Faith Healers (with James Randi) - The Thinking Atheist Radio Podcast #45

soon laughing brash boldface blasphemy question everything find it extremely hard to imagine open your eyes it is quite all right to be in a theater fastest-growing group of people in the country has been measured as being this who have no belief or who are atheists you don't have to be apologetic or quiet about solving the opposition you see religion on a hundred fronts losing the argument and start thinking this is the thinking atheist worldwide if you have arthritis step into the closest aisle and begin to release your faith well I want to say to you my good brother my dear sister I understand that pain she was using this cake to not walk came out of it began running all the pain is gone she's healed by the part well isn't it big oh you have no shame both lows yes you've come for your healing no fire have you a family I have children here are they depending on this tonight ah put your hands on your test audience have compassion for a mother tonight Oh God opened these lungs Christ I know that standing the mast side and I touch her as you would have me touch her I touch her because you tell me to touch her in the name of Christ some that have sicknesses you've been hurting even taking this you've got arthritis you've got other things in your body that are wrong and right now in the name of Jesus I want you to stand up and say I receive my healing right now in Jesus name right now in Jesus name I receive it the best time to sow is when your head that smile on her face that she look like somebody that's dying stand to your feet and smile look at that first time she's hearing God heals raids blood is purified somebody give the Lord a big here for a sacrificial investment of $30 or more to the prayer ministry and I want you to make $1,000 bow faith oh I know you probably don't have a thousand dollars but balance [Music] a thousand dollars to Jesus Christ to the work of God you probably don't have it but he will bless you in fact that's the best time to give when you don't have the resources you don't have a job you might be living on some kind of assistance or maybe you're living with someone else and you've got mouths to feed and a mortgage payment and bills to pay but that's the best time to sow those seeds of faith because Jesus Christ is the great provider as they say he owns the cattle on a Thousand Hills that's exactly how it works I was doing research for this show this week and I found myself just getting livid just angry more and more when I was going through the video clips and the audio clips and reading the articles and looking at the studies and I find myself just live it at these people this show we're talking about faith healers faith healing is founded on the belief that certain people or places have the ability to cure and heal there's something or someone out there who can eliminate disease or heal injury through a close connection to a higher power faith healing can involve prayer it could mean you visit a religious shrine there might be just a strong belief in a supreme being out there somewhere faith healers I was given one of the privileges of my life earlier this week I had a chance to speak to James Randi better known as the amazing Randi who was an illusionist for a long long time an illustrious career and then dedicated his post illusionist career to debunking all of the bunk that's out there going after a lot of the charlatans and the psychics and those guys and he's just brilliantly funny and he is a tremendous champion of skeptical thinking now when I started to doubt my own faith I didn't know much about James Randi at all and he was one of the people I remember watching and catching his clips on YouTube and reading articles and I became introduced to him and I'd always wanted the chance to be able to speak to and I know everybody's pawing at the guy he's part of the reason rally he's going to be on the national stage coming up in March and and you know he's done he's done Carson he's done Barbara Walters done all these shows for decades upon decades upon decades why would he give me the time of day so why did the clear blue I sent him a request and I said look you don't know who I am I know you normally don't do a lot with the Atheist community and the reason that he doesn't is because he believes that most of the atheist communities just always pissed off they're always pissed off they're always crabby and I don't think he really wants to attach his name to vitriol what he wants his productive skepticism right and so I assured him look let's check out my show you know I've interviewed some other people I would love the opportunity to have a conversation and lo and behold they got a reply from James Randi now we had to pre-record the conversation because of his tight schedule we spent just under 30 minutes on the phone and I will play that conversation for you right now you were once known as the amazing Randi now I've got a worldwide audience and many aren't culturally aware of who the amazing Randi is so just humor me give me some background you were an illusionist and for how long well it depends on how you define illusionist I was an actor playing the part of a magician a conjurer more correctly and I did that all of my life up until the age of just past 60 ed which I determined that I was getting a bit old for the for the Turing Act and it was it had been pretty strenuous as an escape artist particularly but I decided I would then go on the lecture circuit and give talks about being skeptical and critical of what were presented by the medium as truth and I had been pursuing that for decades previous to that but I had to have a professional life what I eventually did within the next couple of years after that is I founded the James Randi Educational Foundation and made an agreement with the foundation that I would receive a salary which was approximately equal to what I had previously enjoyed as an entertainer and it's been that way ever since I used to be a believer I used to be a I was raised up in the Christian faith I was a Christian broadcaster for 12 years full-time and back in the early 90s on the radio station it was a little small kind of little radio station at the time right before contemporary Christian music sort of blossomed in the station did with it but we used to play once a day on the air 15 minutes of preaching by evangelist and faith healer peter Popoff now I remember back in 86 he had already been exposed but even in early the early 90s he was still on the air think he filed for bankruptcy right and then he came back is that what happened well he declared himself bankrupt I don't know whether that was official or not he said he did but I don't believe much of what peter Popoff publishes as fact especially some of his strange supernatural ideas and he changed the name of his ministry I exposed him on the on the Johnny Carson show rather definitively and Carson was quite satisfied that we had done a job on him and told people the truth about what he was but as Johnny and I both found out that didn't work at all because you cannot expose these people the believers out there don't listen to what you're saying they only listened to what's preached to them as truth and Popoff simply changed the name of his ministry from peter Popoff ministries to people united for Christ and he just changed his letterhead and went right ahead continued on the same business yes 25 years later and he's still I had a friend who was a skeptic who sent some on refuses an email it was a request actually visited the website incentive request and in the mail they got like a vial of prayer water holy water I don't know it was like prayer cloth it was some icon right some symbol and then there was this long five page printed letter that said please send us your money and this is pretty common right among not just peter Popoff but everywhere we go is that is that accurate oh yeah excuse me I stepped away from the microphone for a moment fine are you enjoying video or not I don't have video at this time no oh I see my video camera is on and I was going to hold up to you the stack of mail that I got just by going through one of the spare cartons that I'm unpacking I've just moved back into my my home that was damaged by a hurricane a few years ago and it's been refurbished now and I'm unpacking stuff that I had stuffed away in curtains and I have literally hundreds of letters from peter Popoff