Mike Myers vs. Hinduism. Deepak Chopra vs Skeptics.

Mike Myers, comedian of Austin Powers fame, is apparently ruffling some feathers amongst Hindus with his upcoming film “The Love Guru.” I tend to be somewhat sympathetic to the concerns of religious people when films appear to ridicule or caricature their beliefs: particularly religious minorities that aren’t well understood in the U.S. to begin with. My sympathies don’t extend to complaining about the films themselves of course (religion shouldn’t be any more or less open to fair game ridicule than anything else): I can just understand the concerns about the negative cultural results.

It’s one thing to mock a culture we are all intimately familiar with: we have a solid basis of understanding that comedy can enhance or even challenge. It’s quite another thing when the only thing many people have to go on is a caricature. And while Hinduism deserves as much criticism and analysis as any cultural, religious, or political force, Hindus, as people, also deserve better understanding and acceptance as part of the bargain.

That said, what’s of particular interest to skeptics regarding this film are Myers’ comments about Deepak Chopra, who is considered by most skeptics to be the reigning king of new age, pseudoscientific woo. Myers claims that his character is based on Chopra, but also notes that Chopra is a close friend.

Myers… …says in an episode of the Sundance Channel’s “Iconoclasts” that Chopra, his longtime friend, was the inspiration for the Love Guru character.

“He is the basis of why I went down this path of a character like that, and it’s because I am interested in higher states of consciousness and I am interested in comedy,” Myers says. “The guru, he breaks down your barriers, gets you silly and gets you light so you’re in a place to receive love.”

Will Myers be poking fun at woo and alt-med in a way that skeptics can be proud of? Or will he be basically celebrating the Chopra-hype with a lighthearted endorsement of its ideas? Seems pretty ambiguous at this point, but its something to watch.

Totally Made Up, Unilateral Blog Carnival! (And a Tiny Bit on Expelled!)

It’s time for another survey of stuff worth reading on the internet, so let’s pretend that I’m hosting some sort of esoteric Blog Carnival. Topic? ME! (And for those readers who are getting sick of Expelled musings, good news: I’ve exiled them to the end of this post)

Anyway, let’s get this thing started with a review of the home-birth-homage film “The Business of Being Born” from someone who might know a little about the subject: family practice doc Harriet Hall. Personally, I think she’s nuts to worry about all the hospital-hate in the film. Doctors are dangerous! That’s why I’m planning on going for an “all-natural” coronary artery bypass when my time comes.

Next, Ed Darrell over at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub points us towards both Cracked list of 11 Movies Saved by Historical Inaccuracy (in which we learn that Mel Gibson’s Patriot hero was, in real life, a notorious slave rapist) and Yahoo’s own similar listing of Greatest Historical Goofups (in which we learn that Mel Gibson’s Braveheart hero would have had to have sex with a three year old to make any sense). Both lists need to apologize for the ridiculousness of calling 2001: A Space Odyssey “historically” inaccurate. It’s called Science-FICTION, guys.

Over at Exploring Our Matrix, religious religion prof James F. McGrath asks “Can (the story of) Noah’s Ark Be Saved?” I’m not sure if his answer is yes or no, exactly but I’m pretty sure that whatever it is, it’s the right answer. The stories of Noah and Job cannot be reconciled any better to modern morals than they can to modern science. That doesn’t mean that we cannot learn things from them (whether believers learning about God, or even non-believers learning about believers).

Then we have Hemant at Friendly Atheist who sees Jesus everywhere he looks. Fair warning though: be prepared to squint.

To pad out my fake Carnival, I’ll also note Bug Girl’s submission to the all-too-real 83rd Skeptic’s Circle/Carnival. The title is simply irresistible: Pubic Lice: “Sea monkeys in your pants” Speaks for itself, right?

Finally, if you want to know more about my sense of humor, here’s Exhibit A: new internet sensations FAIL blog and Stuff White People Like.

