Catholic exorcist explains why he thinks women are more likely to get possessed by demons

boing
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Don’t talk to “strangers,” they could be DEMONS

… pretty sure that’s in the Bible :roll_eyes:

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The part about asking for directions is truly the most hilarious pseudo-justification I’ve ever seen about why men won’t ask for directions!
And it feeds into the toxic masculinity thing that asking for help is wrong and dangerous.

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That’s exactly what a demon possessing a dude would say.

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I see a secondary motive of “If you talk to strangers, they might tell you something we don’t agree with. A well-insulated society is a happy society and the rest of you can just move along and stop being demons to our helpless womens. They have enough problems without you telling them that we might be the cause of it.”

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You have to be careful about what people say in case it’s a trick though. If you ask someone for directions and they tell you to go to hell, make sure you don’t listen!

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I was just talking about the Malleus Maleficarum yesterday.

I feel I should point out for those don’t know the background, some details.

  1. People think that the Malleus was something that came out of a wave of witch-burnings and inquisitions. It wasn’t. Heinrich Kramer was denounced, at the time, by the Inquisition, as a swivel-eyed lunatic, his theology as demented, and his prescriptions for trial procedures and torture as unethical and illegal. Everyone who knew him thought he was barking mad, but he was, in the manner of some such, able to convince some powerful people that he was actually insightful if intense and everyone else had it out for him. One of these people was the Pope.
  2. Sprenger didn’t have anything to do with it: his name only appeared as a co-author thirty years later. It’s usually considered that he was one of the people trying to shut Kramer down, but his name was added later to add gravitas.
  3. late 15C Germany wasn’t a single Germany, it was a tangled mess of regions and city-states, each in competition with each other, all under the nominal control of the Holy Roman Empire. Martin Luther and the 95 Theses didn’t come out of nowhere: the sort of religious fervor which popped up in Kramer were the first bubbles of a pot coming to the boil. Which is to say: the Malleus wasn’t a sign of what it was like generally in the late 15C, it was a precursor to how it would be in the early 16C, and in the years after the Diet of Worms things just went completely nuts.
  4. the standard English translation of the Malleus was by Montague Summers, who was in a perfect position to do so: he was trained in Catholic theology, could read Latin, and was just as barking mad as was Kramer.

Like so many of these sort of manifestos, it makes a lot more sense when you realise it was written to be read one-handed, and often was.

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“We use demons as an excuse to ignore rape, incest, and child abuse while blaming victims and offering them false hope and the means to stay in abusive situations until they finally die.”

Ah yes… the catholic way.

Kinda like torturing people to help them spend less time in hell.

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He’s not trying to explain anything. He’s trying to sell/scare more people into becoming his victims. It’s nothing more than patter from a serial grifter.

When your livelihood depends on frightening gullible victims into believing that imaginary beings from fictional books are inhabiting them, you’re definitely going to say whatever best panders to the as-yet-unfleeced.

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Exactly.

I wonder how many children have “demons” from him or some one he personally knows and chooses to defend this way.

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He is, however, eerily silent on why his colleagues are statistically far more likely to commit serial child rape.

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If they actually did, they’d put it down to possession then seek out an exorcist.

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You know, at 53 years old, I really shouldn’t be coming across new candidates for the dumbest fucking thing I’ve heard in my life, and yet here we are.

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Honestly, “They might be a demon and might possess me” is the best excuse ever for the anxiety- and insecurity-driven masculine refusal to ask for directions.

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The devil is in the details.

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OMG so autism protects me from satan is what I am hearing. New autism superpower unlocked!

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That god of his doesn’t seem to think highly of women, either.

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Wrote a song about it. Wanna hear it? j/k

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