If looks could kill

New from the Why Didn't I Think Of That First department, we have: a guy who performs psychic healing just by looking at people.

Here I thought you had to at least do something to affect a woo-woo cure -- swing some crystals around, say a chant or two, give your patient a homeopathic pill that doesn't contain any medicine -- at least something.

Enter the Croat healer known only as "Braco" (his real name is Josip Grbavac).  Braco, who has apparently been on tour for years and performs to packed houses, gets paid big bucks to sit on a stage for a half hour and stare at the audience.  He doesn't say a word -- just stares, then gets up and leaves, and goes backstage to collect his paycheck.  His gaze is said to have "healing powers."  "People aren't even sure what they're feeling," devotee Sahaja Coventry told a reporter after Braco's appearance at the Renaissance Hotel in Cleveland.  "But it is a sweetness, it is a loving energy and some people get physical healing, some just feel a sense of peace."

If I had to sit there for a half hour in a dimly-lit room in total silence for a half-hour, I bet I'd feel a sense of peace, too -- I'd probably fall asleep.  But of course, that's not what Coventry et al. are talking about.  Neither do they think they're being hypnotized, which is another possibility.  They really think that Braco is doing something with his eyes, somehow affecting "energy levels" in the room.  Braco, of course, does everything he can to beef up this claim; children and pregnant women are not allowed to attend, because the "energies could be too strong," and he does not let his face be broadcast on television for more than seven-second clips, presumably to prevent some sort of electronically-transmitted overdose of Braco Stare.

My objections, of course, are the usual ones.  First: show me the mechanism.  If you think this guy's gaze can cure your chronic headaches, show me how that could work in such a way that it eliminates the possibility of auto-suggestion.  Another of his followers who was interviewed hinted at the problem when she said, "You have to have an open mind and an open heart, more or less to get this feeling."  Why on earth should this be so?  If the guy is doing something real, how could my attitude make any difference?  You'd think it'd be even more impressive if Braco cured someone who thought he was a fraud.

Second, of course, there's the fact that the whole thing flies in the face of how vision actually works.  When you see, it's not because something's going out from your eyes, it's because something's going into your eyes (namely, light reflected from the object you're looking at).  Vision is receptive, not productive.  The ancients didn't get this, and we see this in some relic expressions like to "throw a glance" at someone, and in holdover beliefs such as the "evil eye."  Certainly, the eyes and face can communicate information; a lot of work has been done on the ease with which the human brain picks up on subtle "microexpressions," and how that effects social interaction.  But that's not what Braco's followers think is happening, here.  They really think that some "force" is leaving his body through his eyes, and traveling to you, and changing your mental and/or physical condition.  To which I say: I seriously doubt it.

In any case, if you'd like to see him (or, actually, to have him see you), you can check out his tour schedule at his website.  And because I just have to, here's a photograph of him, screen-capped from his YouTube channel (of course he has a YouTube channel).  I suggest putting on eye protection before looking at this, and whatever you do, don't leave it staring at you for more than seven seconds!  Don't say I didn't warn you.

On the other hand, I see from his current schedule that he's currently offering live online Braco Gaze.  If there's anything goofier than the idea that a guy on stage could send something to the audience via his gaze, it's that he could do the same thing virtually through a computer monitor.  It reminds me of the piece I did a while back about "Quantum Downloadable Medicines," wherein you pay money to get a download link that when you click it, allegedly downloads curative medicines directly into you.  How it works is never explained; presumably it realigns the qi of your chakras and increases the quantum frequencies of your harmonic resonant subatomic coupling to the universe.

You can see how that makes perfect sense, right?  

Of course, right.

I do wonder, though, about Braco's live online sessions.  How is this any different from seeing him on television?  If it isn't, do you pay money and then only get seven seconds of Braco Stare?  Or does he put some kind of filter on the webcam so that the dosage won't get too high?  So many questions.

Honestly, though, like I said initially, I kind of wish I'd thought of it first.  It seems an easier way to make a living than to do what I do, which is to write novels and hope like hell someone will read them.  If I could make a living just by staring at people from a stage for a half-hour every few nights, I'd could ditch all the editing and promotion and marketing and so on, and have a great deal more free time than I currently have (not to mention making a great deal more money).  But Braco seems to have cornered the Psychic Stare market, so I'll have to come up with a different angle.  Hey, I know!  Maybe you could just send me a check for a hundred dollars, and I'll gently place my fingertips on your signature for five minutes.  It will communicate healing energy through the psychic link established through your signature.  You'll feel better immediately.  Trust me.

**************************************

Miracles for sale

Two of the many things I do not understand have to do with fake faith healers (not, in my opinion, that there's any other kind).

The first is how, after a fake faith healer gets caught at his game, he has the gall to ignore the fact that he was caught in a lie, and do the same thing again.  If I were taking people's money by claiming I could do magic, and I got nailed as a phony, I would be so humiliated I would never want to show my face in public again, much less stand up in front of a sellout crowd and shout, "Jesus is acting through me to heal you (despite what you may have heard from my detractors)!"

The second thing is how there can be sellout crowds after someone is uncovered as a fraud.  Are people really that gullible?  Is I-Want-To-Believe really that powerful a driver?

The answer to both questions is provided by none other than Peter Popoff.  Popoff, you might recall, is a hands-in-the-air hallelujah-praise-be type of televangelist, who claimed to be getting messages from god but turned out to have been getting them from his wife via an earpiece.  Besides being clued in on names, illnesses, and other personal details about the people in the audience, Popoff also received edifying messages like "Keep your hands off her tits... I'm watching you."

And although the evangelicals do think that god is obsessed with telling people not to have sex, I kind of doubt that's the way the Almighty would have phrased it.

In any case, it is a bit of a shock to find that Popoff's back.  Again.  There was some indication last year that he had returned to his faith healing game, but now he's going at it a different way, by sending people letters claiming they're going to receive lots of money, if only they'll use his "Miracle Spring Water" (a packet of which is sent with the letter), and, of course, send Peter Popoff a donation.  Here's an excerpt of a letter received by one Mark Smith and turned over to authorities (which you can read in its entirety here):

What I have to tell you deals with a powerful sequence of events that will begin unfolding for you in the very near future... I see in the vision of the Lord a series of "Golden Miracle Manifestations" happening for you, Mark, in rapid succession, bringing you phenomenal wisdom, success, prosperity, happiness, and an abundance of supply... 

During the first manifestation I see a sudden release of money.  This financial influx is showered upon you from a totally unexpected source.  I cannot say exactly what the total amount will be, but it is somewhere between £2,700 and £27,000...  It is possible that you will receive much more... 

You will notice that there is a SECOND SEALED ENVELOPE enclosed with this letter.  In that envelope there is: (1) a packet of miracle spring water for you to use; (2) another faith tool that will completely foil Satan's attempt to hinder you and stop your miracle manifestations; (3) an anointed prophecy for you to read out loud... 

