Relocating Pergamum

Today is the launch of my hero's journey novel Sephirot!  An ordinary man is suddenly catapulted into a network of interconnected worlds where nothing is as it seems, and he has to rely on his wits and courage to find his way through.  But will that be enough to get him safely home?

Get your copy, and also sign up for my monthly newsletter and other special offers, at my website!

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Jonathan Swift commented, with his usual eagle-eyed clarity, "You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into."

This, in a nutshell, sums up why it is so damned frustrating to argue with conspiracy theorists.  Not only do they summarily dismiss any facts you might come up with, they have abandoned the necessity for facts at all.  They've moved from the faith-based stance of "believe this despite the fact that there's no evidence" to "believe this because there's no evidence."  After all, those conspirators are pretty smart guys.

They wouldn't just leave evidence lying around.

But once you've landed in that territory, you've opened yourself to falling for anything.  As an example, consider the latest bizarre conspiracy theory that's been making the rounds, that has repeatedly caused the people who run Wikipedia to have to go back and fix the pages for an archaeological site in Turkey and an obscure Roman Catholic bishop who is the patron saint of toothache.

I swear I'm not making any of this up.

The whole thing started with a passage from the Book of Revelation -- specifically, Revelation 2:12-17:

To the angel of the church in Pergamum write:

These are the words of him who has the sharp, double-edged sword.  I know where you live—where Satan has his throne.  Yet you remain true to my name.  You did not renounce your faith in me, not even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was put to death in your city—where Satan lives.

Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: There are some among you who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality.  Likewise, you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans.  Repent therefore!  Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.

Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.  To the one who is victorious, I will give some of the hidden manna.  I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.

Notwithstanding the fact that most of the Book of Revelation sounds like a bad acid trip, this seems clear enough.  The people of Pergamum are pretty okay for the most part, except for those who eat the sacrificial lamb or fool around out of wedlock; to them the angel says, "Don't make me come over there and give you a good talking-to."

Simple, right?  Nope.  There's a group of conspiracy theorists who have grabbed the "where Satan has his throne" part, and run right off the cliff with it.

The Antipas mentioned in the passage was a real guy; he was the bishop of Pergamum, and was martyred either during the reign of Nero or Domitian (it's uncertain which), allegedly by being placed inside a hollow brass bull and roasted over a fire.  Somehow, he became the patron saint of toothache, instead of the patron saint of third-degree burns, which would have been more logical.

So the conspiracy theorists put their mind to trying to figure out where Satan's throne is.  They reasoned, "Well, the biblical passage says that it's in the city where Antipas died, so if we can just figure out where that was, we'll know where Satan's throne is located!"

Um... let's reread the passage, shall we?

It says right in the first line of the passage that the city is called Pergamum.  Antipas is known to have been the bishop of Pergamum.  Not only that, Pergamum was a huge metropolis of the ancient world, which left a sprawling set of much-studied ruins (now a UNESCO World Heritage Site) located in what is now western Turkey.  The city was settled in the eighth century B.C.E., inhabited continuously through the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Eras, is documented hundreds of times in contemporary sources, and was only more or less abandoned in 1300 C. E. when the Ottoman Turks took over.  Furthermore, the district within which the archaeological site is located...

... is still called Bergama.

Despite all this, the conspiracy theorists were sitting around and scratching their heads in total perplexity.  "This is really complicated, dude," they said.  "Where can it be?  They sure hid Satan's throne well, those sneaky guys!"

But you'll be relieved to know that after much pondering, they figured it out.  Antipas of Pergamum was actually buried in...

... wait for it...

... Geneva, Switzerland.

Why Geneva, you might be asking?  I know I sure as hell was.  Well, they're happy to explain that it's because Geneva is home to the following evil organizations:

1. The CERN particle accelerator 
2. World Economic Forum Headquarters
3. World Trade Organization
4. World Council of Churches
5. World Federation of United Nations
6. World Health Organization
7. World Meteorological Organization
8. International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association
9. GAVI (The Vaccine Alliance)
10. Lutheran World Federation
11. Internet Governance Forum
12. UN Watch

Okay, I can see them targeting CERN, given that the mad scientists there are currently trying to recreate the Big Bang or generate black holes or trigger a false vacuum collapse, so that they will enjoy 3.8 nanoseconds during which to cackle maniacally and rub their hands together in glee before they get vaporized along with the rest of us.  It's also unsurprising that an association supporting us evil queer folks made the top twelve.  And a lot of the others on the list have that "One World Government" flavor conspiracy theorists just hate. 

But... the Lutherans?  Why target the Lutherans?  What do they think the Lutherans are gonna do, organize Satan's dish-to-pass supper, or something?

What is most baffling about all this is not that some loon had a crazy idea.  That's what loons do, after all.  What is completely mind-boggling about all this is that when said loon posted this idea, he got shouts of acclamation about his bravery in coming forth with it, along with people decrying the evil folks of Geneva as being -- once again, I'm not making this up -- "vile, in plain sight, such evil."  And enough people took a look at this claim and said, "Makes sense to me," that the Wikipedia pages for Antipas, Pergamum, and Geneva keep having to be fixed over and over after they're edited to reflect this new and groundbreaking version of reality.

I'm not sure what more to say about this that "What the actual fuck?" doesn't cover.  One slightly hopeful note is that this kind of thing usually has a fairly short shelf-life; the conspiracy theorists get bored with yammering about one weird idea and then move on to something else in fairly short order.  Probably this time that Newark is actually located in Cambodia and is the final resting place of Mussolini, or something.

Okay, so I'm not sure how reassuring this actually is.

One thing that's certain, though, is that as useless as it seems, I will keep fighting against the purveyors of nonsense with the sword of my mouth, lo until the end of days.  Maybe I'll even get rewarded with a white stone with a new name on it.  You never know.

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Snake in the grass

Okay, now I've heard everything.

If you ever run across a more ridiculous claim, I do not want to know about it.  This one already lowered my opinion of the average intelligence of the human species by ten IQ points.

You've probably heard the conspiracy theories about COVID-19 -- that it was deliberately started by the Chinese, that the vaccine contains microchips so The Bad Guys ™ can keep track of us, and so on.  But none of them can hold a candle to what one Bryan Ardis is saying.  Ardis is allegedly a "chiropractor, acupuncturist, and medical researcher," but after you hear his claim, you will probably come to the conclusion that his medical degree came from Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse.

Ready?

Ardis says the Catholic church created the COVID-19 virus from cobra venom, and is using it to turn us all into Satan worshipers.

So far, it's just a wacko guy who came up with a wacko idea.  Nothing special, because after all, that's what wacko guys do.  What sets him apart is that radio broadcaster Stew Peters took him seriously enough that he made a documentary about Ardis and his idea -- a documentary called "Watch the Waters" which has already gotten 640,000 views and is trending on Twitter.

I'd like to hope a significant chunk of the views are by people who are saying, "Whoa, listen up to what this nutcake is saying," but chances are, there are enough people who believe him that it's troubling.  Here's what Ardis says, which I feel obliged to state is verbatim:

The Latin definition historically for virus—originally and historically, virus meant, and means, "venom."  So, I started to wonder, "Well, what about the name ‘corona’? Does it have a Latin definition or a definition at all?"  So I actually looked up what’s the definition and on Dictionary.com, it brings up thirteen definitions: ‘Corona, religiously, ecclesiastically, means gold ribbon at the base of a miter.  So, this actually could read, "The Pope’s Venom Pandemic."  In Latin terms, corona means crown.  Visually, we see kings represented with a crown symbol.  So put that together for me: king cobra venom.  It actually could read, "King Cobra Venom Pandemic."

