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.

Group discount on exorcisms

There's no doubt that Mexico has become a pretty rough place to live, in the past couple of decades.

The crime rate is astronomical.  According to the demographics site Nation Master, Mexico ranks in the top five nations in the world for homicides and violence committed by youths.  They are #3 for number of prisoners per capita, and have a wealth gap that staggers the imagination -- 16% of the citizens of Mexico earn less than a dollar a day.  Corruption is rampant, the drug cartels are in charge of many cities, and the air and water pollution, especially in Mexico City, result in thousands of preventable deaths per year.

So all of those problems, what do you do?

You have a mass exorcism, that's what.

Because clearly what's doing all of this awful stuff is... demons.  At least that's what Cardinal Juan Sandoval Íñiguez, Archbishop Emeritus of Guadalajara, and his sidekick, Spanish priest and exorcist Father José Antonio Fortea, think.

With the permission of the Archbishop of San Luis Potosí, Jesús Carlos Cabrero, the "Grand Exorcism" was held in the Cathedral of San Luis a couple of weeks ago. "This celebration is a sacramental [sic] of the Church,," Cabrero said.  "During the ritual, some priests were present, and Cardinal [Sandoval] did me the favor of accompanying us, in response to an invitation I sent him."  The ceremony was conducted in private, Cabrero added, because otherwise, "morbid interests appear, and misinterpretations."

Hey, you're the one who thinks that demons are running rampant in your country, harming and killing innocent people.  How much more morbid can you get?

Cardinal Sandoval, however, was in full support of the event.  "The Great Exorcism is a prayer asking God to drive away the Enemy, to drive him away from these places.  From San Luis, first of all, and then from all of Mexico.  People should become aware of the very grave situation we are living through in Mexico, whose root is very deep, beyond human malevolence; it is the devil, who is very connected to death.  He is a murderer from the beginning...  Acts of revenge, now occurring between assassins and the government; deaths here, deaths there, and deaths everywhere.  This violence is nothing else but the Devil who is tearing us apart."

As far as how they know all of this, apparently they found out from one of the demons itself.  Roberto O'Farrill, a Catholic journalist and "demon specialist," said that during an exorcism of a devil from a guy named Ángel (I'm not making this up), the demon kind of spilled his guts regarding what is going on.

O'Farrill explained that "the demons possessing Ángel said, 'you are stupid, because She [the Virgin Mary] cast us out of Mexico, and now you with your stupid laws have allowed sacrifices to return to Mexico, human sacrifices. We don't want to say this but She is stepping on our head and forces us to.'"

"During that exorcism," O'Farrill added, "the Virgin Mary forces the demons to say that they have returned to Mexico, that there is once again an infestation, principally in Mexico City and in other parts of the country."

Well, that's proof enough for me.  Time to reboot the Inquisition, sounds like.

So anyhow, Cabrero and Sandoval had their Grand Exorcism on May 20, and in the four weeks since the ceremony, we've seen a miraculous decrease in... um... a heaven-sent... um...

Okay, nothing much has changed.  In fact, just last week, a bunch of "radical teachers" in the town of Tuxtla Gutierrez went on a rampage, and attacked and burned the headquarters of five different political parties, demanding, amongst other things, "100% pay raises."  A few days before that, 42 suspected drug dealers who had taken over a ranch in the state of Michoacán were killed in "sprays of machine gun fire" by police.  Violence has recently spiked in Tijuana during the lead-up to elections on June 7, with gang and drug related killings reaching record numbers, and including such grotesque horrors as "severed heads in an icebox."

So yeah, Cardinal Sandoval really seems to have those demons on the run.

But we can't have reality intruding on the worldview, after all.  Bad for business, in one of the most staunchly Catholic countries in the world.  Gotta keep having meaningless rituals so they can pretend they're actually accomplishing something, rather than throwing their accumulated wealth and resources behind things like remediating the crashing poverty and hiring more law enforcement.

And, of course, dealing with all of the "radical teachers."  Those sonsabitches are mean.

Demon redux

A few days ago, I posted about a fellow named Bob Larson who claims to be able to exorcise demons from the possessed via Skype.  My general feeling was that actual demons, if they're as powerful and evil as the religious claim, would have no particular reason to listen to a guy who was babbling prayers at them via a wonky internet connection from 2,000 miles away.