Quick now, while God's spirit is moving upon you, release your best financial seed-gift.  Don't let Satan hold you back any longer.  This is your opportunity to take your best action of faith that you can towards your secret miracle pathway that only God can uncover.  Right now, give Him your best gift of £27.00 or more.  There's something about £27.00 that so often releases your faith.

He's then told that if he misses the first "manifestation," god's done with him -- there won't be any others forthcoming.  "Don't let Satan make that happen," Popoff tells him.  So send lots of money right away.  The more the better.

This is apparently only one of 34 different letters that Popoff's sent out recently, asking for cash for miracles -- letters that differ only in their details.  "Send me money, or Satan wins" is the theme of all of them.

And you know that some people will.  There's something about this man that makes common sense and critical thinking go right out the window.

I have to wonder, though, if he may have crossed the line into a prosecutable offense.  I'm no legal expert, but isn't this mail fraud?  Maybe not -- it's not like "miracle manifestations" are a real commodity.  But dammit, there should be some way to stop this guy from ripping people off, preying on credulity and misplaced faith to rake in money hand over fist.

The sad part, though, is that even if he's arrested and prosecuted, he'll just bounce back.  Look at Jim Bakker.  Look at Jimmy Swaggart.   You can't, apparently, keep a bad man down.

Or as P. T. Barnum put it, "There's a sucker born every minute."

The return of the faith healer

Following hard on the heels of my post suggesting that caveat emptor is all well and good, but there should be a way to stop swindlers from rooking gullible people, I ran across a story that pushes me squarely in the opposite direction.

There are people who are so gullible that no amount of rationality will persuade them, and honestly, these people probably deserve everything they get.

The story came to my attention via Sharon Hill's wonderful site Doubtful News, and concerns veteran snake oil salesman and purported faith healer Peter Popoff.  Popoff goes back a long way; over thirty years ago, he had a nationally-broadcast faith healing show, during which he would call up audience members for a "laying on of hands" and would scream, "I heal you by the power of Jesus!"  He claimed to make paralyzed people walk, cured sufferers of cancer and chronic pain, and attracted standing-room-only crowds, many of whom paid hundreds of dollars for a ticket to attend.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The whole house of cards came crashing down around Popoff after an investigation by James Randi and his associate Steve Shaw.  Some of the dreadfully ill audience members that Popoff healed, it was found, were perfectly healthy people that Popoff and his crew had planted in the audience to give the appearance of miracles.  His knowledge of people's medical conditions ahead of time turned out to be messages delivered not by the voice of god, as Popoff claimed, but by the voice of his wife Elizabeth, who was scanning audience information cards submitted upon arrival and sending the details to Popoff via a wireless earpiece.  (Amongst the not-so-divine messages Popoff got caught receiving was a reference to an African American audience member by a racial slur, followed by the warning, "keep your hands off her tits... I'm watching you.")

After these revelations, the donations dried up, the audiences stopped showing up, and in 1987 Popoff declared bankruptcy, leaving over 790 creditors unpaid.

And that, you would think, would be that.

But no.  After a humiliating takedown that would leave most of us unwilling to go outside ever again without wearing a paper bag over our heads, Popoff has restarted his "healing ministries," this time in the UK.  According to a piece over at the site Good Thinking, we find out that he's once again raking in the cash:

Over the last six months, we have been investigating ‘faith healer’ Peter Popoff and his highly-lucrative current business of promising to heal sickness and cancel debts in exchange for ‘seed faith’, in other words: cash donations.  In May of this year we attended Popoff’s event at The Troxy Theatre, London, to covertly record his miraculous claims and supposed acts of faith healing, and to witness thousands of people donating large amounts of cash to his ministry.

The Daily Mirror did a story a couple of days ago about the investigation, and called it correctly:

Is the old charlatan “Reverend” Peter Popoff returning to his wicked ways? 

The American snake oil salesman has been in the UK, churning out begging letters and holding a rally to heal the sick. 

Among those “cured” at the latest London gathering was a woman who said her body was wracked with pain. 

Popoff laid his hands on her and yelled “Back to the pits of hell,” apparently with remarkable results. But was it all it seemed? 

Among the audience members was Michael Marshall of the Good Thinking Society, a charity that promotes rational debate. 

“The woman he ‘healed’ had a convulsive fit when he touched her on the head,” said Michael. 

“But she seemed to be part of his team, she was handing out pens and a questionnaire at the start, which leads us to believe that it is possible she was a plant. 

“If she was part of their team, they should have been open about this, but just before the ‘healing’ she came out of a row of seats in the auditorium as if she was just another member of the audience, and left soon afterwards.”

In other words: Popoff is once again rooking audiences, using exactly the same techniques as he did before.

I find it hard to believe that anyone could fall for his schtick, after the events of thirty years ago.  Did god forgive him for his earlier transgressions, and now he's actually healing people through divine power?  Or was James Randi persecuting an innocent man, leading us to the uncomfortable conclusion that god told Popoff "keep your hands off her tits?"

Or is he a cheater and a fraud who was so successful the first time that he is banking on people having short memories and more money than sense?

I'm pretty much certain it's the latter.

So we're looking at a situation where a proven swindler has returned to swindling, and people are once again falling for it.  Which returns me to my original point; if you are taken in by people like Popoff, as harsh as it sounds, you are so foolish that you deserve everything you get.

Miraculous backfire

I walk a pretty fine line, here at Skeptophilia, between criticizing ideas and ridiculing the people who hold them.  And I'm sure that I've stepped across that line more than once, given my fondness for the word "wingnut."  But I do try to focus on people's words, actions, and ideologies rather than launching broad-brush ad hominems.  That way lies Ann Coulter, and heaven knows we wouldn't want to go there.

Wait, was that a personal ad hominem?

Dammit.

Anyhow, any time you write something and post it or publish it, you take the chance that you're going to cause some negative responses.  And the problem is that there's a range of negative responses people could have to what a blogger writes, from "disagreement" to "offense" to "so offended I'm going to sue your ass off for libel."  And this is the predicament that Stephanie Guttormson has found herself in.

Guttormson is the Operations Director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation, and is the kind of person who has slim tolerance for bullshit.  She has a YouTube channel called "Think Stephtically," and she has taken on all manner of psychics, faith healers, and their ilk.  And now, she has gotten herself into (in my opinion, entirely undeserved) hot water over her criticisms of Adam Miller, who claims to be a faith healer and miracle worker.

In two YouTube pieces -- "Adam Miller, Con Artist" and "Adam Miller, Charlatan Antics, Childish Tactics" -- she took Miller's claims apart piece by piece.  Devotees tried to strike back, with commentary such as the following:

I have had work done by Adam Miller for the last 2 years 12 years of nagging pain in my back, INDEED he is a healer this woman is a hacker and knows nothing about spirituality.  Adam and Eve Miller are the real deal back off and allow those their gifts to heal on.

Well, I might point out first that there's a difference between a "hack" and a "hacker," but the more trenchant response is the one that appeared immediately after the above post:

I brushed my teeth yesterday then crossed the street.  Today I forgot to brush my teeth, and was hit by a car crossing the street - IF only I had brushed my teeth, I wouldnt have been hit by a car.  Right?

