As a Christian who doesn’t follow much of the super religious “rules”, I think it’s kind of a red flag but sometimes it’s not. Red flag because my girlfriend’s ex-friend was super devout and put it all over her bio and was very ableist and homophobic. My friend, for example, is agnostic, so he’s not sure if spirituality exists. He has a friend who’s super devout and constantly talks about Christianity. She has a Discord server about Christianity and most of her friends are Christian who just talk about Jesus and God all the time. She puts the crosses and bible verses in her bio too. She’s very nice and tries to be accepting but seems kinda judgmental or like “Oh, your non-traditional ways are… nice I guess.”
She constantly asks my friend how his relationship with God is and if he reads the Bible and what his favorite verses are, even when he says he’s not super religious.
My mom as of recent has become super religious, and while she is pretty left-leaning, thinks the only way to believe is to be Christian and you HAVE to believe in Jesus or you’ll die instead of live forever in Heaven.
I treat it more as a form of mental illness akin to schizophrenia or psychosis. They live in a fantasy world and if you encroach on that world wrongly they can turn ugly on you.
Might be more of a developmental impairment. For children, magical thinking is normal and expected. They might sincerely think they can cause something to happen by thinking about it or engaging in some kind of paranormal way. Like, if a 4 year old points at you with a finger guns gesture and yells ‘bang’, they might just be trying to be silly; but they might also be genuinely trying to kill you. You’ll know if immediately after, they look down at their finger-gun with a wtf expression cuz they’re actually surprised it didn’t work.
Again, normal. Unnerving, but normal.
They should grow out of that shit by about age 7 iirc.
Lots of people never grow out of it, they just compartmentalize that kind of thinking as religion… they know they can’t kill you with finger guns, but Jesus? His finger guns are real!!.
Those people need a fuck ton of therapy.
Development impairment might be a better description yeah. I haven’t given it too much thought as luckily I don’t have many people like this around me. It just always struck me as weird that the medical/psychiatrist community doesn’t dare to touch it.