One thing I want to make clear here is that when I say these businesses are scams, I’m not making any claims about conscious fraud. It’s entirely possible that all of the people involved in all of these businesses honestly believe they’re providing goods and services of actual value for their customers. My point is that if they do believe that, they’re wrong.
Earlier this week I had a pretty long post on The BEAST about a Shroud of Turin presentation I attended. Some of the details didn’t really fit with how I wanted to write the story, so I thought I’d add them here. This isn’t an admission of hiding facts which would have contradicted what I had to say about Russ Breault’s presentation. These are neutral omissions that just would have made the article too sprawling and rambling. Still they’re kind of interesting and I thought I should get them down somewhere and this is kind of the place for me for that sort of thing. So here we go:
The church this was held at had two flags on either side of its altar. One was a US flag and the other was a “Christian flag.” Now these are used by lots of Christian organizations, but they’re all pretty creepy. Here is is outside of the HQ of Focus on the Family:
Joe Nickell is a paranormal investigator at the Center for Inquiry and a historical document consultant. He’s also a senior research fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the author of many books, including Inquest on the Shroud of Turin. We talk about the subject of that book because some dude is coming to Western New York to do a presentation for the Shroudies. Why is God so bad at Photoshop? Listen to find out!
The cover of Jesus’s debut thrash metal album.
A couple weeks ago I heard about a presentation at a local church. Some guy called Russ Breault (unfortunately not pronounced BRO!) was going to talk about the Shroud of Turin and how it was magic. Or something like that.
The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth with the image of a person on it. Some Catholics claim the cloth was Jesus’s burial shroud and that God Photoshopped a .jpg of Jesus onto it as part of his resurrection.
There were a lot of details left out of my recent article on Lilydale which didn’t really fit into the story that well. We wanted to get to the punchline of having the medium identify Taibbi and Randi as spirits around me before boring people with too much of the minutiae, even if some of it was kind of funny/interesting.
In the mid-19th century, three sisters from a sleepy upstate NY community managed to convince the world that they could communicate with the dead. Late in their lives, two of the Fox sisters demonstrated how they pulled off this fraud (one of them simply cracked the knuckle in her big toe). Unfortunately, their confession wasn’t enough to change the minds of true “spirit world” believers, and the legend continues to the present. So does the tradition of bilking the gullible.
Schadenfreude isn’t even the best word to describe what you feel when you hear about cases like these. It’s a very specific kind of schadenfreude: one where you know that the subject’s irrational beliefs somehow shaped their own downfall, so that their own life becomes a case study against the very worldview they had adopted. We’re all happy that Hitler killed himself in the end, but how much sweeter would it have been if rumors of him being part Jewish had sent him to his own gas chambers? Clearly, that would have been awesome. So let’s look at some cases like that.
Sylvia Browne recently trolled Orange County and the local presswere successfully baited into giving her free advertising for her new book about how she lived in “two worlds.”
“I want people to know that I’m a real person,” Browne says of her motivation to write her new memoir.
Oh, and also the money. GIMME GIMME GIMME!!
Atheist Hobos 