Water into wine, version 2.0

If you want the best insurance against being taken in by swindlers, hoaxers, and charlatans, cultivate a healthy skepticism and a rational view of the world.

Whenever I see something that pushes the boundaries of credulity, my first thought is, "what other explanations are there?"  I try not to dismiss it out of hand; a habit of instant disbelief is as lazy as gullibility.  But I do look for a scientifically plausible explanation, rather than just jumping on the woo-woo bandwagon.

Unfortunately, though, a good many people don't see it this way.  Which is why the money keeps flowing to people like South African preacher Lesego Daniel.

Daniel claims to be able to work miracles, and performs them before standing-room-only crowds.  And he has his followers convinced that he can turn gasoline into pineapple juice.

He has one of his helpers pour what he says is gasoline into a basin, and sets it aflame; and then takes a bottle of it, says a prayer, and gives it to volunteers to drink.  Some cough and gag...

... but they just keep coming up anyhow.  And, apparently, believing.

"It has a lot of fumes," said Daniel, after taking a sip from the bottle himself.  "But I don't have any side effects."  And the true believers go wild.

Pastor Daniel has a video of his dog-and-pony show uploaded to YouTube, and it's worth watching.  "With the flame that will burn here," he shouts to the enthusiastic crowd, "that it is evident enough for you to have faith."

Now, if you've watched the video, you probably noticed what I did; that (1) there were many opportunities for sleight-of-hand, and switching the bottle with the gasoline for a different bottle; and in any case, (2) there's no certainty that Daniel himself actually swallowed any of the liquid.  It'd be easy enough just to put the bottle to your lips, and mime swallowing.  But this hasn't stopped his followers from coming to his performances, and giving him donations of cash for his blessings.

"The level of anointing is not the same," says a disclaimer on his video link.  "If you cannot turn water into wine, do not try this."

This, by the way, is the same man who last year had his followers eating grass, saying that it "would rid them of their sins and heal them of any ailments they may have had."

When people ask me what appeals to me about skepticism, I always answer the same way; skepticism starts from doubt and then proceeds toward either belief or disbelief, based on the evidence.  Other approaches to knowledge, especially those that value faith, require you to turn off your brain and "simply believe."

And there is no way in the world that I would want to cede my own understanding to anyone else -- especially given the fact that there are charlatans like Lesego Daniel in the world.

Primed to see ghosts

Yesterday we had a report from Española, New Mexico that a surveillance camera at a police station had caught an image of a ghost walking across a locked compound.

"At first I thought it was a fly or moth, then I saw the legs," Officer Karl Romero said.  "And it was a human.  But not a real human.  No.  A ghost."

The local television station picked up the story, and reporters showed up on the scene.  "There's no way in or out of the secured area without an opened gate, or an alarm sounding," the reporter who covered the story said.  An unnamed officer showed her the area where the "ghost" was seen, and said, "You can see it walks through in the direction of the old transport cages, and you can see there's no way for it to get out through there, but it walks right through."

"Detectives say there is no logical explanation," the reporter continues.  "It's not an issue with the lighting, or a technical glitch.  And it turns out, there are a lot of ghost stories around here."

"A lot of our officers have seen certain things," one of the policemen said.  "Some of the officers have felt what appears to be someone breathing down their neck as they're working on reports in the briefing room."

"Española police tell us that as far as they know, this is not an ancient Indian burial ground, and they say that the police station has been there since 2006, but no inmates have died here," the reporter tells us.

And to wrap things up, the officers are asked if they believe in ghosts, and if they think this was the real deal... and predictably, they say yes.

Now, I want you all to go to the link I posted above, and watch the video for yourself.  You'll see why in a moment.

Alrighty then.  Let's stop and think about this a little.

When I watched the video, I was immediately reminded of a quote from Michael Shermer: "Before we jump to an explanation that is out of this world, we should rule out an explanation that is in this world."  I can think of two possible explanations for the ghost image without even trying hard.

First, the ghost could easily be an insect or spider walking across the lens of the camera.  Something that close up would appear blurry and indistinct -- much like the "ghost" was.  But I'll bet that when you watched the video, you were in complete agreement with the officers that the image was shaped like, and walked like, a human.  Why?

