Therumancer said:
Err, well a couple of corrections.
For starters the whole "Michelle Remembers" thing tends to come down to whether you believe in regression hypnosis, the basic idea that a trained psychiatrist, can use hypnosis to access your deep memories and allow you to remember, or convey, things that you do not consciously remember without it. The idea being that pretty much everything you see, think, or experience is stored there somewhere, even if you can't always access it.
This isn't a matter of belief, this is a matter of science, and memory doesn't work that way. The "tape recorder" notion of memory has been thoroughly debunked, and the idea that false memories can be planted has been conclusively proven.
What's more "Satanism" for a lot of people generally speaking comes down to fancy ways for them to justify sociopathic behavior, ...yeah, I'd imagine there have been plenty of abusers who got organized (like we see busted in kiddie porn production rings and such) donned satanic trappings for fun/atmosphere and pretty much did their thing.
There has never been a scintilla of evidence of any such thing. If you have such evidence, please bring it forth and the FBI would love to hear it-- you know, having spent scads of taxpayer money investigating this nonsense and finding it all to be bunk. Are there some genuinely unpleasant people who identify as Satanists? Yes, just like there are genuinely unpleasant people who identify as Christians, and any other religion on earth. (Oddly, I've seen people trying to hang all manner of unpleasant behavior on Satanists, but I never see complaints about Satanists being cozy with Neo-Nazis-- this is the thing that has most repulsed *me*, as a Satanist, about organized Satanism.) But this molestation-Satanism connection you're so gleefully speculating about doesn't exist, and IMO it's not okay to be so credulous about a thing that has cost innocent people their livelihood, their children, and in some cases (West Memphis Three, for example) their freedom.
As far as the whole pagan/neo-pagan thing, one thing I have to keep reminding people of is that according to strict Christianity there are only two real forces, god and the devil.
I don't think anyone forgets your theology, they simply don't allow your theology to dictate facts. Fact: Neo-Pagan religions don't worship Satan. That your religion would like to conflate every other god who has existed in human history with Satan doesn't change the facts, they simply change how *you* view them.
Arguably it could justify torturing people until they "found god", and then killing them (to send them to heaven before further temptation) as being a humanitarian act by it's own standards.
Could, and has in the past and continues to do so today.
I'm also a big believer that a lot of the pagans were generally speaking not nice people themselves. Us European barbarians wound up freaking out the Romans with the crap we got up to, and really that is what the Christians were still dealing with after the fall of Rome. Basically the situation probably wasn't helped by all the non-Christians basically killing and skinning people and wearing them like capes, building shrines out of skulls, murdering people on stone slabs, and whatever else. You generally weren't dealing with a bunch of peaceful "wise women" dancing in the moonlight and nothing else. That sells well to the new age crowd, but when you start looking back at the crap barbarians were up to back then, and understand there really wasn't a dividing line, it paints a different picture. Every once in a while you see shows on TV where they show caves full of bashed in skulls, depictions of bloody rituals, and similar things, not to mention going off about how the Vikings went around ripping people's rib cages open to make "the blood eagle" as a sign of appreciation to Odin (a pagan deity) for a long time. So really there was kind of an element of "you kill our people horribly, we kill yours" at the end of the day though the Christians by and large won, and did so by killing or converting all of their rivals.
And your source for all this luridness is... TV shows. Please read some actual history, would you? I'd be happy to provide actual scholarly recommendations on whatever aspect you'd like. Humans, though, have been human throughout the course of our existence. Any group that has held power has done both heinous things and admirable things. Arbitrarily deciding that your group is "civilized" and the rest are "barbarians" is silly, harmful, and in many of its manifestations, more than a little racist. At least you acknowledge that killing and forcible conversion is a thing your religion has done-- do you also acknowledge that coerced conversion is a thing it continues to do? Or acknowledge that modern polytheists aren't raiding, skinning, or blood-eagling anybody?