The World's Worst Catholic™ Explains the Rite of Exorcism

It's bullshit. There. Need some more explanation? Let me dish out a little theology from the Catholic Cafeteria where I have my own table (and usually sit by myself). I know the cool kids have a different perspective on exorcism and mainly just get upset when it's done "wrong" but I'm here to tell you that there is no "right" way to cast out demons simply because you can't cast out what doesn't exist. I like to think there are better explanations for unacceptably crazy behavior. The whole idea of a personified evil force is an idea so off base it should be relegated to the ash heap of history along with voodoo, witchcraft and Newt Gingrich being an intellectual force in modern thought. As my friend Charlie the Episcopalian Priest (it's ok - that's almost catholic) told me - there is God and not God. Evil only exists in the absense of the ineffable one. You can no more pin down evil than you could stuff and mount a jellyfish to your wall. Evil is entropy - the dissolution of order - death, decay - all the stuff that has to happen. Our original sin has nothing to do with choice and everything to do with the universe we live in - it is in our baser natures selected for survival. Our job, if we choose to accept it, is to identify these forces of selection and resist them. So by identifying a demon and trying through ritual, magic or force of will to cast it out you are doing nothing more than giving chaos form and creating demons to inhabit the possessed and the priest's interior worlds. No demons exist outside the boundaries of our internal mental states. Nor do any gods - but that's for another time.

What's That Smell?

Now I know Governor Jindal has had a bad week, what with being the governor of a state that has required billions of dollars of federal money just to survive and being simultaneously tasked by the Republican party with explaining why it is wrong for the federal government to spend money, so I hope y'all don't think I'm piling on by bringing up this story I read in
The Daily Beast concerning an article Jindal wrote for the New Oxford Review titled "Beating a Demon: Physical Dimensions of Spiritual Warfare".

We've all done things that we regret, particularly in our younger days. Thought things, that in retrospect, were so mind numbingly stupid that we shudder to recollect them. But never, in the mind altered, anti-vaccine, New Age, nature boy, drunken stupor that was my college years did it ever occur to me that my girlfriend required an exorcism. Some of them may have been a little odd, but possessed? I don't think so. Of course, I didn't attend a whole lot of prayer meetings so maybe there is some sort of group dynamic that I'm not aware of. If you are looking for demons you just might find them. Especially in the area of the colon, as Luther was well aware.

Some of the symptoms Bobby's girlfriend exhibited (besides hanging out with Bobby Jindal) included trailing an odor of sulfurous vapors wherever she went and being unable to repeat the phrase "Jesus is Lord" without bursting into obscenities. Kind of like Richard Dawkins after an egg salad sandwich. You would think a Rhodes scholar would be able to eliminate the obvious, such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome mixed with a dash of Tourettes or possibly IBS induced melancholia, before launching into spiritual warfare. He felt a sense of oppression and found it very hard to breathe whilst casting the demon out. I'm sure he did. That was probably the IBS, Bobby. Although it may seem so at times I doubt that the Devil is directly responsible for farts. If the poor girl smelled that bad why didn't you just dump her instead of putting her through a humiliating public exorcism?

So one of the new faces of the Republican party is a self proclaimed exorcist and the other one
needed to be prayed over to keep the witches at bay. That should lock up the batshit crazy vote for 2012. Next.