If you’ve been following the new you’ve probably heard about the return of Elizabeth Smart to her family. In short, she was kidnapped at 14, lived 9 months with a man who thought he was Jesus, and finally was rescued and is now back at home with her parents.
I don’t want to talk about her though. I want to talk about the man who thought he was Jesus.
Brian Mitchell or as he called himself “Emanuel”, was a vagrant who, with his wife, walked the streets begging for money and telling everyone about “gods message”. You see, god had told him, in the dessert, after having taken 10 hits of LSD, that he was to have 7 wives. In a manifesto he wrote that he was to take 7 young girls, and prepare them to be his wife.
Elizabeth was the first.
Have you ever wondered why so many crimes, and acts of violence. are committed by people who say that “god” told them to be that way, and yet you NEVER hear about any crimes committed by people who see blue trolls or giant invisible rabbits ?
I’ll tell you why.
It’s because the average person, when experiencing a delusion for the first time, will ask themselves afterwards “was that real” ? They will seek to get help if it continues.
The god excuse however is much more dangerous.
We live in a culture that accepts god belief. So the average person wont necessarily say “was that real ?” when experiencing the delusion of a god. “God” is acceptable. Everyone else around you believes in a god, maybe your experience could be true.
God belief is inherently dangerous.
It’s why we put people who say they see invisible giant rabbits, or blue trolls, on medication, or in asylums. Because we understand, there’s an inherent danger in those kind of beliefs.
God belief is inherently dangerous.
It’s so odd that everyone just looks at the psychology of this man as rational like God really told him it was Ok. And somehow that will justify his actions. Yet when someone says the magic fiery pixie told them to steal they throw him in the luny bin.
If the rabbits are invisible how do you know there giant? Besides everyone knows there no such thing as “giant invisible rabbits” thats because the pink flying ones that live in our shoeboxes destroyed them long ago in “The battle of The Hares,” and as for the fiery pixies telling people to steal, now thats just preposterous, they would never do such a thing.
[...] When I read this post from JJ, I was happy to see that someone else has picked up on what I’ve been saying for years. [...]