I actually believe this is more of a religious war on the entire world.  If I was going to do something incredibly evil, how ironic would it be that the Catholic Church, or whoever, would use the one symbol of an animal that represents evil in all religion? …  You take that snake or that serpent, and you figure out how to isolate genes from that serpent and get those genes of that serpent to insert itself into your God-given created DNA.  I think this was the plan all along; to get the serpent’s—the Evil One’s—DNA into your God-created DNA.  And they figured out how to do this with this mRNA [vaccine] technology.  They’re using mRNA—which is mRNA extracted from I believe the king cobra venom—and I think they want to get to that venom inside of you and make you a hybrid of Satan.

 Probably needless to say, I read this whole thing with this expression on my face:

It does leave me with a few responses, however:

• Satan has DNA?
• Linguistics is not a cross between free association and a game of Telephone.  
• When mRNA is injected into you (e.g. the COVID vaccine), it degrades in only a couple of days.  By that time, if the vaccine worked, you've begun to make antibodies to the protein the mRNA coded for (in this case, the spike protein).  It doesn't get into your DNA, nor affect your DNA in any way.  So if the COVID vaccine was engineered to turn us into demons, we'd all turn back into ordinary humans a couple of days later, which now that I think of it could be kind of fun.
• Injecting king cobra venom into you would kill you within minutes, given that this is basically what happens when you get bitten by a king cobra.
• "Corona" is Latin for "crown," that bit is correct.  But coronaviruses are a big family of viruses that has been known to scientists since Leland Bushnell and Carl Brandly first isolated them in 1933, and were named not for the pope's miter but because the rings of spike proteins on the surface look a little like a crown.
• Is Bryan Ardis stark raving loony?  Or what?

So there you have it.  We are now in the Pope's King Cobra Venom Pandemic.  Despite these dire warnings, my wife and I have both been vaccinated three times, and we haven't turned into hybrids of Satan.  But we have, so far, avoided getting COVID, which is kind of the point.

But I will end with reiterating my plea: if you find a crazier claim, please don't tell me about it.  Reading about this one made countless cells in my cerebral cortex that I can ill afford to lose die screaming in agony.  From now on in Skeptophilia, I think I'll focus on happy bunnies and rainbows.  We'll see how long that lasts.

Hopefully a while, at least.  The last thing we need is my brain cell loss contributing to a further drop in the average human IQ.

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My little... Satan

About a year ago, I got into a fairly surreal conversation with a friend of mine over the phenomenon of "Bronies."

A "Brony," for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is an adult, usually male, fan of the television show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.  At first my friend didn't believe that there was such a thing, and she accused me of trying to convince her of something ridiculous so that I would have ammunition for teasing her later when she found out that it wasn't true.

This forced me to dig up an article in Wired from all the way back in 2011 that proved to her that, unlikely as it may seem, the Brony phenomenon is real.

The Bronies are pretty serious about their obsession, too.  They have conventions, and dress up as characters like Fluttershy and Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash, complete with wigs and costumes that are colors not found in nature.

BronyCon. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Keith Survell from USA, Bronycon summer 2012 cosplay session, CC BY-SA 2.0]

They collect action figures.  They have online discussion groups wherein they discuss the events in recent episodes with the same gravitas you would expect if the scripts had been penned by Shakespeare, or at the very least, George R. R. Martin.  They make fan art (as of the writing of the Wired article, the site DeviantArt had over 90,000 pieces of My Little Pony-inspired art; heaven alone knows how many there are now).  They went so apeshit when My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic ended its run in 2019 that EntertainmentOne and Boulder Media teamed up with Paramount Pictures to produce a full-length movie called, I kid you not, My Little Pony: A New Generation, which is scheduled to be released this September.

There is also a subgroup which apparently like to dress up as My Little Ponies and then have sex with each other.  Which I guess is harmless enough if everyone involved is a consenting adult, but open-minded as I am, I really didn't want to investigate further.

Being an author, my internet search history is already fucked up enough as it is.

Anyhow, after discussing the whole phenomenon with my friend, I got to thinking about it, and I decided that I had to see if I could figure out why this show had gained so much popularity amongst adults.  And fortunately, the article linked above has a short clip from one of the shows.  "Who knows?" I thought.  "I'm an open-minded guy, and confident in my own masculinity.  Maybe I'll be charmed.  Maybe I'll understand how some dude could get taken in by the innocent delight of entering a pastel-colored world where stories always end well."

So I watched the clip.  And "delight" is not what I experienced.  All I can say is, the voices of the My Little Pony characters reach a level of Annoying Whine previously achieved only by the actors who voiced the little dinosaurs in The Land Before Time.  After watching ten seconds of the clip, I wanted to remove my ears, with a cheese grater if need be.  I not only cannot understand how anyone could become a Brony, I felt like I needed to chug a six-pack of Bud Light after watching the clip just to restore order to the universe.

But all of this is backstory.  Because just yesterday I found out, through a different YouTube clip that you all must watch, that there is a reason that otherwise normal guys become Bronies.  And after watching the clip, I realized what a narrow escape I had.

Because My Little Pony is rife with symbolism of Satan and the Illuminati.

From Princess Celestia, who watches the world with the Eye of Horus and is actually a pagan sun goddess; to Applejack, whose apple symbol represents the Apple of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; to Twilight Sparkle's six-pointed star.  All symbols of evil magic and the occult.

And don't even get me started about "Pinkie Pie."

All through the video, which is eight minutes long, there is eerie, atmospheric music playing, sort of like the soundtrack to The Exorcist only less cheerful.  I watched the whole thing through twice, because it's just that wonderful.  There are all sorts of references to the Masons and the Satanists and the Illuminati and the Pagans.  An especially great part is where the subtitles tell us that there are six Pony characters, and each one has her own "magic element" and her own color, and 6+6+6 = 666.

I always thought that 6+6+6 = 18.  Maybe it's special Illuminati math or something.

Be that as it may, I guess that this explains the whole "Brony" phenomenon.  Adult guys are getting sucked in by the evil magic of My Little Pony, and through the wicked influence of characters like "Rainbow Dash" they are being induced to dedicate their lives to worshiping Satan.

So it's a truly awesome video, and very educational, although I would caution you against drinking anything while watching it unless you really want to buy a new computer monitor.

Anyway, there you have it.  Why guys become Bronies.  Me, I'm still not likely to watch, even now that I know that the show has a darker side.  Those voices are just beyond anything I could tolerate.  Not that this will convince my friend, who still thinks I'm covering up a secret obsession, to the point that she got me a "Pinkie Pie" mug for my last birthday.

But it could be worse.  She could have gotten me a plush toy with a voice box.  And then I might have made a deal with Satan just to get even with her.

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One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

 

A monster of a problem

Apparently, it's easier than I thought to give your soul to Satan.

You don't have to attend a Black Mass, or hold a séance, or even wear an upside-down crucifix.  Nothing that flashy, or even deliberate, is necessary.

