Froggy went a courtin’ in India

I started reading a book this morning called The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking by Matthew Hutson and so far it looks like it’ll be interesting. The point of the book is to outline how everyone, no matter if religious or atheist, will have odd beliefs that defy logic. This reminded me of an article that I read last week about a rain bringing ritual in India:

Farmers in Berhampur, India have staged a ‘frog wedding’ in an attempt to bring rain to the region.

After weeks of intense, dry heat, residents decided to carry out the age-old ritual, which is believed to please the rain gods.

A full Hindu wedding ceremony took place at a local temple, as attendees blew trumpets and sang songs.

The frog ‘couple’ were adorned with flowers and tinsel as locals chanted Hindu hymns and farmers put colourful streaks of powder on the female frog’s head.

It seems the custom may have worked, as reports suggest that the current weather in Berhampur is stormy with “100% chance of precipitation”.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? So does the notion that a person’s belongings retain an essence of the person long after they’ve died but people will still revere trinkets and clothing and upright pianos if we think someone important once owned or touched them.

We just seem geared toward making room in their heads for any and all kind of nonsense. I suppose that’s what makes us human. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do all we can to be aware of the absurdities of it, though. The more we know of the reasons why we react like we do, the more we can do to consciously override the worst of it. Assuming people have reached the point where they want to…

Jesus watches you pee outside and judges you

I’ve been waiting for another case of pareidolia and, by no surprise, the Daily Mail delivers Jesus appearing in the grit and crumble on the side of a take-away Chinese restaurant.

Mr Ridley, 39, immediately took a photograph of the bizarre sight outside the Mayho Chinese Takeaway.

He said: ‘We were a little drunk at the time and went to get something to eat.

‘We were waiting for our meal outside when we saw it.

‘It was Jesus looking right at us, we were shocked and couldn’t believe it. ‘It’s a miracle!

‘The best thing about it is the face is actually facing the direction of St Luke’s Church so it looks like it is supposed to be there.

‘Since I took the picture, we have shown it to loads of people and all of them can see it instantly.

‘It is amazing and they can’t believe it.’

I wonder if they tell their friends they’re looking at Jesus, or if their friends come to that (silly) conclusion without prompting. People always seem willing to believe it’s Jesus.

Side note, I was listening to a Skeptics Guide podcast a while back that mentioned something called audio paredolia. Quoting what Steven Novella wrote about it later:

Skeptics love talking about pareidolia, whether visual or audio, because it is right in the sweet spot of the skeptical skill set – understanding why people often come to dubious and even bizarre conclusions because they fail to understand the nature of the human mind. It’s also fun and easily demonstrated, and so it makes an excellent skeptical lesson – your brain can be fooled, you can be fooled, and in order to properly interpret this one needs only to understand a little bit about how our brains work. Our brain actively process sensory input, making many assmptions, and forcing fits to recognized patterns. Our brains do not give a truly objective and accurate representation of the world. It give a human one – full of pattern recognition – sometimes real, sometimes forced.

Also in there is a link to a video of a group of singers performing a gospel tune of some kind. The subtitles provided don’t match what they actually say, but what it could sound like they’re saying. What it sounds like they’re saying is nothing you’d expect…

I like this headline: “Jesus: Fast food for the masses”

People line up during mass to receive the Communion wafers intended to be the body of Jesus. They get served pretty quick and the “food” doesn’t sit very long on the tongue, so how very true.

Not quite what the writer of the piece (going by the pseudonym of Titus Aurelius) meant to imply, probably, but it works for a good example of what the piece is actually about: cognitive dissonance:

Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting cognitions (e.g., ideas, beliefs, values, emotional reactions) simultaneously. In a state of dissonance, people may feel surprise, dread, guilt, anger, or embarrassment. In our day to day existence we are constantly bombarded by stimuli and through various processes filtered by our frame of reference, we reach closure.

The process we use to reach the closure is what defines you as a person. It is your morals and values residing in your frame of reference that is instrumental in the resolution. The question that begs answering then is, “How much information do you feed your frame of reference?”

One of the effects of cognitive dissonance is that people tend to get mired in the teachings they received as children, simply because the introduction of new information into the frame of reference will lead to dissonance.

