A tangle of beliefs

I hold two strong opinions that sometimes come into conflict with one another.

The first is that everyone comes to understand the universe in their own way.  Most of the time, we're all just muddling along trying to figure things out and simultaneously keep our heads above water, so who am I to criticize if you draw a different set of conclusions from this weird and chaotic place than I do?  Honestly, as long as you don't push your beliefs on me or use them to discriminate against people who think differently than you do, I don't have any quarrel with you.

On the other hand, there's no requirement that I "respect your beliefs," in the sense that because you call them sacred or religious or whatnot, I'm somehow not allowed to criticize them (or point out that they make no sense).  No beliefs -- and that includes mine -- are immune to critique.

So, respect people?  Of course, always.  But respect claims?  Only if they make sense and follow some basic principles like honoring the rights of others.  My support of "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" is tempered by, "... but if thou appearest to be a wingnut, thou shouldst not expect me not to point that out."

This is the thought that kept occurring to me as I perused a Wikipedia page I stumbled across, titled, "List of New Religious Movements."  By "new" they mean "after 1800," and the point is made rather forcefully that it's an incomplete list -- and that "scholars have estimated that the number of new religious movements now number in the tens of thousands worldwide."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons ReligijneSymbole.svg: Dariusofthedark]

I find this kind of mind-boggling.  I'm so uncertain about most of the Big-Question type beliefs that I'd never presume to say, "Hey, I know what's true!  Here's what everyone else should believe!"  Yeah, I come on pretty strong about things like "science works" and "we should respect hard evidence," but stuff like, "is there a Higher Power at work?" and "is there an afterlife?" and "is there any absolute truth?" -- I'm not going to claim my answers are any better than anyone else's.

But apparently there are a great many people who don't share that attitude.  And a lot of answers they've come up with -- and feel strongly enough about that they try to convert others -- are, to put not too fine a point on it, really fucking bizarre.  You have to wonder how many of the leaders of these groups were motivated by true belief, and how many by desire for power, wealth, fame, and adulation, but even so some of the "new religious movements" on this list are so strange that I find it astonishing they attracted any followers at all.  Here's a sampler of some of the more peculiar ones:

