Hemant Mehta's Blog, page 1898

Reverend Who Offers Exorcisms Over Skype Explains His Methods on The Daily Show

Earlier this year, we learned that televangelist Rev. Bob Larson was offering exorcisms over Skype.

For some reason, Larson thought it’d be a good idea to explain himself to The Daily Show‘s Jessica Williams:

The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

As if Larson wasn’t already a walking punchline…

(via Atheist Revolution)

The “World’s Most Dangerous Church”? If You Go There, You’re Guaranteed to Get High

For most people in the West, going to church is preceded by getting into their car and rolling up to their preferred house of God.

It’s a little different at this church in Ethiopia. Going to it means defying death.

The church, which is dug into the side of a cliff, sits roughly 2,500 feet above the ground. To access it, you must scale a portion of the cliff, walk on numerous narrow bridges and finally hop skip and jump your way into the entrance.

Like so:

I’d visit, but they’d have to helicopter me in (and out). Photographer Philip Lee Harvey, however, was undaunted by the climb and the nerve-wracking “bridges” that are literally an old dead tree laid across a dizzying abyss. I don’t think he found God up there, but at least daredevils like him are rewarded with lovely frescoes and magnificent views.

Pedi-Cure? Virus-Eating Onions On Your Feet Fight Illness, Cleanse Your Blood! (Also, I Have a Bridge To Sell You)

Look at that picture. No, that’s not a nasty foot infection. It’s kind of the opposite: a slice of healing red onion. Behold the lowly onion’s amazing natural powers, says Andreea Zoia, a popular fashion model and actress from Dubai.

Almost as soon as Ms. Zoia placed the onion on her sole and held it in place with her sock,

I started feeling good. I mean really good! I felt tingly, like my blood was being cleansed. It was so cool!

And no wonder!

Placing them on the bottom of the foot gives them access to your internal organs through meridians in your body. The onion can be directly delivered. Trans-dermal delivery (on the skin) is one of the best delivery mechanisms, as it will bypass the stomach acids and go directly into the blood. The bottom of the feet and the forearm are great places to put high powered foods and essential oils into the body.

If you have no onions, never fear:

Sliced garlic on the bottom of the feet will work nicely too.

Repeating astonishing assertions made by others — claims I’ve lately seen circulating on social media again — Zoia is kind enough to explain onions’ healing properties, an effort for which she received almost a quarter of a million “likes” on Facebook, as well as 772,000 “shares”:

Onions are known to absorb toxins. In fact, during the days of the Plague in England, folks would keep chopped onions around to absorb toxins and clean the air. This helped protect them, against getting the plague.

That’s great news. Now maybe we won’t even need pastor TB Joshua‘s Ebola-fighting holy water!

Continues Zoia:

NEVER SAVE AN ONION. It will absorb all the toxins in the air of your refrigerator. Eat that and you eat the toxins. Instead: Chop your left over onion, put it on a plate and keep it in your kitchen as a natural air purifier. I do this all the time! If someone is ill, place a chopped onion on the night stand, next to the bed. They’ll be better in the morning.

Others wholeheartedly agree. With what I imagine was a derisive snort, a skeptical Facebook friend of mine posted the onion-as-a-curative story a few days ago, and a woman called (appropriately) Faith confirmed the account he mocked – as did Matt, another commenter:

Faith: I have been putting cut onion in my disabled son’s room 4 many years in the changes of season’s, ta prevent illness as he is a high risk! And from the time I started doin’ it ? He has not fallen victim ta any flu ! He cannot get the flu. Shot, so I had ta try anything I could and found this bout 7 years ago.

Matt: actually… onion is known to be a sponge for bacteria… some people will cut one open and leave it sitting out in the kitchen to absorb bacteria circulating in the air.. and the feet are one of the areas of the human body which is most often covered and not exposed and allowed to breath.. it is also one of the areas of the body with readily expels toxins held within the blood stream through sweat… “witches” used to use onion in these ways as well.. its really not as far fetched as it may sound.. once an onion is cut open.. it shouldn’t really be saved to be used at a later date.. because the second time consumed it will contain much more than you bargained for…

Matt refers to witches to emphasize that he knows what he’s talking about. Witches, people! How can you not love that?

