Skype exorcisms

Some of my regular readers may remember that a few months ago, I posted about a trio of young and extremely Christian ladies who were invading Britain to rid the country of demons that had been brought there because so many British children read Harry Potter.

One of them is named Brynne Larson.  It will come as no surprise that Ms. Larson is from an fundamentalist household; hard to imagine your believing anything that ridiculous if you didn't learn it as a very young child.  Be that as it may, Ms. Larson's father is Bob Larson, an evangelical preacher, talk radio host, and general wingnut.  Larson has been doing his dog-and-pony show for a while; I remember listening to him back in the 80s when I lived in Seattle.  I'd turn the show on when I got stuck in traffic, which was often, because I figured that the best thing to keep you from experiencing road rage is to listen to a radio show that distracts you by making you even madder at something else.

Well, Larson is still around, and just this week announced that he's out there fighting the Evil One just as hard today as he was thirty years ago.  He has, he claims, performed over 20,000 exorcisms in his life.  Doesn't that seem like a lot, to you?  It would imply that a good many of the people we meet on a daily basis are possessed, which I kind of doubt.  I don't think I've seen anyone lately who was guided by a demon, with the exception of the woman who ran a stop sign and cut me off in a Syracuse mall parking lot last weekend during a snowstorm, and I don't think she was possessed by anything but the evil spirit Dumbassimus.

But Larson begs to differ.  The demons are out there, he says; "there'll never be a shortage."  There are so many, in fact, that Larson can't keep up with the requests.  He receives so many that now he has to do his exorcisms...

... via Skype.

I don't know about you, but my first thought upon reading that was, "How could that work?"  Here you have a wicked, dangerous minion of Satan, who has latched on to some poor unfortunate soul in Hogfoot Junction, West Virginia.  And a guy shows up on Skype and says, "Get thee gone, evil spirit!" from 2,000 miles away via an internet connection, and the demon has no choice but to retreat in disarray?  If I was a demon, and Larson showed up babbling at me to Return to Hell From Whence I Came, the least I would do is to flip him off and then cause his computer to experience the Blue Screen of Death.

I mean, it can't be that hard.  My computer does that often enough without any demons being involved.

And it has to make you wonder what's next.  Will he start distributing general exorcisms through Twitter?

Get thee behind me Satan, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord Amen #ChalkAnotherOneUpForMe #IGuessThatShowedYou

What if he doesn't finish his magical incantation before he runs into the 140-character limit?

My overall impression is that he's fighting a losing battle, trying to use the internet to fight Satan.  Just considering the volume of pornography alone, out there on the 'net, I think that so far it's Larson 0, Satan 1,489,352.

Larson, of course, doesn't see it that way.  When asked in an interview with ABC15 if his Skype-your-way-out-of-hell method was nothing more than a fire-and-brimstone circus act, he said, "It’s real.  There would be no reason to theatrically stage this for any reason.  Why would anybody do that?  I have no idea."

I'll pass over the fact that he used the word "reason" twice, and that his worldview isn't exactly one in which reason, in its literal sense, is the driver.  But really, Reverend Larson?  You can't think of any other incentives for doing what you're doing, other than the need to fight the Evil One?  How about money?  Notoriety?  Being interviewed by a major news outlet?

But other than those, nothing, right?

Of course, right.

So that's the latest from the world of religious wingnuttery.  I live in hope that most Christians recognize whackjobs like Bob Larson for what they are, but the sad fact is that there are enough people still listening to Larson that his show, Talk Back, is still being aired, and his ministry still gets followers.

And he still gets people, over Skype, who are eager for him to free them of demons -- for just a small donation to support the ministry, of course.

Attack of the teenage exorcists

In previous posts I've described a lot of examples of Poe's Law -- a rule that states that it is impossible to tell the difference between a sufficiently well done satire and the real thing.  Today, I want to look at a different phenomenon -- the difficulty of determining when someone is making a claim because (s)he actually believes it to be true, or simply because it has the potential to generate a lot of money and notoriety.