• Chen Tao, founded in 1993 in Taiwan by Hon-Ming Chen.  He later upped stakes and moved his community to Garland, Texas, because "Garland" sounds a little like "God's land."  This one mixes Buddhism, Christian End-Times stuff, and... UFOs.  Chen became infamous for stating that on March 31, 1998, God would be visible nationwide on Channel 18, and would have an important message for us (because, of course, what other kind of message could God have?).  When God failed to show, Chen (showing remarkable contrition for a cult leader) said, "I must have misunderstood," and offered to be crucified or stoned as penance, but no one took him up on it.
• The Ásatrú Folk Assembly, founded in northern California in the 1970s by Stephen McNallen, which combines Norse mythology with ancestor worship and a nasty streak of white supremacy.
• The Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, founded in 2009 by Jim Humble and self-styled "QAnon prophet" Jordan Sather, which seems to have been mostly a way of selling something called "Miracle Mineral Supplement" as a cure for everything from COVID-19 to cancer, but which turned out to be a solution of chlorine dioxide (bleach).  The "miracle" is that anyone survives after drinking it.  Some people, unfortunately, did not.
• The Church of Light, founded in 1932 by C. C. Zain, which melds astrology, occultism, hermeticism, and Christianity.  This one, though, has been torn apart by internal schisms and rifts, to the point that there now seem to be more sects and sub-sects of the Church of Light than there are actual members.
• The Amica Temple of Radiance, founded in 1959 by Roland Hunt and Dorothy Bailey, based on the teachings of spiritualist Ivah Bergh Whitten.  The idea here is apparently that colors have a sacred significance, and you can heal yourself (both physically and spiritually) by figuring out what your color is and then exposing yourself to that frequency of light.  Seems to me that "... but this doesn't actually work" would pretty much puncture a hole in the claim, but I guess the placebo effect can be awfully powerful.
• The Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven, founded in 1922 by May Otis Blackburn, who told her devotees she was charged by the archangel Gabriel to reveal the secrets of heaven and earth to the masses.  Some of her "secrets" had to do with resurrecting the dead, once again resulting in the objection "... but this doesn't actually work" (as you'll see, this will become a recurring theme here).  The whole thing fell apart when Blackburn was imprisoned for stealing forty thousand dollars from one of her followers.
• Adonism, a neo-pagan religion founded in 1925 by German esotericist Franz Sättler.  The Adonists worshipped a few of the Assyrian gods such as Bel, but their main deity was the Greek mythological figure Adonis, the worship of whom involved having lots of sex with whatever gender(s) you like.  So I guess I can understand why devotees thought Adonism was pretty cool.  Sättler, though, ran afoul of the anti-decadency drive of the Nazis, ended up in jail, and is thought to have died in Mauthausen concentration camp.
• People Unlimited, founded in 1982 by Charles Paul Brown, which teaches that humans can be immortal.  The claim ran into an unfortunate snag in 2014 when Brown died, but (astonishingly) the group didn't lose members, who transferred their allegiance (and hopes of eternal life) to Brown's widow Bernadeane.
• The Missionary Church of Kopimism, founded in Uppsala, Sweden in 2010 by Isak Gerson and Gustav Nipe.  The main tenet of this movement is that information is sacred, and therefore copyright law is inherently immoral.  The internet is "holy," they say, because it is a conduit of communication, and file sharing is a sacrament.  Their logo -- I swear I am not making this up -- is a yin-yang kind of thing containing "ctrl-C" and "ctrl-V."
• "Love Has Won," founded by Amy Carlson, who claimed to be a nineteen-billion-year-old being who had birthed all of creation.  Not content with that, she was reincarnated 534 times, including incarnations as Jesus, Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, and Marilyn Monroe, finally ending up as a 32-year-old manager of a Dallas, Texas McDonalds before founding her cult in 2007.  Among her odder claims were that Donald Trump had been her father in a previous incarnation, Robin Williams was an archangel, and the remnants of the inhabitants of the lost continent of Lemuria live beneath Mount Shasta.  She said that she was going to "lead 144,000 souls into the fifth dimension," but died in 2021 under mysterious circumstances before she had the chance.

And this is just a very short sampler from a very long list.

It's not that I'm perplexed about the founders, for the most part.  Some (like Humble and Sather, the ones hawking the Miracle Mineral Supplement) are almost certainly in it for the money.  Others are motivated by having power and influence over their followers, or (like Franz Sättler) because free sex with whoever you want is a nifty perk.  Yet others (like Amy Carlson) probably are just mentally ill.

But what honestly puzzles me is how so many people can look at these sorts of cults and say, "Yes!  Of course!  That makes perfect sense!"  And, even stranger, continue to believe even after circumstances (or hard evidence) show that what the leaders are claiming can't be true.

To return to my initial point -- it's hardly that I'm sure of everything myself, or am somehow convinced I have a direct pipeline to the Eternal Truths.  But to fall for some of these (tens of thousands!) of "new religious movements," you have to entangle yourself in belief systems that honestly make no sense whatsoever.

In conclusion -- if you belong to any of these groups, please don't come after me with a machete.  I'm not saying you can't belong to the Missionary Church of Kopimism and do a Gregorian chant every time you cut-and-paste, or immerse yourself in a beam of orange light to try to cure your acne. 

But at least allow me my incredulity, okay?

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Irrationality, insanity, and the teachings of J. Z. Knight

One of the problems I face in selecting stories to highlight in Skeptophilia is that it is often difficult to tell the difference between a crazy idea that merits ridicule, and claims coming from a person who is mentally ill, and therefore deserves sympathy (and help).

Put another way, when does espousing an essentially irrational worldview cross the line into an actual psychosis?  There are millions of people who subscribe to belief systems that are profoundly irrational, and yet the people themselves are otherwise sane (although how a sane person could adopt an insane model for how the universe works is itself a question worth asking).  But there are clearly times where you've gone beyond that, and crossed into more pathetic territory.