All you have to do is drink the wrong energy drink.

I am referring, of course, to "Monster," that whiz-bang combination of sugar, vitamins, various herbal extracts of dubious health effect, and truly staggering amounts of caffeine, which misleadingly does not include "demons" on the ingredients list.

At least that's the contention of the also-misleadingly named site Discerning the World, which would be more accurately called Everything Is Trying To Eat Your Soul.  This site claims that the "Monster" logo, with its familiar trio of green claw marks on a black background, is actually a symbol for "666" because the individual claw marks look a little like the Hebrew symbol for the number six:

Which, of course, is way more plausible than the idea that it's a stylized letter "M."  You know, "M" as in "Monster."

But no. Every time you consume a Monster energy drink, you are swallowing...

... pure evil.

Now lest you think that these people are just making some kind of metaphorical claim -- that the Monster brand has symbolism that isn't wholesome, and that it might inure the unwary with respect to secular, or even satanic, imagery -- the website itself puts that to rest pretty quickly.  It's a literal threat, they say, ingested with every swallow:

The Energy Drink contains ‘demonic’ energy and if you drink this drink you are drinking a satanic brew that will give you a boost...  People who are not saved, who are not covered by the Previous [sic] Blood of Jesus Christ are susceptible to their attacks.  Witchcraft is being used against the world on a scale so broad that it encompasses everything you see on a daily basis – right down to children’s clothing at your local clothing store.

So that's pretty unequivocal. Never mind that if you'll consult the Hebrew numeral chart above, the logo looks just as much like "777" as it does like "666."

Or, maybe, just like a capital "M."  Back to the obvious answer.

Unfortunately, though, there are people who think that the threat is real, which is a pretty terrifying worldview to espouse.  Not only did I confirm this by looking at the comments on the website (my favorite one: "It is truly SCARY that all the little kids who play their Pokemon and video games are being GROOMED to enter this gateway to hell.  Satan wants to devour our young and he will do it any way he can."), a guy posted on the r/atheism subreddit just last week saying that he'd been enjoying a Monster drink on a train, and some woman came up to him and snarled, "I hope you enjoy your drink IN HELL," and then stalked away.

What, exactly, are you supposed to say to something like that?  "Thank you, I will?"  "Here, would you like a sip?"  "Yes, it fills me with everlasting fire?"  Since quick thinking is not really my forté, I'm guessing that I'd probably just have given her a goggle-eyed stare as she walked off, and thought of many clever retorts afterward.

"It's damned good."  That's what I'd like to say to her.

Not, of course, that it would be the truth, since my opinion is that Monster tastes like someone took the effluent from a nuclear power plant, added about twenty pounds of sugar, and let it ferment in the sun all day long.  But that's just me.

And of course, there's my suspicion that the owner of the Monster trademark is probably thrilled by this notoriety -- they pride themselves on being edgy, and their target advertising demographic is young, athletic, iconoclastic rebel types, or those who fancy themselves as such.  So no doubt this whole demonic-entity thing fits right into Monster's marketing strategy.

Convenient for both sides.  The perennially-fearful hell-avoiders have something else to worry about, and the Monster people have an extra cachet for their product.  One hand washes the other, even if one of them belongs to Satan, who (if he were real) would probably approve wholeheartedly of capitalism and the profit motive.

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These days, I think we all are looking around for reasons to feel optimistic -- and they seem woefully rare.  This is why this week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is Hans Rosling's wonderful Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.  

Rosling looks at the fascinating bias we have toward pessimism.  Especially when one or two things seem seriously amiss with the world, we tend to assume everything's falling apart.  He gives us the statistics on questions that many of us think we know the answers to -- such as:  What percentage of the world’s population lives in poverty, and has that percentage increased or decreased in the last fifty years?  How many girls in low-income countries will finish primary school this year, and once again, is the number rising or falling?  How has the number of deaths from natural disasters changed in the past century?

In each case, Rosling considers our intuitive answers, usually based on the doom-and-gloom prognostications of the media (who, after all, have an incentive to sensationalize information because it gets watchers and sells well with a lot of sponsors).  And what we find is that things are not as horrible as a lot of us might be inclined to believe.  Sure, there are some terrible things going on now, and especially in the past few months, there's a lot to be distressed about.  But Rosling's book gives you the big picture -- which, fortunately, is not as bleak as you might think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Candy bars for Satan

Happy Halloween to all of my loyal readers.  I'm saying this because "Happy Scary Day Of Your Choice" sounds ridiculous, so if you don't celebrate Halloween, you can feel free to get your knickers in a twist.

Because it's a day long associated with legends about ghosts and hauntings and demons and so on, Halloween is not a big favorite with the ultrareligious types.  It's interesting, however, that the day itself has a (sort of) Christian origin; in the Celtic calendar, there were twelve months of thirty days each, which left five days at the end that belonged to no month.  Because of this, they were thought to be days when all of the natural laws were suspended, the dead came back to life, and other special offers.  The culmination was the last of the five days, Samhain, on which your local priest was supposed to get together with the pious members of the village and fight back the forces of evil, after which there was a big celebration complete with high-fives about how they beat the hell out of the demons yet again.  This practice was later co-opted by kids, who would disguise themselves as demons and go from door to door, demanding a gift (a treat) in exchange for their not vandalizing your house (a trick).

The next day, November 1 (All Saints Day) was a holy day, celebrating the start of the new year and the triumph of good over evil, and a time to remember the dead, at least the ones who were buried on sanctified ground.  All Saints Day is sometimes called "All Hallows Day," so the day before is "Hallow's Eve."

And thus Halloween was born.

[image courtesy of photographer Jarek Tuszynski and the Wikimedia Commons]

So the whole thing has a connection to some at-least-sort-of-Christian mythology, although its roots go back much further, to the pagan rites of the ancient Celts.  I suppose I can see how the ultrareligious would object to the whole thing.  But this still doesn't explain Linda Harvey, televangelist and founder of Mission:America, who said last week that you should definitely not let your kids participate in trick-or-treating, because it could...

... turn them gay.

I kid you not.  Harvey said:

Yes, America’s recent exaltation of Halloween as a festival second only to Christmas owes a lot to promotion by homosexuals and their new favorite comrades — gender-confused males and females. 

And as usual, the “LGBTQ” folks have no problem using any tool, Halloween included, to corrupt children.

How did she figure all this out?  It's hard to say, although she says she escaped from the magnetic lure of evil only by the skin of her teeth:

When I was 14, I had my own bizarre encounter with the enemy spirit world by experimenting with a Ouija board.  Since my parents were Episcopalians, I received no warnings of spiritual danger because at that time, they lacked a mature, informed level of faith. 

But when my friend and I asked the “board” questions, some unseen force pushed the pointer around.  At times, our fingers were hanging on for dear life as it flew around the board, often spelling out messages. 

I had little biblical background to understand what this presence surely was.  Now, I can only thank God for mercifully protecting me from being drawn more deeply into this spooky and alluring world where the unseen has real, tangible power.

What "this presence" was is the well-studied ideomotor effect, where people's conscious or subconscious thoughts drive their bodies to respond, often in such a way that it feels "reflexive" or out of their control.  So there's nothing much to a Ouija board, and it's only able to tell us what we already knew (or what we might imagine).  No evil "presence" required.