(Y)our example demonstrates (amongst others) the logical fallacies of cherry picking, and correlation is not causality.  THAT is why we have scientific methodologies - to weed out those claims by people such as Adam when not supported by the evidence.

Spot on, of course.  But the problem with people like Miller is that they never just retreat in disarray when they're shown up -- they lash out.  And that's what Miller has done.  He has sued Guttormson for copyright infringement (she used some clips of Miller's schtick in her own videos) and for "actual harm caused to Mr. Miller as a result of Guttormson’s infringement and statutory damages."

The lawsuit probably doesn't stand a chance of being found in Miller's favor; but the problem is, Miller is wealthy (another indication of how many gullible people there are in the world) and can afford the cost far better than Guttormson can.  So Guttormson has started a GoFundMe drive to pay for her legal costs from this frivolous lawsuit -- to which I hope you will be able to donate.

But what Miller may not have realized, given his apparent unfamiliarity with critical thinking, is that there is a phenomenon called the Streisand effect.  It involves someone objecting to negative publicity, and their objection bringing far more attention to that publicity than it otherwise would have had.  It got its name, of course, from singer Barbra Streisand, who became furious over an aerial photograph of her house that had been taken by an obscure California photographer, and sued him to have it destroyed -- resulting in the photograph being circulated worldwide, appearing in countless articles and blog posts, including on the Wikipedia page about the Streisand effect.

Gives new meaning to the phrase "pick your battles."

Barbra Streisand's house, posted here just because I can.  [image copyright © 2002 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.californiacoastline.org, and courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So let's see if we can invoke the Streisand effect here.  Miller wants his day in court?  Fine.  How about we skeptics pull together, and not only support Guttormson's GoFundMe drive, but circulate and repost her two videos in which she criticized Miller?  When I looked at them this morning so I could link them to this post, they had only 11,000 and 2,400 views each.

That is far too few.

So take a look at Guttormson's YouTube videos (links posted above).  Post them on Twitter and Facebook and wherever else you can think of. They're well worth watching on their own merits, of course; she's hilarious, and her biting commentary on Miller's content and delivery style got some belly laughs from me.  Besides the pleasure of watching Miller's lawsuit completely backfire, it'd be nice to see more people exposed to this kind of skeptical approach of woo-woo claims.

Funny to think, then, that the efforts of a guy who claims to "work miracles" might be to bring much wider attention to a woman who works to demolish such claims.  Now wouldn't that be a miracle?

Signs and portents

What would it take to convince you that you were wrong?

It was the question that was asked to Ken Ham and Bill Nye in their famous debate, and significantly, Ham replied, "Nothing would."  Any evidence, any argument, the best data available, would be insufficient.  In other words: his worldview is invulnerable.  Which is why the Nye/Ham debate was, at its most fundamental level, not a debate at all.

That inviolability is an all-too-common aspect of the belief system of the devout, where "unshakeable faith" is considered a cardinal virtue.  Even as a child, going every Sunday with my parents to the Catholic church, this attitude struck me as awry.  I remember asking my catechism class teacher, "If you're supposed to have faith no matter what, how could you tell if you were wrong?"

My teacher responded, "But we're not wrong."

Circular reasoning at it's best.  How do we know our beliefs are correct?  Because they're correct.  q.e.d.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There was a tragic, but vivid, demonstration of this approach to understanding in Lagos, Nigeria this week.  Evangelist T. B. Joshua, the faith healer and self-styled "prophet" whose revival meetings attract thousands from all over Africa, had some 'splainin' to do after a guesthouse owned by Joshua collapsed, killing eighty of his followers, some of whom had come from as far away as South Africa to hear him preach and take part in his "healing ministry."

Turns out Joshua's people had been doing some major renovations, and apparently didn't notice that the floors they were renovating were occupied.  So the whole building collapsed like a house of cards.

After this, Joshua had three possible responses:

1. Shoddy construction, not to mention doing work on the weight-bearing walls of a building while people are living in it, is likely to result in said building falling down and bunches of people dying.  My bad.
2. God is sending me a sign that I'm misleading people and ripping them off.  I better discontinue my revival meetings forthwith.
3. The building collapse was Satan's work.  The fact that the devil is after me and my followers just means that I'm hot on the devil's trail!  Go me!

Three guesses as to which was Joshua's response.

"The church views this tragedy as part of an attack on The Synagogue Church Of All Nations," a church spokesperson said in a press release.  "In due course, God will reveal the perpetrators."  The collapse was due to "demonic forces" that were determined to destroy Joshua, who is a "man of God."  As a result, church members have become even more devoted than ever to Joshua's message.  The collapse, apparently, has activated the rally-around-the-flag response.  "You think you'll get away with this, Satan?" they seem to be saying.  "We'll pray at you even harder!"

All of which supports a contention I've had for some time, to wit: you can't argue with these people.  The devout are coming at understanding from a completely non-evidence-based angle, so there's  no evidence that would be convincing.  It puts me in mind of the quote, variously attributed, that "you can't logic your way out of a stance that you didn't logic your way into."

But I must say that the whole approach is foreign to me.  On a fundamental level, I've never understood this attitude, which is why my stay in the Catholic Church was largely an exercise in frustration both for me and for the priests and nuns who tried to get me to see it their way.  I know that faith is a great comfort to people who have it, but I can't for the life of me comprehend how anyone could get there from the outside.  It boils down to "believe because you believe," as far as I can see, a summation I saw clearly when I was still in grade school.

And forty-odd years later, I still don't see how anyone could find that a reasonable approach to understanding the universe.

Trials of faith

The state of Tennessee is in a bit of a quandary at the moment.

Back in 2002, one Jacqueline Crank was sentenced to unsupervised probation for negligence in the death of her fifteen-year-old daughter Jessica from Ewing's sarcoma.  Jessica was not brought in for conventional medical treatment, but instead was subjected to a bout of "faith healing" on the part of the girl's "spiritual father," Ariel Sherman, and various family friends.

"Laying on of hands" in a Pentecostal Church [image courtesy of photographer Russell Lee and the Wikimedia Commons]

Despite the light sentence, Crank hasn't been willing to let the matter go, and has pursued appeals all the way up to the Tennessee Supreme Court.  And the sticky part of the issue is that Tennessee has something called the Spiritual Treatment Exemption Act, which allows parents to avoid medical treatment for their children if it would interfere with their religious beliefs.  Crank's claim -- and it's hard to see how she's wrong -- is that this protects certain established religious sects who don't believe in using modern medicine (e.g. Christian Scientists) but it didn't protect her, because she belongs to a sect that includes only her and about two dozen others, living "in a cult-type religious environment with many people... all of whom they consider 'family' although none of them are related."