Any logical adult should scoff at the notion of transubstantiation but Catholic kids are told that the wafer miraculously becomes the actual body of Christ once ingested and many will continue to believe that well into adulthood no matter how scientifically improbable the whole notion is. It’s spiritual alchemy. There are a lot of other impossible ideas religious folk are expected to swallow and mentally change into facts and reality: the six thousand year old earth, Noah’s Ark, Jonah surviving in a whale, etc. The bible is jam packed with stories that any skeptical person could easily discount after a few minutes of research. The work’s been done, and yet so many can still turn a blind eye and believe the “words of God” instead of the words of the educated. Other believers can put a lot of pressure on a person to remain true to what’s written in there, especially if it’s parents or spouses.

So the fear of dissonance, coupled with a possible rejection of parental approval and even societal rejection is a great deterrent in broadening one’s horizons. This leads the religious mind to conceive of belief as a mechanism to resolve cognitive dissonance, but each injection of belief regress the dissonance one level deeper (postponing it) and each regression effectively gets pushed back into the recesses of the memory where it enjoys a blissful state of non-participation.

The rest of the article delves into examples where Christianity requires creating a partition in the brain to keep the logical, rational, scientific factual area to one side and not let it leak over into the spiritual, faithful, part required to believe every fanciful, mystical thing.

One example is the sheer number of contradictions in there involving the “facts” of Jesus’ life. He also brings up something called Preterism, an early Christian belief that the end had already come as Christ supposedly fortold, and a belief later Catholics and Protestants debated. I’ll quote from Wikipedia:

Christian preterists believe that the Tribulation was a divine judgment visited upon the Jews for their sins, including rejection of Jesus as the promised Messiah. It occurred entirely in the past, around 70 AD when the armed forces of the Roman Empire destroyed Jerusalem and its temple.

A preterist discussion of the Tribulation has its focus on the Gospels, in particular the prophetic passages in Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21, the Olivet discourse, rather than on the Apocalypse or Book of Revelation. (Preterists apply much of the symbolism in the Revelation to Rome, the Cæsars, and their persecution of Christians, rather than to the Tribulation upon the Jews.)

Remember Harold Camping? He was the opposite of a preterist. He was fully convinced, and convinced thousands of radio listeners around the world, that the end of the world would come last year, with the great Rapture occurring in May and the destruction of the world in October. You’ll notice we’re all still here.

The article goes on with more examples from the series of miracles credited to Christ like Lazarus, walking on water, feeding a crowd with two fish, etc.; and the stories that led to people truly believing that Jesus wasn’t just a son of God like every other Jew but on par with God in a divine holy trinity.

It is therefore my contention that the truth is too much effort to even comprehend, and that the “whole” is accepted and used as a vehicle for religious equilibrium where the “whole” usually consists of an à la carte menu as listed and supported by various Bible verses.

This contention is supported by the millions of Christians that are blissfully ignorant of the individual levels and happily live their lives in “unshakable truth” with the “whole”.

I think the trouble is that truth isn’t easy to come by. We are a gullible species. We’re easily tricked by our own brains and eyes on a daily basis. That’s what makes pareidolia and other optical illusions so awesome. We can be fooled so easily. And we learn to trust from a very early age; we have to in order to survive. We have to trust our parents implicitly when they tell us what’s good to eat and what will hurt us. We have an innate trust of authority and once we decide someone is an authority, we tend to extend the trust and forget how easily we can be fooled, foolishly believing we’re not at risk of getting tricked somehow. It’s why we fall for scams and con artists. We don’t always think critically about what we’re told and weigh it against what we’ve already experienced and know to be true. We can’t jam two of every kind of animal into a boat, but Noah supposedly did. “It was a miracle.” How’s that a solution to the physical and geological flaws in that story? How can anyone be content with that. And yet so many are.

As far as I can tell, I’ve always been atheist. Even as a kid I saw the flaw in the whole Christianity/Catholic thing during Easter. What weekend did he really die on? Was it in March or April? How come his death weekend bounced around every year? I never asked anyone about that but I know I wondered. And what did rabbits and chocolate eggs have to do with it? It didn’t make any sense and as a biblical story it still doesn’t. Using it as a roundabout way of acknowledging the pagan roots of an Equinox celebration does. Do the parents of Christian kids tell them that history of Easter? I have no idea.