Oh, and Linda: that's a hell of a dig at the Episcopalians, not to mention your own parents.  I guess "ecumenism" forms no part of your religious practice, then?  Nor familial respect?

Fortunately for Linda and her followers, there's an alternate celebration available.  It's called -- and I am so not making this up -- "JesusWeen."  The idea is instead of dressing up in costume and getting candy on the evening of October 31, you dress in conservative clothing and pass out religious study materials.

I just bet the neighborhood kids are going to be busting down the front door to participate in that.

Anyhow, if you're planning on going out trick-or-treating tonight, be ready for attacks from Satan and coming back gay.  I guess we all have to decide what kind of risks we're willing to take.  And this is just me, but if I heard that a neighbor was passing out full-sized Mounds bars, I would throw caution to the wind with respect to either of these.

Soul singer

A couple of days ago, a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link with the message, "I thought I'd seen it all."

Well, I can say from painful experience, never give the universe an opening like that.  Every single time I think I've found the weirdest, goofiest claim ever, people take it upon themselves to come up with something even loonier.

This is why today we're looking at how Lady Gaga's announcement that she has fibromyalgia was her way of admitting that she'd sold her soul to the Illuminati.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

That, at least, is the contention of a group of people who evidently have been doing sit-ups under parked cars, as reported by Mariel Loveland, writing for Ranker.  These folks claim that the documentary describing the singer's chronic illness, Five Foot Two, was filled with hints about the real cause of the disease.  Loveland writes:

According to Anonymous, at one of these very same Lower East Side Clubs she sold her soul to the Illuminati for fame and fortune.  But Gaga, always one to push the envelope, reportedly went about "donating" rather than selling her soul to the organization.

Which is pretty darn generous.  I know I'd want something in return for my soul, and more than just membership in the Illuminati.  I mean, don't they have some kind of signup bonus?  Like back in the day, when you'd sign up for a checking account, the bank would give you a toaster or something.

So according to Loveland's informant, the Illuminati were waiting for her after a concert, to make her an offer she couldn't refuse.  Here's her alleged account of what happened:

…This man, a strangely ageless man in a suit, spoke to me.  He was leaning against the wall smoking, and he said to me, "I think you've got what it takes. Do you want it?"...  I asked what 'it' was I thought he was coming onto me, but he smiled and said, "Everything.  Success.  Fame.  Riches.  Power.  Do you want it all?"

Kind of tempting, that would be.  So she went for it, and sure enough, she became famous and rich and so on and so forth.  But like Faust and so many others have discovered, you can't just sell your soul to the devil and expect to get off with a slap on the wrist:

[T]his chronic pain is caused by conflicting forces battling for supremacy inside herself...  The singer allegedly wants to "rid her body of the dark spirituality" that she welcomed via "Satanic rituals early on in her career."  These dark forces allegedly cause her chronic pain...  They may give you special powers, outer beauty, talent, and wealth for a while, but it doesn’t last.

And of course, no claim of the Illuminati would be complete without a contribution from Alex Jones.  About a concert where she appeared to float upwards, followed by some flashing lights, Jones said:

They say she’s going to stand on top of the stadium, ruling over everyone with drones everywhere, surveilling everyone in a big swarm.  To just condition them to say "I am the Goddess of Satan" ruling over them with the rise of the robots in a ritual of lesser magic.

Which, I think we can all agree, is the only possible explanation for a pop singer doing something flamboyant.

Then we get to hear all about how Gaga's actual name, Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, contains an anagram of the name Lina Morgana, a different pop singer who Gaga supposedly murdered, and how Gaga keeps flashing the All-Seeing Eye symbol during her concerts, either as a sign of her soulless condition or as a desperate plea for help from her fans.  The upshot is that we should all either boycott her concerts, or else rescue her from the Forces of Evil, whichever version you decided to go for.

At that point, my eyes were crossing, so I didn't get any further in the article.

I think what bothers me about all of this is not that loony people have come up with conspiracy theories.  That, after all, is what loonies do.  But here we have this poor woman, who through no fault of her own has contracted a debilitating disease, and she makes a documentary going public with her struggles, and she's repaid by raving wackazoids like Alex Jones claiming that she got her just deserts for taking up with the Bad Guys.

The object lesson here is that fame comes at a price, and I don't mean "your soul."  It means your privacy, and in a lot of ways, your chance at being treated compassionately and empathetically.  All the more reason why I'd never want to be famous, not that it's all that likely in any case.

Bulk discount on demons

As you undoubtedly know, there are people who take the whole exorcism thing with the utmost seriousness.

And given the current chaos in the world, both man-made and natural, it's no wonder that some religious types think that demons are causing it all.  If you're already a believer in supernatural forces (good and bad) controlling things, I suppose it's natural enough that when things get crazy, you're more likely to think that none of it can be due to natural causes.  So according to these folks, demons are directly causing the natural disasters -- and as far as the human-induced ones, it's demons acting through people, directing their actions, that's causing them to do awful things.

Although as far as the natural disasters go, I've heard them attributed to other sources as well.  Noted theologian Kirk Cameron, for example, thinks that Hurricane Irma was sent by god himself in order to teach us "humility, awe, and repentance." He said:

The storm is causing us to remember that it’s God who supplies our life, breath and everything else so that you and I reach out to him...  Remind [us] that God is the blessed controller of all things.  He is the one who gives us peace, security and strength in the midst of the storm and that he uses this to point us to him and to his care for us.

Myself, I doubt that people in the middle of Hurricane Irma are thinking any such thing.  I'm guessing that most of them are trying to figure out how not to have their asses blown into the next time zone, and/or dodging wind-driven projectiles like pieces of houses and, in some cases, entire cars.

Then there's Reverend Lance Wallnau, who has become something of a frequent flier here on Skeptophilia for saying things like god told him the Chicago Cubs were going to lose the World Series because President Obama was from there (the Cubs won),  that Donald Trump's administration has turned into a slow-motion train wreck because he was being cursed by witches, and now that Hurricane Irma will spare Florida if you just pray at it hard enough.  He suggests the following approach:

We command that storm… in the name of Jesus, you will go off to the ocean, you will bounce off in a direction away from the coast… we don’t have to accept this destruction.  And we’ll see it wobble and off to the ocean it goes, out into the open ocean it goes…

Well, I'm not seeing much in the way of a wobble at the moment, and in fact, every forecast I see is more and more certain that southern Florida is directly in the bullseye.  Maybe we haven't hit the minimum number of prayers that is acceptable for god to turn the hurricane aside, I dunno.

Anyhow, my point is that we have a great many people who still engage in magical thinking, and attribute everything from one's own personal behavior to large-scale events like earthquakes and hurricanes to the direct intervention by spirits, both good and bad.  So with all this demonic stuff going on, it was only a matter of time before we had an exorcist...

... offering a quantity discount on demon-eviction.

The exorcist in question is Father Cataldo Migliazzo of Palermo, Sicily, who does his group exorcisms on Tuesdays.  People gather, and he exorcises them all at once.  In fact, Migliazzo says the whole thing works better when there are at least eight possessed people there.  No explanation of why, although it does seem to be a somewhat more efficient way to approach it.  Paul Seaburn, who wrote the article I linked for Mysterious Universe, describes what happens at one of these evil entity meet-ups:

[A] woman begins to groan, a couple of people growl and spit and one man vomits.  All are then attended to by other priests who allegedly are also trained exorcists. They hold some of the people down, put crucifixes in their faces and, in one case, throw flour in the face of a woman.

