So you still believe that those who speak in tongues are "spiritual" and those who don't are carnal? You think that those who have the "so called holy spirit" are special while those who do not have it are not? You must be joking!!!

The Prophecies of Otem Atum shall surely come to pass, and the words "pastor" shall one day become synonymous with the words "senseless lunatic"!!!

FULL STORY:

Long before the age of the Internet and the fleeting spasms of mass hysteria that came with it (Remember Jade Helm? Pizzagate?), and going back to the late 20th century, when irrational fears moved slower and lasted longer, there was Satan.

The “satanic panic,” some call it now. It began some time in the 1980s, when newscasters and fundamentalist Christian cartoons warned of the evils of the role-playing game “Dungeons & Dragons,” and stretched into the 1990s, when police and psychiatrists saw thousands of unfounded accusations of ritualistic sex abuse and children were seized from British parents accused of devil worship.

One case still stands out.

“This country hasn’t seen anything like it since the Salem witch trials,” Texas Monthly wrote in 1994, in a profile of Austin day-care operators Dan and Fran Keller, who had been thrown in prison two years earlier.

The Kellers had been convicted of sexual assault in 1992. Children from their day-care center accused them — variously — of serving blood-laced Kool Aid; wearing white robes; cutting the heart out of a baby; flying children to Mexico to be raped by soldiers; using Satan’s arm as a paintbrush; burying children alive with animals; throwing them in a swimming pool with sharks; shooting them; and resurrecting them after they had been shot. They were hardly the only people to be accused by children during the panic. Many were exonerated long ago — like the 20 people wrongly convicted in the infamous Kern County sex abuse cases. Some now blame the phenomenon on “a quack cadre of psychotherapists who were convinced that they could dig up buried memories through hypnosis,” as Radley Balko wrote in a column for The Washington Post.

But the Kellers suffered for decades.

They served nearly 22 years in prison before a court released them in 2013, after years of work by journalists and lawyers to expose what proved to be a baseless case against them.

And only now — when Fran Keller is 67 and Dan is 75 — has the couple been fully exonerated. Their 1992 case was finally dismissed in June after a district attorney declared them innocent.

This week, the Austin American-Statesman reported, they were awarded $3.4 million from a state fund — a belated attempt to refund a quarter-century that they lost to the delusions of other people.

“We can start living,” Fran Keller told the newspaper after learning of the award Tuesday. “No more nightmares.” “Terror at the day care,” blared the Vancouver Sun in 1992, in prose typical of early coverage of the Kellers. “It didn’t look like a haunted house. But the kids knew better.”

Fran’s Day Care Center actually looked entirely charming, as described by Texas Monthly in one of the few measured stories from that era.

Opened in 1989, it had cages of rabbits and a pony named Dancer, a playground and swimming pool, tucked into a leafy Austin neighborhood “as tidy and pastoral as a cottage in a fairy tale,” Texas Monthly wrote.

The couple lived at the same house — Fran in her 40s and Dan in his 50s — and cared for about 15 children each day, including some who had histories of emotional problems and abuse.

One day in 1991, Fran recalled in an interview with KXAN, only two children were dropped off. Then police knocked on the door and sat with her in the kitchen.

“They told me Dan was accused of hurting a child,” she said. “And I knew that couldn’t be true.” What began as a single accusation from a 3-year-old girl with known behavioral problems, Texas Monthly wrote, “escalated to monstrous proportions” after authorities closed the day care.

Worried parents sent their children to therapists, where they came back with tales pulled straight from horror movies.

At one point in the investigation, the Statesman wrote, police had a suspect list of “26 ritual abusers, including many of the Kellers’ neighbors and a respected Austin police captain.”

As an appeals court judges recounted decades later, one girl claimed that Dan Keller “had come to her house and had cut her dog’s vagina with a chain saw until it bled, that she was taken to a cemetery, where, after a person dressed like a policeman threw a person in a hole, Daniel Keller shot the person who had been thrown into the hole and cut up the body with a chain saw while all the children helped.”

And parents began to reinterpret day-to-day activities at the day care as sinister omens.

The Kellers had once sent children home with American flags, one parent told the Vancouver Sun. The flag “reminds them, ‘Don’t tell,’ ” the parent said. The panic was already beginning to subside in other parts of the world. A three-year inquiry by the British government in the early 1990s concluded that “there was no foundation to the plethora of satanic child abuse claims,” according to the BBC.

“These tales are usually just that — figments of imagination,” the New York Times wrote in 1994, citing a study by the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect that found not a single substantiated case of cult sex abuse among more than 11,000 reported to psychiatric and police workers.

Nevertheless, the Kellers were convicted after a six-day trial in 1992.

Not of chainsawing a dog’s vagina, of course — but of aggravated sexual assault based on the word of children and police, and a single piece of physical evidence: an apparent wound on a girl’s vagina.

That, too, would turn out to be wrong — but not before the Kellers stood in a Travis County courthouse and heard their sentences read aloud: 48 years each.................................


The link:......................................................https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/08/24/accused-of-satanism-they-spent-21-years-in-prison-they-were-just-declared-innocent-and-were-paid-millions/?utm_term=.9b9859d97362