Following a religion sometimes means ignoring facts and realities and taking everything one’s told on faith, no matter how ridiculous it’ll seem to outsiders. Religion isn’t alone in that, though. Look to anyone who believes UFOs land regularly or Big Foot will be found or homeopathy works or Obama isn’t a true American. We are a gullible species willing to believe anything should we really put our minds to it.

It’s a good thing there’s a skeptical movement gaining some ground, at least. It’s good to know there are people doing everything they can to try and burst those gullibubbles before it’s too late. On that note, I have a Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast to catch up on…

Old bones equal proof the bible is true!

At least, as far as Fox News is concerned. Here’s their headline: Mysterious bones may belong to John the Baptist

There’s no way to be sure, of course, as there are no confirmed pieces of John the Baptist to compare to the fragments of bone. But the sarcophagus holding the bones was found near a second box bearing the name of St. John and his feast date (also called a holy day) of June 24. Now, new radiocarbon dating of the collagen in one of the bones pegs its age to the early first century, consistent with the New Testament and Jewish histories of John the Baptist’s life.

What if the box was just owned or built by the dead guy and some family member thought it’d be nice to put it in with him? Isn’t that a more likely scenario than claiming we “just happened” to find John the Baptist? What a miracle! I’m thinking not.

“We got some dates that are very interesting indeed,” study researcher Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford told LiveScience. “They suggest that the human bone is all from the same person, it’s from a male, and it has a very high likelihood of an origin in the Near East,” or Middle East where John the Baptist would have lived.

Him, and how many thousands of other people?

Historical research by Oxford professor Georges Kazan suggests that relics supposedly from John the Baptist were on the move out of Jerusalem by the fourth century. Many of these artifacts were shuttled through the ancient city of Constantinople and may well have been gifted to the Sveti Ivan monastery from there.

None of this proves that the bones belonged to a historical figure named John the Baptist, but researchers haven’t been able to rule out the possibility, Higham said. Their study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but a program detailing the research will be aired on the United Kingdom National Geographic Channel on Sunday (June 17). National Geographic funded the research.

So this is not Fox’s fault? I thought National Geographic put more emphasis on facts over sensationalism but maybe I’ve been living under a rock or something. I’m already aware that The History Channel offers up Pawn Stars and American Pickers. And it looks like the Learning Channel long since gave up on teaching people anything useful. Toddlers and Tiaras? Say Yes to the Dress? 19 Kids and Counting? Give me a break. And I see NatGeo offers up its own share of WTF TV, too. It’s all a ratings game, I guess.

Linkskrieg! (First pass)

It’s occurred to me that I’ve collected far more links than I have time to write about, so here’s a batch of things I did want to bring up at some point but never did. I may flesh out some of these at some point, though. Time will tell.

1. The Codex Gigas:

Lore behind the codex suggests the book was the effort of one monk’s labor in a single night. After breaking the rules of the monastery, he’d been sentenced to a slow death – he’d be walled up in a room of bricks. The night before his sentence would be executed, the monk decided to write his last work, an evil book written on animal skins. He realized that finishing the book before imprisonment would be impossible, so he made a Faustian deal at midnight with Lucifer to finish the book, with the devil signing the document by painting a portrait of himself on the 290th leaf.

2. A pastor’s controversial book on sex:

The book was written by Driscoll and his wife, Grace, to, in Mark’s words, “compel married couples to have important conversations about important things.”

In the first half of the book, the Driscolls discuss their own sexual issues using the lessons they learned to discuss how to reignite a marriage whose flame may have gone out. The book’s second half, which is getting most of the negative attention, discusses sex in detail.

In response, religious scholars and writers have blasted the Driscolls’ work on a number of grounds ranging from the logistical to the biblical.

3. Apocalypse tourism:

The Mexican government is expecting 52 million tourists to visit the five regions — Chiapas, Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Campeche, over the next 12 months, says the Latin American Herald Tribune.

According to goverment reports, the boom is part of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s tourism campaign: “Mundo Maya 2012,” to promote Mexico as a unique destination.

4. Ancient document claims dozens visited Jesus, not just three:

The translation of the mysterious ‘Revelation of the Magi’ describes how the three wise men actually numbered over a dozen and came from a faraway land, possibly China.

