Thanks Joe. My purpose was in no way intended ideologically, but was simply to put the belief into its historical context as something universally believed for a long time. My point was really no more than that Jesus would have believed that because everybody believed it at the time ~~ and indeed continued to do so up to comparatively modern times [early C19, say] ~ whence the tradition of the whip & dark room treatment for the mad, so familiar from 16-17C drama in plays like Middleton's The Changeling and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which was intended to make their bodies so uncomfortable that the demon would not wish to remain in it.

I intended no particular moral or ideological conclusion to be drawn from this, but was simply endeavouring to postulate it as believed, just as disease was long believed to reside in the blood so that blood-letting was regarded as a universal cure-all. We no longer believe either of these things, and know them to be not merely wrong but to have been entirely harmful & mischievous in their effects: and therefore regret that hangovers of such errors might persist in enclaves like certain fundamentalist sects in Africa or elsewhere, with the sort of baleful results as the incident that forms the topic of this thread That was all of my point.

~M~