With churchmen like this, who the hell needs Satan?

French Guiana is a small country of fewer than 100,000 inhabitants situated on the northern coast of South America, nestling between Suriname and Brazil. It seldom makes world news, but when it does it's often for the wrong reasons. Take, for example, this report from Agence France-Presse:

A French Guiana court has jailed four church members for up to 12 years for the exorcism of an epileptic teenager who was found dead attached to a cross.

The members of the Celestial Church of Christ were jailed yesterday [24 June] for terms of three to 12 years for "wilful violence that caused death'' for 15-year-old Roger Bosse in 2005 in the south American territory. The court heard that the mother of the boy, who suffered from mental illness, had brought him to the church for help and was told he was possessed by the devil.

The church members beat the boy repeatedly over a three-day period with reeds and belts and attached him to a cross for the last two days, the position in which he died. A post-mortem examination showed that he had probably died from suffocation.

The Celestial Church of Christ was founded in the west African state of Benin in 1947 and claims millions of adherents worldwide.

It's so tragic that a young life was taken so cruelly and needlessly. Superstition is still rife in our world, even in the 21st century. I'm glad the boy's tormentors were given tough jail sentences. That should deter others, or at least make them think twice before seeing demons where there are none.

Our pic shows another 15-year-old boy being crucified in the Philipines on Good Friday. The difference is that he presumably endured it willingly, unlike the boy in French Guiana.

Yet another botched exorcism, this time in India

News reaches me that in Lakhimpur, a town in northern India close to the border with Nepal, a five-year-old girl was hacked to death and her corpse disposed of like garbage. She'd been beheaded during what appears to have been an "amateur" exorcism.

The Press Trust of India quotes the local Superintendent of Police, Piyush Mordia, on July 28:

Vandana, a resident of Mudia Hemsingh village, was hacked to death by Ram Niwas and his uncle Mewa Lal, who later dumped the beheaded body in the fields, from where it was recovered this morning. Both the accused had been arrested," Superintendent of Police Piyush Mordia told reporters. The SP also said that Ram Niwas was under depression as his wife was failing to conceive and his brother Ram Sahay was ill. "Ram Niwas's uncle Mewa Lal, who practised exorcism, advised him to sacrifice a girl, which the latter claimed can remove his hardship," the SP said adding that Ram Niwas and Mewa Lal picked Vandana from her house on Monday night.

He "advised him to sacrifice a girl". It's hard to know where such abhorrent ideas emanate from. I'd hesitate before outrightly condemning the men involved, because obviously they were following what they believed to be sound religious advice. At the same time, they must surely have sensed that the murder of a child is terribly wrong in any circumstances.

All too often humankind has allowed its culture to be shaped by poisonous beliefs and superstitions such as this. There are no easy answers as to how to prevent a recurrence. Education? India has one of the finest education systems in the world. Kaushik Basu, Professor of Economics at Cornell University, notes that:

India's production of professionals is phenomenal. With over 300 universities and 15,600 colleges spewing out 2.5 million graduates each year, in terms of the volume of production India trails behind only the US and recently China.

I can only conclude that the culture or society in that part of India is at fault. At some time in its past something went wrong: women (or in this case girl children) were scapegoated for the ills of society. That this has endured up to the present day is both sad and despicable.

Let us by all means be on our guard for the presence of demons. That they exist and that they exercise a baleful influence in many countries should be beyond question. That they are present in a five-year-old child, who must be brutally murdered in order that the demons be expelled?

Dangerous rubbish.