(Since the bible never specifies how many wise men visited, I don’t see this as news, personally. Straight Dope dealt with this years ago.)

5. “Miracle” survival of a kid with flesh eating disease:

The pope on Monday signed a decree authenticating the miracle, clearing the way for Tekakwitha to be canonized as America’s first Roman Catholic indigenous saint.

“There is no doubt in me or my husband’s mind that a miracle definitely took place,” Jake’s mother, Elsa Finkbonner, told msnbc.com on Tuesday. “There were far too many things that could have and should have gone wrong with his illness. The doctors went through every avenue they could to save his life and he survived. It’s a miracle that all of the other things that could have gone wrong, didn’t.”

6. Utah’s festive season vs atheist billboards:

“We’re glad to share the Christmas season with Christians, but they have stolen Christmas, and it is not the birthday of Jesus,” said Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Wisconsin-based organization. “It’s a natural event, the winter solstice. … The shortest day of the year has been celebrated for millennia in the Northern Hemisphere with decorations and lights and celebrations. We just think it’s important to celebrate reason and celebrate reality.”

She added that the foundation has heard there’s a feeling of claustrophobia among non-Mormons and nonbelievers in Salt Lake City. “There’s a great dominance there, so we want to be there, too.”

7. Evidence from Dead Sea dirt may verify some bible tales:

Ben-Avraham, head of the Minerva Dead Sea Research Center at Tel Aviv University in Israel, noted that this is important because, when it comes to earthquakes, the last century in the Middle East was unusually quiet.

“People don’t take this into consideration,” Ben-Avraham said, “but we have mighty earthquakes.”

Looking farther back, one of the seismically active eras revealed by the core samples appears to have been about 4,000 years ago, he said.

“If you believe the biblical chronology, this is roughly [the time of] Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said. During this period, according to the Book of Genesis, God “rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed all.”

8. British PM and Dawkins disagree on need for faith schools:

David Cameron has said atheist campaigner Richard Dawkins “just doesn’t really get it” on the issue of faith schools.

The Prime Minister made the comments as he answered questions from well-known figures for a Guardian newspaper article. Mr Cameron said he thinks faith schools are “very often good schools” and he noted that the church had provided “good schools long before the state got involved”.

Dawkins would rather see more schools promoting secularism and critical thinking instead of traditions and indoctrination.

“New” Mayan art contradicts 2012 deadline

Good news for those who might have been worried: archeologists in Guatemala have announced the discovery of a mural there that suggests the earth’s inhabitants still have another 7000 years to prosper.

Working with epigrapher David Stuart and archaeologist and artist Heather Hurst, the researchers noticed several barely visible hieroglyphic texts, painted and etched along the east and north walls of the room.

One is a lunar table, and the other is a “ring number”—something previously known only from much later Maya books, where it was used as part of a backward calculation in establishing a base date for planetary cycles. Nearby is a sequence of numbered intervals corresponding to key calendrical and planetary cycles.

The calculations include dates some 7,000 years in the future, adding to evidence against the idea that the Maya thought the world would end in 2012—a modern myth inspired by an ancient calendar that depicts time starting over this year.

“We keep looking for endings,” expedition leader Saturno said in a statement. “The Maya were looking for a guarantee that nothing would change. It’s an entirely different mindset.”

Bad news for “the usually picturesque and tranquil Pyrenean village of Bugarach.” Their village had been picked as the potential Noah’s Ark for scared hippies the world over. Back in March, the Independent reported that

Upwards of 100,000 people are thought to be planning a trip to the mountain, 30 miles west of Perpignan, in time for 21 December, and opportunistic entrepreneurs are shamelessly cashing in on the phenomenon. While American travel agents have been offering special, one-way deals to witness the end of the world, a neighbouring village, Saint-Paul de Fenouillet, has produced a wine to celebrate the occasion.

Jean-Pierre Delord, the perplexed mayor of Bugarach, has flagged up the situation to the French authorities, requesting they scramble the army to the tiny village for fear of a mass suicide. It has also caught the attention of France’s sect watchdog, Miviludes.

It’s believed by these people that aliens have a spacecraft inside Pic de Bugarach and that they have the capability to “beam away” anyone in the vicinity on that day. No wonder there’s some worry. Nobody wants to see another Heaven’s Gate happen. (Their website is still up and running, by the way.)