Which seems like an odd thing to do.  Do demons have gluten sensitivity, or something?  In any case, the whole thing seems like a combination of auto-suggestion, superstition, and histrionics to me, but I guess that's unsurprising.

St. Francis Borgia Performing an Exorcism (Francisco Goya, 1788) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Federica di Giacomo, who a documentary on modern exorcists, seemed oddly accepting of the whole thing.  "As the priests said to me," di Giacomo said, "people go to the psychiatrist, they go to the magician, they go to other kinds of healers, and they spend a lot a lot of money.  When they finish the money, they go to the priests."

Kind of a troubling progression, that.  Implies that if the psychiatrists can't fix you right away, the only possibility is that you're possessed.  The truth is, many psychological disorders are remarkably intractable, even considering modern medicine and therapy techniques.  The idea of someone who might be schizophrenic going from a psychiatrist to a magician to a priest is actually kind of horrifying.

But Migliazzo thinks he's got the right approach, and apparently his Tuesday demonic socials are quite the rage.  The article didn't mention his success rate, at least in terms of how many people felt better afterwards.  My guess, given what these people are most likely suffering from, any successes would be short-term at best, and end with them becoming repossessed, or whatever the appropriate terminology is.

Myself, I think if you're inclined to growl, spit, or vomit in a public place, you need professional help, and not from a guy in a white robe chanting incantations or throwing flour around.  But I'm not expecting this to change anyone's mind.  If we still have people who think you can pray away a hurricane, all of this exorcism stuff doesn't seem that much crazier.

Spell check

If you were wondering why the Trump administration has turned out to be a slow-moving train wreck, it's not because the American people saw fit to elect an unqualified, ignorant, narcissistic sociopath to the highest office in the land: it's because Trump et al. are being cursed by witches.

At least that's the contention of Lance Wallnau, pastor, author, speaker, "spiritual guide," and writer for Charisma News, who has been something of a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia.  Here are just a few of the appearances Wallnau has already made:

• He predicted that the Cleveland Indians were going to beat the Chicago Cubs in the 2016 World Series, because Chicago is cursed by god because Obama lived there or something.  When the Cubs won, he claimed his prophecy was still correct because of Satan.
• Hillary Clinton was motivated by a "spirit intent on destroying America."  And just one man stood in her path... namely...
• Donald Trump's win was because of god applying a "wrecking ball" to the "higher level demon principality" the United States had become, which means that if you don't like Trump, you're motivated by demons.

So you can see that Wallnau's grip on reality isn't that strong to begin with.  Despite the fact that he's one of these "traditional family values" guys who thinks that social liberalism is sending America into the pit of hell, he is staunchly behind a thrice-married serial adulterer for whom money and power are the sole motivators.  And, apparently, he sees no internal contradictions in this stance, to the point that he thinks that Trump is the next best thing to the Second Coming of Christ.

And now, Wallnau thinks that his Deputy Lord and Savior is under attack.  Because, let's face it; you can't be the Chosen One and expect that all the bad guys in the world are just going to accept it.  So Wallnau thinks that Trump is being cursed by witches, presumably using spells that make the target individual sound like a spoiled and inarticulate toddler.

But there's a twist in all this; since the president is being "protected by the prayers of Christians," most of the evil magic is being deflected, and is instead striking the members of Trump's family.  This could certainly explain some of the trouble that Donald Jr. and Jared Kushner are in at the moment.  And if some of the collateral damage is striking members of Trump's inner circle, this could also make sense of the resignation of Sean Spicer and Anthony Scaramucci, and the rumors surrounding some impending upset involving Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

I don't know how I feel about this.  I mean, taking down Donald Jr., Kushner, Spicer, Scaramucci, and Sessions is all very well, but it leaves so many other deserving recipients of evil spells uncursed.  I mean, come on; Kellyanne Conway?  Betsy DeVos?  Paul Ryan?  And most of all, Mitch McConnell?  If ever there was someone who needs to be targeted by the "Silencio" charm from Harry Potter, it's Mitch McConnell.  The only thing that would be better is to (1) make it permanent, and (2) add some other spell that would get rid of the slimy smirk he always wears.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So anyway, Wallnau wants his followers to rectify this oversight.  “People are praying for the president, but they’re not necessarily praying for his family,” Wallnau said.  “So right now, all those witchcraft curses that did not land on Donald Trump are trying to take out his kids, trying to take out his offspring, trying to attack anything near him.”

As proof of the danger, Wallnau cites an exorcism he once witnessed, wherein the demon was expelled from the possessed person, but instead of hauling ass back to the Pits of Darkness, the demon instead jumped into the body of the family dog, who proceeded to fling himself out of the car window as it sped down the highway.

Which brings up an important question, to wit: who the hell does an exorcism on someone in a moving car?  I'll admit that some people do drive as if they had taken classes in Hell's Driving School.  But even so, it seems like a dangerous thing to do.  Even if it wasn't the driver who was being exorcised, you'd still have the risk of sharp objects being flung around the car and the possessed person puking up pea soup all over the place.

Which would make it kind of hard to concentrate on watching the road.

But Wallnau apparently doesn't find anything at all weird about this.  He told his listeners exactly what they should say.  “We take authority over every hex, vex, spell, jinx, satanic curse, blood curse, every demon assigned to destroy the health of the president, to destroy the health of his family, to harass him, to vex him, to cause him to lose sleep.  In Jesus's name, we veto every curse that has been brought against Donald Trump and his family and his administration.”

And I have to admit that sounds pretty authoritative.  But you have to wonder why they don't do anything more productive, like praying that god vetoes Trump's Twitter account.

Anyhow, that's today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  I have to admit that Lance Wallnau is always good for a laugh, even if my chortling is tempered by the fact that he has a large number of people who actually listen to him and believe what he says, and damn near all of those people voted for Donald Trump.  All of which makes my laughter ring a little hollow.

So I think to cheer myself up I'll go practice hurling spells like "Petrificus Totalus" in Mitch McConnell's direction.  Who knows?  Maybe it'll work.  And if my aim is bad, it could still hit Paul Ryan, which would be almost as good.

Poker face

A wag once said, "Artificial intelligence is twenty years in the future, and always will be."  It's a trenchant remark; predictions about when we'd have computers that could truly think have been off the mark ever since scientists at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project in Artificial Intelligence stated that they would have the problem cracked in a few months...

... back in 1956.

Still, progress has been made.  We now have software that learns from its mistakes, can beat grand masters at strategy games like chess, checkers, and Go, and have come damn close to passing the Turing test.  But the difficulty of emulating human intelligence in a machine has proven to be more difficult than anyone would have anticipated, back when the first computers were built in the 1940s and 1950s.

We've taken a new stride recently, however.  Just a couple of months ago, researchers at the University of Alberta announced that they had created software that could beat human champions at Texas Hold 'Em, a variant of poker.  Why this is remarkable -- and more of a feat than computers that can win chess -- is that all previous game-playing software involved games in which both players have identical information about the state of the game.  In poker, there is hidden information.  Not only that, but a good poker player needs to know how to bluff.