More importantly, why do those medical fancypants at hospitals all over the world not listen to his sage, witch-based advice?

Maybe it’s because of this, from Dr. Ruth MacDonald, the Chair and Professor of the Department of Food Science & Human Nutrition at Iowa State University:

[O]nions do not absorb bacteria. The idea that a vegetable would attract and suck into itself bacteria from the air is not even logical. The onion may turn black because it would eventually rot from both cell breakdown events and bacterial contamination if you left it out, not because it absorbs germs. Onions and garlic are slightly acidic which could have antibacterial effects if you rubbed the juice on things, but these are much less effective than bleach or chemical antibiotics.

Or because of this, from the Wall Street Journal:

Biologists say it’s highly implausible that onions could attract flu virus as a bug zapper traps flies. Viruses require a living host to replicate and can’t propel themselves out of a body and across a room.

Or because of this, from Hoax-Slayer:

[T]he suggestion that onion strapped to your feet can, in some miraculous and uncanny way, make connections to your internal organs, draw out and absorb toxins and bacteria thereby “cleaning” your blood, and cure your illnesses simply defies logic and common sense. Perhaps, if a person really believes that the remedy will work, the placebo effect may kick in and the person may feel some imagined benefit. But other than that, the health benefits of putting onion on your feet are precisely zero.

If only there was some folk remedy that effectively countered the spreading miasma of utter malarkey.

Canada’s Supreme Court Hesitates on Municipal Government Prayer Question

Maybe you remember our previous coverage of the Saguenay prayer case.

To recap quickly: Alain Simoneau, citizen of Saguenay (Quebec), raised a challenge against his municipal government’s practice of opening public meetings with a prayer (containing references to Almighty God and bracketed on both ends by the Sign of the Cross, a particularly Catholic prayer gesture). Quebec’s human rights tribunal ruled that the rights of non-believers were being violated, the Court of Appeal overturned that decision (because tradition!), and now the case is being decided at the level of the national Supreme Court.

Canadian Supreme Court

But not just yet.

The Supreme Court of Canada has reserved decision in the case following the October 14 hearing (meaning they’ll eventually decide the case, even if they don’t do it immediately), in which supporters of the practice argued that the prayer has not been “an attempt to impose religious worship, or favour one religion over any other — but merely a tradition that reflects the city’s historical ‘cultural’ heritage.” After all, the 2001 census found that Quebec, as a whole, is 83% Catholic, and Saguenay in particular is about 96% Catholic. Add other Christian denominations to the mix, and that figure inches up to 97%.

If religious freedom protections were meant to protect the majority rule, those statistics would be damning for everybody else.

The trouble with that argument, however, is that human rights law on the subject of religious freedom is meant to protect the rights of religious minorities, including some 4,000 citizens of Saguenay who do not profess any religion at all.

Lawyers defending Saguenay’s practice essentially argued that non-believers are not entitled to government neutrality on religion, since the trappings of religion and invocations of God appear frequently in Canadian public business, as in parliamentary prayers or judicial oaths. They also invoked references to “the supremacy of God” in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms — a state of affairs that concerns groups like Canadian Secular Alliance, precisely because it is used to defend these sorts of exclusionary actions. (Learn more about the CSA’s push for a secular Charter in this PDF.)

Indeed, lawyer Richard Bergeron invoked the Charter rhetorically in this case, asking: “If the Canadian Constitution has such a reference, then why would a text that has such a reference be unconstitutional?”

Responses from individual Supreme Court justices seem well aware of the merits of Simoneau’s complaint: Justice Rosalie Abella said she had a hard time imagining the invocation had “no religious purpose,” and Justice Richard Wagner dismissed the idea that the Saguenay prayers were inclusive, pointing out the context provided by the Sign of the Cross.

The delay in reaching a decision, then, likely comes from the high stakes of this case. If the Supreme Court chooses to uphold the Tribunal’s original response — that the conscience rights of non-Christians are violated by government prayer — the impact could be felt in municipalities across Canada. Media sources expect that no judgment will be rendered until 2015.

But the justices’ responses suggest that, when it happens, the court just might be on our side.

