I haven’t eaten at Chipotle for years. Similarly, I haven’t had a Margarita in years, even though I think they’re tasty. So I’m not boycotting Chipotle, it’s just that I have no interest in what they offer. I want to be perfectly clear, though: it’s not because I think they’re satanic.

This is the time of year when born-again, fundamentalist Christians are straining to find reasons to hate (something they’re so good at), and their latest reason to shriek while they wait for the seasonal Starbucks cups to come out is Chipotle’s Hallowe’en advertising gimmick. They’re selling Margaritas with a Ouija board hook!

It’s demonic, you know.

The Chipotle controversy reflects a much larger cultural shift.

Tarot readings are increasingly presented as tools for self-discovery. Astrology promises insight into relationships and destiny. Psychic consultations offer supposed contact with deceased loved ones. Spirit guides are promoted in some wellness circles as sources of wisdom.

What previous generations of Christians recognized as occult practices are now frequently repackaged as empowerment, entertainment, or spiritual exploration.

And the marketing is inviting. There is nothing particularly frightening about colorful tarot cards, a fashionable psychic influencer, or a Ouija board appearing in a humorous commercial.

That is precisely why discernment is necessary.

Christians need not believe every Halloween decoration is demonic or that watching a fictional supernatural story constitutes occult participation. There is a meaningful distinction between portraying something and deliberately practicing it.

But when society treats divination, spirit communication, and supernatural guidance as recreational activities, Christians should recognize the danger.

The concern is not simply that people become comfortable with occult imagery. It’s that they may eventually become comfortable with the practices themselves.

Gosh. Atheists must be the godliest, purest, saintliest people on Earth, because we also don’t practice Tarot readings, astrology, or psychic consultations, and we think spirit guides are bunk. I’m not tempted by Chipotle or its Margaritas.

Besides, we have a Qdoba in the student union (no alcohol) and a good Mexican restaurant in town (with a bar and genuine Margaritas made on site.)

Gabe Poirot had a serious skateboarding accident, and was in a coma for 18 days. When he recovered (which wasn’t due to the intensive medical care he received — it was thanks to a lady praying over him), he translated the experience into a book and an appearance on the ever-credulous Fox News.

What a load of horseshit.

My first reaction was to see his description of the afterlife as evidence that he was making everything up. Yeah, sure, the sand and the trees and the wind were all constantly singing the praises of Jesus, and everything was Jesus-soaked. Babble Jesus, Jesus, Jesus to appeal to the most gullible Christians.

Second reaction: boy, that wasn’t heaven, that sounds like Hell. You’re lucky you got out after 18 days…imagine an eternity in that fever dream.

Thirdly, it’s true — we created gods in our image. His Jesus is a homoerotic Republican authoritarian fantasy. It’s Jesus of Finland.

POIROT: Yeah. Now, with every single person I meet, I tell them of the love of Christ, and that He did it all for them, and He died and rose again.

And also, I love how, you know, all these other testimonies, they didn’t meet a female Jesus. They didn’t meet a soft or a passive Jesus. Jesus is a man.

And especially in America, He’s been misrepresented. And especially, even, you know, there are so many cultural things that present Him as if He is some just tolerant guy. It is not the Jesus I met. He’s a lion. But He’s not a lion angry against me. He is a lion angry for me. He is a Mustang on my behalf. He did it all for me.

MCENANY: And what did He look like when you saw Him?

POIROT: Pure fire. He was 5’11”, like 6 feet, yet as tall as eternity. Like an ocean of love. Yet His eyes were burning white and red at the same time. And, I mean, talk about testosterone, like a Mustang. I’m telling you, He’s the Lion of Judah, and there’s a roar within His voice.

Right. His Jesus is loaded with testosterone and is angry for white conservative men everywhere.

People fall for this nonsense?