Her last appeal, in which her sentence was upheld, was decided in June of 2013.  In the decision, the following provision of the Spiritual Treatment Exemption Act was quoted:

Nothing in this chapter [Tennessee Code Annotated Title 39, Chapter 15, setting forth certain offenses against children, including child abuse and neglect] shall be construed to mean a child is neglected, abused, or abused or neglected in an aggravated manner for the sole reason the child is being provided treatment by spiritual means through prayer alone in accordance with the tenets or practices of a recognized church or religious denomination by a duly accredited practitioner thereof in lieu of medical or surgical treatment.

I have two issues with this.

First, how is denying a child medical treatment ever anything other than child abuse?  Allowing a child to remain in pain, or perhaps even to die, of a treatable illness is "abuse and neglect" no matter whether the reason is negligence or "deeply held religious beliefs."  You can't "provide treatment by spiritual means," because it doesn't work.  The list of children who have died in the hands of faith healers -- some from agonizing conditions like appendicitis -- is long.

Second, how do you become a "duly accredited practitioner" of faith healing?  Cf. my earlier comment about the fact that it doesn't work.  I suppose, of course, that there are also training programs for astrology, crystal energy healing, and homeopathy, so having a certificate in Latin on your wall saying you're an accredited faith healer isn't that much more ridiculous.

The problem is, of course, that this puts the Tennessee Supreme Court in the awkward position of either having to admit that the basis of their Spiritual Treatment Exemption Act is a flawed belief that systematizes child abuse, or siding with a woman who while her child was experiencing bone disintegration from a grapefruit-sized tumor, "decided to turn to Jesus Christ, my Lord and my Savior, my Healer, Defender for her healing. That being a believer in the Lord, being a believer in this Word, that He was the only Healer. And through that belief we took it in our hands to pray for her, to heal her with prayer, to know that Jesus Christ is the Healer, is the Deliverer."

So the decision will either imply that all religious beliefs are equal, even the loony ones, or that some beliefs are more equal than others.  And either way, the justices on the Tennessee Supreme Court will have painted themselves into a legal corner that it's hard to see an escape from.

Magic eggs and faith healers

It's a question I've asked before: how do "alternative medicine" and "faith healing" therapies that don't work get started, and then continue to sucker people?  You'd think that if you're told that "pressing a quartz crystal to your forehead will cure your headache," the first time you got a headache that didn't go away after the application of a crystal, you'd say, "Okay, this doesn't work," and go take an aspirin (i.e., medicine that is actually effective) instead.

Oh, I know about the placebo effect, and the possibility of spontaneous remission of symptoms.  But still.  That only takes you so far, especially given the crazy, non-scientific basis of some of these so-called remedies.

Take the claim that was just covered in The Daily Mirror -- that in order to cure hemorrhoids, all you have to do is to go to a temple in the Kunagami Shrine, north of Tokyo, and aim your butt at a "holy egg" (actually an egg-shaped rock) while a Shinto priest chants a prayer, and lo!  Your hemorrhoids will be cured.

The article explains how the whole thing works:

Temple priest Osamu Hayakawa explained: "We perform a short service and afterwards individuals have to point their rear ends at the holy egg and say a special prayer. 

"The devout will find the trip to the Kunigami Shrine will have the desired effect." 

Sufferers apparently used to wash in a local river and afterwards ate boiled eggs at the temple to cure themselves of the condition, but the ceremony has been modernised. 

Mr Hayakawa said: "In the modern world, it is not acceptable for people to be showing off their rear ends while bathing in public but we believe that it is fine if the essence of the ritual is still maintained."

Right!  Modernized!  Because that's the word I'd use to describe pointing your ass at a magic egg to cure an unpleasant medical condition.

Of course, we once again bump up against the reluctance people have to criticize silly ideas when they come under the aegis of religion, which this one clearly does.  My reaction predictably, is, "Why not?"  Ideas are just ideas; they either reflect reality, or else they don't.  Just because a particular ridiculous claim is a ridiculous religious claim shouldn't make any difference.

And the magic butt-mending egg is such a counterfactual religious claim.  But before we laugh too hard at the Japanese ritual, keep in mind that it's really no different from Christian claims of faith healing except on the level of details. 

Which, unfortunately leads us into a darker side of this topic.  Just last year, Herbert and Cathleen Schaible of Philadelphia were charged with murder when a second child of theirs died from a treatable illness.  Their seven-month-old son Brandon died of bacterial pneumonia after days of prayer; four years earlier, they'd lost their two-year-old son Kent from a similar illness.  In both cases, they were directed by leaders of their church, the First Century Gospel Church, to use "faith healing" rather than conventional medicine.

"The church believe [sic] that people get sick because they’re not doing the right thing," a church member named John told reporters for NBC Philadelphia.  (He refused to give his last name during the interview.)  "God promised us that if we do his will, that there’s no infection; all these diseases that you name, would not come to you."

And, he added, the arrest of the Schaibles and the criticism of the church leaders amounts to "persecution."

My attitude is: if you want to call it persecution, fine.  The authorities should persecute the hell out of them.  If your faith involves letting a seven-month-old baby die because you think god is punishing him for "not doing the right thing," you have abandoned your right to claim "freedom of religion" for your practice.

But back to my original point; at what point do the adherents to such beliefs look at this sort of thing, and revise their worldview?  How long will it take before people stop, look at all of the examples of diseases left uncured by "the power of prayer," and say, "Okay, this doesn't work?"

Evidently, the answer for some people is, "forever."

I try to be understanding of people, I really do.  But this is one case where I just don't get it.  This is so far off in the realm of the completely irrational that I can't find any point of contact from which I could comprehend them.

The case for optimism

A friend and frequent contributor of topics to Skeptophilia asked me recently how I don't completely lose faith in humanity, after all these years of focusing on the ridiculous things people believe.

"How you continue to post, day after day," he wrote to me, "and not end up raising your arms in the air, fists clenched in rage, throwing your head back, and screaming a slew of expletives that would make the San Quentin warden blush, is beyond me."

Well, sometimes I do, you know.  I spend a lot of time yelling at my computer, which may explain why it doesn't work sometimes.  But honestly, I'm an optimist.  If I thought that humanity was irredeemable -- that we will never learn, will never figure out how to think rationally, will always be mired in superstition -- my writing this blog would be kind of pointless.

So would my being a science teacher, now that I come to think of it.

 I am by nature an optimist.  A cautious optimist, but an optimist nonetheless.  And three stories that just came out in the last couple of days give me some support in my contention that humankind is capable of moving in positive directions.

First, from Australia, we have a story from The Brisbane Times, wherein we learn that a court in Queensland has denied a woman taxpayer-funded assistance for a $20,000 "spiritual healing" she received in Canada.  [Source]

The woman, who is identified only as "BN," sounds like she has had a rough time of it -- she was assaulted, and had trauma associated with a motor vehicle accident -- and I do not mean to sound unsympathetic with her plight.  In fact, the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal agreed; in their ruling, they said, "It is not disputed that BN suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder."

But the woman's claim was that she needed "Native spiritual healing," and the only place that she was willing to go was to a Cree spiritual retreat center in Canada.  She required the flight to and from Canada not pass through any American or Asian airports, because she found them "stressful."  The total bill, for travel and for the "spiritual healing"  came to close to $20,000, which she expected would be covered by the Australian health care system.