(Image via Shutterstock)

Christian News Suggests That Teaching Bible Classes in Public Schools Might Be OK… Because It’s a Tradition

Earlier this month, Friendly Atheist featured a story about several public elementary schools in North Carolina that are teaching Bible classes – and about the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s insistence that the school district puts a stop to that.

I just read the remarkable take on that situation over at Christian News. The publication first lays out the facts fairly. But then, three-fourths of the way into the article, author Heather Clark veers into this:

The first textbook used in the American colonies even before the nation’s founding, “The New England Primer,” was largely focused on the Scriptures, and was stated to be popular in colonial schools for at least one hundred years. It used mostly the King James Bible as reference, and spoke much about sin, salvation and proper behavior.

We can probably all be in favor of proper behavior (whatever that term means). Having public schools teach little kids about “sin” and “salvation,” not so much.

In 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed “The Old Deluder Satan Act,” which required that children be taught to read so they could learn to read the Bible.

“In being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, … and that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers in Church and Commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors, it is therefore ordered by this court and the authority thereof, that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall then forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read,” it read in part.

If Christian News tacked on those passages as even a sliver as a defense of what transpired in North Carolina, the effort falls flat. In the mid-1600s, there was no United States, no federal judiciary, and no constitution (much less one sporting an Establishment Clause).

If something was the norm 350 years ago, 35 years ago, or last year, that doesn’t mean it’s legal — or a good idea. The folks at Christian News might want to look up why the good ol’ appeal to tradition is a logical fallacy that ought to be excluded from any argument worth making.

(Image via Shutterstock)

Instead of Building the First Public High School in Morinville (Alberta), They’ll Build a Fourth Catholic One

The growing community of Morinville (Alberta, Canada) has a burgeoning youth population; fully one-quarter of the area’s citizens are under 18. Schools in the area are feeling the pinch, and it’s stirring up a holy controversy around the touchy subject of religious accommodation… or the lack thereof.

You see, Alberta is one of the Canadian provinces that still retains both public and Catholic school boards, a vestige of historical agreements made to appease a wary French-Canadian population who feared the takeover of their culture by English Protestantism if they joined the Confederation. Now, students in Morinville have two school boards vying to serve them.

Both boards recently applied for government funding to build a new school, given the overcrowding in the area’s existing schools: the Catholic board wanted another elementary school, while the public board hoped to create the city’s first secular high school. But when Premier Jim Prentice unveiled plans for the new building, only one was slated for Morinville.

Believe it or not, the new school will be the Catholic one — the city’s fourth Catholic school — despite the fact that the city has no secular secondary school option available once children age out of its single K-7 public school.

As recently as 2011, parents had to petition the Alberta Human Rights Commission for access to any secular option at all. At that time, the city had four Catholic schools and no public schools. Rather than build a new school with state-of-the-art amenities and room for growth, the city converted one of the existing Catholic schools into a public elementary school.

Now the public board is seeking to establish a high school for those young graduates, who will otherwise be forced to transfer into the Catholic system regardless of their religious affiliation when they complete their schooling. This is not an ideal transition for anyone, but it may be especially fraught for the area’s large First Nations and Métis populations, given the history of racist indoctrination and abuse at the hands of Catholic educators in Canada’s residential schools.

If the Catholic school declines to enroll them because of their own overcrowding problem — and the school reserves the right to give preference to Catholics — those students’ only option may be a long bus ride to an out-of-the-way location.

The public board has attempted to add a Grade Eight class to its lone elementary school, but it remains a problematic solution: the building’s infrastructure (such as toilet spaces or drinking fountains) was designed with smaller bodies in mind, and the building lacks purpose-built spaces for certain high-school classes, like science labs, art/drama/dance studios, computer labs, or cooking facilities for food studies.

The Alberta government argues that there is still a chance for Morinville to get its public high school if their application meets government criteria, including specification of a planned site. The public board has countered that it cannot acquire a site without first securing funding, and that it has already worked with government officials — even a former education minister! — to ensure that its proposals are up to snuff. At this point, it’s not entirely clear what more can be done, says public school superintendent Michele Dick.

“All I know is that when they announced 55 schools [to be built], we weren’t on the list,” she told the Edmonton Journal. “And I think that’s a missed opportunity.”

