The Exorcist: An Atheist Perspective (Updated)

-  PART I -

THE MOVIE AS A LESSON FOR ATHEISTS

We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.

Anaïs Nin

The Brain – Manufacturing Our Micro Morality

Comprised of two hemispheres, the brain is connected internally by, and communicates through, something called the corpus callosum. Externally, these hemispheres are covered by a sheet of neural tissue called the cerebral cortex. While the right hemisphere of the cortex excels at nonverbal and spatial tasks, the left hemisphere is usually more dominant in verbal tasks such as speaking and writing. The left hemisphere is also considered analytic or logical and thinks in terms of the future and the past, while the right hemisphere is considered holistic or intuitive, and thinks in terms of right now. 

The two hemispheres of our brain work together to fashion a coherent story of the things we perceive. Our speaking left brain constructs an explanatory reason for the things our right brain perceives but cannot articulate. In the process, facts can be created from fictions as both hemispheres navigate their way through an experience with the compass of a belief. An example of how this happens was demonstrated in something called The Scar Experiment. 

Scarface: The Bias of Mistaken Beliefs

In 1980, a study called “The Scar Experiment” was performed in which ten volunteers had a scar painted on their face. The purpose of the study, the volunteers were told, was to examine how people respond to a stranger with a physical deformity such as a facial scar.  The experimenters then secretly removed the scar altogether, under the pretense that they were just giving it some finishing touches. The volunteers were then sent out “into the waiting rooms of different medical offices” to observe how strangers in the office responded to their scar.  All of the volunteers returned with the same report, claiming that they noticed “strangers were ruder to them, less kind to them, and stared at their scar.” 

Since the subjects believed the scar remained on their face, they also believed they were accurately interpreting their interactions. Every subject ended up convinced that the scar influenced how poorly they were treated by other people, despite the fact that none of them had any visible facial scar at all. Instead, their belief colored not only how they interpreted the actions of others they interacted with during the experience, but also how they reacted toward others. Everything they saw seemed to confirm their belief that they were being judged for a disfigurement that they did not possess. Like rats following a “right brain” system of behavior, their “belief” became the automatic answer they reflexively chose again and again. 

Such an experiment demonstrates how we interpret meanings within the context of the beliefs we hold. Much like the imaginary scar, religious beliefs - which teach Christians to always think of themselves as an oppressed minority in an overwhelmingly secular world, even though the very opposite has nearly always been the case - likewise convince the “believer” that they are being attacked for simply be a Christian. They honestly “believe” this, even when the vast majority of people in a given area identify overwhelmingly as Christian, such as in America. This kind of confirmation bias is similar to pouring water through a used coffee filter. The filter is our mind and the coffee in the filter is the belief we hold, while the water is our experiences being poured through it. The result, of course, is that every experience we have continually confirms our belief that water has the taste and color of coffee.

REALITY AND PERCEPTION

Everything is a matter of perception - everything! No religion or divine insight exists that overrides this inescapable fact about the human condition, despite claims by "believers" of every stripe to the contrary. Even if God exists, it would be perhaps the greatest absurdity, and by far the greatest act of evil imaginable, to require that most of humanity depend necessarily for its salvation on a "divine revelation" that God decided to share with only a few of his "chosen" children, and for which the rest must not only be converted, but must be willing to fight to the death to defend. Indeed, no other idea could ever sow as much discord among humanity as this. There is a famous sketch that illustrates how the water of such a subjective idea was transformed into the wine of objective truth, and drunk like blood from the chalice of religion. Depending on how we look at that sketch, we see either a young woman or an old witch. The 1973 movie, The Exorcist, is very much like that sketch, and in more ways than one.

As a Catholic, I was unable to see this, of course, because I was possessed - by my religious beliefs. Those beliefs, which turn our fear of death and damnation into love for any idea or "god" that will save us from both, warped my perceptions of reality, and convinced me I had access to an "objective" truth about reality, that others who failed to agree with me had simply failed to understand.  Religions are "intelligently designed" to have this effect by subordinating human reason to a divine revelation, one that is used to necessarily conflate truth with mere "beliefs." Like that famous sketch, Catholics look at their religion and see a Virgin Mary who looks like Snow White, while atheists see a 2000 year old wicked witch of the sort found in fairy-tales, one that force feeds her children blood from a chalice every Sunday. One see's an institution based on the ideas of Jesus Christ, while the other sees an institution that is about as anti-Christ as it is possible to be. The question, of course, is whose  perception is right, or is all beauty in the eye of the beholder?

When I first watched The Exorcist as a Catholic "believer," I thought the little girl, Regan MacNeil, was possessed by a horde of demons. When I watched it many years later as an atheist, I realized a more accurate way of seeing the film was to conclude that she was perfectly normal, and that the real "horde of demons" were actually all of those who were convinced she was possessed by a horde of demons.  That is what the bias of our beliefs can do: alter reality. Regan MacNeil, in other words, was being treated by "true believers" as a modern day witch.

Perhaps the supreme irony in this movie is how is serves as a microcosm for how the Catholic Church provides a cure for the very cancer it alone is responsible for creating. The Catholic Church is solely responsible for teaching impressionable children to live in fear of eternal damnation, for example, which it claims it alone was established by God to help humanity insure agaisnt. So likewise in The Exorcist, since Regan's behavior was most likely a reaction to sexual abuse, the recent revelations about the thousands of children sexually abused by Catholic priests in nuns around the world over the last several decades likewise captures a similar hypocrisy. How? Because if Fr. Karras truly believes he is trying to free Regan from demonic possession, while working for a Church that was, at the same time, sexually abusing children while protecting the abusers and thus facilitating the abuse, then the entire exorcism should be seen as one necessary to free, not Regan, but Fr. Karras from his own possession of what he mistakenly believes is the true nature of his dearly beloved Catholic Church. 

Like Mel Gibson's, The Passion of the Christ, The Exorcist is a story that leaves the audience suffering from a spiritual form of PTSD, which seems to be the intended effect both God and the film makers desired, since Christ's brutal execution, far from being a requirement for the most powerful being in the universe to "forgive" the sins of the flawed creatures he had created,  was simply one of an infinite number of ways in which that "being" could've offered his children forgiveness, including the fact that God could've simply "turned the other cheek," as Christ himself had done.  But again, I was able to appreciate the importance of perspectives only after I had overcome my need to cling to my ideas about God, the Bible, and Catholicism, the way Fr. Karras clings to his "beliefs" about his religion to the exclusion of his training in psychology, in the same way Linus from Peanuts clung to his blanket. Doing so allowed me to see the Exorcist, not as a movie about a girl possessed by a demon, but about a host of adults who are all possessed by their "beliefs," from doctors to their "science" to priests to their religions, who are all blinded by their biases from seeing the "truth" of the reality staring them in the face. And because none of them can accept that fact, each of them in their own way takes it out on a little girl. Regan, in other words, is not the victim of demonic possession, but of religious obsession, by those who are so convinced they are the only cure, that they cannot see how much they are really the cancer. Religions do not allow people to see the world for how it really is, to paraphrase Anais Nin, but how religion tells people they must think of them to save their souls from hell.