literally because I got on his list and I got on the list as Adam Jason je ER SI n and apparently Reverend Popoff didn't receive some image from my from Tia's or an angel or something it's somebody who should be watching out for him and he has been sending me this material Adam Jason by the way is an anagram for James Randi and I've been receiving this mail and I've been stacking it away I have a huge curtain it's a car that I can barely lift and I just can't upon the stack of several hundred more letters that have been sent out in the mail to me as they've been sent out by the hundreds of thousands every year by peter Popoff ministries or pardon me people United for Christ I'm sorry and I sort of kept track of what he's doing but it it's nothing new he's doing the same old thing with the prayer shawls and the insoles that you put into your shoes in order to bring the holy spirit to you how that works I don't know mechanically it doesn't sound very likely to me in any case the pop-up is still in business and Carson used to call me after his retirement the boat will book once a week I guess and he'd say we went I just saw peter Popoff on TV again on a different channel he's still in business Johnny seemed to be very very amazed to that I told him as I did many times I said John these are unsinkable rubber ducks they simply don't listen to what they're told and if if they do hear it all they don't observe it and they don't remember it they're back looking to be fleeced again I got letters any number of letters from people who very sadly wrote me and said well thank you very much mr. rowdy for exposing peter Popoff I guess he is a crook I not going to deal with them any longer I'm now sending my money to reverend Ainsley or somebody else but they're determined to be swindled they are sheep and they can't wait to get to the average we're talking here with James Randi the amazing Randi and of course of the James Randi Educational Foundation you've taken on many more than peter Popoff I saw the classic Carson bit with Uri Geller the righty was the famous to call him a psychic said he could read your mind had special power as he was bending the spoon and he was doing all that under conditions that he controlled this is a common thread right the the faith healer the illusionist they set up the deck in their favor and then they make it look like God is doing a miracle yeah well and Keller doesn't appeal to God very much I think he believes he is God so he doesn't then appeal to a lesser spirit of course but Keller is now as now on a campaign he's I think I think it's pretty evident that he's trying to back out of the hole that he gotten himself in because he's been exposed so many times his tricks and 11 12 year old magicians are doing his tricks now and doing them as well as he ever did them he only has five tricks that he has ever exhibited and I must admit that he he went a long way on five tricks most magicians have a much much larger repertoire than that but did Papa apartment Apollo but I get them mixed up all the time crooks are crooks you know Geller is now saying that he doesn't want to be known as a psychic he wants to be known as a vista fire now you tell me the difference I don't really know - define personal I don't understand my distinction is but he he is trying to get off the hook you see but he can't he finds himself in a serious situation I'm sure if he thinks about it at all if he were now to say I know it was all tricks I fooled you ho ho ho the joke's on you he would be sued by literally agencies all over the world including some governments who spent literally billions of dollars or the equivalent thereof to investigate the gull effect because he swore to them he said many many times I've got an endless array of video clips here where he looks straight into the the camera or at the the hosts of the show and says no no I don't know how to do tricks this is all real this is the real thing and he's lying and he's lying right in his teeth and if he now asked to say that he was lying all this time he would get sued and he just couldn't avoid losing the case because he has said that he's the real thing and by so doing he's load them into starting to spend money to investigate the effect and give him a lot of money at the same time let's say that they put up the revival tent somewhere near us and you and I both attend of faith healing service tonight okay forgive me for asking such a broad question but what are some of the tactics you probably see the patterns the red flags the tricks of the trade somebody goes in to receive their healing what kind of things should they be looking for well there are a whole raft of standard gimmicks that stretching the leg for one thing that's a thing that that Popoff did at one time as well as WV grant I don't know what grants doing maybe he's in jail again I don't know but WT grant is he's the son of the original WV grant he used to do the baby still does the stretching the leg gimmick where he says oh you've got one leg longer than the other and it's hard to describe what he sits the first amount at a chair and stretch of their legs out horizontally and in front of them and by simply pulling a sugar with it with a man particularly pulling one of his shoes off slightly at the heel he can show that the two legs don't look the same length and then he gestures over it and shakes the legs and such and they said stand up the person stands up and lo and behold the legs are the same length they were the same length in the first place are they the fellow would be falling over but everyone looks upon this as a miracle they takes it one of the standard gimmicks how by just some of them aren't as blatant as that that's it's a pretty crude trick though it works with the faithful anything will work with the faithful and if taught in Souls but we already went through that it's incredible that the gimmicks are so simple the business of looking out into the audience and saying M there's someone here with a name beginning with M or someone who's thinking about someone with a name beginning with M now how could you possibly miss when you've got a thousand or so people in front of you having someone that's going to respond to that and then they do the act of cold reading which is throwing out guesses and suggestions and waiting until they they react to the right one and then concentrating on that it's a you could call it a mind-reading gimmick it's a standard thing with the evangelists to do the cold reading act like Sylvia Browne and John Edward of course this is all that they do except that they also do hot readings and the hot readings mean that the people have either sent them letters in advance with their name and address and phone number and all the information about what they're suffering from if they are suffering from something and that is a hot reading because the person the evangelist goes out they're already equipped with knowledge of that it says something like there's a there's a Henry a Henry be somewhere in the audience said who is that in the person holes that they're heavily already has the information on the card in front of them at the podium and so he just reads it off so there are there are many many gimmicks like this I've heard some people saying faith healers give alright let's say they're charlatans but if so many people go and they feel good and they have positive feelings and people who have positive feelings will often get better do you want to address that yeah sure it's a case of whether you want to be better or just feel better because what they give you is false hope they give you some sort of source for the moment you feel better you're encouraged it's a placebo effect you feel better but you've still got the tumour or the flu or the the virus or whatever you've got you still got it and you will eventually die from it if it's serious enough this is not curing this is just making people feel better temporarily and that is a very dangerous thing what they do is they say oh I was going to have radiation for the for our chemo or whatever for the problem that I have now I don't have to I feel much better today and they they ignore medical help and then they just simply die of it it's the same with the Filipino psychic surgeons so-called in the Philippine Islands they have a great racket going there and it brings in a huge amount of money to the Philippine economy every year from people for all over the world they travel there the Filipino