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Do you believe that the devil, or demons, can possess your body - or your soul?

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I wouldn't want a Democrat with fundamentalist religious beliefs in The White House either.

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Originally posted by Westside Steve:

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I wouldn't want a Democrat with fundamentalist religious beliefs in The White House either.

Well not unless he was running.
WSS

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The exorcism performed on Susan, which included the use of a crucifix and a Bible and Mr. Jindal’s repetition of the Hail Mary, is not conventional or acceptable in the Catholic Church. This is one of the main reasons Mr. Jindal does not want people to read this essay; he participated in an incredibly important religious ritual outside of Church law and protocol.

But this is not the only reason Mr. Jindal and his campaign have already attempted “damage control” concerning this thirteen-year-old essay. The essay also reveals what Bobby Jindal was like three [years] before he became swept into a wave of political appointments. He was distant, nervous, and sometimes emotionally unavailable, particularly around his friend Susan. He was having trouble reconciling his traditional beliefs with the beliefs of his new friends in college, and compounded with that, Mr. Jindal was also struggling to understand the differences between the beliefs and practices of evangelical or “charismatic” Christians and the beliefs and practices his newly-adopted Catholicism. For many college-aged people, religious and existential crises are par for the course, but for Mr. Jindal, his crisis was multifaceted and unique. It was not simply a crisis of religion; it was a crisis of identity. He was raised a Hindu but believed in Catholicism. His parents had wanted him to become a doctor, and even though he did not share their plans for his life, he still earned a degree in biology.

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And Legacy, we've got a couple thousand years of recorded history. Is there a confirmed case of demonic possession you can cite? Anything that wouldn't better be explained by mental illness? On what do you base your belief in demonic possession?

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How would you confirm demonic possession? How would you confirm mental illness? It's not like ghostbusters where we can trap the things.

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...in an incredibly important religious ritual outside of Church law and protocol.

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Jindal is clearly a bright guy, but I think it's important not to elect people with fundamentalist religious beliefs, especially when they try and promote those in the public arena. (Sev talked about this in another forum.) And with respect to this episode, I think Jindal has got some real explaining to do.

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And Legacy, we certainly can confirm mental illness, and do it daily and all the time. We diagnose people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, multiple personality disorder, etc.

It's the greater (yet still very incomplete) understanding we have of how the brain functions, or doesn't function, that allows us to understand what's really going on in people that exhibit types of behavior that in the distant past were chalked up to "demonic possession."