 

WELCOME TO THE TWILIGHT ZONE

 If you ever saw the Twilight Zone episode entitled Eye of the Beholder, which aired in 1960,  and then watched The Exorcist movie in 1973, you may have felt a bit of déjà vu, a term that literally translates into "seen before." This is because in at least some ways, both the little girl possessed by the devil in The Exorcist, Regan MacNeil, and patient 307 in Eye of the Beholder, Janet Tyler, are essentially the same person. The only real difference, however, is that the viewpoints of the audience are transposed. 

While Regan's increasing facial disfigurement is attributed to the work of demons she has unwittingly invited into her soul by playing with a Ouiji board she found in her basement, Tyler, who turns out to be quite attractive by contemporary standards, is led to believe she is ugly because she does not possess the same facial disfigurements as everyone else. In both cases, failure to conform to the prevailing ethos, whether physical or spiritual, is the problem being addressed.         

In Eye of the Beholder, Janet Tyler has undergone 11 surgical treatments (the maximum number legally allowed) in an attempt to fix her face, which her nursers and doctors describe as a "pitiful twisted lump of flesh,"so she can look "normal." Tyler, who is first shown with her head completely bandaged so that her face cannot be seen, is surrounded by nurses and doctor though much of the episode, but their faces are always in shadows or off-camera. 

When the doctor finally removes the bandages, the audience is pleased to discover that Tyler is quite attractive, at least by contemporary standards. Yet much to the surprise of the audience, the doctors regret to inform Tyler that the procedure has failed, and her face has undergone no change. As the camera pulls back, we finally discover that it is the doctor, nurses, and other people in the hospital, who are all horribly disfigured, relative to today's standards.  While Tyler looks perfectly normal to us, everyone else in the hospital has the eyes like a Bullmastiff, swollen and twisted lips like a ducks bill, and wrinkled pig-like noses with extremely large nostrils.

 Distraught by the failure of the procedure, Tyler runs through the hospital as what is considered normal in this alternate society "state" are revealed. Flat-screen televisions throughout the hospital project an image of the State's leader giving a speech calling for "greater conformity."

Eventually, a handsome man (again by the contemporary viewer's standards) named Walter Smith arrives to take the crying, despondent Tyler into exile to a village of her "own kind", where her "ugliness" will not trouble the State. During the middle ages, that "ugliness" was seen as anyone who did not accept Christianity and the Christian brand of God. In America in the 20th century, it was anyone who did not accept that the economic religion of Capitalism was not only the most virtuous economic religion to be had, but that it was in fact not a "religion" at all, but a science.

Such people were often branded - thanks in no small part to the inquisitions started by the Torquemada for Capitalism, Joe  McCarthy -  as "communists" or "socialists," which are the other major brands of economic religions started by that Abraham of economics, Adam Smith. Prior to the Civil Rights movement, the problem was all those who supported integration or interracial relationships, while today it's anyone who defends gay marriage or transgender equality. In the future, it will likely be anyone without the requisite technology, whether on hand or implanted in their bodies.

In Eye of the Beholder, the audience identifies with Tyler when they discover she looks exactly like they do, and only later discover that the doctors, nursers, and others in the hospital where Tyler is a patient, are the ones suffering from the facial disfigurement, at least from the audience's perspective. In The Exorcist, in contrast, the disfigurement begins as a spiritual cancer, with Regan's face only later mutating into that of a grotesque gargoyle. For the atheist, this mutation has less to do with Regan herself, and more to do with how she is increasingly viewed by those around her through the bias of their beliefs. That she is thought to be "possessed" by the "father of lies," for example, is simply a religious way of saying she is thought to be a liar, only the blame is attributed not to her, but an alien who has occupied her. This shift in blame from Regan to a demon reflects the Christian's inability to take responsibility for their own judgements of others, judgements they not only deny they are making when they condemn anyone who fails to conform to their religious ideals about sex and sexuality, but for which they shift the responsibility to their God and their Bible. From the Christian perspective, then, this mutation comes from within Regan, from the demons who dwell within her, but from an atheist perspective, the mutation come from without, from those who have chosen to see her through the lens of their religious biases as someone possessed by demons, even if demons are simply imaginary evil unicorns, and who therefore see her increasingly as becoming one, as the biases of their own beliefs increasingly skew the appearance of young girl that sits before them into that of an old witch, much like the famous drawing that illustrates the malleability of human perception. Regan's change in appearance over time, from this latter perspective, is not necessarily taking place in reality, that is, but instead is simply how she is increasingly viewed by all those around he, once they begin to "believe" that she is the one possessed by evil, and not themselves by the "false idol" of their religious beliefs. .  

The parallel between the two is that, like witches and heretics of the middle ages were viewed to be in league with Lucifer, both Tyler and Regan are surrounded by those who, unable to see the plank in their own eye because it is such a common and even venerated part of  their culture, conclude that the problem resides not with themselves or their own "beliefs," but instead solely with the individual. The Exorcist is simply a window into the mindset that has refused to evolve since the middle ages, when religion was used in a similar fashion to justify cruelty toward the mentally handicap by viewing them as witches and thus a threat to people's salvation. Believers even relied on the Malleus Maleficarum, which is usually translated as the Hammer of Witches, which was written in Germany in 1487 by a Catholic clergyman named Heinrich Kramer and was know as the most thorough treatise on witchcraft. 

Today, with science having largely displaced religion as the default lens though which society interprets reality, accusations of witchcraft and possession have been replaced by blaming people of suffering from chemical imbalances and "mental illness," rather than the result of something in the cultural and environmental water in which we are all immersed. This is like blaming the colony collapse of bees, not on the proliferation of pesticides and electromagnetic radiation, but on insect psychosis, or blaming tumors found in fish not on the toxic chemicals and plastics in the water, but on poor diet and lack of exercise.  As psychiatrist Dr. Peter Briggin's pointed out in The Mind of Men, "Mental illness is a myth, a fraud, a bad metaphor, an excuse, a rationalization. It's a religious viewpoint held by psychiatrists which says that human troubles are somehow medical in origin and medical in their solution. Now just how poverty, unemployment, unhappiness fights between husband and wives, beatings of children, anxiety, alienation - just how all these problems relate to medicine and relate to illness is never stated." 

