Author: Ophelia Benson

The mediums have been taken by surprise, poor dears.

Today, representatives of British mediums will march up Downing Street to deliver a petition containing some 10,000 signatories demanding that the Government change its decision to repeal the 1951 Fraudulent Mediums Act in favour of a new EU directive…”What we have here is a fundamental attack on our right to practise our religion…,” said David McEntee-Taylor, head of the Spiritual Workers Association (SWA).

Yes…except that ‘fundamental right’ has limits, dalling. It doesn’t have enough limits, but it has some. You can’t kill people and eat them with horseradish and call that practicing your religion and go on your way rejoicing.

However, by treating spiritualism as merely a consumer service, mediums believe they risk being sued if customers are dissatisfied with advice brought from the other side – advice they say they always point out should always be treated with care. The solution to the present impasse, according to lawyers advising the crystal-ball fraternity, is via the prosaic expedient of a pre-consultation disclaimer, describing any dialogue with the deceased in terms of either entertainment or scientific experiment. It does not sit comfortably with purist believers.

So what they’re protesting is having to mention at the outset that there is no actual reason to think that whatever mediums talk to when they talk to whatever they talk to is in fact actually the spirit of a dead person. They want to be able to take money for talking to whatever it is they talk to without having to admit to the people who are giving them money that in fact whatever it is they talk to might be…well, unreliable, or confused, or made up. Yes one can see why they don’t want to have to admit that and why they would prefer to take the money without having to admit anything, but I’m not absolutely sure that desire is rightly called ‘our right to practice our religion.’ It looks more like their claimed right to practice their commercial enterprise which is based on customer credulity. It’s rather as if from Monday to Friday priests and ministers took large fees for chatting to God and then telling their customers what God said. The line between religion and commerce would seem rather blurred in that case, I think.

Psychic mailings netted £40m from the British public last year and the number of telephone and internet services are soaring – an unsurprising fact considering some 50 per cent of the public claims to believe in the phenomenon, according to Professor Richard Wiseman, a stalwart critic of the religion. A further third claim to have had a psychic experience. “The problem is that there is no repeatable scientific evidence to back this up,” he said.

Good grief, so 80% of you are bat-loony? At that rate you’re just as crazy as we are.

While few dispute that there are some con men operating big money schemes, supporters say there is a genuine need to liaise with dead friends and relatives. Lyn Guest de Swarte, editor of The Spiritual News, said for most practitioners it is a “sacred calling”. “A labourer is worth their hire. But if people don’t feel they have been best served they should refuse to pay.”

Okay – and the mediums will be fine with that, will they? They’ll just allow the customers to say ‘Sorry, no good’ and walk out? No shouts of ‘Hey, you owe me £50!’? And then there’s this claim that there’s a genuine need to liaise with dead friends and relatives. Well of course there fucking is – and it’s a need that cannot be satisfied and that’s the great tragedy of all sentient life, isn’t it! But pretending some chump in a paisley shawl can fix that right up is no solution. There is no solution, and that’s that.

I can’t help noticing that clerics say odd things sometimes. I suppose it’s their job, but it surprises me anyway. I suppose it surprises me that they don’t try to cover up more.

The Bishop of Oxford (again), for instance. He said something very droll.

I am sure the Roman Catholic bishops are intelligent, rational people, but their starting point on embryo research is mistaken. They believe that the newly fertilised egg, the tiny bundle of multiplying cells smaller than a pin head, has the same right to life as an adult. But more than two-thirds of fertilised eggs are lost in nature anyway. If each of these really is a person, that is, an eternal soul, it would lead to the absurd conclusion that heaven is mainly populated by people who have never been born.

Ah yes, how absurd – but is it any more absurd than the conclusion that heaven exists and that it is mainly populated by people who have been born? Not a lot. The whole idea of a heaven populated by dead people is absurd, yet here is this grown man treating it as a matter of fact.

The other day Gene Robinson, the gay bishop of New Hampshire (the one who has made life so difficult for the archbishop and his friends) was on Fresh Air. Terri Gross asked for his views on abortion, and he gave a both-and reply, the first part of which was that ‘all life is sacred’ and the second of which is that it’s for the woman to decide. It’s odd that churchy people keep saying that, and that no one takes them up for it. They don’t believe all life is sacred! Nobody does, and they’re no exception. Bacteria, viruses, mosquitoes, weeds, parasites, vegetables, fruits, grains – churchy people don’t think those kinds of life are sacred. It’s pompous rhetoric, and they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it, because it can’t possibly be true. Yet get away with it they do.