Old news: faith healing event ends in tragedy, death

It wasn’t directly the fault of Pastor Chris Oyakhilome of Nigeria, but he was the person 150,000 people had traveled to see in Cape Town back in March. He has a reputation as a miraculous faith healer so people who should be going to doctors – or have but don’t like their diagnoses or prognoses – are putting their faith in his ability to heal. One man in the audience during the three day Pentecostal show died, another pastor by the name of Simon Williams. The fifty-six year old

was taken from hospital intensive care to the event by his family. He collapsed and died from renal failure inside the stadium.

Dr Wayne Smith, head of disaster medicine for Cape Town, said he treated about 30 patients in the stadium’s medical centre and sent 16 to hospital.

“Some of them had travelled long distances to get there, they had ongoing medical issues and were in a lot of pain,” he said.

Pastor Chris has a few black marks on him already. In 2008, he was accused of protecting another pastor from his church who might have murdered a girl. He’s been suspected of money laundering to the tune of 35 million dollars and charges exorbitant attendance fees for special events at his Christ Embassy church. He, along with a lot of other evangelicals in the country, preach the prosperity gospel, and the poor are giving him upwards of 30% of their available money in the hopes that God will turn things around for them. Of course, the truth is that only Christ Embassy and the pastors in it get to prosper and enjoy a windfall.

So, back to this faith healing business. It’s understandable why people with little hope of improvement (in health or finances) would try something like this but this shit doesn’t work. James Randi helped expose Peter Popoff as a fraud back in 1987 but he’s still kicking around and still fleecing otherwise intelligent people on a weekly basis. “Desperation changes the balance.”

If you would tell them not to give their money to Peter Popoff, what would you tell them to do instead? Would they be better off giving that $100 to the bank that’s about to foreclose on their house anyway, or to the landlord about to evict them? If we have no alternative solution to offer, then our best arguments may boil down to this: false hope is expensive, and hopelessness is free. That’s not a strong selling point.

People need hope. We have a powerful need to feel like we have some control over our fate, even if it is an illusion. That’s why those with the most serious illnesses spend the most money on quack therapies. And it’s why we can’t save desperate people from the likes of Peter Popoff through debunking alone—we need to offer a positive alternative that meets their needs.

When people really don’t know which way to turn, any wrong direction can feel like the right one. Maybe it seems like there isn’t time to look into alternatives, or it doesn’t occur to them to look for different kind of aid or support, or they think there won’t be anything even remotely close to what they need, save a miracle. I don’t know. I just hope that if I’m ever in dire straits I’ll look for real help rather than put faith in something ultimately useless.

The One Minion Search Party – back in the saddle again

Now that my hours have altered at work, blogging doesn’t require setting aside the first few hours of my morning (5-8am) for hard core writing sessions. I didn’t mind when I was single because I had no after work life to speak of, aside from the odd Freethinker or Skeptics outing, which I could write about the next day (and should get back into doing that. Update the Freethinker page more often, too). I was fond of early nights and early mornings. The Man’s a bit of a night owl, though, so that’s required me to manually reset my internal clock and remain awake past 10pm. It took some doing, let me tell you.

Anyway, this renewed interest in my blog has got me looking at my search results again. I used to enjoy setting aside a post on Wednesdays to feature one or more of them. A few from the past week, then.

once, just once i’d like to be able to land someplace and say: “behold, i am the archangel gabriel.”

Ah yes, that’s one of my favourite quotes from Star Trek TOS. Good old Bones McCoy. Stargate built its main enemy out of a similar premise. The alien race called the Goa’uld were advanced enough to make ignorant humans think they were gods and take serious advantage of the misunderstanding. Arthur C. Clarke made a good point once, too. “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” Near enough, I suppose. Weren’t there tribes in the world wary of cameras because they were convinced a camera could capture a soul? Still wary, apparently. Might have some truth to it, though.. look at how unreal some of those celebrities start to seem. They’re around cameras all the time and of them don’t really seem to be human anymore.. plastic, soulless people with stiletto heels and silicone lips…

was helen keller a satanist

Apparently Keller did dabble in some spiritualism but given the time she was living, she was hardly alone in that. It was the in thing. Christians are torn as to her value. If you believe the Jesus is savior website, she was a devil worshiper. Swedenborg Foundation Press, on the other hand, offers up a documentary featuring her positive reactions to the teachings of the “visionary sage and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg.” Can’t say I’ve heard of him, but Wikipedia fixes that quickly enough.

Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist. In 1741, at the age of fifty-three, he entered into a spiritual phase[5] in which he eventually began to experience dreams and visions beginning on Easter weekend April 6, 1744. This culminated in a spiritual awakening, whereupon he claimed he was appointed by the Lord to write a heavenly doctrine to reform Christianity. He claimed that the Lord had opened his spiritual eyes, so that from then on he could freely visit heaven and hell, and talk with angels, demons and other spirits.

He said that the Last Judgement had already occurred, in 1757, although only visible in the spiritual world, where he had witnessed it…

So Harold Camping was 254 years too late.

was john lennon a satanist

My blog is third on Google’s list when this question is posed because I pondered this question way back in 2009 and it’s still a hot one.

I don’t get what makes the Beatles so wonderful, but I don’t think I’d ever say the devil’s in the details. Listening to their music today, there’s maybe a couple songs I could say I liked but overall their style doesn’t thrill me. I don’t know if I would have been insane for them had I been a teen in the 1960s. My tastes lean more into motown[sic] and doo-wop.

And time with the Man has altered that impression of Lennon and the rest of them. Hell, I’ve even watched Yellow Submarine now and A Hard Day’s Night. We tried watching Help!, too, but the DVD had some issues. Another time maybe.

doctor who christian review

I top the list for this question, too. Yay me.

how i found the lost atlantis paul schliemann

This is mildly interesting. The grandson of Heinrich Schliemann, excavator of Troy (and scandalous thief of relics), claimed his granddad had bequeathed that his successors do all they could to find proof of Atlantis. In 1912 Paul published an article in the New York American, a precursor to such famous quality newspapers as the National Enquirer and Weekly World News, stating he’d done just that.

this turned out to be a flash-in-the-pan hoax. There was no follow-up book, and Paul Schliemann dropped out of sight as quickly as he emerged. The promised artifacts were never produced, and scholars who worked closely with Heinrich Schliemann confirmed that he had never demonstrated any interest in Atlantis whatsoever.

A close read of this article reveals many howlers that even an armchair archeologist will spot instantly. For instance, “…a collection of objects excavated from Tiahuanaca, in Central America.” He misspells Tiahuanaco, and it’s in South America. Or how about “…engraved with a sentence in Phoenician hieroglyphics”. The Phoenicians used a phonetic writing system, not hieroglyphs. And “the Egyptian and the American pyramids [were] covered with a thick coating of smooth and shining cement”, which is completely untrue. Some of the Egyptian pyramids were originally covered with casing stones; none of the American pyramids were encased, let alone with cement.

People just love to believe Atlantis is still to be found out there somewhere. I get such a kick out of that. Any underwater ruin of a city and people try to sell it as a possible site of Atlantis. Natural catastrophe or hubris? It probably didn’t really exist, so why give a crap!?

I think that will do for this round. I’ll try to remember I rebooted this series and post again next Wednesday.

Excorcism in Saskatoon? Say it ain’t so!

Exorcism seems like one of those quirky things that should only exist in the realm of fiction. Sadly, since many people insist on believing a god can exert power over a populace, and hold the opposing belief that demons can manifest a similar ability to wreak havoc, it means many people can believe an exorcism will solve that problem. Including people in the somewhat metropolitan Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Via CBC, the headline– Exorcist expertise sought after Saskatoon ‘possession’:

According to church officials, a priest was called to a Saskatoon home by a woman who said her uncle showed signs of being possessed by the devil. The woman believed a priest’s blessing could help the distraught man.

At the home, the priest encountered a shirtless middle-aged man, slouched on a couch and holding his head in his hands.

The man had used a sharp instrument to carve the word Hell on his chest.

When the priest entered the room, the man spoke in the third person, saying “He belongs to me. Get out of here,” using a strange voice.

The priest told CBC News that he had never seen anything like this and was concerned enough to call police, for safety reasons.