It is crazy that taxpayers should be expected to bear the costs when someone wants to pursue unscientific alternatives to conventional medical treatment.  I'm happy to report that the courts agreed.  Attorney General Jarrod Bleijie said, "I absolutely respect and understand the benefits of rehabilitation for victims of crime, but it was inconceivable that treatment couldn't be found here in Queensland."


A second story that gives me hope that rationality can sometimes win the day comes out of Florida, where a psychic is currently on trial for fraud to the tune of $25 million.

Rose Marks, who has used her alleged powers to advise such well-known figures as romance writer Jude Deveraux, is unrepentant.  Her lawyer, Fred Schwartz, said in an interview, "She said she uses psychic powers to help advise people as a life coach and that she's a spiritual adviser," and added that Ms. Marks' powers have "been in her family for 1,500 years."

You have to wonder how she knows that.  Psychically, I'd imagine.

Well, the U.S. Attorney's office isn't buying it.  The indictment, in part, reads, "Rose Marks, a/k/a Joyce Michael, along with co-conspirators, represented herself as a psychic and clairvoyant, gifted by God to communicate with spirit guides to assist her clients through personal difficulties...  [She] would offer services to walk-in customers, some of whom would be suffering from mental and emotional disorders, who had recently gone through personal traumatic events and/or who were emotionally vulnerable, fragile and/or gullible...  [Marks induced clients] to make 'sacrifices', usually consisting of large amounts of money (but also at times including jewelry, gold coins and other property) because 'money was the root of all evil.'"

Oh, indeed it can be, which is why these charlatans do what they do.  Well, if the prosecutors do their job, we may see one fewer of them out there defrauding their customers, a possibility that should give Sylvia Browne, Derek Acorah, Theresa Caputo, and Sally Morgan pause.


Our last story seems to indicate that courts are disinclined to let people get away with harming someone because of irrational beliefs even if those beliefs are part of their religion.  "It's my religion" has, for a long time, been a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card in the United States, and in many other parts of the world -- but that may be ending.  Just last week, two members of The Church of the First Born, a fundamentalist faith-healing sect in Albany, Oregon, were arrested for manslaughter after their daughter died of untreated type I diabetes.

Travis and Wenona Rossiter prayed over their twelve-year-old daughter, Syble, convinced that the line from James chapter 5 was true -- "Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord." 

This, despite the fact that two other children of members of this sect of loonies have died in similar circumstances -- a seven-year-old of leukemia in 1996, and a seventeen-year-old just last year of appendicitis.  You'd think they'd realize it wasn't working, wouldn't you?  Nope.  They probably just thought they weren't praying hard enough, or rationalized it by saying it was "god's will," or some such nonsense.

The courts aren't buying it.  The Rossiters are in jail, and with luck, will stay there.


Now, all of this is some pretty harsh stuff, and it might be hard to see how this supports my original contention that we have cause for optimism.  But look at the overall trend -- we've gone from rampant superstition, faith healing, and anti-science sentiment being the majority opinion, to its being repeatedly slapped down by the courts, in only a hundred or so years.  Even as little as fifty years ago, the authorities were reluctant to step in when cases involved "matters of faith" -- churches and "spiritual practices" were given carte blanche.

Now?  We're seeing an increasing push to revoke the tax-exempt status of churches, especially in cases where church leaders publicly push political agendas.  We're seeing courts uphold sentences in cases where people inflict damage, whether personal or financial, on the gullible, innocent, or helpless because of their commitment to counterfactional irrationality.  It's getting harder and harder to get away with murder -- sometimes literally -- because you hold an umbrella labeled "god's will" over your head.

And I, for one, find this to be movement in the right direction.

The new weapon of the "elite:" vaccinations

This week we had two news stories that are mostly noteworthy in juxtaposition.

First, we had an interview that took place between Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and political pundit, erstwhile presidential candidate, and noted wingnut Alan Keyes, regarding the plan by liberals to reduce the world's population using vaccines.

Gohmert asked Keyes about the claim by "some liberals" that the world was overpopulated.  Keyes responded:

A lot of people who fancy themselves elites, right, because they’ve made a lot of money, their names are all over the media and so forth, they’ve really signed on to an agenda that requires the depopulation of the globe.  And in the name of fighting global climatological change, called global warming — that’s proven to be something that’s wrong — they are saying that we’ve got to cut back the population of the world.

Bill Gates gave a famous talk back in 2009, which he was talking about actually abusing vaccinations, which are supposed to keep people healthy and alive, and saying how this could lead to a 15 percent reduction in the population of the globe as a way to achieve this result.

They’re preaching that doctrine because they actually believe we’re a blight on the face of the planet, we human beings.  And we should, therefore, be put on a path toward our own semi-extinction. I often try to get people to see that if you think about it, if we actually get back to the levels they’re talking about, it would just be these elitists and the people needed to service them. That’s all that will be left in the world.

And instead of doing what I would have done, which is to guffaw directly into Mr. Keyes' face and then get up and walk away, Gohmert responded as if he had just said something sensible.

"Scary thought," Representative Gohmert responded.

Yes, it is a scary thought, and doubly scary because there are presumably people who believe this.  We're all being duped by the elite liberal scientists.  Vaccines, as we all know from watching the historical documentary The X Files, are just the government's way of tagging the entire citizenry, i.e., marking us for "culling."

Oh, and global climate change is "wrong."  How do we know?  Because elitism, that's how.  Stop asking questions.

But I must interject a question of my own here, and it's one that I've asked before: why in the hell is the word "elite" used as a compliment in sports and an insult in intellectual pursuits?  Isn't it a good thing to be really smart?  Given Mr. Keyes' grasp of the facts, it's understandable that he doesn't think so, but in general?

The whole thing is interesting especially given our second story, which occurred only a little west of Representative Gohmert's home of Texas' First Congressional District, in the town of Newark -- where an evangelical megachurch has has an outbreak of measles after its pastor, Terri Copeland Pearsons, promoted faith healing as an alternative to vaccination.

Pearsons' father, televangelist Kenneth Copeland, has publicly stated his anti-vaxxer sympathies in a broadcast called "God's Health and Wellness Plan."  (The relevant bit comes about twenty minutes into the broadcast, if you decide to watch it.)  He talks about the whole topic of vaccination becoming "personal" when his first great-grandchild was born, and the doctors advised the parents to have the baby vaccinated "with all of these shots, and all of this stuff."  Some of what they wanted to vaccinate the baby with, Copeland said, "is criminal."

"You don't take the word of the guy that is trying to give the shot about what's good and what isn't!" Copeland said.

Nope.  Those damned doctors, with their advanced degrees.  What do they know, anyway?

But then Copeland's daughter's church was visited by someone who had just come from overseas, and had been exposed to measles -- and before you can say "liberal elite," twenty church members had contracted the disease.

