Here's the video :
This video was taken in China, it surely could be fake, a CGI fire. But a possessed person setting themselves on fire is not unheard of.
Regardless if it's real, recently science has had to reckon with what nearly every human being, across cultures and historical periods, have known.
Dr. Richard Gallagher, HERE is an Ivy League-educated, board-certified psychiatrist who teaches at Columbia University and New York Medical College, who has been forced to believe in demonic possession,
"...anthropologists agree that nearly all cultures have believed in spirits, and the vast majority of societies (including our own) have recorded dramatic stories of spirit possession. Despite varying interpretations, multiple depictions of the same phenomena in astonishingly consistent ways offer cumulative evidence of their credibility."
Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, HERE, a psychiatrist who specializes in schizophrenia, arrived at a similar conclusion after he had an unnerving experience with a patient. Lieberman is director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
As Joshua Hoffman and Gary S. Rosenkrantz affirm:
"...if entities of a certain kind belong to folk ontology [the ontological presumptions of our common-sense worldview], then there is prima facie presumption in favour of their reality ... Those who deny their existence assume the burden of proof."
Professor Stafford Betty reports that:
"In the West, several prominent psychologists have opened their minds to the possibility of 'demonic' oppression, gone public with their evidence, and participated in exorcisms.
We must allow the data to challenge our worldview."
Moreover, Betty states: "there is mounting evidence today that evil spirits do oppress and occasionally even possess" people.
William P. Wilson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Duke University Medical Centre, "regards as purely psychological many problems popularly attributed to demons today, but insists that there are real cases, including some that he has encountered, of actual spirits."
Anthropologist Alan R. Tippett writes that: "When one has eliminated the spurious and psychopathological cases one is still left with a considerable residue of material which appears to be genuine possession."
Anthropologist Raymond Firth acknowledges that, despite approaching the subject of spirit possession from a very different standpoint than Christian missionaries, social anthropologists from the Western world:
"Have been faced in the field by dramatic changes of personality in men or women they were studying ... speaking with strange voices, assumption of a different identity, purporting to be a spirit not a human being, giving commands or foretelling the future in a new authoritative way. Sometimes it has been hard for the anthropologist to persuade himself that it is really the same person as before whom he is watching or confronting, so marked is the personality change."
Finally, as David Bentley Hart says
"I know three African priests who are immensely educated and sophisticated scholars (linguists, philosophers, and historians all) and who are also unshakably convinced that miracles, magic, and spiritual warfare are manifestly real aspects of daily life, of which they themselves have had direct and incontrovertible experience on a number of occasions.
All three are, of course, creatures of their cultures, but I am not disposed to believe that their cultures are somehow more primitive or unreasoning than ours. It is true they come from nations that enjoy nothing like our economic and technological advantages; but, since these advantages are as likely to distract us from reality as to grant us any special insight into it, that fact scarcely rises to the level of irrelevance.
Truth be told, there is no remotely plausible reason why the convictions and experiences of an African polyglot and philosopher, whose pastoral and social labors oblige him to be engaged immediately in the concrete realities of hundreds of lives, should command less rational assent from us than the small, unproven, doctrinaire certitudes of persons who spend their lives in supermarkets and before television screens and immured in the sterile, hallucinatory seclusion of their private studies."
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