As an example of the latter, consider the ravings of YouTuber Dave Johnson, who contends that the Civil War, World War II, the War in Afghanistan, and the War in Iraq never happened.  All of them were "media events" with manufactured battles and casualties, designed by political leaders to achieve various goals.  I'm not sure I can really describe the content of the videos -- and I'm also not sure I can, in good conscience, recommend that you watch them -- but he seems to be enamored of symbolism and numerology (he calls the attack on Fort Sumter "a 9/11-style attack on a pentagon") and then just denies everything else without stating any evidence.  "They went on to tell you that over 600,000 people died in (the Civil) War," he says.  "Untrue.  There's zero evidence of any battlefield footage of any death that I can find."

Well, the absence of "footage" may be because the Civil War happened before the invention of motion pictures.  But even forgiving that as a slip of the tongue, is he really discounting all of the photography by Mathew Brady?

Aftermath of the Battle of Antietam, September 17, 1862, by Mathew Brady

I'm sure he'd call them all modern fakes.  He seems to have a profoundly paranoid worldview, which (by the way) includes believing that the Moon is a hologram.

The whole question comes up because of a much more public figure than Dave Johnson -- J. Z. Knight, better known as "Ramtha."  Knight has run her "Ramtha School of Enlightenment" since 1988, wherein she and her followers share the teachings of "Ramtha," a 35,000-year-old being from "Lemuria" who claims to be the "enlightened one."  Knight "channels" Ramtha, and then offers his pronouncements to the masses.

Up until recently, the whole thing has seemed to me to be an enormous scam -- a way to bilk the gullible out of their hard-earned money.  But just in the last couple of years, Knight/Ramtha has left behind her bland, "find-the-god-within" message, and has apparently gone off the deep end.

According to a story this week at AlterNet, Knight is no longer promoting "enlightenment" in Ramtha's voice; she is going off on drunken homophobic and racist rants.  Video and audio recordings of Knight that have been made covertly and then smuggled out of her compound in Yelm, Washington have revealed that the cult has moved into decidedly scarier territory of late.  The article states:

During the 16 or so hours... Knight will disparage Catholics, gay people, Mexicans, organic farmers, and Jews. 

“Fuck God’s chosen people! I think they have earned enough cash to have paid their way out of the goddamned gas chambers by now,” she says as members of the audience snicker. There are also titters when she declares Mexicans “breed like rabbits” and are “poison,” that all gay men were once Catholic priests, and that organic farmers have questionable hygiene.

Add to this the fact that this ritual involves the drinking of huge amounts of alcohol -- they're called "wine ceremonies," and audience members are supposed to take a drink of wine every time Knight does -- and this begins to take on some of the characteristics of a meeting of the Aryan Nations instead of some quasi-religious ceremony.

And, of course, this is fuel to the fire to the neo-Nazis.  Knight/Ramtha is quoted at length on the race hate forum Stormfront, for example.  The two cults, different as they appear at first, both espouse a lot of the same ideology -- survivalism, an "elect" who will be protected when civilization falls, and a sacred message that needs to get out to the people -- at least the right people.

But she also likes to take pot shots at the Christians, and one of the recordings that has come to light begins with, "Fuck Jehovah!" and goes on to state that Jesus is "just another alien" who is on equal footing with Ramtha, and who came to the Earth to teach the same things that Ramtha did, but failed when power went to his head.

Knight, for her part, refuses to issue a retraction for any of her drunken screeds, claiming that all of the ugliness on the recordings is just a matter of Ramtha's words "being taken out of context."  She also accuses two ex-followers, Virginia Coverdale and David McCarthy, of spearheading a smear campaign started because of a love triangle involving Coverdale, Knight, and Knight's significant other.