Joe Schmid was, I hear, a popular atheist YouTuber whose videos I never watched, except one. Belatedly, people told me he provided good philosophical support for atheism, and I was never into that philosophical angle — I’m more of a naturalist, materialist atheist who relies on science. But that’s OK! We need all kinds. Except, too late, he recently announced that he was no longer an atheist. He’s a hard-core Catholic now.

I can’t say that I regret the loss. The one time I listened to him, he sounded like a babbling philbro idiot, and he and Alex O’Connor destroyed their own reputations as far as I’m concerned. I’m not actually surprised after that performance that he has now declared himself a Catholic.

Here, you can enjoy his antic, demented announcement if you want…or skip the goofy histrionics and I’ll just summarize it.

He was brought up in a Catholic family, and attended a conservative Catholic school, and became an atheist because of evolution, of all things. He doesn’t seem to know much science, and elected to go to grad school in philosophy. He was an atheist because evolution seemed so wasteful and cruel (remember that for a minute), and he couldn’t believe a good god had created humans by virtue of that bloody meatgrinder. That’s not a good reason to become an atheist, but OK, it takes all kinds.

He has since learned about fine tuning and theistic evolution, which removed that objection to god-belief, because he’s an idiot. The fine tuning argument is just an argument from ignorance, where he can’t imagine how natural laws could generate complex life without a god rigging the rules to enable living things to arise in tiny, specific environments, like Earth. It might seem like a good excuse to those with a predisposition to believing in intelligent design, but most scientists find the arguments unbelievable and unsupported.

But hold on to your hats, the arguments are going to get worse and worse.

The next reason he gives for believing in god is miracles, miracles that he claims are supported by physical evidence and thousands of eyewitness accounts. That lots of people who share a common belief in supernatural phenomena claim that they saw a miracle like, say Fatima manifesting in the sky, or that they knew a guy who knew a guy whose cancer went into remission after a prayer was said over him, means nothing, but they’re enough to convince gullible Joe that something metaphysical, not psychological, had to have happened.

That’s weak. But then just to prove he doesn’t have a skeptical bone in his body, his next proof of god is Padre Pio, an old fraud whose schtick was to wave around bloody wounds in his hands and feet, stigmata like those that would have been present in his crucified Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We aren’t supposed to wonder why a god would poke bleeding holes into a priest, he just did. It’s about the most useless, pointless miracle ever, but it was enough to convince Joe Schmid that the Catholic god existed. What a rube.

But the next ‘miracle’ is the worst of all. He cites the story of St. Maria Goretta. Holy fuck, this is classically Catholic sickness.

Maria Goretta was an 11 year old girl, a virgin (it’s very important that she was a virgin, otherwise she wouldn’t have been sainted). She was attacked by a 20 year old man who demanded sex from her, which she refused (also important, this is a story about chastity), so he stabbed her with an awl 14 times. She survived for a little while, giving the local doctors time to operate on her multiple times, without anesthetic, and she suffered horribly a long tortuous painful death, but the doctors, all male, claim that she had said, while reduced to screaming, unimaginable pain, that she forgave her attacker. Yeah, right, and Joe Schmid would consider this a documented miracle.

Joe Schmid calls this a profound and beautiful story. Fuck you, Joe Schmid, there’s nothing beautiful about a young girl being tortured to death, you sadistic sick fuck. Recall, though, that he had become an atheist because of the abstract idea of generations of organisms dying over the long course of history, a wasteful and cruel process that he couldn’t imaging a good god presiding over; I guess it wasn’t personal and brutal enough to bring him to the joy of loving a personal, vicious god. I can tell that he had been brought up on the lives of Catholic saints and martyrs, standard training for Catholic children in the deep horrors of their hateful religion. He’s just returning to his youthful indoctrination in torture porn.

I have no problem with people returning to the comforting faith of their youth; I can understand some of the appeal of ritual, certainty, and community. I have no sympathy for people returning to a cult because they were inspired by a horrific tale about torturing a child.

Oh well, his career as an atheist is dead at last. I’m sure his star will be ascending among primitive, psychopathic religious adherents.

