Madness and Witchcraft

Sometimes, you find yourself staring madness right in the face. I don't mean the metaphorical kind. I mean the honest to goodness mind off kilter kind.

The short form of the story:  sometime ago, back on skin hunger, some of you may recall that I posted a video by a young Christian woman that was...odd. She responded to my post, which in turn led to an exchange of emails. Then she facebooked me. Haven't had much of a chance to chat since. Couldn't really get the heart up to, because I had already seen the pattern in the "conversation" -- there wasn't going to be much of one, frankly.

I knew, from her Youtube videos, that, er, her experience of the world was different than, well, most everyone's. Whether that qualified as some kind of mental illness was not going to be something that I was going to pretend to be qualified to judge. She seems a rather sweet person, really. I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

But.

Yeah, there's a 'but.'

I've unfriended her on Facebook, largely because, well, she scares the heck out of

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me, especially after this week. Because there's a kind of belief that is so medieval, and so dangerous, that it chills me completely to see a person actually holding it:  she believes in demons. And witches. And Satanists (with real, demonic powers, not just the silly pretenders of the Church of Satan). To wit:  she thinks she is under attack from all of the above.
Really. Honestly. I've never honestly met someone like this, someone with a persecution complex so extreme. Witches working magic against her! Dark Satanic prayers being leveled at her! Demons in the house! Desperate calls for a "prayer shield." It's a simple world view:  people who don't believe what she believes are demon-controlled. Or Satanists and Witches, ie active agents of Evil.


Harmless crackpot? Some of you may also recall a video that made the rounds a bit -- I posted it myself at one point -- that showed people in Africa being burned alive as witches. Those kinds of beliefs have had devastating consequences far too often for me to dismiss her as just another harmless crackpot.

When a person's beliefs are so deeply delusional, who knows where they will lead? We do know where they have led in the past -- to fires and stonings and pogroms. Magical thinking is dangerous, dangerous stuff. It's a floodgate that can devastate everything when it's opened. I can't really hem and haw and say, well, maybe she isn't too scary, maybe she's harmless, maybe she's just a bit odd and all. She's delusional. And delusional people can do a lot of damage.


It's also hard not to notice how her particular religion can reinforce and strengthen her delusional thinking. The persecution complex, the infantile ordering of the world into Good and Evil, Dark and Light, with our Mary Sue as the Stalwart Hero fighting the dark forces. And, of course, being heavily persecuted for doing so. I think we all know how that kind of thinking often turns out in the real world.


Definitely a learning experience. There's always part of me that thinks that everyone is reachable. But. Yeah. There's always a 'but.'

(And, of course, since I wrote this, I am now persecuting her. Or so she'd probably read it. Probably I'm possessed by a demon. Or maybe I'm a Warlock. *tries to cast spell, accidentally sets hair on fire*)