Try becoming a little less full of yourself.

Lots of people have had “Weird Crap” experiences. I’ve had them twice, and Congressman Bobby Jindal got into trouble with everybody mentioning one (more spectacular) one he had. Weirdness happens. Deal with it.

Messed-up Vets were returning from Iraq & Afghanistan, and for years everybody dropped the ball on them? Shrinks, VA, Chaplains, everybody?

That paper sounds like what they got was the Universal Advice from that “Counseling with a Purpose” Christian radio show of the Seventies: No matter what the problem, “PrayTheSInner’sPrayerAndAcceptJesusChristAsYourPersonalLORDand Savior (TM)”.

(And during the Reagan years, Christian (TM) media routinely praised how so many of the armed forces were becoming Evangelical Christian, how We Were Taking Back The Military — looks like the results of that Culture War campaign including taking back the dark side of American Evangelicalism as well, the dark side so often written about by IMonk, Totem to Temple, Christian Monist, and all the others wandering the Post-Evangelical Wilderness.)

*We actually do not have that much scientific understanding of causation or cure. Sure we know that mentally ill people’s brains don’t look the same as others, but there is so much we do not know.*

Alright, here’s the thing: In *every* case–not many, or most or nearly all but *every* case–in which people have attributed something on this Earth to the work of demons or faeries or magic or angry storm gods and it has later been investigated, it has ALWAYS turned out to be something scientifically explicable. Who was it who said: “There’s never been a case where, having investigated, scientists returned from their labs to say, ‘Well gosh, we poked around inside and wouldn’t you know it, it was leprechauns after all’” ?

There’s a yawning, gaping, howling, multi-mile chasm between the statements:

1.) “Scientists are not yet sure of what causes this.”

2.) “Demons are likely to be the cause of this.”

If the two ideas were just different or even if the second of the two were merely mistaken in it’s own right, then it would just be something to shrug and chuckle at. But history indicates that believing in the second tends to very frequently lead to the enforcement of the first. That is, people decide something is work of demons (or, say, vaccines), then stop listening to (or funding) scientists who come forward with a more reasonable explanation and/or remedy.