The other other day Desmond Tutu was on the local public radio station. I admire Tutu, as most people do; from what I know he’s a sterling fella. But he did say this one thing…that the universe is a moral place, and that truth and justice always ultimately prevail. No – it isn’t and they don’t. Especially the universe is not a moral place – I think that’s such a mistake. The universe is a bunch of gas and rock; it’s no more moral than my kettle is when I put it on to boil water. We’re here and the universe is there and the universe couldn’t possibly care less about us or about morality. If there’s going to be any morality it has to come from us. That’s sad, because we’re not much good at it, but we’re all there is. And, alas, truth and justice don’t ultimately prevail, not least because there is no ulitmately, there’s only a series of nows, all of which are shot through with truth and justice not prevailing.

Speaking of stupid stuff, the struggle continues to persuade the future king to act like a responsible adult and not endanger the health of his ‘subjects.’

The Prince of Wales is being challenged today to withdraw two guides promoting alternative medicine…The documents, published by the Prince and his Foundation for Integrated Health, misrepresent scientific evidence about therapies such as homoeopathy, acupuncture and reflexology…Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter, and Simon Singh, a science writer and broadcaster, call on the Prince to recall the publications, one of which was produced with a £900,000 grant from the Department of Health…Professor Ernst and Dr Singh say the Prince accepted the importance of “rigorous scientific evidence” to alternative medicine, in an article he wrote for The Times in 2000, and point out that more than 4,000 research studies have since been published…The first document is a pamphlet, part-funded by the taxpayer, that gives advice on finding practitioners of alternative therapies. It is misleading, Professor Ernst said, because it includes disorders for which alternative remedies have been shown to be ineffective. It states, for example, that chiropractic is used to treat asthma, digestive disorders and migraine, when it has been shown by rigorous trials only to be useful for back pain. The guide also promotes acupuncture for addiction, when studies suggest that it has no benefit, and homoeopathy, which a major review for The Lancet has indicated works only as a placebo.

That’s a good wheeze, isn’t it – to describe worthless treatments as being ‘used to treat’ diseases it can’t treat. It’ll be true, because there are people who ‘use’ them that way, but it’s misleading, because ‘using’ them that way is like me using a hammer to paint the wall blue. It doesn’t work.

Natasha Finlayson, of the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health, said: “We entirely reject the accusation that our online publication Complementary Healthcare: A Guide contains any misleading or inaccurate claims about the benefits of complementary therapies. On the contrary, it treats people as adults and takes a responsible approach by encouraging people to look at reliable sources of information . . . so that they can make informed decisions.”

That’s rather disgusting. It’s manipulative bullshit to talk about ‘treating people as adults’ by giving them misleading pseudo-information. It’s not treating people as children to give them information that is careful not to mislead, especially when it comes to medical treatments. It’s disgusting that Chuck abuses his unearned power and influence to do this kind of thing. He’s not a doctor, he’s not a medical researcher, he’s not a physiologist, he’s not even a competent journalist, but here he is pushing quack medicine on people who will take him seriously because of who he is. Bad, very bad.

Chris Hedges has a new book out, a really terrible book on the putative ‘new’ atheists. It’s so stupid it’s unreadable. This is a little surprising, since he was a foreign correspondent for the NY Times for several years, and even though the Times is not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, I would expect it to be above the kind of counter-factual drivel Hedges perpetrates in I Don’t Believe in Atheists. Or would I. No on second thought maybe I wouldn’t. Anyway the book is the kind of stupid that makes your jaw drop as you read. You don’t have to wait long, either – only five pages in you find

[The liberal church] accepts along with the atheists and the fundamentalists, Pangloss’s rosy vision in Voltaire’s Candide that we live in ‘the best of all possible worlds’ and that if we have faith and trust in the forces around us, ‘all is for the best. It is this naive belief in our goodness and decency – this inability to face the dark reality of human nature, our capacity for evil and the morally neutral universe we inhabit – that is the most disturbing aspect of all these belief systems.

He’s including atheism in that – specifically the atheism of what he calls ‘the new atheists.’ (He claims they call themselves that, which is typical of his respect for accuracy.) Really?! Dawkins and Hitchens and Dennett think we live in the best of all possible worlds? Which Dawkins and Hitchens and Dennett has he been reading?

And he enlists this kind of wildly inaccurate characterization in a stupidly belligerent attack on people and ideas and books that don’t exist. It’s cheap stuff. (I’ve heard him on the radio, too, out pushing his book – he works himself into an unpleasant lather of rage at these non-existent atheists. I felt dirty after hearing him.)

He’s on form in this piece.

The “new” atheists, in the name of reason, science and progress, endow themselves with the moral right to abuse others in the name of their particular version of goodness…These atheists, like religious fundamentalists, live in the illusion of a binary world of us and them, of reason versus irrationality, of the forces of light battling the forces of darkness. And once you set up this world, you are permitted to view as justified military intervention, occupation and even torture – anything, in short, that will subdue what is defined as irrational and dangerous.

Nice. Temperate, judicious, careful, precise, accurate, thoughtful, reasoned. Journalism at its best.