But back to our original question; is Knight still, on some level, rational, or has she simply become psychotic?  Certainly her message now clearly qualifies the Ramtha School of Enlightenment as a hate group; but I'm more curious about Knight herself.  Before, she has just been classified as a religious version of P. T. Barnum, a huckster, suckering in the gullible and relieving them of their cash in exchange for a more-or-less harmless message.  Now?  She shows every evidence of insane paranoia.  So personally, she's more to be pitied than censured.

The difference, though, between a J. Z. Knight and a Dave Johnson -- the war-denier we started this post with -- is their relative reach and influence.  Johnson's YouTube videos, when I watched them, had on the order of a thousand views each.  Knight's message has reached millions -- her followers include some famous names like Salma Hayek, Linda Evans, and Mike Farrell.  Her New Age nonsense wrapped up as an educational video on quantum physics, What the Bleep Do We Know?, grossed ten million dollars and was in movie theaters for a year.  Knight herself lives in a 12,800 square foot French-style-chateau next to her school, can earn up to $200,000 for every speaking engagement, and has a net worth estimated in the tens of millions.

Which means that regardless of the cause of her crazy rantings, the damage she can do is very real.  Her home town of Yelm is full of her followers -- non-Ramtha-ites call them "Ramsters" -- and the Ramtha symbol appears on many businesses in town, telling RSE members that it's okay to do business there.  Local churches have started anti-RSE campaigns.  Ordinary citizens, caught in the middle, are scared.

For good reason.  Whatever Knight is now, her teachings are now no longer merely New Age pablum, but ugly, racist, homophobic invective.  And you have to wonder when she'll cross another line -- into saying something that induces the authorities to intervene.

Considering her followers, we could have another Waco on our hands.

Elf highway blockade

One thing I would love to know is how groups of people end up being superstitious.  Not individuals; you can see how specific individuals could become superstitious about odd things, through a combination of classical conditioning and confirmation bias (you wear a specific t-shirt to a football game, and your team wins; you link the t-shirt to the win, and every time something good happens while you're wearing that shirt, it reinforces the belief.  Voilà -- "lucky t-shirt").

But how do specific counterfactual beliefs become so entrenched, despite a complete lack of evidence, that entire cultures begin to buy in?  I know that this is skating onto some seriously thin ice for some people, and I've no intention to skate any closer.  In any case, as you'll soon see, I'm not talking about what you probably think I'm talking about.

The reason this question comes up is because of a link sent to me by a frequent contributor to Skeptophilia, regarding a highway project in Iceland that has been blocked -- because the project will upset the elves.

Meadow Elves (Ängsälvor) by Nils Blommén (1850) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The project was designed to create a direct route from the Álftanes peninsula to the Gar∂abær suburb of Reykjavík.  But the highway was supposed to cut across a lava field inhabited by huldufólk, the Icelandic version of the Little People, and this got some people seriously up in arms.  A group calling themselves the "Friends of Lava" banded together with the intent of stopping the project, citing "detrimental effect on elf culture" -- and amazingly enough, it worked.

"(The highway project) would be a terrible loss and damaging both for the elf world and for us humans," said Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, a folklorist and seer from Reykjavík who was instrumental in halting the project.  "If you ask an Icelander about elves, they might say they don't believe.  But we always have stories of them, if not from ourselves then from someone close like a family member. Of course, not everyone believes in the stories, but the stories and the elves are still there and being told."

So the project appears to have been scrapped.  "Some feel that the elf thing is a bit annoying," said Andri Snær Magnason, a prominent Icelandic environmentalist.  "However, I got married in a church with a god just as invisible as the elves, so what might seem irrational is actually quite common [with Icelanders]."

What I find interesting about these beliefs is that they run counter to the usual perception of superstition being more common amongst the poorly-educated.  Iceland has an amazing educational system, resulting in a citizenry with a near 100% adult literacy rate.  They have the world's highest percentage of their GNP (8%) used for supporting education.