This left Pastor Pearsons to deliver the news to the faithful, which she did, albeit a little awkwardly:

There has been a ... confirmed case of the measles from the Tarrant County Public Health Department. And that is a really big deal in that America, the United States has been essentially measles free for I think it's ten years. And so when measles pops up anywhere else in the United States, the health department -- well, you know, it excites them. You know what I mean... I don't mean... I don't mean they're happy about it, but they get very excited and respond to it because it doesn't take much for things like that to spread.

Sure.  The Health Department just loves outbreaks.  It's some excitement to distract them from their otherwise humdrum job of figuring out ways to cull the human population.

So it was wryly amusing when last week, Pastor Pearsons announced that there would be free measles vaccination clinics held in the church, in spite of the fact that the bible should be enough:

There are a lot of people that think the Bible -- we talk about walking by faith -- it leaves out things such as, I don't know, people just get strange. But when you read the Old Testament, you find that it is full of precautionary measures, and it is full of the law.

Why did the Jewish people, why did they not die out during the plague? Because the Bible told them how to be clean, told them how to disinfect, told them there was something contagious. And the interesting thing of it, it wasn't a medical doctor per se who took care of those things, it was the priesthood. It was the ministers, it was those who knew how to take the promises of God as well as the commandments of God to take care of things like disinfection and so forth....

Many of the things that we have in medical practice now actually are things you can trace back into scripture. It's when we find out what's in the scripture that we have wisdom.

Yup.  Because priests have such a better track record for curing disease than medical doctors do.  Oh, but by all means, Pastor Pearsons, don't let little things like facts get in your way.  Do carry on.

And in neat contrast to all of this, we have two new peer-reviewed papers this summer showing that vaccinations save lives.  As if we should need more evidence.

Well, we might not, if it weren't for anti-science whackjobs like Keyes, Pearsons, and Copeland babbling their bizarre, fact-free opinions on the air.  All of which just goes to show, as I've said before -- if you want to learn how the world really works, don't listen to politicians and pastors.

Ask an "elite scientist."  They're the ones who actually know what they're talking about.

Magic in the water

It's always struck me as baffling to see people how much people will pay for woo-woo stuff.  Not so much the alt-med stuff like homeopathy, because there, the recipient has been bamboozled (usually via some science-y sounding nonsense about vibrations and energies and quantum signatures) into thinking that the remedy being sold actually does something that has been verified experimentally.  (i.e., they have been lied to.)

On the other hand, it's less understandable to see someone buying something that doesn't even come with any sort of rational explanation -- when the item being sold falls into the Magic, Pure & Simple department.  It's probably narrow-minded of me, but whenever I hear about this sort of thing, I always think, "How on earth do people expect this to work?"

For example, there's Temitope Balogun Joshua, the Ghanaian pastor of the Synagogue Church of All Nations in Accra.  Joshua, a charismatic figure who attracts huge crowds in Ghana, Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, goes about preaching the gospel and selling stuff, including "new anointing water."  "New anointing water" has been blessed by Reverend Joshua and has been credited with miraculous cures of diseases, and the relieving of stress and anxiety.  It usually sells for 80 cedis (about $40) per bottle -- a sizable sum in West Africa.

Well, unfortunately, a radio station announced last Saturday that Reverend Joshua would be giving away bottles of "new anointing water" for free at the service on Sunday.  Crowds began to form at two in the morning.  So many people showed up that it "brought traffic in large parts of Accra to a standstill."  And then, when the doors opened, there was a stampede, which killed four and injured thirty.

Joshua himself was apparently upset by how the whole thing turned out, and he's promised to pay the hospital expenses of the ones who were injured.  This shouldn't be a hardship...

... because apparently his net worth exceeds $15 million.  That, my friends, is a crapload of bottles of water.

Now, it's not that I think this kind of magical thinking is uncommon, mind you.  After outlaw John Dillinger was gunned down, bystanders soaked handkerchiefs and the hems of skirts in his blood.  Earlier, men and women who met their end by losing their heads had their spilled blood treated the same way -- notable examples were Anne Boleyn and King Louis XVI.  The idea of magic (of various kinds) clinging to a substance, be it water, blood, or something else, is as old as humanity.

But still.  How, precisely, do these folks think Reverend Joshua's bottles of miracle water can work?  I know I'm approaching this from my squared-off, show-me-the-goods rationalism, and that the mystical worldview allows for all sorts of other stuff going on.  But try as I might, I just can't see how this guy's magic potions and preaching have made him worth $15 million, despite his hawking his wares in some of the poorest countries in the world.

Magical thinking, apparently, is big business, even if you don't resort to science-y words.

On a more hopeful note, though, is a second story, this one from Spain.

Another idea that is hardly new is the love spell -- magic cast to make the target of your amorous feelings fall in love with you, or (more prosaically) at least willing to have sex with you.  Like Reverend Joshua's magic water, this one is still with us today, and is still as ineffective as ever -- as Zaragoza businessman José Laparra found out.

Laparra, the owner of Spanish football team Club Deportivo Castellon, had his eye on a woman who evidently was resistant to his advances.  Frustrated, he went to a psychic, Lucia Martin, who said she would help him -- if he paid her $210,000.

Now that is desperation.

Be that as it may, Martin said she knew the very spell, and she took Laparra's money, and proceeded to do her magical stuff.  To no avail; Laparra was no more successful than before.  So he went to Martin, and demanded his money back.

Only fair, I suppose, but according to the source, the psychic "foresaw his arrival" and tried to prevent him from entering.  She called the police, who came in, and found the money wrapped up in a newspaper -- and promptly arrested Laparra, because he'd apparently paid the psychic by embezzling the money from the funds belonging to his football club.

Laparra, for his part, proceeded to have an "anxiety attack," which is hardly a surprise, considering the circumstances.  Maybe someone should have gotten him some "new anointing water."

Calling a fraud a fraud: James McCormick and the bomb dowsers

I know I tend to write about frustrating topics -- my usual fare is illogic, irrationality, gullibility, hoaxes, and general foolishness.  And it's got to be wearing, at times, to read a non-stop parade of human craziness and credulity.  So it's heartening to me that today we'll start the day with a positive story -- a story of the triumph of science over woo-woo nonsense.

You may have heard about James McCormick, the man who developed a "bomb detector."  The device, he said, worked on the same principle as a dowsing rod; it was a metal antenna that sits in a hole in a plastic sleeve, and it detects the "electromagnetic disturbance" created by the bomb and swivels toward it.  (The whole thing is described in detail in Phil Plait's wonderful blog Bad Astronomy, in an article called "Dowsing for Bombs" that then appeared in Slate.)

You can see how such a device, if it worked as advertised, would be invaluable to the military.  The problem is, it didn't work.  The whole thing was basically just a plastic handle with a ten-dollar Radio Shack antenna glued into a rotating plastic cylinder.  But the military was suckered right in -- to the tune of between $16,500 and $60,000 per device.  Well, it wasn't long before the people in charge realized that they'd been sold a bill of goods; as Plait said, the devices "might as well have been crayon boxes full of rocks.  They were useless."