Oh, and in case you yourself had PHAILed to notice it, that big honking graphic over on the top right goes to Expelled Exposed, the soon-to-be official National Center for Science Education response to that expelled movie thingy everyone has been going on and on about. I highly recommend other bloggers doing something similarly prominent to get the word out: feel free to steal my graphic if you’re lazy.

It’s also worth noting that, for some unknown reason, this teensy blog is actually the or at least amongst the top results when you search for information on the film, which is pretty odd, because I almost never post about the darn thing. While I’m flattered, Internet, I can’t help but think that other science sites should be up there instead.

Finally, as I noted over at Skepchick, what is probably one of the most crucial Google search terms in this little PR war, “expelled movie,” didn’t have a single critical, pro-science site on the all-important first page of results. But then, lo and behold, the very day after I complain about it, Phil Plait and I break into the big time! Somehow, I have gained the power to move digital mountains.

Beware!

Think You Can See the Dead? Skeptics Can’t Wait to Test Your Brain and Find Out

One of my favorite articles of blogging past was the piece I did on “Spiritualism Camps” in which I mused over just how it was that a camp counselor medium like Judy Ulch could litterally see “stubble on their faces” of ghosts.  Just today I received the first and only comment on the piece… and was given a terrible review.  “Jean” even said that I looked stupid: trying to apply scientific hypothesizing to spirits, pshaw!  I’m crushed.

Of course, Jean was apparently so outraged by the mere idea of examining spiritual phenomenon that she didn’t bother to read far enough to see all her complaints addressed.  And her post did spark an bright idea of bloggy  back-issue synergism.

You see, just last week I came across a story about some scientists at Berkeley who are working on an MRI technique that could potentially allow scientists to reconstruct the images that a brain is seeing. Now, for mediums like Judy Ulch to be registering anything ghostly as a visual image at all, let alone something detailed enough to have distinct facial features, it almost certainly has to show up in her brain.  And if we can reconstruct that image… well you probably see where I’m going with this.  If we can see what they see, then we can see if they really see what they say they see.  See?

Of course, most mediums will probably balk at the very idea of testing their powers of paranormal perception in such a definitive fashion, and are as unlikely to let scientists strap them into an MRI machine set up in the middle of an Indian burial ground as they were to take James Randi’s million dollar challenge.

Which is a sad thing really.  If spirits really did exist, and mediums really could perceive them, then even a failure in this case could teach us all something.  That is, if a ghostly visage fails to appear on the processed MRI scan at the moment the medium claims to see one, then at the very least we’ve been able to rule out yet another false model of how spirit images work.  We could rule out all sorts of things in fact:

• The possibility that mediums have special rods and cones in their eyes that allow them to detect spiritual radiation.
• That any kind of optical image (light waves hit the ghost, bounce off, are captured by human eyes, etc.) is involved at all.
• That mediums are really “seeing” the ghosts in any meaningful sense, as opposed to the ghostly gaze being somehow superimposed onto the mental results of regular vision.

And of course, there’s always the possibility that spirits would show up on the MRI technique, in which case mediums would be vindicated and heralded as ingenious and overlooked pioneers in a entirely new realm of scientific exploration.

I’m game.  I bet most skeptics would be.  All we have to lose is the money for the use of the machine.  What we have to gain, however, is knowledge, one way or the other.  Sounds good to me.

So how about it, mediums?  Ready to do your part for human knowledge?

Corporate Death Sentence for Enzyte, the “Natural Male Enhancement” Scam

You’ll never have to sit through another “Smiling Bob” commercial again: Enzyte maker Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals and it’s President have been busted on everything from mail fraud to money laundering.

Some former employees, including relatives of Warshak, pleaded guilty to other charges and cooperated with prosecutors. They testified that the company created fictitious doctors to endorse the pills, fabricated a customer-satisfaction survey and made up numbers to back claims about Enzyte’s effectiveness.