Not that this addresses the deeper problem that there's no evidence that demons exist in the first place.  But still.

Evidently, there are a lot of people who saw the Larson story and agree with me, on the first point at least.  One of them is a gentleman named Isaac Kramer.  Kramer, in an interview that you can watch over at Vocativ, said, "They just can't be done that way.  If a person is fully possessed, the demon inside of them will not let them sit in front of the computer screen to be exorcised.  Chances are, they’re going to throw the computer screen across the room and destroy everything."

Which sounds pretty reasonable, until you find out that Kramer is a Catholic priest who is the director of the International Catholic Association of Exorcists,  and he's apparently only saying this because he thinks he can do it better than Larson can and resents the competition.

I would like to think that belief in demons is on the decline, but if you've been following the news, there have been several recent stories where claims of possession were taken seriously by the powers-that-be.  The best publicized, just last week in Gary, Indiana, involved a house that was a "portal of hell," a nine-year-old boy who walked up a wall backwards, and various priests and chaplains and so on -- a story that got so much press that the priest who was in charge of it all, Reverend Michael Maginot, ended up being interviewed on Fox News' show The O'Reilly Factor.

Bill O'Reilly, to his credit, started out with the right approach; he asked for Maginot to keep his story fact based, and asked the priest what he knew about the little boy.  Maginot responded, not surprisingly, "Actually, I have never met any of the children.  The first time I heard about the incident was after the boy walked up the wall backwards...  I was in my parish, conducting a bible study, when I got the call, and they called me in to do an exorcism."

O'Reilly said, "Now, exorcism in the Catholic church is a serious thing... you have to jump through hoops to get it approved...  It disturbs me a little that the boy involved -- and this is according to the newspaper, and other eyewitnesses -- was doing incredible things, like walking up walls, but you yourself never talked to the boy.  Why not?"

Why not, indeed.  Maginot seemed vaguely embarrassed by the question -- as well he should have been.  "Well," he responded, " when I went to do the interview, at the home, with the mother and the grandmother, it was a four-hour interview, and the first two hours were basically getting information on all the occurrences leading up to the incident."

"The problem I'm having with this," O'Reilly countered, "is number one, you didn't see the boy.  The credibility of the Catholic church is in a tough way now, in this country.  Exorcism is a serious thing, a very serious thing.  I understand you got permission from the bishop in your diocese to do this.  But it seems to me that the story is not solid enough to go public with it.  There are a lot of people watching right now who are saying, 'this is more mumbo-jumbo from the Roman Catholic church, there's no credibility here at all.'  How would you answer that?"

More nervous, sidewise glances from Rev. Maginot.  "Well, the two boys and the girl, the one boy was put into a lockdown psychological children's ward, and the other two were taken to the Carmelite sisters who take care of foster children.  And so they were taken away from the parents, the mother and the grandmother, and so I didn't have access to them.  And the mother, I found out at the very end, was also possessed.  I put the crucifix on her forehead, and she began to convulse."

Righty-o, then, Father Maginot.  That's your evidence?  And you think that the mother, who was the one who had called in the priests, has any credibility at all?  Not mentioning, I notice, that this woman has already been exorcised four times and has a history of mental problems?  That the children need to be in foster care not because there are demons roaming around, but because their mother is a raving lunatic?

I can't say I often agree with Bill O'Reilly, but this time he nailed it, and asked all the right questions.  And it bears mention that O'Reilly himself is a practicing Catholic, who has no vested interest in making Maginot and his In The Name Of Jesus Begone act look silly. 

But that's not stopping the story from making the rounds, not as evidence that the whole practice is ridiculous, but that it somehow proves that demons exist.  As further evidence, they say, there's the photograph of the house, which shows a demon looking out a window:

To me, this more looks like E.T. the Extraterrestrial than it does like your conventional image of a demon.  And all of which goes to show that, as we've seen before, "proof" means something entirely different in the realm of religion than it does in the realm of science.

Interesting, too, that it only seems like people who were already religious get possessed, isn't it?  You'd think that a strident nonbeliever like myself would be perfect Satan bait.  But atheists never seem to need exorcisms.  Funny thing, that.