So the whole idea of education and superstition being inversely correlated apparently isn't true -- if we can draw such a conclusion from a sample size of one.  You would think that as the population becomes better educated, the amount of adherence to odd cultural beliefs would diminish, but despite the dramatic advances in education in Iceland in the past century, the belief in the huldufólk remains strong enough in Iceland to generate a legal block to a highway project.

I still think that learning critical thinking is the best way to counter non-evidence-based ways of thinking, so it appears that something else must be going on here.  One thing that comes to mind is that Icelanders are, as a group, extremely proud of their heritage, language, and history, and this is bound to make them more culturally conservative.  Beliefs and practices can be powerful indicators of cultural identity -- witness the members of my wife's family, who are descended from Lithuanian Jews, and who still celebrate a lot of the Jewish holidays and rituals -- although they have, by and large, abandoned the religious underpinnings. 

So I still find the Icelandic elves a peculiar thing, but I'll have to leave it to someone with a better background in folklore and anthropology to answer the question in a more rigorous fashion.  I guess it's to be expected that certain vestiges of old beliefs persist, even if the rest of the system has gone by the wayside.  Now, y'all will have to excuse me, because I need to finish this up.  I've got Christmas presents to wrap.

Red shirts and widow ghosts

One of the best arguments against superstitions is how variable they are across cultures.  For example, if a rabbit's foot is lucky for anyone except the rabbit, it shouldn't matter if you're from the southeastern United States (where the superstition seems to be the most common).  Rabbits were lucky animals in some cultures -- but not among British sailors, for whom a rabbit dashing on board would prevent a ship from sailing that day.

Throwing a pinch of spilled salt over your shoulder originated with the Romans.  In traditional Chinese folklore, you'll ruin your family's prosperity if you build your house facing north.  In Jamaica, you shouldn't feed a child cooked chicken before (s)he can talk, or the child will be mute.  In Spain, you should eat twelve grapes at midnight on New Year's Eve -- one month of good luck will follow for each grape you've eaten.

And so on.

None of these superstitions are known in cultures other than the one where they originated -- which should indicate that they are nothing but folk legends, with no basis whatsoever in truth.

Which brings us to Tha Sawang, Thailand, where there have been some unexplained deaths of young men -- caused, the locals say, by a "widow ghost" who is strangling them as they sleep.  [Source]

Now first, it needs to be established that there actually is a pattern of young men dying, here.  And it appears that there is; Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome has been known in Southeast Asia since 1977, where it was first observed amongst the Hmong of Laos.  It has since been recorded in Thailand, mostly in populations of Laotian ancestry, and the cause has been identified as a gene that results in cardiac fibrillation during sleep (called "Brugada syndrome").

But knowing the scientific explanation for something doesn't usually stop the superstitious from clinging to their own answer, and the "widow ghost" idea has been spreading.  As has the solution.  How do you keep away a "widow ghost?"  Simple, the people of Tha Sawang say.

Hang up a red shirt in front of your house.

 

Red shirts, they say, repel the evil spirit, because red is a lucky color.

I find this particularly amusing, given the fact that in certain other circumstances, a red shirt has quite the opposite meaning:

 "So, men, you've been selected for a mission on which you're all going to die horribly.  But I want you know that as your captain, I'm proud of the sacrifice you're about to make."

The downside of some superstitions, of course, is that it prevents people from seeking rational answers (and potentially solutions) to their problems.  In the case of SUNDS/Brugada syndrome, it's especially problematic, since the fibrillation strikes young men who previously showed no sign of disease -- fostering the belief that the deaths are due to some random, unseen force, and giving credence to the superstition.  In point of fact, there's no good medical answer to SUNDS yet, short of hooking every young male in northern Thailand to a heart monitor every night, so the "widow ghost"/red shirt response is going to be hard to combat.

It's easy to laugh at all this, but the fact is, we're all subject to such phenomena as correlation/causation error, where we use the fact that two things happened simultaneously (e.g. wearing a particular t-shirt and your favorite sports team making an unexpected win) with the first causing the second.  It's especially prevalent where we don't understand what the cause of the second event actually was, and most common of all where education in science is lacking.  Put those three things together, and you'll usually end up with a long list of items or actions that are considered lucky -- and an equally long list of unlucky ones.