(Image via Shutterstock)

Churches Are Very Good at Dealing with Fear (Seriously)

The video below, part of The Atheist Voice series, discusses how churches are very good at handling fear (seriously):

This is an excerpt from a longer video, which can be seen here.

A rough transcript of the video can be found on the YouTube page in the “About” section.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on the project — more videos will be posted soon — and we’d also appreciate your suggestions as to which questions we ought to tackle next!

And if you like what you’re seeing, please consider supporting this site on Patreon.

The Pagans Are Coming…

Jeremiah Films produced a 13-part (!!!) series on the Pagan Invasion and the horrors of things like Halloween and evolution:

The craziest thing is that they’re still selling this video!

So buy the series, invite some friends over, make some popcorn, sacrifice a small child, and have some fun.

(via Christian Nightmares)

Meth Dealer Hides Drugs in Sacred Heart Jesus Candles (Talk About a Religious High…)

Baton Rouge police officers made a curious discovery Thursday morning. It started with a routine stop of a commercial bus for a traffic violation. A K-9 unit was called in, because, officers told WAFB News, it is common to find contraband smuggled in this type of vehicle.

So what did officers discover?

… [A] suitcase that contained 48 candles of methamphetamine mixed in wax, disguised as candles. Those candles weighed 72 pounds. They also found four larger candles, weighing 41 pounds, containing meth in the wax.

And those candles all looked like this:

Apparently, the smuggler — Texan Jose Antonio Rodriguez-Lara — thought that lugging around a hundred-plus pounds of Jesus candles would go unnoticed. And I’m not even kidding — because this purportedly pious pusher was so confident his plan would work that he left a photograph of himself in one of the bags.

Rodriguez-Lara was arrested and admitted that the candles were his. He now faces charges for “distribution and manufacturing of schedule II drugs.”

Because the answer to “What Would Jesus Do?” is obviously not “meth.”

Judge Suggests Doctors Shouldn’t Impose Their Views on Child Who May Soon Become a Victim of Faith-Based Treatment

Several months ago, I posted about Makayla Sault (below), an 11-year-old with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The disease is treatable with two years of tough chemotherapy and has a nearly 90% survival rate… but Makayla no longer wanted to continue the chemo and her Ojibwe/First Nations parents were more than happy to oblige, seeking out useless faith-based treatments instead.

Makayla was allowed to quit the chemo, but we learned earlier this month that her condition had worsened.

And to make the issue even more on the forefront of people’s minds, it turned out another First Nations girl was in the same position — she would benefit from chemo, but she didn’t want to go through with it for cultural reasons.

This week, Justice Gethin Edward of the Ontario Court of Justice said that the doctors were in the wrong:

[Edward] suggested physicians essentially want to “impose our world view on First Nation culture.” The idea of a cancer treatment being judged on the basis of statistics that quantify patients’ five-year survival rate is “completely foreign” to aboriginal ways, he said.

“Even if we say there is not one child who has been cured of acute lymphoblastic leukemia by traditional methods, is that a reason to invoke child protection?” asked Justice Edward, noting that the girl’s mother believes she is doing what is best for her daughter.

YES! The girl needs protection! As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. What the mother believes ought to be irrelevant; there’s no evidence that her methods will help her daughter. Meanwhile, the chemo has a very good success rate. This is a child who needs protection from her own family. If she were an adult and chose this route for herself, it’d be a very different story.

If you need a sense of how warped the anti-science community is, look no further than local resident Laurie Hill:

“There’s a fear of [aboriginal remedies] or denial of it. If things can’t be quantified or qualified, to them it’s irrelevant,” said Ms. Hill, as she shopped at Ancestral Voices Healing Centre Thursday. “Who are they [doctors] to say she will make it with their treatments. Just because they have a degree, that makes them more knowledgeable?”

YES! The people who have specialized expertise in medicine are more knowledgeable than you when it comes to medicine.

It’s one thing that Hill is an embarrassment; it’s another that the judge agrees with her.

Maybe this issue would be more clear-cut if these parents were more actively hurting their child. Then, the child’s interests would surely come first. Just because the parents have the best of intentions in this case shouldn’t change the result: the child needs proper medical help, not feel-good cures that do nothing at best and likely make the condition even worse.

(Thanks to Stephen for the link. Large portions of this article were posted earlier)