Probably the true believers would explain this by saying that we're being controlled by the Evil One, we just don't realize it.  You can't win.

Anyhow, that's our story for today.  I just want to end by stating a hope that the poor kids involved in this mess get some help and counseling, and their mother gets the help she needs, too... probably in the form of some heavy-duty medication.

Skype exorcisms

Some of my regular readers may remember that a few months ago, I posted about a trio of young and extremely Christian ladies who were invading Britain to rid the country of demons that had been brought there because so many British children read Harry Potter.

One of them is named Brynne Larson.  It will come as no surprise that Ms. Larson is from an fundamentalist household; hard to imagine your believing anything that ridiculous if you didn't learn it as a very young child.  Be that as it may, Ms. Larson's father is Bob Larson, an evangelical preacher, talk radio host, and general wingnut.  Larson has been doing his dog-and-pony show for a while; I remember listening to him back in the 80s when I lived in Seattle.  I'd turn the show on when I got stuck in traffic, which was often, because I figured that the best thing to keep you from experiencing road rage is to listen to a radio show that distracts you by making you even madder at something else.

Well, Larson is still around, and just this week announced that he's out there fighting the Evil One just as hard today as he was thirty years ago.  He has, he claims, performed over 20,000 exorcisms in his life.  Doesn't that seem like a lot, to you?  It would imply that a good many of the people we meet on a daily basis are possessed, which I kind of doubt.  I don't think I've seen anyone lately who was guided by a demon, with the exception of the woman who ran a stop sign and cut me off in a Syracuse mall parking lot last weekend during a snowstorm, and I don't think she was possessed by anything but the evil spirit Dumbassimus.

But Larson begs to differ.  The demons are out there, he says; "there'll never be a shortage."  There are so many, in fact, that Larson can't keep up with the requests.  He receives so many that now he has to do his exorcisms...

... via Skype.

I don't know about you, but my first thought upon reading that was, "How could that work?"  Here you have a wicked, dangerous minion of Satan, who has latched on to some poor unfortunate soul in Hogfoot Junction, West Virginia.  And a guy shows up on Skype and says, "Get thee gone, evil spirit!" from 2,000 miles away via an internet connection, and the demon has no choice but to retreat in disarray?  If I was a demon, and Larson showed up babbling at me to Return to Hell From Whence I Came, the least I would do is to flip him off and then cause his computer to experience the Blue Screen of Death.

I mean, it can't be that hard.  My computer does that often enough without any demons being involved.

And it has to make you wonder what's next.  Will he start distributing general exorcisms through Twitter?

Get thee behind me Satan, in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord Amen #ChalkAnotherOneUpForMe #IGuessThatShowedYou

What if he doesn't finish his magical incantation before he runs into the 140-character limit?

My overall impression is that he's fighting a losing battle, trying to use the internet to fight Satan.  Just considering the volume of pornography alone, out there on the 'net, I think that so far it's Larson 0, Satan 1,489,352.

Larson, of course, doesn't see it that way.  When asked in an interview with ABC15 if his Skype-your-way-out-of-hell method was nothing more than a fire-and-brimstone circus act, he said, "It’s real.  There would be no reason to theatrically stage this for any reason.  Why would anybody do that?  I have no idea."

I'll pass over the fact that he used the word "reason" twice, and that his worldview isn't exactly one in which reason, in its literal sense, is the driver.  But really, Reverend Larson?  You can't think of any other incentives for doing what you're doing, other than the need to fight the Evil One?  How about money?  Notoriety?  Being interviewed by a major news outlet?

But other than those, nothing, right?

Of course, right.

So that's the latest from the world of religious wingnuttery.  I live in hope that most Christians recognize whackjobs like Bob Larson for what they are, but the sad fact is that there are enough people still listening to Larson that his show, Talk Back, is still being aired, and his ministry still gets followers.

And he still gets people, over Skype, who are eager for him to free them of demons -- for just a small donation to support the ministry, of course.