Indeed, the only reason why religion can be so openly criticized in a Christian society today has far less to do with the progress of human intelligence, and far more to do with the fact that the theistic religions of the past have been largely replaced by the sexier pseudo-scientific religions of modern world, one's based on math and science, like economics and psychiatry. And while both the religions of old and the science of today characterized the problems of the human soul and mind as a war emanating from within, one of the soul and the other of the mind, the future will no doubt increasingly cast this war for our soul as one between man and technology.

Even today, in fact, "man's struggle to save his personality from destruction by technology," as Arnold J. Toynbee explained, can only be called a Third World War, in which we are all presently involved.  As technology becomes the new world religion, in practice at least, we move closer and closer to what Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society called the "biocracy," or "the complete joining of man and machine." It is the "biocrats," Ellul warns, who will become the new high priests in the future. "The individual will have no more need of conscience and virtue," he explains, because "his moral and mental furnishings will be a matter of the biocrat's decisions," much as they were a matter of the perish priest a century ago, and the psychiatrist today. And is this not the utopian goal, hope, and dream of religion as well? In the future, in other words, anyone without a cell phone will be seen as either a savage or satanic.

This, then, illustrates yet another great irony found in this film, yet one of such a nuanced yet ubiquitous nature that it goes altogether unnoticed by the vast majority of people today. That irony is how today, the "machine,"  - or more specifically, technology - has replaced reality itself. In fact, today, it increasingly impossible  to distinguish the difference between reality and technology, with even physics suggesting reality itself may be simply a hologram. Why is this ironic from the perspective of  The Exorcist? Because today, what increasingly consumes the human mind is not religion or demonic possession - which is often a distinction without a difference - but technology and the internet.

 The story of Narcissus, as such, is not the story of a single man, but of mankind, who is currently cocooning itself inside of a manmade cyber cave. Humanity has fallen in love with it's own reflection, in other words, in the lake of it's technology and the thoughts and images of its own collective mind, on an internet that echoes into infinity.  In the 1972 Russian sci-fi movie, Solaris, "a psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet called Solaris to investigate the death of a doctor and the mental problems of cosmonauts on the station. He soon discovers that the water on the planet is a type of brain which brings out repressed memories and obsessions." Ironically, inside an iPhone screen, what allows you to scroll  is a silvery liquid, that looks almost like mercury. And the internet is, if nothing else, a cyber lake which "brings out repressed memories and obsessions," that has been described as both the collective mind of humanity and the mind of God. In a sense, Karl Popper touched on these ideas in his concept of "cosmological pluralism," and today we consider the mental sheath that blankets the earth of our collective conciousness as a mindspehere or nousphere.

as Lewis Mumford pointed out in Technics and Civilization, "the machine came most slowly into agriculture, with its life-conserving, life maintaining functions, while it prospered lustily precisely in those parts of the environment where the body was most infamously treated by custom: namely, in the monastery, in the mine, on the battlefield."(Mumford., p.26.)

• [M]echanization and regimentation are not new phenomena in history: what is new is the fact that these functions have been projected and embodied in organized forms which dominate every aspect of our existence. Other civilizations reached a high degree of technical proficiency without, apparently, being profoundly influenced by the methods and aims of technics. All the critical instruments of modern technology-the clock, the printing press, the water-mill, the magnetic compass, the loom, the lathe, gunpowder, paper, to say nothing of mathematics and chemistry and mechanics existed in other cultures. The Chinese, the Arabs, the Greeks, long before the Northern European, had taken most of the first steps toward the machine. And although the great engineering works of the Cretans, the Egyptians, and the Romans were carried out mainly on an empirical basis, these peoples plainly had an abundance of technical skill at their command. They had machines; but they did not develop "the machine." It remained for the peoples of Western Europe to carry the physical sciences and the exact arts to a point no other culture had reached, and to adapt the whole mode of life to the pace and the capacities of the machine. How did this happen? How in fact could the machine take possession of European society until that society had, by an inner accommodation, surrendered to the machine?

For the atheist, this only illustrates how religion has formatted the human mind into a binary system of rights and wrongs, despite the fact that nature itself is largely analogue by comparison.  With its emphasis on traditions, moral deferment to a professional priestly class, and later rote bible memorization, religion turned people into automatons who were forced to love a God out of fear of his eternal wrath for failing to do so, even though "hell" negates any ability to make such a choice freely, God was impossible to know, and 'commanding' someone to love you would be no more authentic from a dog than if it had been programed into a robot. And with it's worship of divinity and disdain for the purely human, religion elevated  abstinence and fasting, daily prayers, and weekly mass, teaching its adherents to behave more like machines than  like the animals said "God" had created them to be. Indeed, it was for trying to be anything more than that that God flew into a terrible rage and required the murder of his only son to forgive. And today, religion is caught between its condemnation of the human condition on the one hand, which it had always characterized as corrupt and contrary to the divine will, and its fear of becoming ever more like the computers it has largely sought to program human behavior to resemble on the other.  The mechanization of the human mind has become a mouse trap, one that religion helped to create but now struggles everywhere to escape. 

The point, of course, is that anyone who does not accept and conform to the prevailing beliefs of the day, and thus anyone who does not allow their brains to be steered by the power of the confirmation biases those beliefs inevitably embed deep in our psyche, will be considered to be like a cancer to the society at large, and will therefore need to be either reeducated or removed. In this sense, the atheist is as anathema to the Christianity as the minimalist is to the consumerism.  

SEXUAL ABUSE

The Exorcist is also simply a metaphor for child abuse, both sexual and psychological, at the hands of religious fanatics who themselves all appear to be suffering from their own emotional and psychological problems, even more than Regan. Hence, this movie is not about the possession of Regan MacNeil by a demon, from this perspective, but of Fr. Damien Karras by his religious beliefs and guilt about his own mother.

 By imagining that a person is possessed by a demon, the "believer" concludes there exists a kind of spiritual homunculus inside of the person's brain, one which gained access to the victim's psyche - the word "psyche" meaning "soul" or essence - because the person had failed to implement the home security system of adequate belief in God. And by failing to believe in God enough, I mean they had failed to be sufficiently fearful of the devil's ability to find an open window into their soul. Like the "believer" who needs to believe that the universe itself must have been "designed" by a creator, and with all the deliberateness of a watchmaker, the Christian anthropomorphizes that which they cannot explain into that which they can explain quite easily; while the Christian calls the former God, they simply call the latter the devil, but they are nevertheless two sides of the same anthropomorphism.   

