(apologies for this late response)
Once you can accept the concept of a spiritual entity (the soul) having control over certain functions of a material body, is is feasible that there could be circumstances when a different spiritual entity can somehow take over control of the same body. This would explain many of the "dual personality" features mentioned previously. It is also backed up in the New Testament which describes several examples of a person being possessed by evil spirits. And there is the dangerous practice of Ouija boards which involves inviting other "spirits" to take over the control of our physical bodies. The Roman Catholic Church recognises this danger and forbids its use to members of the church. And exorcism (the casting out of other spiritual entities) is still a recognised religious practice.
Hi Alan
Glad you were able to join the conversation.
I think there is a need to amplify the details of the psychological disorder in question. D.I.D., as far as can be ascertained, can almost always be traced back to a period of
extreme physical and psychological abuse, most often in childhood. The conventional explanation is that the developing personality retreats from these traumas by developing protective selves, which then can dominate the original person, just in order to allow the organism to function in the world at all (personality A suffers abominably, personality B is cunning, strong and dominant and able to escape from such suffering - and so on with often a nested 'onion' of other personalities). In some cases, it can appear to the outside world that the second or third personality to appear is the
real self, for a very long time. The question is: what is happening to the original self, trapped in this cycle of abuse? Can such a self be considered to develop in the way that the rest of us do, in order to make decisions, and to be specific, in a Christian sense, to make one moral choice over another? Or to choose Christ as their saviour? Maybe the original self is now so enfeebled as to be incapable of making any choice; maybe personality B chooses to be a Christian, and personality C will have none of this, and refuses to take any of the steps that B wishes to embark on. I'm just speculating here, but some of the instances of D.I.D appear to be far more bizarre than this.
Well then, let's reflect on some of your suggestions of demonic possession, for the sake of argument. It is bad enough that a loving, all powerful God would allow such prolonged abuse of a child to occur in the first place, but to suggest that such a wounded and suffering individual should then be subjected to invasion by evil spirits, and this again is allowed to happen, does not reflect well upon the deity. To cite your example of people playing around with Ouija boards as inviting trouble for themselves, or perhaps attending 'Spiritualist' seances*, at least suggests that they have put themselves in harms way - but that an innocent child should be attacked in such a way with impunity is really quite a ghastly suggestion IMO.
*The matter of Spiritualist seances is a significant one, with regard to how many different faces a human can present when the conditions are right - and here I speak from personal experience. I did for a short while attend a Spiritualist church, and witnessed a number of bizarre phenomena. One that particularly stuck in my memory was that of a very pleasant, seemingly feminine young medium, whose normal voice was light, high and very female, beginning to talk (when 'possessed') in a deep bass male voice, such as one would not think her larynx and vocal chords were capable of. I can confidently say she was not a natural male in drag and speaking falsetto in her everyday voice
