“Brinton said Braun currently lives and practices in Montana with a restricted license, Martinez reported.”

A Restricted License!

These “therapists” were paid to assist a troubled woman, and instead – pumped her full of drugs and used hypnosis and suggestion to convince her of the most ludicrous nonsense. Some kind of criminal prosecution seems far more appropriate. The idea that this person has already had her license reinstated once after previous allegations should be enough to revoke her license permanently. The “therapist” is obviously more delusional than her patient. Murderous Satanic cults always have been and always will be little more than Christian propaganda. People like Manson and Ramirez and Berkowitz were hardly Satanists – they were simply psychotics using “demonic forces” to justify and give meaning to their behavior.

The findings stated in a 1992 FBI investigation show that “Satanic Ritual Abuse” simply does not happen.

http://www.skeptictank.org/fbi1992.htm

As a Satanist, I’m appalled to see that this sort of thing is still going on. It’s a recurring public hysteria prodded on by paranoid Christians, but I thought the results of the report cited above had finally laid to rest the Geraldo-fueled Satanic Panic of the 1980s.

The interesting thing to me about your comment, of course, was that Satanic Ritual (such as it is, and not as it is imagined to be) IS psychodrama and can make use of these fictional visions of “Satanic Cults” (history of such goes back for ages) for the benefit and enjoyment of the individual participants.

No quack therapists required.

More importantly though, he’s not actually making the claim that there’s no ritual abuse or that there’s no Satanic ritual abuse; the only concrete statement (iirc) that he can make about it is that he hasn’t found any evidence in those ten years of Satanic ritual *murder* — that is, of a murder that was committed specifically as part of a Satanic ritual.

He also conflates the terms “ritual abuse” and “satanic ritual abuse” like crazy, as people did back then — meaning that when people can’t find proof of an international Satanic cult conspiracy, they assume ritual abuse never exists. Even though he cites a number of examples of what *I* would call ritual abuse by people in (or perverting) *other* religions.

Most of the ritual abuse I’ve seen (and I actually do know people who have had enough evidence to bring these things to court, for whatever that’s worth) has been by people practicing some twisted (or regular, or fundamentalist, or….) form of a mainstream religion, actually. Or government ritual abuse, which is probably more prevalent in a lot of ways. But people often don’t count that – they like to exploit Satanism to “prove” that these things don’t happen, just as they used to exploit it to “prove” that all ritual abuse was Satanic and all Pagans and Satanists were Bad.

anyway :)