Just another reason not to trust the claims of those shilling “herbal supplement” and other such products which have no independently proven results. What’s unfortunate here is that BPN only got caught because they flagrantly abused things like their money-back guarantee (not only would they not give people’s money back, but they would apparently keep quietly charging customers’ credit cards for non-existent purchases). Meanwhile, countless other companies who manage not to blatantly steal things from their customers outright will continue with their snake oil scams without any fear of prosecution for their bogus claims.

Demons Among Us: Exorcism Revival in Europe

Exorcism, in all its goofy glory, is making a comeback.

“People don’t pray anymore, they don’t go to church, they don’t go to confession. The devil has an easy time of it,” Amorth said in an interview. “There’s a lot more devil worship, people interested in satanic things and seances, and less in Jesus.”

Amorth and other priests said the resurgence in exorcisms has been encouraged by the Vatican, which in 1999 formally revised and upheld the rite for the first time in almost 400 years.

Because as we know, people that don’t go to church inevitably drift towards worshiping a demigod in the pantheon of a random theology that they don’t believe in.

Jankowski cited the case of a woman who asked for a divorce days after renewing her wedding vows as part of a marriage counseling program. What was suspicious, he said, was how the wife suddenly developed a passionate hatred for her husband.

“According to what I could perceive, the devil was present and acting in an obvious way,” he said. “How else can you explain how a wife, in the space of a couple of weeks, could come to hate her own husband, a man who is a good person?”

Well, clearly, only mystical demons waving their googly invisible fingers can explain such a thing as minor marital strife!

This sort of logic strikes me as an embarrassingly naive Satan-of-the-Gaps gambit. How does the priest know that the husband is a “good person” anyway? Can he really rule out the possibility that he’s done something awful to his wife that she resents but doesn’t want to talk about? Or that she’s just gotten annoyed by the guy, as just happens sometimes? Or that she’s just a jerk?

But, as I’m always interested in the technical details of these sort of phenomena (which often seem to get made up on the fly), this article actually does provide a bit of insight:

Exorcists said the people they help can be in the grip of evil to varying degrees. Only a small fraction, they said, are completely possessed by demons — which can cause them to display inhuman strength, speak in exotic tongues, recoil in the presence of sacred objects or overpower others with a stench.

Ah, so people can be partially possessed by demons. That makes things much more interesting.

But how do priests know this, exactly? Did they stumble upon a demonic livejournal documenting the halting progress of some illict supernatural relationship? How can they tell partial possession from just a really smart demon who knows better than to act up too much when priests are lurking around with their ghostbuster equipment? What’s going on with a “partial” possession anyway? Are demons in control of some neurons in the brain, but not others?

Or, if you want to insist that “souls” are involved, then maybe you could explain how this works, exactly. Do souls have little labeled levers that demons can tug at?  How do souls “work” such that these behorned-goatypants-ghosts can actually manipulate them?  What functional inner workings of a soul are demons subverting, exactly?  What functions are they seizing from the operator?  How does the conflict work? Come on, tell me.

Again, the thing with “reality” is that there are tangible details to true explanations, and the details matter. The thing with “stuff someone makes up as they go along” is that the details don’t matter: demons act however they need to for the belief in them to continue to fit the story being told. Or maybe there’s no grounds for any sort of explanation. It’s a “supernatural” explanation, which means, basically, no explanation at all.

And, yes, yes.  You heard it here first: demons are to blame for Smelly Body Odor. But only if their voodoo powered soul-squatting or whatever is “complete.”  

Exorcists said they are careful not to treat people suffering from mental illness, and that they regularly consult with psychologists and physicians. At the same time, they said, conventional medical therapy often neglects spiritual ailments.

Perhaps it does.  But I’d really like to know how one would diagnose a spiritual ailment.  Doctors, for instance, diagnose problems by knowing generally how the symptoms are connected to an underlying cause.  They can often even provide some sort of testable plausible model that gives reliable results. What’s the similar process here? Is there one?