so-called psychic surgeons again that they perform an operation using in many cases real blood but it's not the blood coming from the patient on the table they use sleight of hand techniques to produce what looks like tumors and they throw the boy in the trashcan and they wipe the patient's abdomen and send them on their way nothing has happened it's just sleight of hand but the people feel much better and then they go home and die talking here with James Randi very quickly I do want to address the million-dollar challenge now for those who follow your work they're familiar with it but many are not would you explain the million dollar challenge for us very simple um many years ago I was challenged on a radio program out of New York I believe it was by a parapsychologist and a couple of rather negative folks who didn't like what I was saying and doing and they said why don't you put your money where your mouth is and so I said okay I'll give $1,000 to any person per persons who can provide evidence of any paranormal alcohol or supernatural event of any kind under proper observing conditions that sort of silenced them at that right now I had the thousand dollars at that time but once that followed sometimes I didn't quite have that thousand dollars in the bank so I was I was being a little deceptive there but pretty soon the bank balance would come back up again it is now a billion dollars it got to be a thousand dollars $1,000 to $5,000 and ten thousand and now it's a million dollars because of the generosity the largesse if you will of a very wealthy gentleman in Virginia who offered to put some teeth into our offer and for the last I guess 11 years now it is good at 1 million dollars as a prize to anyone who compared his evidence of any paranormal occult or supernatural event or power of any kind under proper observing conditions now some will argue though that you're stacking the deck in your favor so what are what are the proper observing conditions depends on what they say okay they set the conditions I don't know they this is a you see if you go to my web webpage which is called Swift after Jonathan Swift the famous some would say cynic but I say skeptic if you go to the page you will find the rules and conditions right there we get together one way or the other either by mail or by telephone or whatever we decide what a proper test of the claimed powers would be and then we put it into the hands of independent people I don't conduct the test unless I'm specifically asked to do so and I've often done that upon such requests because they say that I put out negative vibrations you see I even insist that I not be told when the test is going to take place that happened with the BBC I guess it was three years ago now BBC wanted to do a definitive test of homeopathy and I said that I would directly offer my million-dollar prize to anyone who came through with but inside that and they said that they they would give me a call when they're going to do the test and I said don't know don't tell me when you're going to do the test call me only after you've done the test at least 48 hours after you've done the test so that I can't interfere with it with negative vibrations and they thought that was rather silly but I said no this is what they say they say only didn't work because he put out the negev ib's as they call him and they did the test very definitively and it turned out to be just random results it's exactly what chance would dictate and the homeopathy immediately said of course no it it wasn't done properly and we reminded them you did the test you designed the tests and you approved the protocol and you performed the tests yourselves under controlled conditions absorbing conditions and they said oh there was something wrong with the tests then he said so there's nothing you can't win with these people they always come up with excuses afterwards then you just wait to see what variety of excuses are going to be offering incidentally homeopathy is supposed to be a form of medicine but if it worked because the homeopathic remedies have zero ingredients in them there are nothing but binder lactose or or fiber or whatever in the pills there are no active ingredients in homeopathic compounds that would be paranormal that's why we included in the million dollar challenge you must take a lot of heat for going after homeopathy I mean it is it's all natural that must be good for us Western medicine especially is evil the drug companies are evil all of these types of things but you must take a lot of heat for that you've taken a pretty hard stand yeah sure it's not a hard stand I say say I'm not saying it doesn't exist you say it does prove it I give you a million dollars it's that simple they don't have to invest anything mind you I don't pay their cost to to travel from Bulgaria or whatever and they don't have to come here if they wanted that there in Bulgaria and they want to do it all we have to do is make the application sign the agreement and such and we come to two terms and get it notarized and then we simply have somebody local there because I have colleagues all over the world who will do this sort of thing for me I simply tell them go ahead do the test and report to me and they're always negative you've been very generous with your time one last question we've talked about there's a sucker born every minute you know I was one of them for a long time and maybe again you just never know you know we're all candidates to be duped if we don't have our eyes and ears open but let's let's give them the happy ending have you had people who have seen your research senior expose is read your books who have seen the faith-healing phenomenon the psychic phenomenon and other phenomenons that are like them through a different lens thanks to your work and come back to you and said wow I've totally changed my perspective do you get those stories oh yes I get them just about well I'm looking at my screen I don't see anything on the screen here on the computer this morning but I do get these letters every now and then and the you start out mr. Randy I thought you were a terrible man and then I I bought your book flimflammer or whatever they they get the faith theatres or any of the books I've written or I and got in your website and discussed things with people and then now I'm turned around I very very seldom get people who get turned around and then turn back again now I think I've got a sort of a permanent effect on people and the interesting thing I must say and I'll leave you with this observation and I it's a very very heartwarming one for me very satisfying I very frequently get notes from people who say after I had this burden lifted from me I felt such a relief I felt freed now I thought at one time and my naive say that they would say oh I'm so disappointed it's a terrible thing for me to have to live with no belief no they usually go the opposite way in fact in almost every case they go the opposite way they say I'm now relieved I'm starting to live a real life now that I know is based on reason and rationality and they are relieved by it rather then oppressed by it James Randi will be one of the featured presenters at the reason rally on March the 24th I know I'm going to be in attendance in the crowd you know when I made the turn from religion to non-believer to skepticism you were one of the people that I discovered and I was hungry too I watched your videos reading your articles and books and browsing your website and so without gushing too much I just wanted to thank you it's a tremendous honor for me to have the opportunity to speak to you and and to have a conversation with someone who was so instrumental and and you've sort of helped to reawaken curiosity and skepticism now when I walk into a room I'm a little more apt to be dubious ask the questions demand the evidence you know make sure it's real and so I owe you a tremendous debt thank you so much sir well thank you for calling and let's do it again I'm going to come back in just a second and I'm going to sort of qualify why I'm spending so much time with peter Popoff all right but I think it's unfair of me to reference him so much with James Randi in that conversation without playing you the audio of what James Randi did back in 1986 I believe was the year now peter Popoff was a healing evangelist he was going around he was making a ton of money and James Randi took an associate and they went into the audience and they exposed Peter