Unfortunately for all the traditional and primitive religious institutions and creeds, they continue to lose in the standoff between reason and magic. Religion is magic. Faith is the suspension of reason. Contrary to those modern thinkers (Stephen J Gould, Francis Collins...) who can't let go of the religious magic, modern humans continue to slowly and inexorably abandon their primitive ignorance as they rely more and more on Reason to lead them away from the religious BS. Changes in humanity's view of the world and itself, and of its understanding of its own existence, are very slow, and modern religious institutions that are heirs to the village or tribe's priest, holy man, magician, medicine man, wizard, chiromancer, diviner, sorcerer, charlatan.... continue to inflict damage to our world by making ignorant people confuse tradition with faith. I cannot suspend my reason, therefore I have no faith and hate the very idea of "belonging" to a religion. But I like and respect the traditions of my society, regardless of the fact that they originated in ignorance long time ago.
It wasn't long ago when religious institutions burned people (mostly women) at the stake, accusing them of being heretics, witches and warlocks, when the religious institutions themselves are founded on equally weird and made-up stories, myths and legends: splitting oceans, gods with twelve arms and elephant heads, raining frogs, impregnating virgins and 100-year old women, immaculate conceptions, prophets with exclusive access to gods, Chosen people, self-anointment as the very last prophecy, virgin births, rising from the dead, miracles, ascending to heaven on a winged horse, casting demons out of mental patients and into pigs in a society that didn't consume pork... and promises that I will have eternal life as a ghost somewhere up in the clouds if only I follow the faith.
I recently heard a story, a joke that goes like this. An Asian (non-Christian) man opens the door of his apartment to someone knocking on it. Jehovah's witnesses were there telling him that if he doesn't know Jesus he's going straight to hell. He politely replies that there are billions of people in Asia that have never heard of Jesus, and so will they all be going to hell too? The Jehovah's witnesses respond that since these people never heard of Jesus, they are innocent and won't go to hell. The man sarcastically thanks them for, now that he knows of Jesus's existence he is going straight to hell. He was fine and going to heaven, he said, until they knocked on his door.
I can't believe that the Catholic Church still has priests who specialize in exorcisms, now that it has admitted that the earth circles around the sun, that the earth is round and not flat, that Darwinian natural selection as a driver for evolution is a fact, that "scriptures" are more symbolic than factually real, that there is no "limbo" where babies who die before being baptized are parked (versus paradise for the wholly sin-free, and the purgatory where the Church condemns the sinful until they "purge" themselves of their sins).. Why does it take the Church (and other religious sects and cults) centuries to admit that its primitive beliefs have become outdated?
I do think that the Church understands it is always trailing behind human development and progress. But it just can't admit it at the moment when it is faced with the change. It drags its feet for decades, refuses to admit it for centuries to avoid appearing as a follower. By dilating the time it takes it to publicly admit the evidence of the change, the Church prolongs its own lifeline and maintains millions of imbecile faithful in the illusion. It took the Catholic Church 360 years (1633 to 1993) to formally admit that it was mistaken on Galileo's scientific discoveries. Pope John Paul II exonerated him in 1992 during a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, itself an incongruous creation of the Church with which to hypocritically pretend it is "modern": a religious cult that believes in reason-based science is oxymoronic.
How about marriage for priests? All other religions, including other Christian ones, allow their priests to marry. But not the Catholic Church. It will take it centuries before finally accepting it. The ordination of women is another one. The use of birth control too. And other issues over which ordinary humans have settled their minds, but which the Church dilates and drags its feet because it knows that admitting such otherwise reasonable and logical new ideas would shorten the shelf-life of the Church itself: in other words, the Church cares more for its own survival as a fossil from an ancient age than for the welfare of humans in the here and now.
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Washington archbishop removes priest as exorcist after comments on UFOs and demons
DAVID CRARY
Updated Wed, June 3, 2026
FILE - Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington attends a press conference at the North American College in Rome, Friday, May 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia,File)
The Catholic archbishop of Washington, D.C., Cardinal Robert McElroy, on Wednesday removed a well-known priest as an exorcist of the archdiocese after he made public comments suggesting that UFO sightings were the work of demons.
McElroy said the archdiocese also was cutting ties with the St. Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal, a Washington-based nonprofit headed by the priest, Monsignor Stephen Rossetti.
The archbishop said Rossetti's statements "linking UFOs to demonic presence and the Center's recent use of social media gravely undermine the Church's very precise teaching on the devil, demons and exorcism."
"There's a danger here," Rossetti said in a May 29 video posted on his Facebook page addressing UFO sightings and the existence of aliens. "As an exorcist I wanted to raise that danger. And that is that demons like to hide. ... They don't want us to know what they're doing because they're more effective when we don't realize it."
"They can kind of get into your head, you know, and manipulate things in the world to influence us to do evil."
"It's my personal belief that probably many if not most of these UFO sightings are in fact demons," Rossetti added.
Rossetti also said that people can be good Catholics and believe there's life on other planets, though he does not personally believe life exists elsewhere.
In a statement posted on the St. Michael Center website, Rossetti said he was saddened by the action of the archdiocese.
"I ask forgiveness for any ways that I have not been faithful to the teachings of the Church's Magisterium, particularly in the cited video on 'aliens and the demonic,'" he said. "I believe it is of the utmost importance to be obedient to the Church and I will continue to endeavor to subject all that I do and the Center to be thus obedient."
Rossetti, who has over 148,000 followers on Instagram, is a prominent psychologist as well as an exorcist. His center has specialized in offering spiritual healing for priests troubled by various difficulties.
In 2023, he told The Associated Press there was increasing and renewed appetite for information about demonic possession and exorcism.
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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