In other words... lie.

Michael Bowling, who led the team at the University of Alberta, said that this turned out to be a real challenge.  "These poker situations are not simple," Bowling said.  "They actually involve asking, 'What do I believe about my opponent’s cards?'"

But the program, called DeepStack, turned out to be quite good at this, despite the daunting fact that in Texas Hold 'Em there are about 10¹⁶⁰ decision points -- more unique scenarios than there are atoms in the universe.  But instead of analyzing all the possibilities, as a program might do in chess (such an approach in this situation would be, for all practical purposes, impossible), DeepStack plays much like a person would -- by speculating on the likelihood of certain outcomes based on the limited information it has.

"It will do its thinking on the fly while it is playing," Bowling said.  "It can actually generalize situations it's never seen before."

Which is pretty amazing.  But not everyone is as impressed as I am.

When Skeptophilia frequent flier Rick Wiles, of End Times radio, heard about DeepStack, he was appalled that we now had a computer that could deceive. "I'm still thinking about programming robots to lie," Wiles said.  "This has been done to us for the past thirty, forty, fifty years -- Deep State has deliberately lied to the public because they concluded that it was in our best interest not to be told the truth...  What's even scarier about the robots that can lie is that they weren't programmed to lie, they learned to lie.  Who's the father of all lies?  Satan is the father of all lies.  Are we going to have demon-possessed artificially intelligent robots?  Is it possible to have demonic spirit to possess an artificial intelligent machine?  Can they possess idols?  Can they inhabit places?  Yeah.  Absolutely.  They can take possession of animals.  They can attach themselves to inanimate objects.  If you have a machine that is capable of lying, then it has to be connected to Lucifer.  Now we’re back to the global brain.  This is where they’re going.  They’re building a global brain that will embody Lucifer’s mind and so Lucifer will be deceiving people through the global brain."

So there's that.  But the ironic thing is that, all demonic spirit bullshit aside, Wiles may not be so far wrong.  While I think the development of artificial intelligence is fascinating, and I can understand why researchers find it compelling, you have to worry what our creations might think about us once they do reach sentience.  This goes double if you can no longer be sure that what the computer is telling you is the truth.

Maybe what we should be worried about is not a computer that can pass the Turing test; it's one that can pass the Turing test -- and chooses to pretend, for its own reasons, that it can't.

I mean, the last thing I want is to go on record as saying I agree with Rick Wiles on anything.  But still.

So that's our rather alarming news for the day.  It's not that I think we're headed into The Matrix any time soon; but the idea that we might be supplanted by intelligent machines of our own making, the subject of countless science fiction stories, may not be impossible after all.

And maybe the artificial intelligence of twenty years in the future may not be as far away as we thought.

The witches vs. Donald Trump

As an example of the general principle that there is nothing that is so weird that someone can't respond to it in such a way as to make it far weirder, we have: witches attempting to cast a spell on Donald Trump.

Many of us are looking for ways to resist President Trump's rather pernicious agenda, so I suppose it's not to be wondered at that the Wiccans want to give it a try, too.  They did so five days ago with hexes designed to "bind Donald J Trump, so that his malignant works may fail utterly" so that he "shall not break our polity, usurp our liberty, or fill our minds with hate, confusion, fear, or despair."  They used various props such as orange candles, magic wands, and Tarot cards to support the cosmic vibrations they were attempting to harness, and instead of ending with the traditional closing words of Wiccan spells -- "So mote it be" -- they ended with "You're fired!"

For the good of the order, I'm not making this up.

Michael Hughes, one of the witches involved, explained that they weren't trying to harm President Trump.  "This is not the equivalent of magically punching a Nazi," Hughes said.  "Rather, it is ripping the bullhorn from his hands, smashing his phone so he can't tweet, tying him up, and throwing him in a dark basement where he can't hurt anyone."

Which, honestly, doesn't seem to be any less violent than magically punching a Nazi.

Be that as it may, the whole thing turned out to be pretty popular, given that a Facebook page devoted to the ritual garnered 10,500 likes, and for a while the hashtag #magicresistance was trending on Twitter.

As far as results, though, not so much.  After the Cosmic Convergence of Anti-Trump Spells, there has been no discernible decrease in the president's tweets, lying, or divisive bullshit.  So you'd think that'd make the Wiccans go, "Huh.  I guess it doesn't work, then.  What a bunch of goobers we are."  And that'd be that.

But as I said, there's no bizarre claim that can't be countered so as to make it even more bizarre.  Despite the utter lack of effectiveness of the curses, the whole episode had the pro-Trump cadre completely up in arms.  For example, Alex Jones, who really needs to stop doing sit-ups under parked cars, claimed that the witches were attacking Trump "because he's good."  "Every evil force out there hates Trump," Jones said.  "He has mega-level charisma."

But there's no one who can contribute to a surreal situation quite like Pat Robertson.  He was outraged when he heard about what the witches were doing, and said that concerned folks need to "send those curses back where they came from."

"I read that a bunch of witches have gotten together to put a curse on Trump," Robertson told his audience on The 700 Club a couple of days ago, "and I think the Christians need to be praying for him to defend him...  all you have to say is the five words, 'I bind you, Satan, and the forces of evil, in Jesus's name.'"

Which is way more than five words.  But given the grade-A-lunacy of the rest of the claim, I'm not going to quibble over simple arithmetic.

His co-host, Wendy Griffith, agreed.  "That thing with the witches was supposed to happen Friday night at midnight, and I know all the believers were there on Facebook, you know, cancelling out those curses by the witches, and pleading with the blood of Jesus.  You know, there were probably millions of Christians praying for him."

"Yes," Robertson said.  "Send it back where it came from.  Send the curse back."

So let's see, here.  We have some witches sending useless magic spells out against Trump, because he's so good and charming and charismatic, and Pat Robertson is mobilizing Christians on Facebook to utter their own magic spells (prayers, to be accurate, although in this particular case I'm not seeing much of a difference) to make the witches' spells bounce back, presumably resulting in their being "thrown in a dark basement where they can't hurt anyone."

It's enough to make me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

Look, I know that magical thinking is hard to eradicate, but is it too much to ask people to apply a little bit of rationality to these situations?  Okay, yeah, it probably is beyond Alex Jones and Pat Robertson, but fer cryin' in the sink, why don't their listeners stop and say, "All right, that was ridiculous"?

Or better yet, stop listening?

Anyhow, that's today's news from the Forlorn Hope Department.  Me, I'm not expecting this to be over any time soon.  I'm sure the witches have some more potent spells in their arsenal, and once they realize that (1) the first salvo accomplished fuck-all, and (2) the ultra-religious are mobilizing their forces to work up some kick-ass counter-spells, they'll really want to step up the campaign.  Maybe they'll even move from orange candles to black ones.

That's when shit's gonna get real.  Or surreal.  Whatever.

The Phoenix devil

At present I've been sent a link five times to a claim that someone near Phoenix, Arizona took a photograph of Satan.

Without further ado, let's take a look at the photo:

A couple of the people who sent it to me appended messages along the lines of, "Hoo boy.  Look at what people are claiming now."  Two, however, had more noteworthy commentary, which I reproduce in toto below.