Seeing stars

I am endlessly amused (or endlessly frustrated, depending on my mood) by the way the same piece of information can be interpreted by different woo-woos to support each of their varying, and in many cases mutually contradictory, views of the world.  All of them take the same bit of data, and put their own spin on it, so that it becomes some kind of purportedly incontrovertible support for whatever they already believed in.

In short order, you have a multilayered rainbow-colored cake of craziness, with nuts.

Take, for example, the curious photograph that is currently zinging its way around the Internet, an image from Google Maps taken by satellite of a spot near Lisakovsk, Kazakhstan:

The thing is real, not a photoshopped image; type the coordinates 52°28’46.86″N 62°11’7.68″E into Google Earth to see it for yourself.  But of course, once you know it's real, what is it?

You can bet that the fundamentalist Christians have an answer to that.

The upside-down pentagram is well known as a sign of Satan, and this cadre has accompanied the photograph with a dire-sounding message that the Time Of The Antichrist Is At Hand.  This version of the story is also accompanied by a claim that the pentagram appeared near a pair of towns called "Adam" and "Lucifer," a statement that is supposed to be significant somehow but for which I could find no corroboration.  And frankly, that part sounds a little spurious to me.  Most of the towns in Kazakhstan that I could find on a map have names like "Zhezkagan" and "Stepnogorsk."  "Adam" and "Lucifer" sound a little... anglo to me to be place names in that part of the world.

And, after all, New York has an Adams County and a Lucifer Falls, and I haven't seen any giant pentagrams appearing around here, so there's that.

Another thing, though, is that whether this looks like an upside-down pentagram depends on the angle from which you view it.  Turn the photograph around, or (in fact) rotate it by 36° in either direction,  and all of a sudden it becomes a right-side-up pentagram.  So just color me unconvinced that this is a sign of the End Times.

But of course, the evangelical Christians aren't the only ones who have weighed in on the curious photograph.  You also have the ones who think it's a sign from Mother Earth that we are "abusing nature" and that we need to be more considerate of our environment.  This version of the story has a piece about the pentagram being one of the "signs that we cannot continue to harm our planet without the planet letting us know about it."

These are presumably the same people who think that crop circles are a way for the Spirit of Nature to inform us to give up coal mining and take up organic farming and wear clothes woven from hemp.  And these folks think the upside-down pentagram isn't an evil symbol at all, but a positive, vital neopagan symbol that has suddenly appeared to bring us all to some kind of environmental enlightenment.

Then, you have the people who think that the pentagram is "an unfinished summer camp for the children of the Illuminati."  Because the Illuminati are just that sneaky and secretive, that they would create a structure that you couldn't ever find out about unless you happened to check out Google Maps.  According to this guy, "Kazakistan" (which is how he pronounces it throughout the entire video) is part of the "bloodline of the Illuminati."  Whatever that means.  But that's where the whole world is being controlled from, so... so... just don't let your guard down for a minute.

You know how that goes.

The speculation doesn't end there, however.  There's another group who weighed in on the topic, and they don't think the star is a symbol of Satan, the Illuminati, or Gaea, but a communiqué from... you'll never guess who.

Righty-o.  Because intelligent extraterrestrials who have expended a great amount of effort, time, and energy to get to Earth from a planet light years away would have nothing better to do than to draw a giant star on the ground and then leave.

Of course, the actual explanation turned out to be much simpler.  No Antichrist, Nature Spirits, New World Order, or extraterrestrials needed.

"It is the outline of a park made in the form of a star," archaeologist Emma Usmanova said in an interview with LiveScience about the geographical oddity.  "The star was a popular symbol during the Soviet era.  Stars were often used throughout the Soviet Union to decorate building facades, flags and monuments...  We believe that the star shape was the abandoned site of a Soviet-era lakeside campground."

And Usmanova apparently has years of experience working in the Lisakovsk area, so she should know.

Not that I expect that this will shut up the It's Aliens crew, much less the neopagans or the fundamentalists.  But that's how confirmation bias works, isn't it?  You latch on to an explanation for something because it fits what you already believed, and hang on like grim death even if there's a plausible explanation to the contrary.  Because, let's face it; when it comes to choosing an explanation, "an abandoned campground site" just doesn't have the gravitas that Satan, Mother Earth, the Illuminati, and aliens do.