Because you'd been primed to believe that it was a human shape.  The officers said so.  When we're told what to see, we most often see it.  Turning back to Michael Shermer, and the talk he gave from which I pulled the above quote, the phenomenon of priming is a well-studied, and well-understood, characteristic of the human mind.  In his talk, he presents us with a bit of a Led Zeppelin song played backwards, and it sounds like gibberish -- until we are given subtitles that tell us what we're supposed to be hearing.  And then, lo!  We hear exactly that.  (And no surprise that the backmasked lyrics are all about Satan.)

So if you go back and watch the video again, and consciously try to see the image on the surveillance tape for what it is rather than what you were being told it was, suddenly it doesn't seem as clear that it's human, any more.  It could well be a bug, in fact.

But suppose further analysis, should such become possible, shows that the image is in fact human-shaped?  It still doesn't mean it's a ghost.  Some older security cameras aren't digital, meaning that they run on a magnetic tape system, similar to old VCRs.  Since there's no need to keep tapes on which nothing interesting happened, they are frequently reused and recorded over -- sometimes resulting in what amounts to an echo from a previously recorded video.  It's possible that there was a video recorded of a guy crossing the compound when the gates were open, and that those images weren't fully recorded over in the new video.

Do I know that one of these two explanations is correct?  No.  Maybe there was no bug, and for all I know the security system used in the Española Police Department is running on digital video recording only.  But I'd want to explore all of the possibilities of a natural explanation before I jump to a supernatural one.  And unfortunately, that isn't happening here.  The reporter, especially, wasn't helping matters, by suggesting that if there was no ancient Indian burial ground nearby, and no one had died in the station, that we'd exhausted all the possible avenues of inquiry.

Let's not let prior belief, priming, and fear hobble our capacities for rational thought, okay?

iGiveUp

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A chat with grandma

I frequently find myself wondering why people are more willing to believe folksy anecdote than they are sound scientific research.

I ran into an especially good example of that yesterday, over at the website Living Whole.  This site bills itself as "a landing spot for all things parenting, common sense, and healthy living," so right away it sent up red flags about veracity.  But the article itself, called "I Was Told To Ask the Older Generation About Vaccines... So I Did," turned out to be a stellar example of anti-science nonsense passed off as gosh-golly-aw-shucks folk wisdom.

In it, we hear about the author's visit to her hundred-year-old great-grandma, who still lives in her own house, bless her heart.  But we're put on notice right away what the author is up to:

I’m not sure why people in my family live so long.  It could be the organic diet, the herbs, or the fact that all of my century-old relatives are unvaccinated.  If my grandmother dies in the near future, it will only be because she’s started eating hot dogs and no one has told her that hot dog is mystery meat.  Do they make a vaccine for that?

Or it could be, you know, genetics.  As in, actual science.  My own grandma's family was remarkably long-lived, with many members living into their 90s, and my Great-Aunt Clara making it to 101.  More on them later.

We then hear about how her grandma got chicken pox, mumps, and German measles, and survived 'em all.  So did bunches of the other family members she knew and loved.  The author says;

Mumps, measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, and even the flu were rights of passage that almost every child experienced which challenged and groomed the immune system and protected them from more serious diseases as adults.  Deaths from these diseases were rare and only occurred in the really poor children who had other “things” as well.

Like my two great-aunts, Aimée and Anne, who died of measles five days apart, ages 21 and 17, and who were perfectly healthy up to that time.

Hopefully this last-quoted paragraph will shoot down the author's credibility in another respect, though.  How on earth does surviving mumps (for example) "groom your immune system" to fight off other diseases?  Any of my students from high school introductory biology could explain to you that this isn't how it works.  Your immune response is highly specific, which is why getting chicken pox only protects you against getting chicken pox again, and will do bugger-all for protecting you against measles.  And sometimes it's even more specific than that; getting the flu once doesn't protect you the next time.  The antibody response is so targeted that you are only protected against that particular flu strain, and if another crops up, you have to get revaccinated -- or get sick.

Then, there's the coup-de-grace:

In the last decade I have had to explain to my grandmother what Crohn’s disease is, autism, type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, ADHD, peanut allergies, and thyroid conditions.  She never saw those health conditions growing up. “Vaccine preventable diseases” were replaced with “vaccine-induced diseases.” Can we even compare chicken pox to rheumatoid arthritis?