Popoff's lie and I have some audio of that very healing service right here [Music] during the 1980s I entered a world that I found filled with fantasy and rife with abuse the world of faith humans I developed a special interest in a television evangelist named Peter papa and God told me he said you Shrike that cancer with your fists at the time Popoff was pulling in nearly four million dollars a year healing people on his miracle Crusades you've got cancer of the stomach are you ready forgot to burn that cancer out here it goes in the mighty devil back off hallelujah hallelujah you really believe you're healed yes do you think her cancers are gone now yes I believe that because you can never lies maybe standing his war praise the Lord I tell you from now on you're gonna have a song of victory in your heart hey man to his followers Popoff seem to have divine powers as is it Gould Alice Gould he knew their names stand up Alice as well as the afflictions they come to cure God is touching that thyroid condition right now God is touching your nerves right now God is touching your eyes just lift up your hands get ready here it comes he also knew the personal details of their lives your good news from Charles before everything is over I'll tell you he's going to be completely delivered because of your prayers because of your faith here he comes complete healing it Jesus mighty name right now right now right now so I racked appraisal I suspected that Popoff's revelations were other than divine radio scanner we brought to the hall picked up a decidedly worldly source hello PD can you hear me if you can't you're in trouble yeah is it papa was being prompted by his wife through a wireless earpiece she'd gotten her information from prayer cars filled out by the faithful before the show began [Music] you want to get rid of this Walker sister hope nor how long have you been walking on that walk two years three years 16:27 tenth Street burning this apparatus right out of your body take a few steps just to make the devil mad hallelujah sit just move around a little bit there she goes just walk with me Oh glory to God she's not gonna need that walker anymore God's just new strength new healthy burning that arthritis out of her body just keep going hell yeah alright so peter Popoff exposed well he said at the time he said well you know there's nothing wrong with using a little assistance I mean he totally equivocated totally dodged it declared bankruptcy right now if you go online to peter Popoff dot or p/e ter Pio poff dot org you'll see that he's alive and well and still a millionaire and guess what according to the home page if you share your most urgent need with Reverend Popoff he will rush your miracle spring water to you and agree with you in prayer and you will see a little vial a little plastic container and it says miracle spring water on it there's a place you to put in your name your address your phone your email and of course your prayer requests and once you are on that first letter you get is your little vial of miracle spring water plus a request for money and you will get request after request after request now having been to an uncountable number of church services many of them healing services or prayer services or revival services the tactic of most mainstream pastors evangelists faith healers is to distance themselves from people like peter Popoff no he's the wrong he's not to the he's a charlatan he's a fake he is a fake but they're doing essentially is they're separating themselves from someone who has obviously been debunked someone who is so over the top and of course well I'm not I'm legitimate God is now using me as his representative you can trust me and anywhere you go I'll bet in any city of the United States you will go to a faith healing service you might mention the name of somebody like peter Popoff or someone else who has been exposed in the news and they'll say oh no no they're they're counterfeits that's a note you came here tonight for a real healing a real healing but their tactics are exactly the same high emotion subjective people desperate for healing desperate for answers desperate for a spiritual solution often financially destitute like those people who go to the casino with their last hundred dollars in this world you know trying to hit it big trying to hit it big one last act of desperation when the emotions are gone and the endorphins wear off and the Adrenaline's completely waned they go back home to the exact same problems that they had before and I know many of our listeners have experiences with faith healers as well let me go to the phones and talk to area code 504 thanks for waiting you're on the thinking atheist podcast who's this Paula from New Orleans glad you're Collin you have a faith healer experience or an opinion on the subject for me yeah actually down here in New Orleans or sub Louisiana area we have the Cajun faith healers called Ted to you or take juice which is uh they're not evangelical they're not muslim to other house most of them actually learning some childhood there pass the prayers are passed down secret prayers that only they know um I'm sure there's money involved in stuff like that but it's actually from childhood that they started passing the grandfather or the grandmother to the mother or whatever whatever well there was a recent episode of swamp people I think was last season where one of the characters Liz sell and sprung Frankl no talk of the doctor no talk of medical whatever she goes to today too so the old lady goes tada she goes to the house and she prays quietly she said the secret what can go the prayers well she walks away she still living but yet they never say she actually went to receive medical help real medical help that is healed did he get worse or whatever when someone goes to a prayer or revival or healing service right and when the evangelist has moved on right he's packed up his tent he's moved on or he's at least moved on to someone else people punished themselves I didn't have enough faith if I'd only believed if only I'd been more in tune with God if I'd only stood on the Bible it's my fault I still have a problem do you know what this person said or was it they never really recovered her injury and most of them they do other homes so they're in the community people come to have come soon for generations it's it's almost like instead of concert of doctor first let's go to the mess he'll be down the road and pray on your ankle god no there's some free thinkers in Louisiana man oh yeah all right we'll tell them they're not alone out there New Orleans okay right what one quick little thing I want to add just recently started listen to your podcast and I've been man I've been like sucking to me like nobody's business so I just want to say that I'm a Harry Potter loving military cause this abs and celebrate Halloween believe in evolution have to get out you have listened to it a bunch of our broadcast over the past few months it's funny when I started this in the middle I being a broadcaster I I really kind of fell back into it but people seem to be hungry for it I mean so a lot of people give me hell for not producing a video I'm not posting a video online it's another podcast God but time and again I get people who say this assures me I listen to it while I'm working out or while I'm driving to the office or up you know taking a trip in the airport headed on my ipod and I'm hearing stories of people who just enjoy and there's just no better feeling than knowing that that I love doing it but I really want people on the other end of the radio show to feel like man I enjoy listening it helps me so that's the probably the best compliment you can give me thank you so much I Drive an hour to and from work so I downloaded iTunes and let it play while driving to work and actually your podcast was the first I've ever listened to I've never engaged into any any of the podcast and much less calling into one so you guess who broke my podcast virginity but I appreciate it man keep up the good work and have a good night appreciates very very much we're getting a lot of iTunes listeners it's funny in January of 2011 I was looking at the stats on blog talk radio it provides those two hosts and I think we were getting about 35,000 downloads for that month which I thought was great you know Wow 35,000 oh that's fantastic how encouraging January of 2012 we were at I'm doing it from memory here but it was a hundred and twenty