By the definition of these guys, I probably have a pretty darn serious “spiritual ailment” in my atheism: how come I don’t smell like sulfur or recoil at red wine that’s been duly blessed?  How come I’m not blowing through cartons of underarm deodorant a day?  Savvy defenders might, I suppose, excuse my lack of demonic influence by the excuse that demons have no need to trifle with the already fallen.  But why is there no consistency to any of these things other than whatever the priest declares, ex posterio, is going on?

And is “spiritual ailment” just a religious gloss on the far more mundane “upset and unhappy,” perhaps with a little theological angst tossed in? It sure seems like it is.

Still, it must be nice to believe that ones bad thoughts and impulses are the work of some sort of covert act of sabotage, and that by waving a ball of incense around, you can block the transmissions of the CIA…. er I mean, Satan. But no no, seriously, these people aren’t mentally ill. No similarities there at all.

“My remedy is based on spiritual means, which cannot be replaced by any pharmaceutical remedies,” said Trojanowski, the priest who is overseeing plans for the new exorcism center. “I do not stop at the level of just treating symptoms. I’m very much interested in the soul of a person. As a priest, I keep asking questions a doctor will never ask.”

Because I know how always frustrates me when my doctor won’t consider the possibility that elf curses are making me gain weight.

Seriously though, what the priests are ultimately doing here is making upset, confused, and possibly deranged people feel better by telling them that they are using their mystical powers to cure them. For all their pretensions about curing a “soul,” what they are doing here is no different than what any psychologist tries to do: trying to make people feel better and deal with their problems by talking to them.   The priests simply toss in a bit more ceremony.

And while any medical doctor could do the same sort of thing with a physical ailment, they don’t. And why not? Because in the case of the doctor, just telling patients that they are curing them and then making some cryptic hand signals is fraud and malpractice, not medicine.

Until priests can actually describe the specific working mechanism of souls, explain how in particular they are subverted by fallen angels, and show how the priest’s interventions work to treat the condition, I think the sanctimonious scorn for the limits of western medicine is a teensy bit premature.

The Thimerosal (that’s not) in Vaccines Does Not Cause Autism. Can We Stop the Deadly Scaremongering Now?

Yet another damning study came out today: damning to those people who have risked the lives of millions of children with phony, unfounded scares about vaccines.

Jenny McCarthy’s babbling mommy-mentalism aside, the case for thimerosal or any other preservative causing autism was never strong to begin with.  But the tide of definitive evidence has come in over and over again, and it all soundly puts the link, both for causation and even correlation, well beyond the realm of the ridiculous.  Read the study.  Recognize that a chemical that isn’t even in vaccines in the first place cannot “cause” anything in the first place.

So now that that’s all taken care of, can we go back to stopping the spread of deadly diseases now?  Ok?

Randi’s 1 Million Dollar Skeptical Challenge to End in 2 years: What Will Woo Do?

I didn’t believe it at first, but it’s true: James Randi’s famous 1 million dollar challenge now has a final deadline, after which it will be discontinued.

When I first heard about this, I was sad and a little disappointed. But on second thought, it’s really a pretty smart move. In theory, the challenge was a brilliant way to tell psychics and other woo-meisters to put up or shut up. But the reality has played out differently:

Our expectations at first were that we’d attract major personalities by this means, but they’ve avoided having to take the test by simply not applying; those who have actually applied are generally honestly self-deluded persons who have difficulty stating what they can do, which can be understood if they really don’t know what they’re experiencing; we at JREF have gone through involved procedures to help them recognize their problems. Usually, they have indicated that they don’t know what real scientific rules are, when it comes down to their actually being properly tested.

Early this year, Randi and the other folks at the JREF decided to face facts: things weren’t working as planned, and something had to be done. Mystics, astrologers, psychics, John Edward, Sylvia Browne, dowsers, and all the rest were basically just getting away with dismissive technicalities and giving implausible excuses and then dropping the subject. Originally, the plan was to change the rules to screen out mentally ill applicants and target celebrity woo-meisters more directly, something that was done last March.

