Howard A Treesong wrote:
Of course, seeing as there's no such thing as demonic possession it makes you wonder exactly what they do to people that need to be 'exorcised', particularly children and vulnerable adults.

Most likely they are people who, if they have anything wrong with them at all, need to be treated by a genuine professional and not some kook from the church who thinks their actually are inhabited by evil spirits. Fortunately they seem to dismiss most cases of rebellious children as nothing more than 'being a teenager'.

This isn't questioning the existence of god. I don't believe in god but that's beside the point. If people really needed to be exorcised of some sort of physical possession then it could be fairly easily demonstrated scientifically and factually. There are claims that the possessed have supernatural strength and the like, from people I've debated this with in the past. The fact that even such obvious manifestations have never has been proven shows it's total crap which makes their treatment through exorcism rather questionable as to what they are 'treating'.

For example, the person I debated with defended that some exorcisms required the use of physical restraint. This they said was in a tiny minority of cases. Well even accepting that, what the hell is going on if even in one case in thousands they have to 'physically restrain' a person in order to 'exorcise them'. Bearing in mind of course that there's no such thing as demonic possession, this means that there are some people being restrained and having exorcisms forced upon them to treat something that just doesn't exist. Tiny minority of cases or not, one case like this is too many. They just shouldn't be allowed to do this to anyone.