Blame Shifting

Every few years a tragedy surfaces in the news and the perpetrator claims they were "possessed by the Devil." The Andrea Yates case. The so-called "Slenderman stabbing." Random acts of violence attributed to "demonic influence." Mental illness, poor parenting, extreme indoctrination, untreated psychosis, drugs: the real causes are ignored in favour of the dramatic, sensational narrative. And the media, always eager for a story that writes itself, runs with it.

What most people fail to recognise is that at the root of nearly every one of these cases, you find Christianity. The concept of "demonic possession" is a Christian invention. It doesn't exist in the pre-Abrahamic traditions. The Greeks had no concept of a malevolent spirit that invades and controls a human being against their will. The Egyptians had no such doctrine. The Norse didn't either. "Possession" as popularly understood is a product of Christian theology, specifically the theology that created "demons" by slandering the ancient Gods and then invented an entire pathology around the entities it had fabricated.

The psychological evidence supports this reading. A study published in Child Abuse & Neglect (Bottoms, Shaver, Goodman, and Qin, 1995, "In the Name of God: A Profile of Religion-Related Child Abuse") documented cases of child abuse directly motivated by religious belief, including exorcism-related injuries and deaths. The concept of demonic possession provides a ready-made framework for reinterpreting mental illness as spiritual attack, diverting attention from treatable psychiatric conditions toward religious "solutions" that frequently worsen the problem. When a schizophrenic person is told they're possessed rather than ill, when prayer is substituted for medication, when an exorcism is performed on someone who needs a psychiatrist: that's not spiritual warfare. It's medical negligence enabled by theological delusion.

Mental health research consistently demonstrates the correlation between fundamentalist religious upbringing and certain psychological disturbances. Children raised in homes where they're taught that invisible demons are watching their thoughts, that Hell awaits for wrong thinking, that God is simultaneously all-loving and will torture them forever for disobedience: these children develop patterns of anxiety, self-monitoring, and compulsive guilt that often persist into adulthood even after the belief system is consciously abandoned.

Plutarch observed this pattern nearly two thousand years ago. In On Superstition (Περὶ Δεισιδαιμονίας, Moralia 164E-171F), he argued that superstitious fear of the Gods is more destructive than atheism itself: "The superstitious man fears the Gods, yet flees to them; flatters them, yet accuses them; prays to them, yet blames them." The person trapped in superstitious terror lives in a self-created hell that no external force imposed. Christianity, which teaches precisely this kind of relationship with the divine (a God who loves you but will destroy you, who wants the best for you but has prepared eternal torment should you disappoint Him), is the most successful generator of superstitious terror in human history.

Zeus and the Daemons don't possess people. They don't torment the innocent. They don't drive people to violence. The Daemons are teachers and protectors. The confusion exists because Christianity spent 2,000 years teaching the opposite, producing the very disorders it then attributes to the Gods it slandered. This is Atibilibil in its most tragic form: confusion so total that the victim cannot distinguish the cause from the cure. The arsonist points at the fire and says, "see how dangerous fire is." The institution that created the psychological damage blames the damage on the entities it demonised. The Abrahamic Inversion explains the full mechanism. The Family of the Gods offers the clarity that Christianity's blame-shifting was designed to prevent.