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*)

It's time to draw the line in the sand: No on Prop. 1!

When we talk about reaching further than our ancestors -- by learning about the universe, pushing ourselves, expanding that "comfortable proscenium of our ancestors" -- it isn't just a matter of realizing that the universe is bigger, and older, and weirder, than anything humans could've imagined. The notion encompasses other ideas as well -- pushing ourselves ethically, for instance. One of the most brilliant parts of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion was the chapter on how we don't get our morals from the Bible. Ethics and morals, instead, have been a topic of constant discussion and exploration and progress. The Moral Zeitgeist, as he puts it, has grown over time. A progressive thinker of the 19th century, like Darwin, held many ideas that we find outrageous today -- on race, on gender, you name it.

As for the ancients, they were in most respects quite barbaric by our standards. The cosmopolitan Romans, for all their grandeur and advances, engaged in cruelties that shock us today. And the ancient Hebrews, whether in earlier times or in the time of Christ? Yeah. Barbarians is quite a good term for them. So I'm always a bit concerned with folks that try to claim their ethics are based in the Bible. Or try to make modern ethics more so. It seems like stepping backwards to me.

Case in point:  gay marriage. Modern ethics is actively engaged in an expansion here, right down to expanding the meaning of the word "marriage" beyond traditional usages. Because that is the great journey that we take in ethics when we dare. In Renaissance times, there were spirited debates on whether the natives of the New World were even people. We justifiably look at those views now as being absurd, and indeed evil. But the fight was fought, and slowly the ideas and definitions changed. We have advanced enough in our ethics that the very idea that people would even ask such questions amazes us. Likewise, I believe there will be a time when people will look at the debate over homosexuality, and rights for homosexuality, as equally absurd. Heck, many of us already do, and honestly have trouble even understanding why people get so worked up about it. But they do get worked up about it, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

In the U.S., we will see the latest round in the fight this fall, in Maine, when

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Proposition 1 goes before the voters. Prop. 1 will, if passed, override the Maine legislature's legalization of gay marriage. The Religious Right really, really wants to win this one, because it would be another brutal defeat for progressive forces.

The fight for gay rights has slowly been gaining steam of the last ten years. This fall, we have one of those points in history that could decide a lot of the future course of the fight. Greta Christina has an excellent post on why this one is so important. Go read, then get active. It's time to take the fight to the bastards. It's time to make the big push to expand our ethical proscenium just a little more. Let us fight this one so that the generations following us will be utterly and completely perplexed by how anyone could have questioned gay rights. Let's push humanity forward just a little bit more. Let's win Maine, and then the nation.