six thousand listens online in a 30 day period and it's tremendously humbling I mean I just thought wow you know fantastic I'm so glad people are are engaging and enjoying doing this it helps me I don't know how much you know about me I love the people I'm surrounded by my inner circle but they're almost all believers I love them love them but this is the one 90 minute stretch in the week where I can sit down and connect with people who don't think I'm going through a midlife crisis or they don't think that I'm deluded or I've been deceived it's the work of the evil one and they are constantly praying for my Redemption the prodigal must come home they're not giving me the Manneken stare you know they're not quoting scripture they're not making me a science fair project they get me I sort of depend on you guys I'm I'm an addict my name is Seth I'm an addict I've been sober for four years that's exactly how I feel but we're talking about faith healers I totally went off on a bunny trail there sorry about that area code 303 thank you for waiting you're on the thinking atheist podcast who's this hey this is Karina from Colorado my grandmother had recently gotten into some weird Asian thing called the light basically they pray over people in Japanese and it's real weird so and what are we talking about incense and you know sitar music or anything yeah it's just Japanese praying basically uh about three years ago she got a knee replacement and it didn't go so well she's been hurting a lot she has been on a lot of pain pills also been going through some hard times because my mother died about four years ago and you know she's just been going through some depression and stuff but she got into the light and first I wasn't sure what to think because the lady that does the light for her does it for free all she has to do is come down and the lady will do the little thing she claims said it helped her pain and then later they wanted money so that she could learn to do the light herself I told her that it wasn't a good idea that I thought you know it's pretty much just a placebo effect type thing but she did it anyway and now she gets annoyed with me because she wants to give me the light to help with I have no idea what because I'm perfectly healthy so are we talking about somebody who's their Social Security check - to somebody I mean is she a woman of means oh no she's retired she's not wealthy at all that's one of the reasons why I didn't want her to do that in her mind though does it give her peace and comfort she believes right she believes she's getting help yeah she thinks that it's working but not I don't think there was a couple of times receiving said that it doesn't seem to be working as well anymore but the lady that gives her the right said that's just the bad spirits or something like that getting inside her they were giving her negative energies and that was the reason why that she's trying to fight back against those that's what James Randi was talking about you know you give off negative vibrate you cramping my style here you're getting into my spirit world you got to just back up off me Wow that's exactly what they're saying you know they do the same thing when it comes to doubt when you're a believer and you start to doubt your faith if you have a legitimate doubt they say they'll say test God test your faith but what they mean is test it and if you come back with an answer that we don't like then it's it's the the evil one yeah it's the devil it's you know what it's negative vibrations that's what it is we'll all my best to you and your grandma I hope eventually she kind of wakes up and saves our coin and does something more productive with it I hope thanks for calling let's do one more real fast uh five-30 you're on the thinking atheist podcast who's this this is a shun from California thanks for calling ash appreciate you very much all right what do you have for us today well come on the topic of the whole facial thing over in this area there's actually a bevel and it's kind of a gossip page but they've got this whole program called the best supernatural school of ministry where they teach you to do faith healings essentially what are we talking about I mean they did lay on of hands they teach you how to put your hands on someone else or push him over or make them fainter um yeah kinda it's actually the church I went to and I was younger and before I D converted I'm guessing Bethel is like a like an assembly of God Pentecostal experience right yeah they actually um they're kind of overboard Pentecostals so much they got asked to leave Assemblies of God what I've heard they were so outrageous they were asked to leave the Assembly of God shirt Oh the rumors that have heard as a kid at least if you watch the documentary Jesus camp that's pretty much I was as a kid there and what do you had enough she vomiting busted out obviously yeah it was kind of a gradual process it took a few years I actually was finally be converted right around the time when you were from we've said I was a good year he's definitely a good you man yeah actually I one of the smartest Susie was actually one of the first videos I found and it was a there's the only one you had on the channel of time yeah I was one of my very first I subscribe to you immediately I loved the video and I've been watching every Swann ever since well I'm glad you escaped and appreciate your input you have a great week thanks again for calling thanks I had an email from Glenn he said I live in Norway and the town I live in we're in the middle of the Norwegian Bible Belt although this town's no longer in the buckle of the belt it's painfully obvious that we're pretty close at the last local elections the Christian Democratic Party is now in power together with the Conservatives by the way try to guess where the money is in this town in secular hands or in the bank accounts of the religious congregations well just north of this town Glen says there's a community called Wow I hope I say this right forgive me for not knowing it is it the ness Allah Vanessa lobby and an ESL a I'm going to go with Vanessa this is the home of a faith healer and he has his own phone service where you call in and his voice will be played of a tape recording that lasts for 12 minutes or so when he claims he can heal the sick lately as business has gone down a bit so he's just started a new service pre-emptive prayers yes mothers you can now call him and he can pray for you to not get sick it's a 15 minute recording where the last two is a prayer for your health and well-being the rest is just idle talk about Hell fifteen minutes for about two point five dollars a minute and the best part is if you do get sick despite the prayers you can get a partial refund it's brilliant and this man has the nerve to say well everyone's got to make a living even some evangelicals let their palms meet their faces but some insist that the prayers have cured them give me strength Cheers from Norway acclaim thank you so much for the message Robert says my mom used to drag us to these guys when we were little I've been to see ernest angley Oral Roberts and Leroy Jenkins you might know mr. Jenkins has been arrested at least twice for assault because he tried to quote beat the hell out of someone and he saw this is a good thing since he was removing the devil from this guy's soul what he just laid him I've seen him dude the thing where they put their hands on their foreheads with incredible verb you know come to you and bam some 90 year old lady just about loses her head it's horrible back to the letter I'm sorry my mom spent what little money she had to send this to these guys and others foolishly she used to buy holy water by the four gallon case from Reverend Jenkins we were on welfare we never had much money to begin with she went to these charlatans because she thought they'd healed my brother's asthma and helped her and us get out of poverty my brother grew out of his asthma as he grew older and she stopped smoking and today she's in a home with Alzheimer's so either we were truly unredeemable sinners or those preachers were frauds the whole lot of them my bet is on the latter Johnny says I was raised as a bible-believing Baptist in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky I kind of grew out of it when I was started thinking but my younger stayed a believer his spine was crushed in a jeep accident when he was 18 and he spent six months in intensive care he prayed