No.  No, you can't.  Because they have nothing to do with one another.

But you know why great-grandma didn't know about all of those diseases listed?  Because there was no way to diagnose or treat them back then.  Kids with type-1 diabetes simply died.  Same with Crohn's.  (And that one is still difficult to manage, unfortunately.)  Autism has been described in medical literature since at least the 1700s, and thyroid conditions long before that.  So sorry, but this is just idiotic.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Let me point out what should be the most obvious thing about all of this, but which seems to have escaped the author entirely: your great-grandma's reminiscences aren't relevant.  Neither is the survival of my own grandmother, and many of her brothers and sisters, into old age.  You know why?  Because it would be a little hard to have a friendly chat with the tens of thousands of people who did die of preventable childhood diseases, like my grandma's brother Clarence (died as an infant of scarlet fever) and sister Flossie (died as a teenager of tuberculosis).  Of course the survivors report surviving.

Because they survived, for fuck's sake.  What did you think she'd tell you?  "I hate to break it to you, dear, but I actually died at age six of diphtheria?"

But that didn't seem to occur to most of the commenters, who had all sorts of positive things to say.  Many said that they weren't going to vaccinate their children, and related their own stories about how their grandparents had survived all sorts of childhood diseases, so q.e.d., apparently.

I'm sorry.  The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."  There is 100% consensus in the medical community (i.e. the people doing the actual research) that vaccines are safe and effective, serious side effects are rare, and that leaving children unvaccinated is dangerous and irresponsible.  You can go all motive-fallacy if you want ("of course the doctors say that, it keeps them in business"), but it doesn't change the facts.

But unfortunately, there seems to be a distinct anti-science bent in the United States at the moment, and a sense that telling stories is somehow more relevant than evaluating the serious research.  Part of it, I think, is laziness; understanding science is hard, while chatting about having tea with great-grandma is easy.

I think it goes deeper than that, however.  We're back to Isaac Asimov's wonderful quote, aren't we?  It seems a fitting place to end.

Throwing out Quentin

You often hear the True Believers in such questionable phenomena as UFOs, Bigfoot, psychic phenomena, and so on rail against us skeptics for not taking them seriously.  "You dismiss us out of hand," they say, "which isn't being skeptical, it's being a scoffer.  How can we gain any credibility amongst serious investigators if you won't even listen to our claims?"

Well, part of it is the fact that the True Believers are so bad at self-policing.  They take claims that might be worthy of serious consideration, and mix them liberally with the rantings of wingnuts, and then seem surprised when we throw up our hands in frustration and stop paying attention.

Take the pair of posts that appeared this week over at UFO Digest, a site that bills itself as follows:

UFO Digest (UD) and its contributors create content that engages us all in thinking consciously about our planet and beyond: be it extraterrestrial, terrestrial, scientific or supernatural or other phenomenon.

Sounds pretty thoughtful, doesn't it?  Well, consider these two articles, which appeared UFO Digest in the last week, both by one Lester Maverick, and both of which sound like the plot of a low-budget made-for-TV movie on Syfy.

Let's start with "About Quetzalcoatl and Quentin," which purports that the Mayan feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl was actually a space dude named... Quentin.

Quetzalcoatl, or perhaps Quentin [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm not making this up, although Lester Maverick certainly was.  Here's an excerpt:

Perhaps you might be intrigued by how Quentin (his space name) became the legendary god Quetzalcoatl in South America...  Quentin is a real to life extraterrestrial SUPERMAN originally from the fifth Spectran dimension with all the super powers of a superman!  Also Quentin is a grade 5 personal representative of the Council of Guardians who are a kind of a group mind of super beings who are the elder brothers of humanity everywhere in multiple universes... 

Currently, Quentin is grade 5 Spectran adviser to the Federation of Psychean Worlds whose Psychean astronauts have landed on our world millenia ago and now are even walking our streets...  Quentin is even part of our history because he was Quetazalcoatl, plus Kukulcan and Viracochia all in South America thousands of years ago.

