As a former fundie myself (brief stint, I assure you!), I do
have some sympathy for your hotel guests. Decades ago, in my
teens, before I was fortunate enough to snap out of it, such
a situation would have produced an *extreme* amount of
anxiety.
I can only feel sorry for anyone who has lived their whole
life that way.
There aren't many ways to help them, everything you say or
do is processed via an elaborate shell script that basically
amounts to this:
sed -e 's/outside help/trick of the devel/'
Poor people, really. If they weren't so dangerous &
annoying, we ought to have sympathy for them. It really was
a high-stress lifesytle. I'm thankful to have snapped out of
it early on, lots of others aren't so lucky. It really is
like a trap.
Especially the bit about "high-stress lifestyle". Because really, it's not just about being simply offended by imagery that is perceived as antagonistic to their religion, it's about getting completely worked up over a cartoon image of a devil, and truly believing that whoever put that there must be corrupted by Dark Forces.
It's kind of hard to come up with a non-Christian equivalent, maybe something like travelling to Asia, visiting a Hindu temple, and completely freaking out about the swastikas, because obviously this means that all Hindus are in fact Nazis. Or even more direct, refusing to book a hotel owned by Hindus that prominently display some swastika emblem behind the counter (as a good luck/prosperity charm).
Now imagine living with this delusion, you actually believe this, everybody trying to convince you otherwise is either sadly misguided, corrupted, or "one of them" and these swastikas are quite prevalent in Asia. You'd be living in a constant state of fear of Imaginary Nazis!
It's one of those things that is both funny and sad and amazing and pitiful, all at the same time.
Maybe another comparison, I know a couple of people that can completely freak out from simply seeing a picture of a spider, as much that if it's large and unexpected enough they will actually jump out of their chair and panic. A big difference is of course that these people are aware that their fear is irrational--that a picture cannot hurt them (well, apart from any physical reactions they bring about their own, of course).
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-chat/2011-Novembe...
Especially the bit about "high-stress lifestyle". Because really, it's not just about being simply offended by imagery that is perceived as antagonistic to their religion, it's about getting completely worked up over a cartoon image of a devil, and truly believing that whoever put that there must be corrupted by Dark Forces.It's kind of hard to come up with a non-Christian equivalent, maybe something like travelling to Asia, visiting a Hindu temple, and completely freaking out about the swastikas, because obviously this means that all Hindus are in fact Nazis. Or even more direct, refusing to book a hotel owned by Hindus that prominently display some swastika emblem behind the counter (as a good luck/prosperity charm).
Now imagine living with this delusion, you actually believe this, everybody trying to convince you otherwise is either sadly misguided, corrupted, or "one of them" and these swastikas are quite prevalent in Asia. You'd be living in a constant state of fear of Imaginary Nazis!
It's one of those things that is both funny and sad and amazing and pitiful, all at the same time.
Maybe another comparison, I know a couple of people that can completely freak out from simply seeing a picture of a spider, as much that if it's large and unexpected enough they will actually jump out of their chair and panic. A big difference is of course that these people are aware that their fear is irrational--that a picture cannot hurt them (well, apart from any physical reactions they bring about their own, of course).