I had an older relative that watched The 700 Club like it was the news. This honestly is just mid-level crazy for them. Rest in piss Pat Robertson, you absolute fuckhead.
Fun fact you can permanently scare off Jehovah's witnesses by offering them a random object and insisting that it's absolutely not cursed or possessed. Really insist that the thing you pulled out of the junk drawer is absolutely not possessed and is simply a gift that they need to accept.
They used to, but since thrifting came into style, they mark up the possessed stuff to the point where you might as well go buy brand new possessed stuff.
You can trust him since he looks like a possessed thrift store doll of Dorian Gray whose painting has just lost its magic and time is still deciding which parts of him to fuck up first.
Okay, I’m a hard atheist (meaning I have a positive belief that no gods exist), but I’m not really using that to make this point.
People who actually believe this kind of thing should be considered candidates for clinical treatment. This is not “I believe that Jesus was god” level stuff. This is complete tinfoil hat levels of crazy. If they didn’t get a free pass because their beliefs are considered a religion, I honestly think we’d have a lot more people in treatment.
I don’t know if the Pat Robertsons of the world actually believe this kind of crap or not, but some people obviously do. There’s a hypothesis you occasionally see floated that the Nigerian prince scam emails are written that badly on purpose because you know if someone falls for them, they’ll fall for anything. I really have to wonder if that’s what’s going on here.
People believe all kinds of whackadoodle shit that has nothing to do with religion and they don't get committed for it, because just believing wrong things isn't the sole criterion for that sort of thing. Also involuntary committal is basically a kind of prison that requires no crime and no prescribed sentence length, which has been enormously abused over the years. Lowering the barrier to that is not a good idea.
If you meant "candidates for clinical treatment" in some way other than involuntary committal then it wouldn't work because people who believe things... believe them. They don't see their beliefs as a problem requiring treatment.
And really even treatment is just to enable people to function in society.
You can believe that the dishes and shirts that you bought from the thrift store have demons in them all you want as long as you go to work and pay your taxes and aren't a danger to yourself or others.
Speaking for myself, my house is almost completely full of thrift store things and I have no demons here whatsoever.
Maybe I'm just lucky, or maybe Pat Robertson doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.
The phrase that I circle back to specifically in the Christian religion about these sort of things is that the wicked see evil everywhere, because you see what's inside yourself.
Yes. I use the term “hard atheist” because in my experience that’s the term that people who aren’t necessarily familiar with atheism get on the first read. I think I first came across it being used by Dennett or one of those guys, but I can’t remember at this point.