Right.  Makes perfect sense.  But you might be asking, "who are these Psycheans of whom Lester speaks?"  For that, we must go to article two, "Who Are the Psycheans?"  Here's a bit of that one, just so you can get the flavor:

Well they, the Psycheans, look exactly like us and one characteristic that I noticed is that they are very psychic and maybe that is why they call themselves the Psycheans.  Since the Psycheans look exactly like us then pretty well, the only way to recognize them is through psychic means so it's mostly extremely intuitive or very psychic humans who manage to recognize them.  The Psycheans are allied with many other human ETs like the Plaedians, the Arcturians or the Lyrians.  Well, Oscar Magocsi eventually wrote a book about his UFO adventures and his own meetings with the Psycheans and the book is called "My Space Odyssey in UFOs."  This book is available from me if someone wants it.  Some of the Psycheans even became part of our history like "Jason and the Argonauts."

Because the voyage of the Argo really happened.  You know, with the Golden Fleece and Circe the Witch and the Harpies and all.

And I love the way you can only recognize a Psychean if you're psychic yourself.  Maybe I'm a Psychean, you think?  Use your own psychic powers and see if you can tell.  I'll be eagerly awaiting your responses, but I won't promise to tell you if you're right or not, because "Quentin" might be unhappy with me for spilling the beans.  And the last thing you want is to make a feathered-snake-god-space-dude unhappy.

So anyway.  You get the point.  If the UFO crowd (and/or Bigfoot-chasing, paranormal-believing, ghost-hunting types) want us to take them seriously, they need to do a better job of cleaning up their own act.  Some do a good job with it; the Society for Psychical Research comes to mind.  But when stuff like the Ravings of Lester show up on a site that claims to take a serious approach to studying paranormal phenomena, it's no great wonder that we skeptics tend to throw out the whole shebang.

Opening the floodgates

There's a bizarre battle going on right now in the state of Florida.

First, a Christian group was allowed to hand out bibles to students in eleven high schools in Orange County.  So an atheist group asked the Orange County School Board for permission to hand out atheist pamphlets, and was denied.  This resulted in a lawsuit from the atheists, which was summarily thrown out.

The school board wouldn't comment on the reasons for their denial, only saying that the atheist literature would be "disruptive."  Others opined that since atheism isn't a religion, it's not covered under the freedom of religion clause.

This last suggestion, however, opened the floodgates.  The next to step up to the plate was the Satanic Temple, who applied to the school board to pass out promotional materials including a book called The Satanic Children's Big Book of Activities, the cover of which I show below:

[image courtesy of the Satanic Temple]

The tall kid looks kind of grumpy, doesn't he?  You can tell he's regretting posing for this picture.  Maybe he was coerced somehow, you think?  ("If you won't be part of the group photo, we won't let you take part in sacrificing the goat on the equinox tomorrow.")  And the kid on the left could probably use going up a shirt size or three.

The Satanic Temple, of course, was trying to make a point, and they were completely up front about it.  "There has to be an understanding that they probably have a student body that is generally aware of Christian teachings," Temple spokesperson Lucien Grieves said.  "Kids know about the Bible. They probably go to church on Sundays with their parents. But our material juxtaposed to that offers differing religious opinions, not just the view that's dominating the discourse."

"We don't argue the merits of any one voice in a school environment," Grieves added.  "We think it's in the best interests for everyone, especially the kids, that the district not to have religious materials of any kind distributed in schools."

If that wasn't enough to make the school board question the wisdom of their actions, just yesterday we had another group throw their hat into the ring.  This, unfortunately, was the Raelians, a religion based in France that believes that the Earth was created by an extraterrestrial species, who are still more or less managing matters.  The core beliefs of the Raelians are that we should strive for world peace, feel free to have lots of sex with anyone who is willing, and both men and women should run around shirtless all the time.

"It's about equality for all," Donna Newman, spokesperson for the International Raelian Movement in South Florida said.  "No violence, peace on Earth.  If society is just leaning towards just one specific doctrine, it's not fair.  Why can't they open up their doors to other beliefs?  Let the children choose, not just pound one doctrine into their heads all their lives."

So.  Yeah.  If the whole debacle brings up the phrase "Be careful what you wish for," I have to say that it did for me, too.