It's the problem with psychics, isn't it?  Given the human capacity to lie convincingly, you can see that it would be difficult to determine if people like Psychic Sally Morgan sincerely believe that they can "see what's hidden," or if they are simply hoaxers and charlatans, in it to make money from the gullible.  (Note that even if the first is the case -- Morgan et al. actually do believe that they are psychic -- it has no relevance to the additional question of whether they are right.  There are lots of people who sincerely believe lots of things, and who are simply wrong or delusional.)

Which brings us to the trio of teenage exorcists who are currently embarked upon a quest to eliminate demons from England.

An upcoming documentary, filmed by Dan Murdoch and airing tomorrow on BBC3, chronicles the efforts of sisters Tess and Savannah Scherkenback and their friend Brynne Larson to exorcise the evil spirits that are currently troubling Great Britain.  These bad guys, the three say, were always kind of oozing around the place, but really gained a foothold recently...

... because of Harry Potter.

"It has been centuries in the making, but I believe it came to a pinnacle with the Harry Potter books," Savannah told reporters for The Daily Mail.  Her sister Tess agreed, adding, "The spells you are reading about are not made up.  They are real and come from witchcraft."

Funny, then, how when I shouted "Petrificus totalus!" at a student in my class who wouldn't stop talking, nothing happened.  Maybe the demon who is helping me was taking a nap, or something.

Be that as it may, these girls have gone all over the world with their dog-and-pony show, Casting Out Unclean Spirits and making Satan Get Thee Behind, um, Them, and raking in lots of money at each appearance.  It's clear that a lot of the audience members believe they're for real; there's the usual screaming and rolling-back-of-eyes and so on that accompanies exorcisms, followed by hallelujahs and praising of Jesus when the all-powerful Evil One is once again, surprisingly enough, vanquished.  But the question remains:  do the Weird Sisters themselves think that they're banishing demons -- or are they just charlatans who are in it for the money and publicity?

One thing that would argue for the former is that Brynne Larson is the daughter of Reverend Bob Larson, who is an evangelical wingnut of some proportion.  He's been around for a while; I remember listening to his radio program, Talk Back, in the 1980s when I lived in Seattle.  His major theme -- harped on in just about every single show -- was how the music industry was infested by demons, and how listening to rock-and-roll was going to endanger your soul.  He's written several books on the topic, including Rock & Roll: The Devil's Diversion, Hippies, Hindus, and Rock & Roll, Rock & the Church, and Rock, Practical Help for Those Who Listen to the Words and Don't like What They Hear, as well as the more general titles Larson's New Book of Cults and In The Name of Satan: How the Forces of Evil Work and What You Can Do to Defeat Them.  So it's pretty clear that Larson himself believes what he's saying, even though most of the rest of us think he should see a doctor about getting some antipsychotic meds.

Actually, my most vivid memory of Larson's radio show is that he was notoriously slow on the five-second delay button when people would call up to harass him, which happened with clock-like regularity.  On one extremely memorable occasion, a woman called up, asked a couple of misleading questions about how to invite Jesus as her personal savior to get Larson off his guard, and then said, "I'm just curious to ask, Reverend, can god get it up?"

Larson, clearly not understanding, said, "I beg your pardon?"

She said, "Can god get it up?  You know?  Because after all, man was created in god's image, and my boyfriend has a hard-on pretty much constantly.  And god made the Virgin Mary pregnant, and all, so I was just wondering..."

*click*

Then followed a fifteen-minute rant about how the forces of Satan were constantly attacking him, and how evil and twisted and depraved they were, and how that woman must have been possessed by a devil to call him and say such a thing.  No mention was made about how his (human) tech crew should be doing a better job of screening his calls, which is the reaction I would have had.

But I digress.

My guess, about the teenage exorcists, is that they probably are at least nominal Christians, but that they know full well that what they're doing isn't real.  "Reality" is the last thing that "Reality TV" turns out to be, and I suspect that that this is no exception.  I also suspect that the British, who are in general considerably less religious than Americans, will simply roll their eyes at the documentary and then proceed to forget all about it.  And the trio will have to take their Malleus Maleficarum roadshow elsewhere.

I'm sure, however, that this isn't the last "documentary" of this sort that we'll see.  Because, after all, the exorcists aren't the only ones who are motivated by profit.  If Teenage Exorcists is successful in garnering anything approaching high ratings, it will probably be only the first of many such shows.

All of which makes me glad that we don't watch television.