Today I stopped to grab replacement frames for my daughter’s glasses. The lady asked about my daughter’s name (Hermione).
Me: Like the girl from Harry Potter.
Clerk: Oh I’ve never seen those movies, I don’t believe in the witches and warlocks and such.
Me, jokingly: Well it’s all make believe, nobody actually thinks that witches or warlocks are real.
She then informed me that they are indeed real and she’s a member of a missionary group who “casts them out” all the time…
This is a fully grown (looked to be 45-50ish) adult woman, who is allowed to vote and reproduce, who straight up believes that magic, witches and warlocks are real, and not only that, she is a member of a larger organization of people who go out on “missions” to “cast out” these evildoers. And she works in a business where she holds at least some authority over an aspect of peoples’ health and well being.
The crazier thing is, she’s not the first person in this area I’ve met who thinks witches and warlocks are real life people out there casting spells and shit.
And that is why Trump won re-election.
Edit for clarification: Around here when somebody says they “don’t believe” in a thing, specifically in this context, what they mean is they “don’t support” that thing. I’ve also heard people say they “don’t believe” in guns, despite them being very real. What they mean is, they don’t “support” a thing, not that they literally don’t believe it’s real.
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Clerk: I don’t believe in the witches and warlocks and such. Also clerk: they are indeed real
This is what I imagine atheists in the lore of D&D are like.
“Gods? They’re totally real. I saw Baal himself kill a man once. But I don’t believe in them. They’re all gonna fail eventually.”
I think that’s basically it. Gods are not omnipotent and can be killed. Powerful mortals can likewise attain godhood. A D&D atheist can accept they’re real but also believe that they’re just really powerful people and not true divinities.
Heck, on that line of thought, it’d be cool to have a faction of militant atheists in a campaign whose goal is the eradication of all gods as a way to help bring order to the world. Additional twist: in this faction’s effort to produce champions powerful enough to go at it with a god, they inadvertently create additional god candidates.
Edit: Actually I think I just summarized the plot of Neon Genesis Evangelion
Campaign tag-lines:
Gods all the way down.
Too many dieties!
A barrel full of blasphemy.
That’s pretty much world history.
A reminder on how D&D used to be attacked in the 70s-80s as some cult activity thanks to Jack Chick tracts, even sparking a TV movie.
Tom Hanks’s first lead role, Mazes and Monsters.
And people want to be respected for having faith.
Not from me
She then informed me that they are indeed real and she’s a member of a missionary group who “casts them out” all the time…
You: “‘Casts them out?!’ So you’re admitting you’re doing sorcery. I’m sorry, dealing with magic users is against my faith. I cannot speak to you any longer” /s
jesus magic is ok.
That’s because he is a full fledged Zombie now.
Cleric good, wizard bad, ignore that some spells are on both lists. Also they think wizards are all warlocks or sorcerers in 5e terminology
Religions do teach that stuff; the holy ghost, drink my blood and eat my flesh, rising from the dead. Sounds like a horror movie.
Ouch that was a hard one to read.
Media literacy is so incredibly low.
The brainwashing has got them thinking everything in tv they see is real. No wonder they will give everything to a scam like religion and toxic pedos running the operation.
When I was a kid (90s) my grandmother swore straight up and down that a certain woman she knew was a witch, and that one way to test it was to put a sewing needle down and see if she would refuse to step over it. So one day I took one and sort of mashed it into the wood in the bottom of her door frame so you couldn’t see it. The woman came by a day or so later and when invited in she declined and said she needed to get back home. That was all the proof my grandmother needed. My mom is also convinced they’re real. Pentecostal churches are reasonably common around here (eastern Kentucky) where people scream and holler and speak in tongues and cast out demons and all kinds of other nonsense.
Why the needle? Was it a form of evil eye or something? I don’t get the thinking.
I have no idea. The old folks also used to think witches were scheming against them and casting spells because out here in the woods sometimes if you’re deep in the woods after dark you’ll hear something that sounds eerily like unintelligible voices babbling together in the distance. Guess what screech owls sound like, especially if there’s a group of them? 🤣
Needles, quills, pins etc are often used in defensive magic (yeah, thinking a witch can’t cross a needle is magical thinking, which is funny). One of the slightly less obscure examples is in Witch bottles, a sort of gross protective charm against witches.
Needles and thorns protect animals and plants, so obviously knitting needles can also protect us, is what magical thinkers would say. Magical thinking is all about symbolism
I mean, anyone with enough skill at using chopsticks can probably wield a set of 8 gauge knitting needles with a high degree of efficacy
KY, you say? Explains a lot - even without making lubrication jokes,
Take your business elsewhere.
I plan on it.
Then where the fuck is my admission letter? I’ve been waiting for that owl since ages.
This truly is the worst fucking timeline.
It definitely sucks donkey balls, but I know for a fact it could be even worse. I mean, we’re still able to come here and kvetch, right?
They call me the Hero of Kvetch
Mkay, Jayne.
My ex’s aunt was terrified when she found out we’d read the books and sent us religious pamphlets about how it’s evil.
I wonder if she’s changed her mind now that the author came out as a bigot.
People like this are a big part of why I have no sympathy for this planet.
Unless it was a bigot against something that she personally cares about, I wouldn’t bet on it. Even if that were the case, mental gymnastics to “justify” it are far more likely than ever admitting the truth that she was wrong.
who is allowed to vote and reproduce
Holy fuck dude.
Humanity and humans have always been like this and the majority still are.
You would think that access to the collective knowlege of the internet would fix that… Its apparently made it worse…
Turned out there was more collective stupidity
We all forget that we are really at the very start … the very infancy of our civilization. We spent much of our evolution as hunter/gatherers wandering around the wilderness trying to survive … it’s only been a couple hundred years that we got out of that. Sure many of us became farmers and city people a few thousand years ago but all of them were all uneducated, unaware and highly superstitious people who only understood the world superficially.
It will take a few hundred or a few thousand years of development and hundreds of generations for us to get away from our habits … if we can survive that long.
Your IF statement at the end of your post really is the limiting factor. Im not as optimistic as you are, but its good that some people are.
Eyup. I met those type but its rare although feels like less rare. I think they problem is they tend to have kids as stuff that just happens.
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I’ve met lots of other folks around here who legit believe in this stuff. I just posted another comment on this post about some of the experiences I’ve had growing up here.
This is a fully grown (looked to be 45-50ish) adult woman, who is allowed to vote and reproduce
Haha, we should definitely castrate people for what they believe, lolz roflol
No, but if you think magic, fairies and monsters are real, maybe you should be dissuaded from propagating that ignorance.
What are you talking about, the fae have been about in drives here, lately. They look like this https://alabama.butterflyatlas.usf.edu/species/details/134/little-yellow
What if you think superstition is a consequence of genetics?