FEAR OF SEX AND THE WORSHIP OF VIRGINS

Much of the dialogue in the movie coming from Regan is steeped in sexually explicit profanities, that many grade school and high school children would laugh at, but which Catholics, Christians, and "mature" adults take great offense at. That language only illustrates, not how much the devil enjoys sex, but how much Christians seem to hate it, whenever it deviates from what their Catholic Church proscribes, even though not a single Catholic actually follows those proscriptions any more than non-Catholics.  

The Catholic Church's need to maintain the belief that Mary remained "ever virgin" is a clear indication that Catholic's think there is something more moral  and righteous about abstaining from sex rather than having it, even though such abstinence is more unnatural than even homosexuality, which many Catholics today still consider to be the most "unnatural" thing of all.  This disdain for sex in general, and complete opposition to sex outside of the narrow lines proscribed by a religion ruled by men who chose to live their lives as voluntary eunuchs, traces its lineage back to the early Church fathers, including superstars like St. Augustine.   

 After he had slaked his carnal appetites in the brothels of Rome, for example, St.Augustine converted to Catholicism and declared sex itself was "a shameful and degrading act" (one wonders if his change of mind was perhaps precipitated through the contraction of a venereal disease). Other Church fathers agreed with Augustine, with Methodius calling sex "unseemly," and St. Ambrose referring to it as a "defilement."  Tertullian went even further, directing his hatred of sex - which he taught "drives out the holy spirit" - toward women in general, calling them "the devils door" and "a temple built over a sewer, the gateway to the devil," through which "Satan creeps into men's hearts and minds and works his wiles for their spiritual destruction." He went on to renounce all sexual relations with his wife, and claimed that it was because of women that "the Son of God had to die." A few centuries later, Saint John Chrysostom would proclaim that "among all savage beasts, not one is found as harmful as woman."

Men have blamed women for their own sins at least since the time of Adam and Eve, and these Catholic fathers of the Church were no different.  In fact, doing so had long been a part of the Roman culture as well, complete with an affinity for virgins. One of the protective deities of Rome was Vesta, for example, "a guardian of the hearth and household, and for many centuries the well-being of the state was thought to depend on the diligence with which the Vestal Virgins, her priestesses, tended the sacred fire." As Reay Tannahill explained in her book, Sex in History:

"When Rome suffered disaster at Cannae in 216 B.C., the blame was placed not on military incompetence but on erring Vestals. Two were denounced and condemned. A century later, all six were declared corrupt, and three were found guilty of having surrendered their virginity. The penalty was lingering death, immured in a small underground chamber with a bed, a lamp, and a few days' food. Plutarch, describing the procession that escorted the guilty Vestals to their death chambers, said, "There is no spectacle in the world more terrifying, and in Rome no day of comparable horror."

This description sounds eerily similar to what Regan's room eventually comes to resemble by the end of the movie, with Regan herself thought to be slowly dying as a prisoner, with her own body serving as the "underground chamber." 

When these ideas are combined with the fact that St. Augustine, along with many early Church fathers, enthusiastically supported the use of torture to coerce conversion among sinners - with Tomás de Torquemada, the Dominican friar and first Grand Inquisitor in Spain's movement to homogenize religious practices with those of the Catholic Church in the late 15th century, being the most famous,  the atheist is left to wonder if the the "demon" allegedly possessing Regan is perhaps the ghost of St. Augustine himself. And if not, there is no doubt that Augustine would certainly be fully supportive of the devil's use of torture Regan, since it the trauma of the event on all concerned, especially those who saw the movie, is could only lead to more conversions. 

  

In fact, historian Perez Zagorin, explained just how much St. Augustine would've likely approved of Regan's demonic possession, seeing it as a kind of "conversion by coercion,"  in his book, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West.  In it, Zagorin "takes readers to a time when both the Catholic Church and the main new Protestant denominations embraced a policy of endorsing religious persecution, coercing unity, and, with the state's help, mercilessly crushing dissent and heresy."  According to Zagorin, Augustine claimed that “[M]any must first be recalled to their Lord by the stripes of temporal scourging, like evil slaves, and in some degree like good-for-nothing fugitives.” In a letter to Boniface (Epistle #185), c. 417: De Correctione Donatistarum, Augustine went on to elaborate:

• Why, therefore, should not the Church use force in compelling her lost sons to return.... ? Is it not a part of the care of the shepherd, when any sheep have left the flock, even though not violently forced away, but led astray by tender words and coaxing blandishments, to bring them back to the fold of his master when he has found them, by the fear or even the pain of the whip, if they show symptoms of resistance.

For Augustine, coercion through the use of "great violence" could be justified, not when it was applied by unbelievers who persecuted because of cruelty, of course, but when it was applied by "Christians who persecuted because of love.” Nor was this limited to St. Augustine and a handful of psychopathic saints who used torture like the serial killer from the horror movie Saw. Instead, as Zagorin points out, “from Augustine onward, and for well over a thousand years, virtually all Christian theologians agreed that heretics should be persecuted, and most agreed that they should be killed.”

In this sense, then, the devils possession and torture of Regan in the Exorcist is no different from God curing cancer through a miracle, since both are simply tools of propaganda intended to coerce conversion to God, or more specifically, Catholicism. This only leaves the atheist to wonder why a God - who is said to possess both infinite intelligence and infinite power, so much so He is said to have "intelligently designed" the entire universe and everything in it with but a single thought - has such difficulty figuring out how to get people to love Him that he is forced to rely on such gimmicks like commandments, miracles, and even demonic possessions, all of which have failed miserably to produce the desired effect. From a marketing standpoint, then, the devil would be the CEO of Goldman Sachs and God couldn't even get a job selling shoes, let alone carry those of Satan's junior executives.