But the main thing that bothers me, here, is that none of the groups -- Christian, atheist, Satanist, Raelian -- seem to be thinking much about the children, here and now, who are in the middle of what is turning into a four-way tug of war.  Sure, the school board created this mess, through a misguided Freedom-Of-Religion-As-Long-As-It's-The-Right-Religion approach.  But now the kids are the victims, hearing every other day about some new group who wants a crack at their allegiance.

Can we clarify one thing, here?  Schools are about free education.  They are not about proselytizing, a lesson that I can only hope the Orange County School Board has learned.  But they are also not about using high school students to score political points, however important the issue is (and I do think this issue is important).  Children are not pawns on a chessboard, and partisanship has no place in the classroom.

Being an out atheist in my community means that a good many students walk into my classroom knowing my views on religion.  But that's no different, really, than students seeing one of their teachers walk into any of the half-dozen or so churches in our village.  I keep my religious opinions (and my political ones, as well) out of my classroom.

And so should every teacher.  And so should school boards.  The Orange County School Board's misstep, therefore, serves as a shining example of what not to do.  All of us -- religious and atheist alike -- hopefully get that by now.  So to all the groups currently clamoring for these poor Florida teenagers' ears, I can only say one thing:

Point made.  Time to lay off.

Exorcism While-U-Wait

In the latest from the Bizarre Religious News department, we have word that Catholic exorcists in Italy are being told to take it easy by the powers that be.

The Archbishop of Florence, Cardinal Giuseppe Bertori, has become concerned that priests are conducting too many exorcisms.  There's a danger, Bertori said, that some of the purported possessed actually are suffering from conventional mental illnesses, and would be better off consulting a psychiatrist than a priest.

Saint Francis Borgia Conducting an Exorcism by Francisco Goya [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Well, yeah, I'd agree, especially if you substituted the word "all" for "some."  But Bertori obviously still thinks that the whole demonic possession thing is real, because instead of telling the Get-Thee-Behind-Me-Satan crowd simply to knock it off, he's telling them that they have to apply for and receive permission from the higher-ups before going through with it.

This strikes me as simultaneously appalling and hilarious.  Because if bureaucracy is good at anything, it's dragging its feet.  Can you see the problem here?

Italian church member:  Father, you need to come conduct an exorcism on my wife.  She froths at the mouth whenever anyone near her says a prayer, can't stand the sight of crucifixes, chews on the upholstery, and recently turned her head a full 360.  It's scaring the pets. 

Priest:  I'll have to apply for permission.  I'll get right back to you. 

*a year and a half later* 

Priest:  Good news, we've got permission!  I have you on the calendar for March of 2018.  I hope that works for you.

So that could be problematic.  But Bertori et al. seem to be more worried that unauthorized exorcisms are making the church look kind of... silly.  So he's sent all the priests a manual called (I'm not making this up) "Regarding Magic and Demonology," telling them to pay special attention to the section called "Exorcisms and healing prayers… pastoral rules and recommendations."

"Some priests, with the best intentions," a Catholic spokesperson said in an interview in La Nazione, "are making themselves available to listen to these people and sometimes perform exorcisms on them in a way that is not permitted, not regular and not coordinated."

Well, the last thing we want is uncoordinated exorcisms.  And lest you think I'm simply being snide, allow me to point out that there are regular reports of people dying during exorcisms -- just this week a man in Zambia died during a ritual to expel evil spirits, in which the victim was given a poisonous liquid to drink because supposedly the demons would be poisoned, not the man.  It didn't turn out that way.  The pastor, once he realized that his ritual had killed the man he was supposed to be helping, dumped the body and is currently on the run from the law.

This sort of thing hasn't stopped the practice, nor diminished the support of many religious leaders.  And no one is more convinced than Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican's "chief exorcist," who claims to have expelled 70,000 demons in his 25 years of service in the position.  Keep in mind, though, that this is the same dude who thinks that yoga is "satanic," and that it "leads to evil, just like reading Harry Potter."

So we're not talking about someone with a particularly sound grasp on reality, here.

In any case, I am heartily in favor of anything the church patriarchy can do to cut back on the exorcisms being conducted by the rank-and-file.  It'd be nice if they'd abandon "magic and demonology" stuff entirely, but that's probably too much to hope for.  In the meanwhile, if you need an exorcism, you might be looking at a long wait.  I might suggest trying a good psychologist in the meantime.