This is really just a more dramatic move in that direction: think of it not as the challenge giving up, but rather as giving paranormalists a hard deadline. Randi will now be able to go on Larry King and put it pretty pointedly: the test is ending and you’d better get in gear and step up to the challenge instead of endlessly putting it off with excuses. It’s now or never: will you step up to the challenge? Or will you continue to run away and make excuses?

Once the prize expires, it will also put a nice solid period on the whole affair. For ten years, a million dollars was held out to paranormalists of all stripes. A million dollars that they could have just won and then given to charity if they had pleased. Or spend on promoting this amazing new insight into reality that had so far eluded all scientists and other natural observers. All they had to do was show their abilities under controlled conditions, where cheating and other non-supernatural forces were controlled for. And no one could do it: no one could even come close.

Or can they? Two years is a long time to prepare. If you can move things with your mind, if you can predict the future, if you can even see an aura: now is the time to prove it. All you need to do is get a local media outlet or other qualifying skeptics group to check out and report on/preliminarily witness a demonstration of your power in action. The rules are simple, sensible, and open to public scrutiny. We’re waiting… but now we won’t be waiting forever…

Detox and Re-Tox: Bad Medicine and Even Worse Homeopathy at Alt-Med Mecca NewsTarget

It’s time for another foray into the neverending stream of nonsense that is NewsTarget, the alternative medicine super-site run by bemuscled granola guru Mike Adams.

This edition will be a double feature debunking: two awful articles for the price of none. In the first, Adams himself tries to convince readers that picking your nose all day long once every year is a sensible way to stay healthy. In the second, engineer Sarah Ramratan takes a stock principle from the pseudoscience of homeopathy and drives it off the deep-end. Let’s roll!

Hoodia Hoodoo can’t Scam Skeptics

I knew I couldn’t glance over at alt-med megasite NewsTarget and resist ridicule, but there’s simply too much to dash off before work. In the meantime, check out Secundum Artem a where skeptical pharmacy student N.B. does some quick calculations and figures out that there’s something tremendously fishy about popular weight loss supplement “Hoodia”.

Deepak Attack! Choking on Chopra’s Medical Malarkey

Deepak Chopra believes in positive thinking, which is why he’ll never ever realize that he’s a fool.

In response to Chopra’s latest medical advice antics, Orac over at Respectful Insolence slices Chopra’s arguments to nice digestible pieces, and then Mark Hoofnagle of the denialism blog goes and chokes on those pieces anyway.

Both bloggers are well worth a read, delivering useful insight beyond merely exposing inanity. Hoofnagle in particular makes an extremely important point regarding how alternative medicine stacks up against the conventional variety:

The last half is again just an example of the selection pressure for ineffective treatments for altie medicine. You probably can trust most quack remedies to do nothing, and therefore be pretty safe. And lots of people each year do die in hospitals, therefore hospitals must be dangerous killers of the innocent! Or, maybe, lots of people die in hospitals because that’s where the sick people are, and you know what? No one lives forever. Eventually, something gets you.

Chopra makes it sound like a 20-year-old who goes into the ER to get stitches is going to die of MRSA. What this ignores is that hospitals are responsible for taking care of people who are actually really sick, often very old, and frequently near death. In other words, hospitals take care of patients that no altie practitioners in their right mind would touch with a ten-foot pole, you know, those with real sickness. If you actually look carefully at the reports that the quacks cite to show how dangerous hospitals are, it’s really a reflection of just how incredibly sick and likely to die the patients were in the first place.

In any case, go read. I may have gotten all worked up about Chopra’s inane musings on Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness, but those sorts of bad ideas are ultimately pretty harmless. Chopra’s rambling diatribes about health and medicine, on the other hand, have the potential to truly hurt and even kill the people who might buy into his alternate reality. The more people are out there armed with the knowledge to counter him, the better.