That said, there are superstitions that persist even amongst rational, well-educated people, who presumably should know better -- something I find frankly mystifying.

So I'll wrap up here, because I'm almost out of time, and have to get myself ready for school.  Got my clothes all picked out.  No red anywhere.  So if I suddenly drop dead today, just blame the "widow ghost" paying a visit to upstate New York.

Sneak thievery

Having dealt with such issues in recent posts as the ethics of resurrecting extinct animal species, and the difficulty of addressing the problems with the American educational system, I want to look today at an even more serious problem: penis theft.

At this point, you are probably thinking, "Did I just read what I think I just read?"  I know that's what I thought when I came across the article on AlterNet entitled "Penis Snatching On the Rise -- Africa's Genital-Stealing Crime Wave Hits the Countryside."  So, yes: you did just read that.  And yes, it's what it sounds like.

Well, sort of.  My first guess would have been that for some reason, better left un-thought-about, there was a cult of some sort that was stealing the body parts off of corpses.  If that's all it had been, it would have merited little more than a quick retch before moving on.  But no, it's weirder than that.  These people believe that somehow, guys are being relieved of their favorite body part magically, while they're still alive.

For example, the author of the article, Louisa Lombard, tells of a Sudanese traveler going through the Central African Republic town of Tiringoulou.  The traveler stopped for a cup of tea, and after receiving it, shook hands with the tea seller.  The unfortunate tea seller felt "an electric tingling," and at that point realized that "his penis had shrunk to a size similar to that of a baby's."  There was an outcry from the alleged victim, which led to a small-scale riot, during which a second man fell prey to the same fate.

Kind of gives new meaning to the phrase "going off half-cocked," doesn't it?

Anyhow, it'd be nice to think that there would be at least one voice of rationality in the crowd who would demand that the two supposed targets drop trou and prove that they had been de-privated, but I guess no one thought of that.  Everyone just sort of said, "Oh, okay.  That makes sense."  And alas for the poor traveler, he was subjected to a "harsh interrogation" and was eventually shot to death for his magical crimes.  And as far as the leader of the armed rebel group who governs the town, and who oversaw the traveler's execution, he tells a different story; he said that the man wasn't killed, that he "mysteriously vanished from his holding cell."

And lest you think that this weird belief is confined to central Africa, allow me to point out that Singapore has had outbreaks of, um, dewangification as well.  Check out, if you dare, this article, entitled, "The Great Singapore Penis Panic and American Mass Hysteria," which is about an epidemic of "koro," a condition in which men suffer "a catastrophic loss of yang energy," causing their penises to shrivel away.

Well, needless to say, there's no such thing as any of this stuff.  So, for any of you guys in my readership who has read this post hunched over in a protective half-crouch, and with a horrified expression on your face, fear not.  There's only one thing I know of that can cause a similar effect:

And fortunately, it's temporary and reversible.

What I find astonishing about all of this is how credulous people are, and how seldom it ever occurs to anyone to say, "Prove it."  You claim that you're a psychic, and can accurately predict the future?  Prove it.  You claim that you can communicate with the spirits of the dead?  Prove it.  You claim that someone magically caused your willie to shrink?  Prove it.  The burden of proof lies with the person making the outrageous claim -- not, as in the case of the poor Sudanese traveler, with the one trying to defend himself from it.

But, apparently, such an approach is sadly uncommon in the world, and not only in such undeveloped, poverty-stricken areas as the Central African Republic, but in the urban First World streets of Singapore.  As always, there's just one solution to all of this, and that's education in science -- the only thing I know of that is successful at eradicating myth, irrationality, and superstition.  But given that here in the United States we still have a significant percentage of the population who believe in horoscopes, homeopathy, and young-earth creationism, maybe I shouldn't point fingers.  After all, none of those ideas is any more scientifically supported than the claim that someone can magically steal a guy's penis by shaking his hand.