Photo submitter #1:

You like to scoff about the evil in the world, and claim that our souls aren't in peril.  Satan walks among us.  Unbelievers like you will be the first to be dragged to Hell.

Photo submitter #2:

People like Mr. Skeptic doubt evidence for the supernatural when its [sic] right in front of your face.  I wonder what would happen if you saw this with your own eyes.  Would you keep doubting then?  It's easy for Armchair Skeptics to sit in their living rooms and say no, but as soon as you go out in the world you learn that its [sic] not that simple.

Well, predictably, I'm not impressed.  To paraphrase Neil deGrasse Tyson (who in the original quote was talking about UFOs) there probably is an "add demon" function on Photoshop.  My general opinion is pretty consistent with the following:

However, the bigger question is why I'm a Scoffing Armchair Skeptic about such matters more has to do with Ockham's Razor.  Ockham's Razor is rightly called a rule of thumb -- something which isn't 100% true but is still a pretty damn good guide to understanding.  The original formulation comes from William of Ockham, a 14th century monk and philosopher, who phrased it as "Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate" (Don't multiply entities without necessity), but a more modern phrasing is "All other things being equal, of competing hypotheses, choose the one that requires the least assumptions."  (It must be pointed out that Ockham himself was hardly a scientific rationalist; he's also the one who said, "Only faith gives us access to theological truths.  The ways of God are not open to reason, for God has freely chosen to create a world and establish a way of salvation within it apart from any necessary laws that human logic or rationality can uncover."  So while Ockham's Razor is a great idea, I doubt I'd have agreed with him on much else.)

In any case, the Demon of Phoenix certainly is more easily explainable as a hoax than it is that Satan for some reason descended upon southern Arizona, posed for a blurry snapshot, and then disappeared without doing anything else or being seen by anyone else.  So the second submitter is, in a sense, quite right; I would be much more likely to believe that it was real if I did see it with my own eyes.  Just looking at the photograph, here in my Comfortable Armchair, I'm still saying "Nah."

Of course, being dragged to hell would do it, too.  Nothing like a little fire and brimstone to convince one of the reality of a situation.  But until that happens, you can still put me in the "Mr. Skeptic" column.

Speak of the devil

Just because I keep hoisting the banner of rationalism here at Skeptophilia doesn't mean I don't get pretty freakin' discouraged at times.

I suppose it's an occupational hazard.  My spending hours daily seeking out the most bizarre examples of irrational behavior I can find, so I have something to write about, means that inevitably I'm going to come to the conclusion that humanity is pretty much screwed.  It's like people who become addicted to shows like CSI and Cops and Law and Order.  At some point, you're pretty certain to decide that the world is full of criminals who are trying to kill you and get away with it.

So it's an effort at times to remain optimistic.  Especially given stories like the one over at Fusion a couple of days ago describing a poll taken in North Carolina wherein 41% of Donald Trump supporters said that Hillary Clinton is literally the devil.

As I've said before, I'm not here to discuss whether or not you agree with Clinton's politics.  But the idea that 41% of Trump supporters think that his opponent is the incarnation of Satan on Earth is troubling, to say the least.

That, however, is not the strangest thing about the poll.  Apparently, of the currently undecided voters, 15% thought Clinton was the devil.  So I'm thinking: You believe one of the candidates is literally the Prince of Hell (or Princess, in this case), and you're undecided?  What are you planning to do, stand there in the voting booth and say, "Let's see: candidate who is Satan, candidate who is not Satan... how to choose, how to choose?"

The weirdest thing, though, is that on the poll there were three choices: (1) Clinton is the devil; (2) Clinton is not the devil; and (3) Not sure.  And of the people who say they're voting for Hillary Clinton, 6% of them said they were not sure if she was the devil or not.

Now, I realize that this may be because 6% of the respondents thought the question was funny enough that they decided to fuck around with the results.  Or, perhaps, that this represents the 6% of respondents who are actual practicing Satanists, who think that Clinton might be the devil and are happy about it.  But if you look at the results, you will find that 33% of undecided voters are also undecided about whether Clinton is Satan.

So there are people in North Carolina (a lot of them, apparently) who when asked, "Who are you voting for?" said, "I dunno," and when asked, "Is Hillary Clinton the devil?" said, "Um... I dunno about that either."

Some days I feel like I've side-slipped into a bizarro world where this kind of stuff is normal.  Because this isn't the only insane thing that's happened lately.  When a map came out showing that if only men voted, Donald Trump would win, his followers immediately started calling for repealing the 19th Amendment, with one woman saying she would "give up [her] right to vote to make this happen."  Then we had a completely surreal video of Alex Jones making the rounds, wherein he bursts into tears on air and says that not only is Clinton a demon, so is Obama, adding that if you vote for Clinton you're "electing President Linda Blair."

I dunno, President Linda Blair could probably get stuff done, don't you think?  If Mitch McConnell stonewalled President Linda Blair, she could just puke up some pea soup on him.  "Oh, you won't give my Supreme Court nominee a fair hearing?  Well, take this!"  *BARRRRRFFFFF*

At least it would make C-Span more interesting.

So I guess we rationalists have a way to go, and it's an uphill battle.  I'm not ready to give up any time soon, so if you are a loyal reader, no worries: I still have a few posts left in me.  But it'd be nice if we could make more headway in convincing people not to engage in insane magical thinking.

Although it would make it harder for me to find material.  So I suppose I should be glad, in a backhanded way, that these people are keeping me in business.

Possession profession

Looking for a job with excitement and travel opportunities?  Do I have news for you!

Of course, there are a couple of downsides.  These include (1) you most likely have to become a Catholic priest to be eligible, and (2) it requires you to commit yourself to fighting bad guys who almost certainly don't exist.

What I'm referring to is an urgent call that was issued last week by a spokesman for the Vatican regarding a drastic shortage of exorcists.  The announcement was made by Valter Cascioli, who is the "scientific consultant" for the Vatican-endorsed International Association of Exorcists, which in my mind is a little like being the "reality consultant" for Looney Tunes.  Cascioli, we find out, also teaches a course in exorcism at the Pontifical University of Regina Apostolorum in Rome.  This makes me wonder if there's a required lab class that goes along with the course.  Do you get graded on how thoroughly squelched the demon is after you exorcise it?  Do you get points off if your subject is eventually, as it were, repossessed?

Be that as it may, Cascioli takes the whole thing pretty seriously.  "The lack of exorcists is a real emergency," he said in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Stampa.  "There is a pastoral emergency as a result of a significant increase in the number of diabolical possessions that exorcist priests are confronting.  The number of people who take part in occult and satanic practices, which lead to serious physical, psychological and spiritual damages, is constantly rising."

Saint Francis Borgia Performing an Exorcism by Francisco de Goya (1788) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Amongst the difficulties I see with the whole concept of possession is that you'd think an atheist like me would be a sitting duck with respect to demonic attack.  I mean, I don't do all of the Vatican-approved things to protect myself, e.g. wearing a crucifix, making the sign of the cross, praying, and sprinkling myself with holy water.  And yet, here I sit, neither turning my head a full 360 nor puking up pea soup all over my computer.  In fact, atheists never seem to be the victims of demonic possession -- it's always people who believed in the devil and all of his assorted pals in the first place.

I wonder why that is.