constantly to be able to walk again and believe that God was going to heal him me to take him to five different faith healers over the next two years and I did they have guys to go around and ask you about your medical condition before the show begins and they would not let him near the stage because they knew they couldn't do anything for a person with a real problem they have several people that are ringers and get healed over and over again but most of the people were desculpe Allah nuff to think they were healed at least until the emotional high wore off Eddie died when he was 21 years and six days old still believing God was going to make him walk again thanks for the letter 87 to your on the thinking atheist podcast who's this yes piers what's going on I I don't know well this time it's like it's never been addressed I've always wondered why did they believe this I don't understand that PT Barnum used to say there's a sucker born every minute you know they've always been scam artists not just in religion everywhere people are always going to be sheep it was funny I was talking to Bill Morgan a friend of mine who is a he was on the founding staff at Oral Roberts University we're going to talk about Oral Roberts here in a minute by the way he was on the founding staff back when he was a true-blue believer right well over the course of time he fell out with the University and fell out with his faith he's now an any theist he spoke it to the Oklahoma free thought convention last year and we talked from time to time and we had a conversation and he told me he said you know what it's a good thing that you and I are honest people people of character I'm like oh really why yeah you know what what he said if you and I wanted to tonight he said if we wanted to the church is gullible enough we could go back to the church and say we had a religious reconversion we had we were atheists right we were deceived and Jesus appeared to us and we could come up with some wild scenario you know I was I was standing by the fridge there was Jesus rather here you know I was driving in my car and I heard his voice or what we could just come up with whatever story we wanted to and we would be welcomed in churches all across the country and they probably passed the freaking plate for us you know Seth used to be an atheist he had his website he used to produce videos he spoke around the nation and look at him now everybody let's hear a praise - praise the Lord for Seth who finally the prodigal has come home let's support Seth's ministry I mean it can imagine how much of a temptation that would be for anybody who was charismatic who had a great story and and people want to believe people want to be some people what did James Randi call him the unsinkable rubber ducks you just can't tell them so I honestly think there's 'inna there have always been the gullible there will always be the Sheep piers thanks for the call take it easy man all right is it yo Han on skype you're on the thinking atheist podcast what's your name John and from Toledo Ohio John thanks for calling what do you have for us today I'm a boy scout and one year I wasn't able to make it to be a boy scout and so my parents found out another period so that I could go camping and it was just like what you would see in the movie Jesus camp I mean he was just like it and the lady that we had was I would say mr. Popoff knit a the God warrior from wife swap I think I remember which was the god warrior the lady who came back and said it's dark sided everything's dark sided whoa yeah I'll have to have everybody Google that clip if you haven't seen it there's a lady right now I don't watch wife swap but apparently this really devout kind of redneck Christian lady goes and lives with a non-believing family is that the gist and so when she comes back she rips up the the check the payment that the producers paid her for her participation and flips out starts talking about how they're not Christians it's I everything is dark-sided so it was like that I'm pretty over the top yeah and there was a few acts that I can remember on the Friday of prayer revival and one of them was there's a kid who is on his bike and he broke both of his legs they weren't serious fractures to just need to keep it in cat and so they actually told them you're not wearing cool clothes or jeans like everybody else and they had them wear sweatpants he was in a cast they put him in sweatpants yeah they made him walk oh I see I see yeah they used him as serve like he has broken legs now he can walk well I'm uh I'm hearing more Jesus camp type stories from people just like you but I'm glad you're able to see it objectively and glad you found your way out and I appreciate your call John thank you very much there was an article written by the American Cancer Society and it says what is the evidence and I just grabbed a few snippets of it for you it says although it is known that a small percentage of people with cancer experience remissions of their disease that cannot be explained available scientific evidence does not support claims that faith healing can actually cure physical ailments when a person believes strongly that a healer can create a cure a placebo effect can occur the placebo effect can make the person feel better but has not been found to induce remission or improve chance of survival from cancer the patient usually credits the improvement in how he or she feels to the healer even though the perceived improvement occurs because of the patient's belief in the treatment taking part in faith healing can evoke the power of suggestion and affirm one's faith in a higher power which may help promote peace of mind this may help some people cope more effectively with their illness one review published in 1998 looked at 172 cases of deaths among children treated by faith healing instead of conventional methods these researchers estimated that a conventional treatment had been given the survival rate for most of these children would have been more than 90 with the remainder of the children also having a good chance of survival a more recent study found that more than 200 children had died of treatable illnesses in the United States over the past thirty years because their parents relied on spiritual healing rather than conventional medical treatment in addition at least one study has suggested that adult Christian Scientists who generally use Prayer rather than medical care have a higher death rate than other people of the same age it's from the American Cancer Society a guy named Stephen Barrett he's an MD he has an article on a website to create website it's called quack watch yeah like he's a quack there was an article called some thoughts about faith healing a segment from it about evangelistic healer says during the early 1970s Minnesota surgeon William Nolan MD attended a service conducted by Kathryn Kuhlman the leading evangelical healer of that period after noting the names of 25 people who had been quote miraculously healed he was able to perform follow-up interviews and examinations among other things he discovered that one woman who had been announced as cured of lung cancer actually had Hodgkin's disease which was unaffected by the experience another woman with cancer of the spine had discarded her brace and followed miss Kuhlman's enthusiastic command run across the stage the following day her backbone collapsed four months later she died overall not one person with organic disease had been helped dr. Nolan reported his findings which included observations of several other healers in healing a doctor in search of a miracle a book I heartily recommend he says so in the article I continued a study examined what happened to anxiety depression and self esteem in 406 patients who received intercessory prayer or no prayer the prayer was offered for 15 minutes daily for two of weeks the researcher reported improvement in all of the subjects but found no differences between the prayer and the no prayer groups a study of the effects of intercessory prayer on 40 recovering alcoholics also found no benefit a six-month study of 40 advanced AIDS patients exposed to 10 weeks of distant healing reported fewer new illnesses physician visits and hospitalizations in the distant healing group 2001 Mayo Clinic researchers have found no significant effect of intercessory prayer prayer by one or more persons on behalf of another on the medical outcomes of more than 750 patients who were followed