From the perspective of a Catholic, therefore, The Exorcist looks like a ringing endorsement of God and the Catholic Church, but from the atheist perspective, The Exorcist looks more like a ringing condemnation of both the Catholic Church and the "God" they claim to work for. One sees a young woman, calling children to her bosom like Hansel and Gretel to a candy cottage, while the other knows exactly how that story ends. And as one claims to have "put away childish things," but practices a religion that tells them they must "be like children," while the other  

 -  PART II -

DISSECTING THE MOVIE ITSELF 

When I was a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things

1 Corinthians 13:11

I have long believed  that the true purpose of religion is to necessarily conflate its "beliefs" with the truth, even though the two are more often than not, complete opposites. Take the quote from Corinthians above, for example. Despite the Bible's claim to have "put away childish things," Christianity teaches its faithful flock that complete spiritual dependence upon a supernatural deity, and more specifically a man-made church, is not only the greatest virtue of all, but the only way to avoid moral decay in this life, and eternal damnation in the next. What's more, Christianity teaches people that believing in an invisible friend is a perfectly mature and legitimate thing for adults to do, as long as that invisible friend happens to be named Jesus, and not, say, Roger Rabbit, even though, from an atheist perspective, this is a distinction without a difference. 

That organized religions have always conflated its beliefs with the truth, since those who have always organized religions have always understood that the two are mortal enemies, explains why the Bible quote above is actually intended to hide the fact that religion is designed to preach the very opposite of what it does in practice. Hence, Christianity teaches its followers that having an invisible friend and fostering complete lifelong dependence upon an institutional church for all moral guidance is exactly what every adults should do, just as long as the invisible friend is Jesus and the church is whatever one they happen to belong to at the time. Christianity, in other words,  not only treats people like children, but it encourages them to believe in child like fantasies, rather than grow by challenging their most sacred assumptions, regardless of how much evidence there is that proves those assumptions are simply wrong. 

While this may seem harmless, and even laughable, making such conflations and fostering such dependence become the very butterfly that produces Crusades, Inquisitions, and even exorcisms, by those who have become so addicted to the endorphins their "beliefs" reward them with, that some of the "truest" believers would prefer murder the whole world rather than admit they could ever be wrong.  In a sense, we see this conflation even in the movie itself, from Regan playing with the Ouija board, a child's toy through which demons infiltrated her soul, while the "men in black" come with their own version of the same thing, their Bible, which they use to call upon a supposedly even greater super natural power than the one said to have possessed Regan, and the movie is about these two supernatural powers duking it out in the ring of a little girl's bedroom, for a paying audience more eager to see the carnage than the conclusion. 

God is Rocky & Satan is Apollo Creed

It seems the fight between these two supernatural powers has always revolved around sex, with one wanting humanity to know it tastes great, and the other always preaching about ways to make it less filling, or what an atheist would describe as "less fulfilling." We see this in the contrast between Eve and Mary Magdalene on the one hand, and Mary ever Virgin on the other. Why immaterial beings would be so concerned with the sexual habits of material beings, however, remains forever a mystery. 

We see this contrast even in the first scene in the movie, which is an outside view of Regan MacNeil's bedroom window at night, just as the lights in her room go out. Those lights remain turned off for most of the movie as well - how voyeuristic. After this, the camera pans to the right as we see young lovers walking into the dark of night, arm and arm, which then fades to a statute of the 'virgin' Mary, followed by the opening credits. By juxtaposing the lights in the bedroom window with the lovers fading into the darkness, the film portends a contest between our sexual nature on the one hand, and a near deification of virginity in the mother of "God" on the other.   

 After the opening credits, the first scene is in Northern Iraq, where many maps show the Garden of Eden may have been located. Interestingly, however, the scene looks like the landscape of hell, complete with countless condemned souls feverishly swinging shovels and pick axes at the scorched earth, like prisoners on a chain gang in Dante's Inferno, digging up the bones of the past and kicking up dust everywhere in the process. (This obsession with the past will play a major part of the film for Fr. Karras, by the way.) It's as if these men are right out of slave labor camp from Dostoevsky's, Crime and Punishment, and symbolically toiling for the loss of our collective innocence. And who knows, perhaps even due to our sexual licentiousness.

When we contrast these scenes agaisnt each other, we see the "civilized west" typified in an affluent D.C. townhouse, with what we typically think of as rugged uncivilized rustics living in the desert, much as the Native Americans were seen as savages for failing to live in cabins instead of teepees. Such contrasts have always been relied upon to support the illusion that the more creature comforts a society has, the more moral and "civilized" we presume it to be, even though the historical record almost always demonstrates the opposite to be true.

Fr. Merrin, the older priest leading the expedition played by Max von Sydow, then finds a small amulet in the dirt, and is shaken by its resemblance to a statue with a giant erect penis; a statue which Merrin goes to visit shortly thereafter. The statue is of the ancient Neo-Assyrian deity called Pazuzu (which is often mistakenly assumed to be a demon, but isn't), and its erection only strengthens the contrast between the virginity of Mary and the loss of our innocence and fear of sex by Catholics and religion. (The erection, by the way, is added for effect, to expressly show the pitting of our fear of sexuality against the religious worship of virgins, much like in the Muslim religion. This is obvious since normal statues of Pazuzu are not suffering from such a priapistic erection.)

On his way to see the statue of Pazuzu, Fr. Merrin comes across a blacksmith with one eye, which stands in contrast to the carpenter of Christ that Fr Merrin has pledged his life to follow as a priest. We are left to wonder if Fr. Merrin is here looking at his own reflection as a one eyed man, with the audience constituting the land of the blind, at least as far as he sees it. Is Fr. Merrin blind because he is only seeing the world through the single eye of  his religion? Or does the blacksmith suggest that we are all blind, in some respect, by our own scatomas, because our beliefs prevent us from seeing anything but what we believe?

When Fr. Merrin finally does go to see the priapist statue of Pazuzu, the scene ends with Merrin standing on a precipice to the right of the screen, facing the statue, which stands on the left of the screen. As the scene fades, a full yellow sun emerges between the pair, surrounded by a blood red-orange sky. This imagery returns later in the film, when Regan creates a Barney-like puppet, which is presumably  her imaginary friend "Mr Howdy," which bears a striking resemblance to the statue of Pazuzu that Fr. Merrin encountered earlier in Iraq (only the phallic erection of the statue in Iraq is replaced on Regan's puppet with a large phallic nose instead; and both are similar to the phallic appendages found on the desecrated statue of Mary in the Church later on). Mr Howdy, by the way, just happens to be the same color of the blood red orange sky from the earlier scene just mentioned, with a yellow tuft of hear on top.

Later in the movie, Chris MacNeil is arguing with Fr. Karras about her daughter's need for an exorcism in the basement of her house. She was washing his shirt, recall, because it had been covered in green pea soup (apparently the actor playing Fr. Karras, Jason Miller, could never eat green pea soup again after that scene). Karras is to the right of the screen, sitting at the table, while the Mr. Howdy puppet sits across the table from Karras, facing him. Standing directly behind Mr. Howdy is Chris MacNeil. Fr. Karras is positioned in the same way as Fr. Merrin, to the right of the screen, while Mr. Howdy/Chris MacNeil  and the statute of Pazuzu are positioned to the left. This is not a coincidence.