This doesn't seem to occur to Cascioli, however.  In fact, he says, "There is a broad spread of superstitious practices, and with that a growing number of requests for help from people who are directly or indirectly struck by evil.  It is dangerous to underestimate a phenomenon that is caused by the direct actions of the devil, but also by a decline in faith and values."

Note that Cascioli attributes the rise in the demand for exorcisms with the "spread of superstitious practices," which is true, but not for the reason he thinks.

In fact, Cascioli thinks that exorcist training programs need to be expanded dramatically.  "There doesn’t exist a training institution at university level," he says.  "We need an interdisciplinary approach in which science collaborates with religion, and psychiatrists work with demonologists and exorcists."

And of course, there's just one problem with that, which is that there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that demons exist, so a scientist collaborating with a demonologist would be sort of akin to a scientist collaborating with a unicornologist.  Not much chance there of getting funding, much less making it past the peer review process.

Nevertheless, Cascioli is getting a lot of support from his fellow demon-eviction squad.  Father Vincent Lampert of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, who is called "America's top exorcist" and whose activities have been featured on the television show Paranormal Witness, concurs with Cascioli's call for more exorcists.  "We’re gaining all sorts of knowledge, but there’s still that emptiness within us that is being filled with addictive behavior such as drugs and pornography," Father Lampert said.  "The decline in faith goes hand in hand with the rise in evil."

Well, all I can say is that if pornography led to demonic possession, the vast majority of single males (and a good many of the married ones) would be possessed.  In fact, it's hard to imagine the demons keeping up with the demand.

In all seriousness, the whole thing strikes me as kind of dangerous.  Not the demons, but the exorcists themselves.  How many people who are mentally ill -- especially schizophrenics and people with panic and anxiety disorders -- have been frightened by the combination of their experiences and the superstitious nonsense being thrust upon them into undergoing an exorcism rather than seeking legitimate medical attention?  Despite Cascioli's confidence that he can tell the difference between a mental illness and demonic possession, I'm unconvinced.

Of course I would be, given that I don't think demons exist in the first place.  But still.  The idea that some poor tortured soul would seek out an exorcist rather than getting help from a doctor is appalling.

So there you have it.  Today's dip in the deep end of the pool.  Myself, I can only hope that the shortage of exorcists isn't because the demons have been busier, but because belief in this dangerous superstition is on the decline.  The fact that there are still people like Cascioli and Lampert around is indicative of the fact that we're not fully in the 21st century yet -- but perhaps we're moving in the right direction.

Tunnel vision

Last week, Switzerland opened the Gotthard Base Tunnel, which at 57 kilometers is the longest underground traffic tunnel in the world.  The entire project took twelve years to complete, and cost over $12 billion.

All of which is cool enough, but things got even more interesting at the inauguration ceremony last week.  Because the powers-that-be saw fit to open the tunnel with a performance that can only be described as "really fucking weird."  It started with bunches of people in hard hats and orange jumpsuits doing a slow march into the tunnel, followed by their doing some kind of strange interpretive dance involving headbanging.  Then came a whole bunch of people wearing tiny tight garments that left you in no doubt about the size and shape of their naughty bits.  The almost-naked people proceeded to have what appeared to be a cross between a square dance and an aikido tournament, all while being watched over by an image of a very old lady with a creepy, knowing smile.

After this came some white Dementors flying around.  Then the almost-naked people came back, covered in gauzy veils, wearing expressions of extreme angst.  This was followed by about a dozen people flailing about wearing wigs and swinging around yards of swoopy material.  In the midst of which was a guy dressed up like a goat.  Some of these people were wearing suits with long colorful dreadlocks, sort of like Cousin Itt gone punk.

The whole thing culminated with the appearance of a huge-headed baby with wings.

I would strongly recommend watching the entire thing.  (Here are links to part I and part II.)  The whole time I watched it, I was thinking, "Who planned all of this, and what mind-altering chemicals had they just ingested?  And can I have some?"  I'm sure all of it was supposed to have deep significance and relevance to Swiss history and culture, but mostly what it did for me was cause me to say "What the fuck?" about 47 times.

But people do trippy things all the time, so my purpose here is not simply to report about a performance that looks like what J. K. Rowling would come up with if you gave her acid and then told her to write a script for a sequel to Zardoz.  The reason this comes up on Skeptophilia is the reaction of people who saw the ceremony.

Because large numbers of folks are completely freaking out over this.  Here is a variety of responses, gleaned from people who commented on the video and/or blogged about it:

• This is a satanic ritual.  These people have invoked the power of Satan.  That tunnel has been consecrated as a portal to hell.  I wish anyone who goes in there luck.
• A New World Order ceremony, complete with the all-seeing eye.  The real rulers of the world are coming out of the shadows.  We are near the end of them hidding [sic] -- prepare yourselves.
• They have called on Lucifer, they shouldn't be surprised when he shows up.
• Better pick which side you are on!  Jesus Christ's or Satan's...  Because at this rate, you DON'T have TIME to ride the fence.  They are flat out laying their evil ways and plans right to YOU, no longer are they in hiding.  Which side will you choose?  I pray you choose the Lord! Eternity is too long to be wrong. 
• FOR UNGODLY PEOPLE, THE WEIRDER THE BETTER!!!  THIS IS JUST A SMALL EXAMPLE OF DISGUSTING REPROBATE MINDS AT WORK!!!  I CAN'T WAIT UNTIL JESUS RETURNS AND DESTROYS THE FOUL WICKED!!!!
• sick and sad. they have there hands in everything.  FEMA train here it comes, even in switzerland.  stay tune bc they have big plans for this new rail train tunnel.
• FINALLY Illuminati ControllS [sic] Humans By RFID and Humanoid Robots In 2017 
• And so many buy all the paranormal bogus leaks from CERN.  Think.  Same country same leaders.
• THIS IS NOT ART.... THIS IS SATANIC OPENING CEREMONY/RITUAL RIGHT ON YOUR FACE!  you will see more and more of this until the world is used to the worshipping [sic] of Baphomet through entertainment.  You will fall in love with these dark presentations. AND you will embrace SATAN, the prince of this world!  YOU BETTER REPENT of you sins and seek the face of GOD!

So.  Okay.  Will all of you people just calm down for a moment?

The ceremony was bizarre, I'll grant you that, but I would strongly suspect that if Satan exists it takes more than bare-chested guys in tightie-whities jumping around on a train platform to summon him up.  What this looks like to me is an off-kilter experiment in modern dance, not an appeal to Lucifer.

A few other points:

• If this is a ritual of the Illuminati, the Illuminati need to lay off the controlled substances.
• If you "can't wait" for Jesus to return and butcher all of the nonbelievers, I think it's your morals that need some examination, not mine.
• FEMA is an agency in the United States.  Therefore there will not be any FEMA trains in Switzerland.
• CERN is a scientific research laboratory, and has nothing to do with mutant winged babies and guys in goat suits.
• The expression is "right in your face," not "right on your face."  If someone had a satanic ritual right on your face, it would be a far more serious matter.

Anyhow, that's our visit to the wacko fringe for the day.  If you're in Switzerland, make a point of taking a train through the new tunnel.  It'll significantly cut your travel time, and you'll have a nice tour of the nine circles of hell.  Such a deal.