530.
Those who worry about a rising tide of Satanic crime in America are giving the Devil much more than his due according to a report issued today by the Committee for Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER), a group of scientists and scholars dedicated to the critical evaluation of religious claims.
"SATANISM IN AMERICA", compiled after three years of investigation, finds some evidence of Satanic or "occult- related" criminal activity in the United States, but cautions that its prevalence has been grossly exaggerated by self-styled experts who have wasted millions of tax dollars and countless thousands of police hours in search of a conspiracy that isn't there.
In fact, according to CSER's study, a phalanx of Christian fundamentalists, political extremists, bereaved parents, opportunists, and several mentally unstable persons have combined to form a lucrative "information industry" on occult-related crime. The report asserts that public monies have been used to fund police and law enforcement training seminars (often costing hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of dollars), and the publication of dozens of books and manuals, offering little more than "evangelism posing as criminology." And all of this has happened despite the fact that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to be the victim of a Satanic crime.
THE DEVIL WITH GERALDO
CSER decided to begin its investigation in 1986, shortly after its widely publicized
expose of fraudulent TV faith healers. Alarmed by the nationwide Satanism scare, which had
been fueled by outrageous claims and sensational media coverage, the Committee later
focused much of its attention on an analysis of Geraldo Rivera's special television
presentation, "Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground," aired on the night
of Oct. 25, 1988.
The report is sharply critical of the Rivera special, charging that it was:
- poorly researched. - sensational. - highly irresponsible.
"SATANISM IN AMERICA" tells that "The Rivera report was misleading, much of the information presented was inaccurate, and key facts were omitted." And these facts, CSER contends, would have left the viewing audience considerably less alarmed about the "threat" of Satanism.
Says Dr. Shawn Carlson, the report's principal author, "Had Rivera been a bit more even-handed in his treatment of the subject matter, perhaps some of the hysteria could have been averted or avoided altogether."
Carlson, a physicist and software engineer, points out that there was at east one confirmed case of homicide associated with the program.
"Timothy Hughes of Altus, Oklahoma murdered his wife immediately after watching Rivera's special," Carlson says, "because he believed her to be part of the conspiracy."
"20/20" IN THE ACT
Carlson contends that since the airing of a special report on evil-worship on ABC's
newsmagazine "20/20" in 1985, and the continuing fascination of TV talk-shows
and the press with allegations of a Satanic conspiracy, numerous acts of violence have
been committed by vigilantes and arsonists across the country against those suspected of
Devil-worship. "A number of small churches, including several Black churches, have
been vandalized and burned because of rumor-panics," says Carlson. "After the
Matamoros incident -- which had nothing to do with Satanism -- people in Pharr, Texas
began to hear rumors that blond-haired, blue-eyed children were to be ritually murdered in
a little church called the Church of Fire.
The church was destroyed in a mysterious blaze, and several of the members were threatened with similar fates.
The same thing happened to a Black church in Illinois last winter." Carlson points to a similar incident involving the producer of the "20/20" segment on Devil-worship, Kenneth Wooden. "Wooden addressed an audience of 200 people in Olean, New York last April on the topic of Satanic crime, and told them that 25% of all unsolved homicides were ritualistic in nature. That's one in four -- an unbelievable number! There had been a rumor about Satanism spreading in Jamestown, a nearby town. Asked about it, Wooden said, 'It doesn't surprise me . . . it can happen here.'"
"Two weeks later, the police had to stop a mob armed with knives and clubs in Jamestown from converging on a wooded area. And a local warehouse, used for punk rock concerts, sustained $4000 worth of damage because several townspeople believed that a ritual sacrifice was to occur there.
"Wooden's report for '20/20', as well as his comments in that public meeting, were simply irresponsible," according to Carlson.
MORE EXAGGERATION
The report claims that many of those making public allegations about Satanic crime have
exaggerated the extent of the problem beyond reason. According to Carlson, "These
people claim to know who the cultist are, where they meet, and how they dispose of the
bodies of their victims. But unlike undercover police officers and informants on organized
crime, they are unable -- or unwilling -- to provide names, dates, places, or any other
tangible evidence."
Carlson's charges are supported by many law enforcement officers and criminologists, among them Kenneth Lanning of the FBI's Behavioral Research Unit in Quantico, Virginia. Lanning, a specialist on crimes involving children, has recently published an article critical of the current Satanism scare in the October issue of "Police Chief" magazine, and reprinted as an appendix in CSER's report.
"SATANISM IN AMERICA" addresses the entire spectrum of claims surrounding Satanism and occult crime -- child-abductions, ritual abuse, human and animal sacrifices, women who purportedly offered their own infants up for sacrifice, animal mutilations, the link between Devil-worship and Heavy Metal music, and the phenomenon of "backward masking." It concludes that most of the allegations made over the last several years are baseless.
The report states that in the few instances where crimes with undeniable Satanic overtones have occurred, "there is no evidence to show that Satanism, per se, was responsible for the act. Nearly every Satanic criminal had a history of anti-social behavior long before he/she took up the trappings of Satanism. Satanism, in these cases, appears as an expression of one's mental illness, and not as the sole motivation for anti-social behavior. Satanism is a symptom, not the cause."
According to Carlson, "Some of the people who are most public about this issue make the silliest claims -- insisting that between 50,000 and two million children are ritually murdered each year by Satanists. We know that this just isn't true. The FBI states that they have fewer than 80 open files on children abducted by strangers in any given year. And there were a total of 23,000 homicides in the U.S. last year, making the lowest sacrifice number often offered by the conspiracy theorists TWICE the national murder average for children and adults combined. The numbers offered by the so-called experts simply don't add up."
"Far more children drown in our backyard pools than are killed by cultists," Carlson argues. "In fact, last year 2,100 children were murdered in the U.S. by their own parents! This means that children are far more likely to be killed by their own father than by a Devil-worshiper. If we want to help children, we should cover our swimming pools and do something about child abuse, not waste limited resources chasing after non-existent Devil-worshiping conspiracies." According to the report, there have been over a million violent crimes committed in the U.S. in the past five years, fewer than one hundred of them involving Satanism or the occult.
CHILD ABUSE
"I'm proud of the work we've done, especially in the area of child abuse," says
Gerald Larue, Emeritus professor of Religion at the University of Southern California and
co-author of "SATANISM IN AMERICA". "The hysteria-mongers would have us
exhaust our resources going after a non-existent, nation-wide cult of Satanic
child-abusers. We must concentrate our efforts on finding the real abusers and taking them
off the streets, as well as providing help for abused kids. We owe it to our children not
to indulge ourselves in hysteria in their names."
"Our investigation has shown that, in child-abuse cases, allegations of Devil-worshiping conspiracies are phantoms of the prosecutors' imagination and that juries tend not to convict when such allegations are raised. I can't help but think that real child-abusers may have been released from jails because some prosecutors failed to concentrate on the abuse by getting carried away with meager evidence of Satanic murders allegedly committed during black masses and the like," adds Larue. "This panic is hurting kids a lot more than its helping them."