And, they cost lives.  The Iraqis began to use them at terrorist checkpoints, and (of course) their reliance on them caused them to miss bombs -- including one incident where terrorists sneaked two tons of explosives past a checkpoint, right past McCormick's dowsing rods, resulting in 155 casualties.

Well, the military finally wised up, and McCormick was arrested and charged with fraud.  And last week, he was convicted.

This should be a cause for celebration by skeptics the world over -- that finally, a major governmental institution has seen to it that science triumphs over the peddlers of woo-woo.  But I do have a question, however, that tempers my jubilation.

Why stop at McCormick?  If what he was doing is fraud -- in the sense that he was knowingly hoodwinking the gullible, making claims that were demonstrably false, and becoming filthy rich in the process -- then so are the homeopaths.  So are the psychics, the astrologers, the faith healers.  And yet we still have psychics like Theresa Caputo, the "Long Island Medium," who is booked for readings two years ahead and allegedly charges $400 for a thirty-minute reading over the phone.  (I say "allegedly" because she doesn't reveal her fees publicly; all we have to go by is claims by former clients.)  We still have astrologers like Susan Miller, "astrologer to the New York City fashion set," whose astrology website gets six million hits per month.  (If Skeptophilia gets six million hits in my lifetime, I will die a happy man.)  We still have faith healers like Peter Popoff, who was roundly debunked by James Randi and yet who still attracts tens of thousands of hopefuls to his "healing ministries."

We still have homeopathic "remedies" sold online -- and over the counter in damn near every pharmacy in the United States and western Europe.  Worse, there are groups like "Homeopaths Without Borders" making sure that their useless, discredited sugar pills and vials of water get distributed to needy (and poorly educated) people in places like Haiti, Honduras, and Guatemala, where they are used by the ill in place of actual, effective medications.

How is James McCormick guilty of fraud, and these people are not?

Oh, I know the difference is in who McCormick defrauded.  "Don't piss off the military-industrial complex" is a pretty good guide for life.  But even though the woo-woos of various stripes aren't ripping off the US Army -- they're just ripping off ordinary slobs like you and me -- the principle is the same.  They're making claims that are unscientific bullshit, are charging money for their useless services, and yet they seem to get away with it, day after day and year after year.

Okay, I know I said I was going to be positive, here.  And honestly, I'm glad that they nailed McCormick -- he richly merits everything he gets.  And perhaps this will act as a precedent; maybe the fact that the courts stood by reputable, testable science, and identified fraudulent woo-woo as such, will be one step toward pasting that same label on other deserving targets.

The bottom line is: the good guys won, for a change.  Let's hope that it's a trend.

Magical thinking and falling crucifixes

Today we have a story from Newburgh, New York about the power of prayer, and the untoward results thereof.  [Source]

David Jimenez, a devout Catholic, prayed every day in front of a giant, 600-pound marble crucifix in the Church of St. Patrick, asking god to heal his wife Delia, who was suffering from ovarian cancer.  Doctors told the couple that Delia's cancer was in remission in 2010.  Elated, David offered to spend hours meticulously cleaning the crucifix, as a sign of his thankfulness that his prayers were answered.  Unfortunately, what neither he nor (apparently) anyone else in the church knew was that the crucifix was held to the wall by only a single screw, and when he started scrubbing it, the screw popped loose, and the crucifix fell over on top of Jimenez, crushing his leg.  He was rushed to the hospital, but doctors were unable to save his injured leg, and it was ultimately amputated.

Last week, Jimenez's lawyers announced that they have initiated a lawsuit seeking $3 million in damages from the church.

This story has elicited a lot of sardonic laughter on atheist websites.  I understand why people responded that way -- irony always seems to generate laughter, even when it involves injury or death (look at "The Darwin Awards").  Me, I feel sorry for the guy.  After all, he was throughout the incident only acting from the best of motives; care for his ill wife, thankfulness for her recovery, gratefulness to the church for their support.  Whether the church owes him $3 million is not for me to say; but clearly if what he claims is true, that the 600-pound statue was only secured by a single screw, he might well have a case.

What I don't get here, and (honestly) probably never will get, is how anyone gets caught up in that kind of magical thinking in the first place.  It is undeniable that Jimenez and millions of others seem to take "the power of prayer" as a matter of course; "pray every day" is commanded from pulpits all over the world every Sunday.  And there are thousands of accounts of times that the "power of prayer" resulted in cures (or as they call them, "miracles").  My question is: do these people really not get cause-and-effect?  Delia Jimenez was cured by doctors, presumably through chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, or some combination; David's kneeling in front of a crucifix had nothing whatsoever to do with it.  Before you can make the claim that the "power of prayer" really works, you have to explain all the times it didn't work with something more than "god has a plan" or "god works in mysterious ways."  If you pray for Uncle Frank and he recovers, and I pray for Aunt Betty and she doesn't, you can't just say that Uncle Frank's recovery proves that prayer works and wave away what happened to poor Aunt Betty.

Of course, the toppling over of the crucifix adds another surreal element to the whole thing.  If you believe that god really was behind Delia Jimenez's recovery, don't you find it odd that god walloped her husband with the very object of devotion her husband had been praying in front of?  One of the commenters on the story stated, "God healed Delia Jimenez and then punished David Jimenez for idolatry.  Catholics always have had trouble obeying the Second Commandment."  This kind of made my head spin.  Do you really think that a deity, especially one of the kind Christians worship, would work that way?  "Through my power, and because of thy prayer, I have healed thy wife, but now I'm going to smush thy leg because thou didst pray the wrong way."  Really?  That's what you believe, that's the god you worship?  A god who would do such a thing would beat the Greek deities in simple capriciousness.  In fact, I think that given a choice, I'd rather worship Hermes.  At least he knew how to tell a good joke.

I guess the bottom line is, I will never understand magical thinking.  I honestly do try to be tolerant of others' beliefs, however I sometimes come across as an arrogant know-it-all.  But stories like this make me realize that there is a wide, probably unbridgeable, gap between the way I think and the way most of the religious think.

Alien footprints, leprechauns, and truth in advertising

Here at Skeptophilia headquarters, we're closely following three stories, all of which leave us saying "What the hell?" or some stronger variant.

In the first, we have a story from Kentucky, about a man who claims that his family is being terrorized by a bunch of cave-dwelling three-toed aliens.  (Source)

The man, who for obvious reasons didn't want his name released and is going by the pseudonym "David," stated that for the past nine months, his property has been repeatedly visited by alien beings "the size and stature of a small child, devoid of any facial features save for large, oily eyes and lipless mouths."

In an email that he sent to Ghost Hunters, Incorporated last year, he describes his first encounter with the aliens:

Standing in the flower bed just to the bottom left of my window was a small, humanoid figure, with sickly pale skin, completely hairless, standing roughly 4′. It was looking in the direction of the shadows, and had clearly come from around the left side of the house opposite the porch and had not noticed me as far as I could tell. It’s face was devoid of features, save for large round eyes, very reminiscent in shape and color of a bird’s eye. It had no nose to speak of, and only a small slit for a mouth. It didn’t appear to move it’s mouth as it chirped, sounding more as if the noises originated from it’s throat. It was most certainly not a “wild animal” and even more certainly not a child. I was too terrified to move, and watched as the creature hopped to the others, and together they scrambled into the woods on the right side of my property. It was clear that there were at least five in the group.