for six months after discharge riman hospital coronary care unit the patients were randomized within 24 hours of discharge into a prayed for group and a control group the prayer group involved at least one session per week for 26 weeks by five randomly assigned individual or group intercessors he finishes intercessory prayer studies accomplished nothing beliebers won't change their view if further studies are negative and non-believers won't change their some additional studies appear positive prayer may help some people feel reassured when they are worried but to me it makes more sense to spend ones time and energy on more constructive health promoting activities although luck is still a significant factor I think it's more sensible to believe that health is more likely to be influenced by prudent living than by magical thinking also a praying for people worked with strangers praying against them caused them to become sicker or as one of my religious friends put it is God so stupid that he or she would respond to popularity contests Stephen Barrett MD there's a concept about prayer that I addressed in a recent blog called nothing fails like prayer which was a take-off of Dan Barker's parody song that he wrote after he had turned from being an evangelical Christian into one of America in fact the world prominent atheist we talked about prayer and if you think about prayer prayer for healing prayer for whatever you think about it objectively it makes no sense I'm on Facebook somebody was talking about a child in the hospital with I don't know what the affliction was I can't even remember what it was but we've seen those type of posts all the time so-and-so is in the hospital poor little girl send out your prayers and inevitably if you are in a Christian circle you will see a litany of comments after that post that's it our prayers prayers prayers praying now praying now our families praying right and you think about prayer in that context it makes no sense if normally they will pray lord if it be your will which is the ultimate out right well if it's God's will it should happen anyway if it's God's will and he's holding on to the aces in the deck waiting for you to come to him right to plead well that makes God is satus it's it's God's will for the little girl to be healed but I'm gonna hang back right I'm God I'm gonna hang back until I know you really want it I want to hear it people send those prayers up I want to hear my name in Jesus name and God's name god be praised praise God to God be the glory I want to hear it and until I do I'm gonna do nothing if it is in God's will for the child to be healed the prayers are worthless anyway because God's will will be done no matter what the prayer scenario looks like it makes no sense for you to pray for anything right it's either God's will it's not as will or it's his will and he's a bastard he's a sadist he's a monster he gets off on watching the cancer ridden body of a seven-year-old in the hospital rife with poisons and chemo and everything else under the grieving tears of parents and family and friends he's gonna wait on that he's just gonna hang back and wait until you have to ask me and you have to ask me in the right way they're just not gonna happen area code 801 you're on the thinking atheist podcast thank you so much for your patience who's this uh yeah this is Josh in Salt Lake City glad you're callin Josh you're in Mormon country out there everybody rooting for Romney everybody out there rooting for Romney or what no heck we've all I just know that you tarred in a you tartar part of the world but I I've been wanting to call yourself for a while I mean I'm actually in your chat room right now but uh it's funny you know because Mormons actually don't really do the whole faith healing thing I mean I think it's funny that you know I never heard that what is they pop off yeah I never heard of him until this show do you pray for blessings or healing in the Mormon Church educate maybe what do they go for what what they do is I mean we have a thing called anointing oil where basically they will use olive oil and they bless it and once it's been used oh we can't be using it for cooking no no no dude oh but it's still in there it's gonna leave it on label on it concentrated Mormon oil it's olive oil that you'd like pick up at Walmart well it's just your standard oil you can buy them you know Smith Walmart whatever yeah and once this blessed oh they can't use it so what they do they basically put it away and they use it for certain blessing but anyway uh dad I it's great to talk to you the first time I tell you I've been listening to you ever since I heard you last year I listened to all your episodes on YouTube I went and recorded mom put them mp3 player list them all the time you need to do another facepalm episode that like warning my favorite yeah that's one of my first you know it's funny I don't have a I don't really have a schedule lined up for the next several weeks maybe we'll do a facepalm episode and you can call back in alright good alright take it easy hey you took that very enthusiastic guy addison on skype you're on the thinking atheist podcast who's this oh my god hello is it addison yeah can you hear me I sure can were you calling fraud I'm calling from England UK I'm so glad what time is it there it's gonna be like yeah we in the morning I'm it it's 30 minutes past 1:00 Wow well what do you have for us on faith healers today well first of all I just want to say thank you so much for doing these shows you've been like such a big inspiration thank you so many people like must tell you all the time but yeah just thank you so much for doing these shows well it's my pleasure honestly now in England you guys aren't you guys don't have a whole lot of religion going on I mean I know you're charged of England but I hear people all the time from your part of the world say geez America must be a crazy place yeah it's kind of weird we have like it's kind of you don't really speak about it as much like most people are it's kind of 50/50 most people are either religious or they're not religious but you do get quite a lot of people believing in you know like spiritual ghosts and fortune tellers and things like that so that's a bit of a downside to it do they have like revival preachers or faith healing preachers um it's not it's not really the faith healing it's more like the the sort of psychics and things like that but it just reminded me you know the peter Popoff story yes he just reminded me of this this woman called psychic Sally and she was 16 yeah great name she was basically a massive TV a psychic and you know she had yet she had shows and she was selling out massive theaters and things like this and it's basically all over the newspapers and unload on the radio about a year ago she was doing this big massive like theater packed out theater doing all these readings and you know telling people that they're like granddad was like you know speaking to them and stuff like that basic cold weed in and you know you can tell it from like mouths away and basically these two women sat at the back of the theater they could hear this man speak in talking through this back little window that they had open and basically psychics Ali was saying everything that the man was saying ten seconds afterwards and it was revealed that she had like the best thing was it was on her own footage from the show and it showed her taking off a hidden earpiece she was she was basically just found out the same way Popoff was and she's again sadly buck doing it selling out yeah that's beautiful I looks like when Randy exposed peter Popoff or uri geller any of those other guys wouldn't you like to bend the audience when it happened just to feel that wash of euphoria come over you as you realize another charlatan has been exposed it's beautiful yeah now you guys have Darren brown over there right he's he is so he's like one of my heroes I just basically like try and whenever people say you know I visited a fortune-teller or did you see most haunted on TV and things like that basically the first thing out my mouth is have you ever seen their umbrella before well the challenge we have here in the states is that Darren brown is not known in fact I think he often uses it to his advantage yeah Darren brown I believe it was last year did an entire hour long special on faith healing now I can't for copyright reasons I can't play it for you on this show but I believe it's