My Encounter With Allah, Fox News and possibly the CIA.

...so, what are you on, and where can I get some?

Lol! That comment was even more entertaining than the OP.....wait. You weren't serious, were you?

...instead of a mental health professional, who could actually prescribe anti-psychotic medication and let him live a normal life. You'd rather do an exorcism, a traumatic and entirely nonsense ritual that does little but perpetuate delusions of persecution, frequently causes real physical harm sometimes including death, and has a proven success rate of...zero percent.Faith, you sound just like someone I once knew who told my epileptic girlfriend that her seizures would go away if only she accepted Christ.Hint: mental illness is not caused by demons any more than goblins are responsible for the pox. There are real psychological and physical disorders that cause these issues, and your mumbo-jumbo doesn't help , at all, ever, even a little.You, madam, are helping to hold back the progression and mental health of the entire human race. So, congratulations on that.

1) How can you tell which mental illnesses are demonic and which are not?2) If mental illness is caused by demonic forces, why do anti-psychotic medications work?3) If mental illness is caused by demonic forces, why do exorcisms not work?4) Why should we believe that mental illness is caused by "demonic" influence, if all you can say is "these other people say so?" Whio are they? Why should we give credence to their words? What evidence supports their testimony?

Why do you say that?It's very well-known that we can induce hallucination with medication, no demons required. LSD does it, peyote can cause hallucinations, and there are far more.If hallucinations can be the result of purely chemical causes as in the case of those drugs, why then must hallucinations in mentally ill individuals be caused by demons rather than a physical problem in the brain? When additional medications relieve the hallucinations so long as the afflicted individual continues to take the medication, doesn't that corroborate the hypothesis that hallucinations in the mentally ill are the result of physical abnormalities like a chemical imbalance, rather than a supernatural demon?

LSD is not used for ritual purposes - it was created relatively recently.Peyote was simply one other example, and its use is not restricted to religious purposes.You are claiming, then, that even though these drugs cause hallucinations, it's simply because demons follow the drugs? Like LSD molecules are actually little demonic gateways?...You really seem to be reaching, Faith. We have ironclad evidence that chemical substances cause hallucinations regardless of the religious leanings of the individual taking them. We have further evidence that mentally ill individuals suffering from hallucinations can be treated with medication.The reasonsble conclusion is that chemicals imbibed by a person can affect their brain. This is even further backed up by monitoring brain activity when these sorts of drugs are administered.You're turning this whole "demonic influence" bit into yet another unfalsifiable unsupported assertion: hallucinations are supposedly caused by demons, something we cannot see or detect, and anything else like chemical influences that seems to have an effect on either causing or relieving hallucinations is attributed to still more demonic activity.So I'll ask again: why on Earth should anyone believe what you're saying here? Occam's Razor suggests that, if the phenomenon of hallucinations can be explained just as well with the assertion of demonic causes as it can without, and there is no additional evidence suggesting demonic forces, then the explanation that does not assert the unsupported extraneous factor is to be preferred.By the exact same reasoning you're using, I could claim that hallucinations are all the result of direct communication with the Flying Spaghetti Monster, that taking hallucinogenics is a form of inviting his noodly presence, and that anti-psychotics work because they ask him to back off. Such a scenario is similarly unsupported and unnecessary, yet fits just as well with reality as your imagined demons.I would suggest that the logical answer is that hallucinations are not supernatural in origin, but are rather the result of aberrant brain activity which can be caused by natural chemical imbalances and dysfunction as in the case of the mentally ill, or can be artificially induced by the introduction of foreign chemicals into the body.I would suggest that your assertions about demons are nothing more than irrational nonsense.