Ghost Hunters, Incorporated sent some folks out to investigate, and they went and poked around in an abandoned mine on "David's" property where he said the aliens lived, but they didn't find anything.

But "David" says the visitations have continued, and even his kids have seen the aliens, peering in their bedroom windows at night.  And now, "David" says that he now has proof of the visitations: a footprint.  Because obviously that couldn't be faked.  And he says that if nobody will take action, he will:

Though I’m armed, I’m afraid that I’m far too frightened to enter the mine by my lonesome, and cannot convince any sympathetic friends to accompany me, though I cannot blame them. I am convinced that the only answer is to collapse the mine.

So he's planning on blowing up the mine.  And I can't imagine how that could end badly, can you?


Actually, perhaps "David" should count his blessings; at least he didn't get beaten up by a pack of leprechauns.  (Source)

This past weekend, Seattle police got a report of a fight on Bell Street, near the Alaskan Way Viaduct.  Arriving at the scene at 1:55 AM, they found a "bruised and bloodied" man who was "holding his head and screaming in pain."

The police questioned the man, and were astonished when the man told them that his assailants were leprechauns, who were mad at him because he was "dancing with a girl."

Myself, I always thought that leprechauns were pro-dancing, as long as you didn't dance anywhere near their pots of gold.  Maybe the victim and his girlfriend were attempting to do a Riverdance-style Irish step dance, and doing it badly, and the leprechauns felt the need to defend Ireland's honor.  Or maybe his assailants just happened to be short guys dressed in green.

Whichever it was, the police did a brief search of the area, and were unable to find any leprechauns, so the victim was taken to Harborview Medical Center, where he was treated for his injuries and then released.


It's perhaps fortunate for him that the assault didn't take place in England, where the Advertising Standards Authority has ruled that a Christian group's website can include a page that encourages sick people to seek out healing through prayer alone, because "God heals everything." (Source)

Healing on the Streets (HOTS), a British evangelical group which supports faith healing, was told by the ASA last year that it had to take down a page on its website because it was making false medical claims, to wit:

Need Healing?  God can heal today!  Do you suffer from Back Pain, Arthritis, MS, Addiction ... Ulcers, Depression, Allergies, Fibromyalgia, Asthma, Paralysis, Crippling Disease, Phobias, Sleeping disorders or any other sickness?  We'd love to pray for your healing right now!  We're Christian from churches in Bath and we pray in the name of Jesus.  We believe that God loves you and can heal you from any sickness.

You have to wonder, if all of this is true, why Christians get illnesses just as often as the rest of us do.  Shouldn't there at least be some kind of statistically significant difference between the rates of serious disease in the faithful, as compared to the rest of us slobs?  So myself, I think that the ASA was exactly right in stating that HOTS was making "false medical claims," and endangering the lives of the credulous by discouraging them from seeking out conventional care when they are ill.

But the ASA was bombarded by letters from irate Christians, claiming that they were treading on the Toes of the Divine, and the ASA reversed their ruling.  "We acknowledged that HOTS volunteers believed that prayer could treat illness and medical conditions, and that therefore the ads did not promote false hope," they stated, in the revised decision.

No?  What, then, do you call it when some poor deluded person with MS is told that all that's necessary for a cure is prayer in the name of Jesus?  I think the whole thing is despicable, and that the ASA should be ashamed of themselves for not sticking to their guns.


So that's our news from the world of woo-woo for today; cave-dwelling aliens in Kentucky, leprechauns in Seattle, and faith healing in England.  As always, our motto here is: Fighting Gullibility With Sarcasm.

Life Vessels and faith healers

I'm often asked why I feel so passionately about critical thinking.  "Why," the question usually goes, "does it matter so much if people believe in crazy stuff?  How does a belief in astrology, crystal healing, Tarot cards, or whatever harm anyone?"

Two recent stories will illustrate that there can be a tremendous human cost to irrational thinking.

First, we have a story broken by Karen Stollznow of the James Randi Educational Foundation (read it here) regarding a quack cure called "The Life Vessel."  The purveyors of this useless piece of woo-woo  "alternative medicine" state on their website, "THE LIFE VESSEL is a patented non-invasive technology and technique by which Frequency, Vibration, Sound and Light Waves are applied to the human body in a resonate [sic] frequency, resulting in the body being able to perform its innate Natural Ability to Heal Itself."

Note the use of our favorite words "frequency," "vibration," and "resonate" (although I think they meant "resonant").  I'm surprised they didn't throw in "quantum" for good measure.  The machines are basically a bunch of light bulbs and speakers in a box; you climb into the box, and are exposed to light and sound, and voilà!  You're healed!  Now, fork over...

... $125 per session.

And these things are showing up in "alternative medicine clinics" all over the Midwest.  An investigative reporter working for the James Randi Foundation posed as a potential client, claiming to speak on behalf of her ill mother, found that the practitioners of this foolishness claimed it could cure ovarian cancer!

How many people are forgoing medical treatment for serious conditions to pay $125 for the privilege of spending a half-hour in a box with some light bulbs?  And yet when the CBS station in Denver did an exposé regarding the practice, people came howling out of the woodwork claiming that the treatments work -- logic and the placebo effect be damned.

Then, out of South Africa we have this story, in which a popular "faith healer" presided over an event in which one man died and sixteen were hospitalized.

Brother Chris Oyakhilome, a Nigerian pastor, stages something he calls the "Higher Life Conference" at venues all over the world, attracting huge crowds and raking in money.  He has supposedly made paralyzed individuals walk, cured terminal illnesses, and performed other miracles.  And last week, he was doing his dog-and-pony show in Cape Town, South Africa, to a crowd of 150,000.

I guess the miracle pipeline was down for repairs that night, because one man collapsed from renal failure and later died, and thirty had to seek treatment at a local medical center.  Sixteen were sent from there directly to a hospital.  "Some of them had traveled long distances to get there, they had ongoing medical issues and were in a lot of pain," Dr. Wayne Smith, the doctor in charge of the emergency room, stated.

What harm if people believe in ignorant superstitions?  A lot.  Sometimes a fatal dose of harm.  Had the gentleman who died in Cape Town last week gone to a hospital directly, instead of trying to get Brother Chris to heal him through miraculous means, it's possible that he could have received treatment and might still be alive.  But no doubt Brother Chris would rationalize the man's death as being "god's will."

Sorry, I don't see it that way.  People like Brother Chris and the purveyors of the Life Vessel are charlatans and frauds.  They are making claims that are factually untrue, and are harming people in the process.  And as there seems to be no particular will on the part of governments to institute legal proceedings in these cases, the only alternative is to educate the populace in how to think critically -- and put these hoaxers out of a job.