Why wouldn’t the first assumption be mental illness? There are people who’ll self mutilate and hell, my teacher in grade 3 talked to us in the third person all the time. “Mr. Y. would like you to open your Language Arts books now…” (That is third person, right? Perhaps I need a Language Arts refresher.) I went to a catholic school and nobody went to find a priest in the hopes of ridding him of demons. He was just weird.

He said he then blessed the man, saying he belonged to the good side, to Jesus. With that, the man’s voice returned to normal for a short time.

The unusual voice returned when police arrived, and the priest continued to bless the man until he resumed a more normal composure.

So the possibility that the guy was doing all this just for a bit of attention isn’t worth considering? Over the top, granted. He could have just stripped down and flashed his neighbours or masturbated at the library (as some have been known to do).

CBC News followed up on the incident to learn if an exorcism had been performed, but church officials said a formal exorcism did not happen.

Bishop Don Bolen explained that the ritual of exorcism is a very structured exercise. He said it was not clear if the Saskatoon man was possessed or experiencing a mental breakdown.

Well, that’s something, at least. Good of him to admit there’s difficulty telling the difference. Of course, it requires the belief that possession is actually possible, sadly. The guy should be treated by medical professionals to see if there’s something they can do for him that will rid him of whatever delusions he’s living under. The problem I see with the “very structured exercise” is the need for said exorcist to buy into the delusion, too, and cater to it. It’s like people who truly believe dowsing rods work, or that they have psychic ability.

“I would think there are perhaps more stories about exorcisms in Hollywood than there are on the ground,” Bolen said. “But the Catholic Church teaches that there is a force of darkness, and that God is stronger than that darkness.”

Church leaders in Saskatoon have been considering whether Saskatoon needs a trained exorcist.

Sorry, but that’s just stupid. Stop encouraging people into believing these dark forces exist. This is the 21st century. Lay that superstition to rest already. Encourage the power of prayer, because you would anyway, but it would do so much more good to push these people toward medical help instead of engaging in spiritual fluffery as a supposed solution. If exorcism does anything, it does it like a placebo would; by tricking the mind into thinking that shit works.

Regina has no expert in this field, the article goes on, but mentions Saskatoon’s retired Rev. Joseph Bisztyo who’d been trained in the “art.”

Anglican priest Colin Clay, who has worked with Bisztyo, told CBC News the topic of exorcism touches on questions that go back centuries.

The issues revolve around the nature of evil and how to respond to people who claim they have the devil in them.

“The churches have to respond,” Clay said. “And they’ll either do it by saying — some churches will say — ‘Well that’s the devil, and the devil is at work in the world and we’ve got to deal with it,’ or the churches will say, ‘Well there’s certainly evil in the world, whether there’s an actual Satan or devil, there’s certainly evil in the world, and it has a terrible effect on people’s lives,’ and so we’ve got to respond to it.”

Clay said he does not dismiss how evil can affect people.

People in general are capable of tremendous good and extraordinary wickedness. Sometimes the same person can achieve both within a half hour, I’m sure. I don’t think wickedness ought to be explained using demonic possession as a possible reason for it, though. If some churches are still pushing that scenario, why aren’t the others speaking out against it more often? Why do ideas like that still persist? What use do they have beyond keeping people tense and scared? Better church attendance records when people think the devil might get them in their sleep? Or their children? Lunacy. Wouldn’t education would protect people better than Armor of God pajamas?

I hope it’s decided that an exorcism expert is unnecessary for the city. Surely there are better uses for their time and money.

Another final resting place for Jesus found: in a tortilla

Yep. I believe this is true more than I believe the tomb story written about earlier.

David Sandoval says he was about to chow down on Ash Wednesday dinner last week when he saw Jesus in one of his mom’s hand-baked tortillas.

“I passed it to my mom, and she said, ‘oh my god,’” said Sandoval.

What made the find even more astonishing was that it was the first day of Lent.

He went and posted the picture on Facebook, and comments started flooding in.

“Everybody has been able to see it. They agree, and they’re calling it a miracle.”

Yes, of course they would. Astonishing.

Hardly.

I’ve showed off my french toast Gandalf before. If this tortilla somehow proves Jesus was real, my french toast proves Gandalf was real. Praise J.R.R. Tolkien for revealing the truth!