The two scenes parallel the priests facing off against perceived threats to their authority, in a sense, and the beliefs that they rely on to derive that authority. The question, however, is what is the "demonic force" Merrin and Karras are fighting against? Interestingly enough, Pazuzu is most famous for vanquishing the evil goddess, Lamashtu, who was known for kidnapping children from their mothers. One can wonder from this fact alone, if they scratch the surface of this film slightly more, if the staging of the puppet across the table from Fr. Karras to parallel that of Pazuzu across from Merrin in Iraq, is in fact a way of suggesting that the Catholic Church is, in a sense, Lamashtu.  

In addition to Rob Ager's interpretation that Burke Dennings may have been molesting Regan, I also think The Exorcist can be understood - from an atheist's perspective anyway - to illustrate hypocrisy, the detrimental effects of sexual repression, and ultimately rebellion against our parents and their superstitious beliefs (as can be seen in the scene just mentioned of Chris MacNeil standing directly behind Mr Howdy).

It likewise illustrates how our beliefs shape our perceptions and control our actions, with Chris MacNeil allowing her beliefs in the secular religion of psychiatry to lead her to the conclusion that Reagan telling the psychiatrist to "keep his fingers away from her goddamn cunt" to be the result of a mental problem, instead of the result of sexual abuse.It apparently never occurs to her, however, that sexual abuse could be the cause of  Regan's "mental problem."

And lastly, in more subtle but nevertheless direct ways, the film may also communicates William Friedkin's agnostic contempt for religion overall.

GUILT AND FRAUD

We see the potential fraud and the effects of guilt rather clearly in Fr. Karras. Indeed, if The Exorcist is about anything, it's about a priest haunted by mommy issues, who, unable to forgive himself, appears to take out his guilt on a little girl.  

When we first meet Fr Karras he is in the audience of onlookers watching Chris MacNeil, a famous actress filming a movie on the campus of Georgetown University. Like Inception, perhaps the meaning of this filming of a movie inside of a movie is an allusion to the idea that Friedkin thinks that religion is itself nothing but a theatrical charade.

For the scene that Chris MacNeil is preparing to do, for example, there are students gathered on the steps of one of the Catholic Georgetown University buildings, holding picket signs. One of those signs clearly reads Help Eliminate Lying Pigs, with the letters H-E-L-P written down the left side of the poster in capital blood red-orange letters, and the words spelled out accordingly, in dark letters. Interestingly enough, at the very end of the movie, when Fr Dyer looks down the famous "Exorcist stairs" where Fr Karras tumbled to his death, on the left hand side we see written on the wall, in capital blood red orange letters, the word PIG, and on the wall above it, closer to the top of the stairs, we see in dark writing, the capital letters MY.

This is either pure coincidence,  or something more. Is it perhaps Friedkin's attempt to confess that the whole movie is, in a sense, his own lie, in some respect, or that he perhaps feels that way about religion? Who knows.  And given the Manson Family Murders of 1969, where the perpetrators had written the word PIG in blood on the wall, one wonders if Friedkin is suggesting that religion is no different than a cult.

When Chris MacNeil decides to walk home right after shooting this scene at GU, she passes by a church yard where she first sees Fr. Karras, and overhears him trying to encourage a fellow priest. Karras is heard to say "There's not a day in my life I don't feel like a fraud." He continues, however, that he doesn't know anyone who hasn't felt this, not just priests, but everyone, including doctors and lawyers as well. Perhaps this is a look at the problem known as "imposter syndrome," where people are always racked with the fear that they will be discovered to be a fraud.  Hence, the first time Karras sees MacNeil she's "pretending" to play a part, and the first time MacNeil sees Karras, Karras is admitting to feeling like he's simply "a fraud," and pretending as well.

 But while MacNeil plays her part and goes about her life, walking happily home, we see Karras walking under the cloud of his own fraud soon after, when he is asked in a New York subway by a homeless man, "Father, can you help an old altar boy? I'm a catholic?" Rather than help the man or give him some spare change, Fr Karras gives the man a distrustful look and hurriedly walks away. By doing so, we see how Karras is haunted by his own fears, and even perhaps his own distrust of Catholicism itself.

Also, when Karras finally gets to his aged mother's apartment, she hugs him as if she had not seen him in a long time. This is confirmed by the dialogue, when she tells him that his uncle (presumably her brother) had come by to see her recently. When Karras asks when, she replies, "Last month." This suggests that Karras has not been by to see his mom in at least a month, despite the fact that she has some problem with her leg, that Karras is then seen binding for her. He then mentions to her that he could take her someplace where she would be safe, where she wouldn't be alone. In short, Karras is a priest who has not visited his own mom in over a month, despite the fact she's an old woman, living alone, in an unsafe place, with a messed up leg. The audience is left to wonder from all of this, of course, if perhaps Karras really is a "fraud," or if he is simply riddled with the self doubting belief that he is.

Karras, we find out shortly thereafter, thinks he has "lost his faith," and is no longer cut out for his vocation. Maybe this is because he recognizes that he has been so inattentive to his own aging mother. He had studied psychiatry while in the priesthood, but even when he goes to visit his mother in the psych-ward of the mental hospital, he is neither compassionate nor caring to the mental patients who crowd toward him like the crowds that flocked to Jesus, in search of his healing touch and compassion. Karras, however, simply pulls away, visibly annoyed by them all. After that, he finds his mother, strapped to a hospital bed, and promises to take her home. She writhes away from his touches like Regan writhing in agony to what she believes is holy water, even though it isn't.' Like his own mother, in other words, Regan turns away not from the holy water that Karras sprinkles on her, but from Karras himself.  And as he attempts to comfort her, his mother (and later during the exorcism Regan, in his mothers voice) wales, "why Damy! Why do you do this to me? Why Damy! Why?" It is as if Karras is the false holy water.

This is the last time Karras sees his mother alive. (In contrast, the first time Karras sees Regan, she is similarly old and decayed looking, and likewise strapped to the bed. Is it any wonder, then, that Karras is haunted by his own mother? This will be confirmed at the end of the movie.) And the very next scene, Karras is in the gym fighting the heavy bag, as if fighting his own demons, his own failures, and his own sense of guilt.