Also, I thought his weirdly frantic performance in the above half-hour long video was off-putting enough, but would you believe his next couple of videos, in which he tries to provide a more detailed justification for his freaky beliefs, are 7 and 10 hours long. No, I haven’t watched them, nor will I. There’s something wrong with that boy.

My address is easy to find, and if nothing else, you can just send it to me, at the University of Minnesota Morris, and it will find its way to my mailbox. Lately, I’ve gotten mundane pages from the Watchtower (Jehovah’s Witnesses are instantly recognizable by the style of their illustrations), and this…this kookrant. The guy really, really hates trans people and the expectation that you will be kind and respectful to your fellow human beings.

He doesn’t seem to understand numerals. “6000 thousand” is six million. Unless he’s in some weird sect that has a different age of the Earth than other fundamentalist Christians, he’s confused, or just innumerate.

My eyes glaze over. Would you believe this letter goes on for 8 pages of intolerance and hatred? I’ll spare you the middle — it’s all the same — but here’s the last page, where he tells me to become a Christian.

No, not ever. I have no desire to become garbage.

Holy crap. Guess who these guys are looking towards for advice. Gad Saad.

Musk: I mean, there’s a guy who posts on X who’s great: Gad Saad.*
Rogan: Yeah. He’s a friend of mine. He’s been on the podcast a bunch of times.
Musk: Yeah, he’s awesome. … And he talks about, you know, basically suicidal empathy. Like, if there’s, like, there’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself. So that we’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide.
Rogan: Also, don’t let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed.
Musk: The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. So, and I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.
Rogan: Right. Understand when empathy has been actually used as a tool.
Musk: Yes. Like it’s weaponized. Empathy is the issue. Yeah, weaponized empathy.

He’s awesome…I’m going to have to puke. Gad Saad is a marketing professor with no qualifications in science, but is thriving by jumping on the evolutionary psychology bandwagon. Or, as Eiynah describes him,

He is a white nationalist, someone who calls for expelling Muslims, a vicious transphobe, someone who refers to anti-Zionist Jews as insects. A truly vile man who they described as ‘a Canadian professor’.

His latest schtick is to claim that people are caring too much for their fellow human beings, especially if they belong to ethnic groups he doesn’t like, and calling it suicidal empathy. He’s written a whole book on the topic, a book I’ve mentioned before, and not one I’d ever care to read. Let’s take a look at the Amazon reviews, where it has 4½ stars (the reviews show all the signs of being carefully pruned of criticism), and all you have to do is look at who is praising him to know it’s trash.

“Western civilization is doomed, unless the core weakness of suicidal empathy is recognized and actions are taken that are hard but necessary for survival. Gad Saad articulates this well. All of Gad’s books, including this one, are great.” — Elon Musk

“Over the course of nearly half a century tracking culture war issues I have some perspective on our time and society, and I am deeply worried that the West faces a challenge like no other. But I was unable to link the disparate threats—the DEI, BLM, and trans movements, the fetishization of victimhood status, the ennobling of terrorists and criminals, and the failure to solve the drug and homelessness problems—to the underlying cause until I read Gad Saad’s magisterial work on Suicidal Empathy. There it is! We’re killing ourselves with kindness and it must stop before the patient dies, starting with this book, which includes the contagion’s diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.” — Michael Shermer, Publisher, Skeptic magazine, author of The Moral Arc and Conspiracy

“What happens when society becomes so empathetic that it tolerates intolerance? Gad Saad is the evolutionary psychologist who can tell us whether the enlightenment can endure in an age of suicidal empathy.” — Lord Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist and Birds, Sex and Beauty

Western civilization is doomed, unless we purge it of DEI, BLM, and trans movements and stop being kind. But Musk, Shermer, and Ridley are the people you should listen to only if you plan on doing the opposite of what they advise.

Instead, respect every branch of human civilization equally, regard them with fairness and generosity, and give them nothing but kindness. Except for Nazis.

Sucking up to Rogan or Musk will only make you popular with Nazis, and those people are bad.