Hey if you’re a magician, be careful about what tv talk shows you grace with your presence. Go on the wrong one and you might be set on fire.
Wayne Houchin, a Las Vegas-based magician, was.
Shocking footage has emerged on YouTube of a magician being attacked and badly injured by the host of a TV show on which he was a guest. In an apparently spontaneous gesture, the man (who has been named as Franklin Barazarte) who is both host and producer of a talk-show in the Dominican Republic, doused 29-year old Wayne Houchin with a flammable liquid and set it on fire.
Well at least Bill O’Reilly doesn’t do that.
We shouldn’t jump to any conclusions about this one incident, although it if *was* an attempted exorcism, it would not be unique in involving violent and dangerous practices. To take two examples from different parts of the world, in 2007 a Romanian priest was jailed for 14 years for conducting an exorcism that led to the death of a nun, while in Japan last year a 13-year-old girl suffocated after being strapped down and doused with water by her father and a Buddhist monk who were trying to expel an “evil spirit”.
And there are all the children in places like Akwa Ibom state in Nigeria, and London, and all the women in places like India and Kenya, who get tortured to death for being “witches.”
Bullshit is not always harmless.