In contrast to Karras's mother, we see the fraud of Regan's mom, Chris MacNeil,  who spends Regan's birthday, not taking her sight seeing and to the movies like she promised, but instead drinking and spending the day screaming into the telephone; and all out of a desire to shame Regan's dad (who is in Rome, the home of the Roman Catholic Church, coincidentally enough) for not calling his daughter on her birthday. Chris is less interested in making Regan happy on her birthday, in other words, than she is in taking an opportunity to feel morally superior, and wanting desperately to rub her ex-husbands nose in it. (Hell hath no fury as a woman with an axe to grind.)

Although we see Damien go to see his mom in the hospital, when Chris later sees Fr. Dyer at her party, she asks about Karras, to which Dyer responds, "he had a pretty rough knock last night. His mother passed away. She was living by herself and I guess she was dead a couple of days before they found her." We are left to wonder if Karras had ever actually visited his mother in the hospital, or had he wishfully imagined it all. Many people simply assume that he had, and had then taken her home, where she must have died alone shortly thereafter. Either way, Karras is clearly haunted by the death of his mother, as his dream of her coming out of the subway reveals. It is in Karras's dream that we first see the demonic face that we will encounter again in Regan's dream, and during the exorcism itself. And lastly , Karras drowns his sorrows with a bottle of Chivas Regal that Fr. Dyer admits he stole.

Indeed, even Fr. Dyer finds a way to justify his failure to practice what he preaches.  

CONTROL, REGRET, & BELIEFS

Recall that the first time Karras sees Regan, she's strapped to the bed just like his mom was the last time Karras saw her in the hospital, and both are dressed in their nightgowns. Regan here seems to represent the repressed guilt of Fr Karras about his own mother, then. This parallel is a bit like Norman Bates and his own mother, who had warped his mind so much with a disgust for his own sexual desires that he attacked women he was sexually attracted to. The exorcism may be less about freeing Regan from the demons that possess her, therefore, and more about freeing Fr. Karras from his own demons and his own regret. Yet rather than free himself from those demons, Karras seeks only to externalize them through his religion, so that he can try to control them instead.

Strapping Regan to the bed makes little sense, however, when you consider that she had already demonstrated her ability to move furniture around the room at will, even opening the drawer when she first meets Fr. Karras. So why binding Regan to the bed would stop her from moving the furniture with her mind is never explained. It's true that is may be to prevent Regan from harming herself, as she had already done with the crucifix, but anyone who can make the bed rise off the floor,  bang the cabinets, slam doors hard enough to crack them, and even crack the ceiling, unleash a tempest in the room, and shake the entire room like an earthquake, can't be stopped from being tied to a bed. What other purpose does strapping Regan to the bed suggest, then, but that of being controlled by the beliefs of those around her?Her violent reaction to those attempts to control, may simply be, not what she is actually doing, but what everyone in the movie is perceiving her to be doing, when they look at her through the lens of their different beliefs.

After all, why would Regan react so violently to tap water, just because she believes it is holy water? And why would a demon not know the difference? Does this simply illustrate how the power of a belief can effect us, even when the belief is false? Is the water being sprinkled on Regan really just an example of Fr. Karras showering his own beliefs on Regan, and her reaction to it is not to the Holy Water she thinks it to be, but to Fr. Karras's beliefs about Regan herself on the one hand, and his projection of regret and guilt over his mother on the other?

We may see a parallel to this "false belief" in Fr. Merrin, who doesn't care what Fr Karras has to say about Regan's condition. When Merrin first meets Karras in the MacNeil house, for example, Karras asks him if he would like to know about the many personalities Regan has displayed. Yet Merrin simply dismisses Karras's clinical psychiatric assessments, insisting that he knows better, "There is only one." When Merrin later claims "the demon is a liar, and will mix lies with the truth to confuse us," it is unclear if he is talking about Regan, Fr. Karras, or even himself.

Merrin also explains that "the attack is psychological," not spiritual. Here, Merrin seems to be alluding to the fact that Damien's demons ( and Regan's too perhaps) are all in his head, not in his soul. "Don't listen," Merrin insists, as if to say, do not listen to the doubts in your own head, to the regrets that haunt and heckle us all.  These regrets are like Freddy Kruger, invading our dreams, and our minds. In this respect, Regan is simply a prop for everyone else's beliefs. As a child, she is never consulted about what she thinks. Instead, she's poked and probed, hypnotized and exorcised, as if talking to her like a normal human being would be a complete waste of everyone's time. As a child, she is seen as less of a rational human being than an adult. And as such, her behaviors can only be explained by her mother, doctors, or even priests. After all, "Father knows best."

As the exorcism progresses, Regan eventually breaks her straps and floats into the air, to which Merrin and Karras use the power of their commands to force her back onto the bed, yelling together repeatedly, "The power of Christ compels you." As they do, Regan floats back onto the bed, where Karras then binds her hands and feet together which, given the nature of two men tying up a little girl, may suggest more than initially meets the eye of the audience. Yet either way, given the fact Regan has already moved everything around the room with ease, whether she is bound or unbound, and likewise demonstrated how easy it is for her to break the straps that bind her (the straps of other people's beliefs?), perhaps there is something more sinister being suggested by the binding of the hands and feet. Perhaps this is simply the bondage of the beliefs of Karras and Merrin.

Recall that Karras bound his mother's leg for some condition that we never learn about, and as he binds Regan's feet together, she sits up and clobbers him, sending him to the floor. Again, perhaps this is simply an example of how his own sense of guilt is beating him up inside, for having left his aged, incapacitated mother, all alone, to eventually die. And, he may even be asking if his own priesthood is indeed a "fraud," for if he couldn't even help to save his own mother, from either her fears or death itself, then what hope could he have of saving anyone else? 

Karras's wrestles with his own demons even further, after stepping out of Regan rooms for a break, when he asks Merrin:

• Fr Karras: Why the girl? It doesn't make sense
• Fr. Merrin: I think the point is to make us despair; to reject the possibility that God could love us.

Immediately following this exchange, Karras goes back into Regan's room and sees his own mother sitting on the bed, under a white light (despite the lamp having been broken just minutes earlier) and unbound. (Maybe she is unbound, because she is free of the guilt that Karras is carrying around.) The love Karras is having difficulty accepting, so it seems, appears to be either that of his own mother, or of himself, out of a sense of guilt about his mother's death.

