The religio-wingnuts: Robin Williams Died When Demons Exacted Their Price for His Success

And now from the "Outer Limits of The Twilight Zone" Department:

"Williams recognized these powers had manifested a very evil influence on stage and that there could be a hefty price to pay for their assistance."…

 

It’s sad to see so many of our fellow citizens living in the thirteenth century, obsessing over demon-infested this and demon-infested that. With their embrace of the idea that illness is caused by demons, these people have willfully surrendered centuries of advancement by the human race in the field of medicine.

I’ve written before about the religio-wingnuts' demon-mania, their obsession with Satan, claiming that Obama is demonically possessed or even the Antichrist himself. What better way to delegitimize your enemies than to claim they stand opposed to god himself. So not only illness, but opposition to any claim they advance, is, they insist, caused by demons.

Even comedian Robin Williams, we are now being told, was the victim of demons. Heck, didn’t you know all Hollywood is controlled by demons? Did you know you can find out all about it for just $19.99?

Joe Schimmel at the cult Good Fight Ministries makes the claim that Williams died as the result of “insidious” demonic influences. Citing something Williams told James Kaplan of US Weekly over a decade ago,

“Yeah! Literally, it’s like possession all of a sudden you’re in, and because it’s in front of a live audience, you just get this energy that just starts going…But there’s also that thing it is possession. In the old days you’d be burned for it…But there is something empowering about it. I mean, it is a place where you are totally it is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where you really can become this other force. Maybe that’s why I don’t need to play evil characters [in movies], ’cause sometimes onstage you can cross that line and come back. Clubs are a weird kind of petri dish environment. I mean, that’s where people can get as dark as they can in comedy in the name of comedy, be talking about outrageous stuff and somehow come out the other side. I mean, that’s one place where you really want to push it” (Robin Williams, “Robin Williams,” by James Kaplan, US Weekly, January, 1999, p. 53).

Schimmel goes on to “interpret” this energy as demonic. Of course it has to be demonic, because it’s not the gospel Williams is excited about:

Everybody is currently talking about Robin Williams and his tragic suicide. Many are puzzled as to how a man, who made so many people laugh, could be so depressed that he would violently end his life. What people are not learning is the deeper truth about the insidious forces that tormented Robin Williams and drove him to suicide.

Robin Williams acknowledged that he had opened himself up to transformative demonic powers that aided him on stage. Without the aid of such demonic powers, it is likely that you would have never have heard of Robin Williams and many other famous celebrities. Williams also recognized that these powers had manifested a very evil influence on stage and that there could be a hefty price to pay for their assistance.

I remember reading once about John Denver, an interview he gave in Playboy, where he talked about not-knowing where his music came from, that it just appeared fully-formed in his head and he wrote it down, that “The song comes when it wants to come and I’ve got practically nothing to do with it, the most I can do is get myself in a space to let it come.” Robert E. Howard, who created Conan the Barbarian, said that it was as though Conan were standing at his shoulder, telling his story, and that he was just the scribe. I’ve experienced the same when I am writing fiction, that I don’t consciously think about the things I am writing, I don’t work the details out in my head. Don’t plan them out. It just appears and I write it down as fast as I can. I have no idea where they come from.

In fact, Denver sounded a lot like Williams when he told Playboy,

I’m probably not that nice all the time. I do have periods of what to me is incredible depression. As high as I can get, I’m capable of being that low. There are times when I am very sad, times when I’m lonely; there are times when I’m unhappy and when I feel sorry for myself. What have I got to feel sorry for myself about? I have everything. But it has nothing to do with what you’ve got or where you are. It’s the human condition. To run the gamut of those emotions is a great part of the living experience; I have all of those things in me and I’m able to communicate them in songs better than I’m able to reflect them in person, perhaps. I think a lot of my songs reflect the sadness and show the pain that I feel.

There are a lot of things even scientists don’t understand about the mind, which has been called science’s “final frontier.” Dr. Fred Mendelsohn of the University of Melbourne, describes what we are dealing with:

The jelly-like tissue that is the brain is the most complicated object in the known universe. Its 100 billion nerve cells (nearly 20 times the number of people on earth), are each connected to thousands of other nerve cells in a bewilderingly complex network.

It does not connect to demons.

And now that the thirteenth century is behind us, we know mental illness, like physical illness, is not caused by demonic possession. Demons did not kill Robin Williams. Rather, because the brain is still such a mystery, it is more accurate to say modern science’s best efforts failed to save him.

We also know it isn’t demons influencing our decision to oppose fruit loops like Joe Schimmel, but rather an education and a modicum of common sense, which is why, from the right’s point of view, education must be done away with and replaced by faith, why common sense must be silenced: “Do not ask questions, just believe” has been the mantra of Christian conservatives for two thousand years.

It is hardly coincidental that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s wife Judy, complains that,

“People are sympathetic to different things and different causes, but when you bring up Christian, there is no sympathy whatsoever. They do not think you should be able to have that belief,”

If she agrees with Schimmel, if she espouses David Barton and Bryan Fischer and Tony Perkins, she might run into some people who are unimpressed by her witness. Then again, what she is espousing is not christianity, so her experiences are hardly evidence of the alleged persecution of christians.

Standing up to quackery is hardly the stuff of persecution. It is the stuff of people fed up with bullying by so-called christians who insist they have the right to infiltrate our bedrooms to make certain we don’t violate their bizarre and inexplicable beliefs.

Besides discounting science, morons like Schimmel discounts his own bible: he is happy to cite jesus in support of his claims about demons, while carefully avoiding any mention of jesus’ contention that rich people got their wealth the power only through commerce with the dark powers that ruled his age. In other words, Satan.

What Schimmel insists on is faith healing, not medicine:

Depression can have many sources, but has only one ultimate remedy. True joy can only come from a relationship with the lord jesus christ and the infilling of his holy spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is manifold and includes love and joy. Let us remember that there are a lot of hurting people out there like Robin Williams, who are filled with hopelessness and despair. May god make us sensitive to their needs and help us to show them His great love through our concern, willingness to help and sharing the gospel.

The Founding Fathers broke the centuries old stranglehold organized religion had on civil government, but now the tide seems to be turning, as first Reagan, and then the shrub, embraced and unleashed these lunatics on innocent Americans, and ultimately, the world.

In a very real sense, Schimmel and others like him are no better than the adherents of the Westboro baptist cult. What he says is ultimately just as hateful, and because words themselves can be violence, he doesn’t have to get up from his couch to hurt people. Thanks to the modern technology brought to us by the science Schimmel disdains, he doesn’t even have to get up from the couch to cash the checks for his DVD, Hollywood Unmasked 2, with volumes 1 and 2 available for the low-low price of just $19.99!

Before you laugh, remember: these guys control the U.S. House of Representatives, and after the midterms, they might control the Senate, too.