The War on Christmas… and on the Golden Compass

Two things caught my attention tonight:

First, a Guy in the Pew gives the rational Christian’s take on the War on Christmas. We on the non-believer side of things spend a lot of time bemoaning this phony, bullying crusade for its pandering politics, but Mr. Blanchard reminds believers that those trying to pass this off as a truly Christian cause have some real explaining to do. His argument is similar to what’s always struck me as bizarre about religious support for “In God We Trust” or “Under God. Why get so excited about pushing to get some watered down religious graffiti tagged onto the Pledge and pennies when you live in a country where you can pray all you want out loud and undiluted? Neither atheist nor believer alike should take it for granted.

Second, Hemant over at Friendly Atheist notes the explosion of online religious groups all calling for boycotts of The Golden Compass, a forthcoming film based on the work of outspoken atheist author Phillip Pullman. I’m with Hemant as to how overblown the controversy is. We have to hear over and over that atheists are so militant and uppity, and yet I don’t seem to recall atheists similarly on the warpath over Christian evangelist author C.S. Lewis’ Narnia films. Nor are atheists particularly worked up about the film (honestly, talking animals annoy the heck out of me and I have a hard time seeing myself rushing out to go see it). Again, compare our generally blasé attitude to the marketing mania over The Passion of the Christ, where the amount of grassroots organization and hysterical hype made it seem like the very fate of Christianity rested on its boxoffice returns.

The one thing I sort of sadly expect from Compass is that it will make a convenient target for cultural war spin. The film, which was reportedly plagued by production problems, may or may not be any good on its own rights, and with organized boycott campaigns and media talking heads railing against it, its chances of doing well at the theaters seem slim. That’s going to make it a tempting target for endless overwrought pieces about the film’s poor showing means the recent surge of publicly visible atheism is a fading fad. Conservative news filter Matt Drudge is notorious for juxtaposed stories, especially ones that try to make culture war points by comparing some films to others. I’ll be mighty surprised if he doesn’t start up a section linking every dehyping bit of fluff on the film he can find.

In any case: I’m hard at work composing both a sort of “guide for newbies and journalists” on Expelled, complete with some more information from the pro-science folks “featured” in the recent promotional clip (the ones supposedly threatening Ben Stein for “asking questions”). And as I promised after the recent rounds of back and forth with National Review bloggers over stem cells, I’m also working on a rather weighty piece taking on the common claims about their moral status and proposing a better way.  Plus, hasn’t the aptly named alt-med woo-site NewsTarget published dozens and dozens more wacky articles since I last gave them some love?

“Red Defense” Supplements & Quack Biology

We’ve all heard about the research suggesting that a daily glass of red wine is good for your health. By why wait a lifetime of steady moderation? “Red defense,” a product I recently heard shilled on the radio, claims to put vino to shame, containing per pill as much of the “good stuff” as 34 glasses of red wine. Indeed, various things with the “Red” tag seem to be part of a sort of a mini-supplement fad these days: another example is Superior Red. You gotta love the list of ingredients on this thing: it starts out with amounts of the usual nutritional components like fiber, protein, & sugar but then goes on say that it contains 150mg of… Watermelon? 100mg of… Blood Oranges? Aren’t fruits themselves made of sugar, fiber, and protein anymore?

In any case, Red Defense is marketed on the idea that if mainstream science suspects that something is good for you, then it makes sense to immediately start imbibing loads of it, proper dosing be damned. Superior Red seems marketed on the idea that lots of really really tiny amounts of lots of different fruits is better than just eating one piece of actual fruit. Both ideas seem profoundly ignorant of human biology: they take decent but preliminary nutrition science about things like flavonoids, resveratrol and anti-oxidants in general and spin them into modern snake-oil hokum. And as we all know, bad ideas deserve beatdowns.