When he sees his mother in Regan's room, she is sitting up in the bed, facing Karras, looking to her right, as Karras stands to the left of the room (from the audiences perspective). When Karras entered the room and saw his mother in the hospital, however, he was on his mother's left (or to the right of the room, from the audiences perspective), and she only turned to her right (our left) to escape his touch. When Karras walks back to his right in Regan's room, he once again sees Regan on the bad, not his mother. Only this time, Regan is again bound to the bed, despite the fact that Karras had only bound her hands and feet together minutes earlier, not to the bed. It's possible this was simply a mistake that was overlooked in the editing stage, in the same way that sometimes the nightstand to the left of the bed is there, and sometimes it isn't (much like Stanley Kubrick with chairs in The Shining) Or it may have been a direct parallel, intended to show how truly haunted by his guilt about his mother Karras really is.And given the haunting image Karras encounters soon after, perhaps this latter interpretation may make more sense.

 If the shift back to Regan being bound to the bed, instead of being bound on the bed, is not simply a mistake, then it may be alluding to Karras fighting with his own demons yet again. Indeed, Karras even hears his own mother's voice coming from Regan. Regan, then, as a person, seems completely hidden behind a veil of Karras's own sense of guilt and self doubt. All Karras sees, in other words, is his own mother, and in the festering flesh of Regan, he sees only the effects that his own sense of guilt and regret are having on him. Yet rather than seeing the connection, Karras's religious beliefs blind him to seeing how he is simply externalizing into an anthropomorphism, his own sense of guilt and regret. Karras, in other words, may represent the one eyed blacksmith, who only sees what is in others, but not what is so clearly eating away at himself. 

When Regan begins talking to Karras in his mother's voice, asking him "why do you do this to me Demy?" Karras explodes, "You're not my mother!" This is important, because it is a prelude of what is about to happen. Merrin then tells Karras to leave, which he does. Fr Karras is next seen downstairs with his own hands clasped tightly together, as if he had bound his own hands when he was binding Regan's, and held to his head, as if he is symbolizing his own bondage to his beliefs, to his guilt and his regret. Most people probably interpret this scene to be Karras praying silently to himself, but if he is downstairs taking a break from the praying he was just doing in the exorcism, it seems strange that he would go downstairs and continue to pray. Regardless of whether Karras is praying or not, his hands clasped together and held against his head suggest he is bound by his own thoughts, whatever they may be. 

When Karras goes back to Regan's room a second time, he finds Regan unbound yet again, much as he had seen his own mother just minutes earlier. Fr Merrin is dead, however. Enraged, he attacks Regan, violently throwing her to the floor. And while punching her in the face, he screams "Take me! God damn you! Come into me!" During his attack, Regan pulls the chain of Saint Joseph from Karras's neck, as a tempest of wind begins throwing things about the room. Karras then looks up toward the closed double window from which Burke Dennings had been thrown to his death earlier in the film, and in that instant, Karras sees the haunting face of his dead mother rushing toward him from behind the fluttering curtains. It is only after he sees the image of his mother's face, it should be noted, that Karras's eyes turn green with possession.

What Karras appears to be clearly possessed by, then, is his own grief, and his own regret, about his own mother. The "demon" they all appear to be fighting is the one that each of them brings to Regan in the first place. In this sense, Karras's attack on Regan is really Karras externalizing his aggression. Indeed, how often have any of us come home from a lousy day at work, and taken out our frustration with our boss or a customer on our family or friends, wives or husbands?

BUT WHY? 

From an atheist perspective, the movie makes little sense otherwise. Why, for example, would the devil or a demon possess a little girl in the first place? To what end? Since doing so could only have the effect of driving others around her to believe in the devil, and thus turn in reaction to a necessary belief in God - which you would think would be the very last thing a demon or the devil would want. And what's more, if we accept the Catholic point of view as legitimate, then why must the priests struggle so much to eject the demon or demons, given the fact they have God on their side? Regan, after all, is simply an innocent victim, all of the age of 12 going on 13. But the fact that God does nothing on his own to intervene on Regan's behalf, even though the Devil clearly took far more initiative on his own, only suggests that God favors the devil's freedom over protecting Regan.

And as the message "Help Me" appears on Regan's stomach illustrates, much to the shock of Fr Karras, Regan is clearly asking for help - so why does God decide not to do so directly, and instead leaves it in the hands of one over-aged priest in ill health, and another priest who is haunted by regret that has "lost his faith"?  If the whole point is simply to reconvert Karras to his faith, then God is no better than Torquemada or the serial killer from Saw, for he is willing to let a child suffer greatly for no other purpose than that one of his priests would learn to love him. To an atheist, this seems like cruelty beyond compare. It's like a doctor withholding a cure for cancer because he wants to use the suffering of the patient to entice a nurse to fall in love with him.

Instead, the movie only seems to confirm, on every level, just how much a person's beliefs can make them completely delusional. In the extended version of the film,  for example, Regan's complaint about her bed shaking - and nothing else! - leads her mother to drag her to see a stable of doctors and undergo a battery of tests. This complete overreaction is often overlooked by the audience because they believe, like Merrin and eventually Karras, that Regan is possessed to begin with.  Yet why her mom feels there is something wrong with Regan, simply because Regan complained about her bed, and nothing more, is never addressed. This then only suggests that the mom is the one possessed, and by a belief no less. As such, the increasing coldness in the room simply corresponds to the increasing coldness with which Chris - and everyone else, by the way - views Regan. We even see this when Chris tells Fr. Karras "that thing upstairs isn't my daughter."

Thus, from an atheist perspective, the movie is about a witch hunt, and everyone from the cast to the audience finds proof of exactly what they want to see. They see only the "mote in other people's eyes," in other words, "and not he plank in their own," as the Bible says. And the only way Regan is ever "saved" from all of these beliefs, is when the priest, Fr. Karras, hurls himself out the window, and his beliefs along with him. And although Regan is saved from Lamashtu for the time being, Fr. Dyer shows up in the end to wish them goodbye and give them the medal of St. Joseph, which is the Catholic counterpart to the amulet that Fr. Merrin found in Iraq at the beginning of the movie.

This, then, is like Jason from Friday the 13th, opening his eyes at the end of every movie, spooking the audience that his reign of terror will continue with more victims (Catholics, of course, see it as God saved Reagan, and the St Joseph medal is seen as God's continuing to protect the very child God allowed to be tortured and possessed in the first place). 

And a few thousand years from now, someone will find the Saint Joseph medal in an archeological dig in America somewhere, much like Fr. Merrin in Iraq found the amulet of Pazuzu, and conclude that this "patron saint of departing souls" was not a defender of a loving God, but simply demon and an angel of death. And Christians will all be cast as the Cullen's family.