Half-term this week and what does that mean? Right! Daytime television, is what it means.
Right now I have on a discussion show and they are earnestly considering the question of whether Ouija boards are bad. Apparently one of the toy companies is producing them again and marketing them, shock-horror, at children.
What's amusing and sad at the same time is that the callers to the show are clearly all in need of professional mental health care.
The first caller had me, as they say on the internet, ROFLMAO. She started off clearly stating that while she had been heavily into playing with her Ouija board as a child it hadn't affected her in any way. Now, though, she was implacably opposed to them because since joining the Spiritualist movement she had learned about the evil dangers they pose.
Er... run that by me again. You were into Ouija boards as a child and grew up to join the Spiritualist movement. While it's not actually evidence of causality it's certainly correlation. Of course this was a thought that didn't seem to have occurred to her.
Another caller claimed that her childish experiments with a Ouija board had led first of all to the glass flying around the room and smashing and subsequently to hauntings, poltergeist activity, possessions, doppelgangers and so on and had ultimately needed priestly intervention to exorcise the family home. Given that she seemed to believe everything she was saying, I'd say that if she hasn't already sought professional help, by which I mean psychiatric rather than religious, it's probably time she considered it.
For what its worth, now that I've stopped laughing (and I know that laughter and ridicule aren't actually the appropriate responses here), I'm opposed to Ouija boards too. They clearly have a detrimental effect on the mental health and stability of some people who use them . I shouldn't have laughed at either of those two women. It's actually sad not funny. Encouraging irrational beliefs seems to me not to be a good idea.
Right now I have on a discussion show and they are earnestly considering the question of whether Ouija boards are bad. Apparently one of the toy companies is producing them again and marketing them, shock-horror, at children.
What's amusing and sad at the same time is that the callers to the show are clearly all in need of professional mental health care.
The first caller had me, as they say on the internet, ROFLMAO. She started off clearly stating that while she had been heavily into playing with her Ouija board as a child it hadn't affected her in any way. Now, though, she was implacably opposed to them because since joining the Spiritualist movement she had learned about the evil dangers they pose.
Er... run that by me again. You were into Ouija boards as a child and grew up to join the Spiritualist movement. While it's not actually evidence of causality it's certainly correlation. Of course this was a thought that didn't seem to have occurred to her.
Another caller claimed that her childish experiments with a Ouija board had led first of all to the glass flying around the room and smashing and subsequently to hauntings, poltergeist activity, possessions, doppelgangers and so on and had ultimately needed priestly intervention to exorcise the family home. Given that she seemed to believe everything she was saying, I'd say that if she hasn't already sought professional help, by which I mean psychiatric rather than religious, it's probably time she considered it.
For what its worth, now that I've stopped laughing (and I know that laughter and ridicule aren't actually the appropriate responses here), I'm opposed to Ouija boards too. They clearly have a detrimental effect on the mental health and stability of some people who use them . I shouldn't have laughed at either of those two women. It's actually sad not funny. Encouraging irrational beliefs seems to me not to be a good idea.
1 comment:
I'm only going on my (often faulty) memory here, and can't verify its accuracy.
ISTR that the ouija board was originally sold as a children's game and there was no suggestion made at the time that 'messages' were of supernatural origin. It was only a little while later, following the growth of spiritualism, that it was taken up by supposed adults and the messages ascribed to being from 'the other side'.
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