available online yeah it's not it's not blocked sometimes they'll block some adaran stuff because of proprietary reasons I think but he did like a whole hour right where he picked a guy just an average everyday Joe and he taught him I forgot what he did but he didn't he teach him how to be a faith healer how to pass himself off as one yeah he taught him how to he's basically I think he was a plumber or electrician nothing at all to do with you know faith healing or spirituality I think he said he was you know slightly religious but he didn't mind doing it to expose the charlatans and he basically taught him all the tricks of cold reading hot reading throwing out you know random random things that anybody could you know pick up on make make it their own and he went round and you know toward toward America with this this guy who he trained up and so many people believed in him and stuff like that and then at the end they had an audience and and he basically just revealed how he done it afterwards to this audience and it was just great to like see the reactions of you know the people who had been fooled by it and the thing about Darren Brown is dead he's not cruel yeah yeah that's right he used to be a crease Kozma he says I used to be a happy clappy Christian they assumed those were his words yeah and when he essentially exposed the ruse to everyone he said he wasn't trying to kill their their hope yeah he was like protect yourself protect your mind and heart realize that these people are out there I thought he handled it very well yeah that was great I think I was great about how he wasn't as in-your-face look at how stupid you've been and you how you've been tricked by it look how look how the people use these techniques to fool people and you know maybe you should think twice next time you you know they asked you to donate these sort of things that's what that was the whole way you went about it wasn't too cruel which yeah it's a good way to get people to not show off straight away not be too angry about it well I think Darren brown enjoys his anonymity because he can come to the states and do things like that but I would I would encourage everybody to if you don't know who he is it's de RR e n it's a little bit of a strange spelling de RR en Brown he's obviously a performer e all but stuffs very dramatic it's it's incredibly well shot and produced and lit and the audio the music everything is very much over the top but he knows it he knows he's a showman and he tells you yeah oh this is all a bunch of BS yeah he basically started out as a sort of illusion like a stage illusionist so he did you know card tricks hypnotism and things like that and at the beginning of his shows he always starts off by saying oh all the events that you'll see tonight they're not used by Stooges they're all like it's magician ship showmanship you know confusion and trickery and things like this and then he basically does he live a do tricks in that he's made of himself that just unbelievable they're worth watching anyway or he'll oil do a special or a take on you know popular things that people can get tricked by so psychics and faith healers all sorts of things like that and he shows how it can't be very easily done using you know provable techniques that you can actually you know say there's nothing spiritual about it whatsoever people are gonna wonder if you know Darren brown is sponsoring this portion of my show I just I tend to gosh well I I stumbled upon him but at the same time I was starting to see a lot of the other stuff that I was looking at on YouTube being from Dawkins and Hitchens and these guys and for somehow there was a length that led me to a link and I was like oh look at this guy he's amazing he did one a one more one more anecdote everybody just bear with me while we're talking all right Addis night we're having we're having a moment here everybody but he's great at he's a hypnotist right yeah yeah yeah the fact so they set up an arcade about our suggestion did you see it yeah set up a video arcade and they brought it in in the I don't know if it was a way that the screen was flashing but he has some technique that he did not divulge and it put the guy playing the video game the stand-up video game in the arcade it put him into like a hypnotic state yeah and they whisk him down the street several blocks where they had built a life-sized representation of the game screen the actual game environment right zombie hospital yeah it was a zombie Hospital and he snaps his fingers or there's another I don't know they put some bogus plastic gun in his hand and he wakes up in this blackened dark creepy place with zombie tearing that and he literally ends up playing the game live in from the inside out any screaming and he's carrying on and I don't know how long they let it go on like five ten minutes yeah the poor guy who's scared to death and then at the last second Darren brown runs out grabs him he puts his hand on his head and he essentially puts him back in the hypnotic state I don't know how they do it and they run him back down to the arcade and they place him in front of the video game and he snaps back to and does not realize yeah that he was just there inside the game screen it is I think it's on YouTube yeah just be very very quick there's a slight variation one as well as it's called hero at 30,000 feet it's basically people apply for the show when any narrows it down to this one guy and he picks like the really the most shy guy you could find like complete opposite of outgoing and he basically he gives him challenges that in his everyday life he doesn't know the from Darren Brown and he builds his build his character up and makes him more confident in his everyday life and he makes him fly on an airplane to somewhere I can't I can't remember what the reason was and basically it's all it the whole airplane is filled out with actors and you know actresses and other the stewardess and everything's all fake Darren brown then gets gets the people on the tannoy to announce that the pilot and the copilot are incapacitated somehow they've had like some sort of heart failure or the pilots you know being in company incapacitated and then he basically says no is there anybody that can help us fly this plane the ground control will talk you through it but we need somebody to help and he's got this timer on the screen and I think if he you know if he agrees to do it or he wins some money or something like that and basically in the last three seconds this guy you know you can see him any seat who's like really like debating what should I help people should I not and he gets up and he he he's like yeah I can do it I don't know how to fly a plane but I'll try I'll do my best we're all going to die anyway if not and so he's walking to the front of the pet plane down Brown jumps out he basically interrupts is-is-is movements and you know shocked similar charms the plane lands and then what they do is they put him in a in a simulator you know like the simulators you can get fairground right at fairgrounds and he basically ground control through this simulator and you know talking how to fly the plane down and stuff like that it's basically just like such a great moment to see this guy and then obviously you walks out the simulator and it's in this big airplane hangar and everyone's clapping and yeah just amazing Wow Addison you're a great caller I feel yeah I feel like we you know to feel like two guys who have the same hobby who'd like knowing to say hey I'm a because I could talk about this stuff all day but I appreciate it very much I'm so glad to know that you're listening in England and if you know if you ever get over here bring daring with you we'll call it a day buy you coffee okay Ellen laughing uh-oh can I just have a line I look very much fun I'm sorry I just lost the last part of your call would you say I just said that my girlfriend listened to the sheriff I just like the carload oh man it's the day after Valentine's Day hey thanks for calling brother and say hi to your lady for me okay we love you thought thank you all of this would Darren brand still I think relates to the phenomenon of the power of suggestion in my opinion and from my experience this is exactly what we're talking about think about it you go to an environment where the lighting the mood the pacing the music the cadence of speech and many tactics that people like Darren brown and others use to to put suggest to pee and it doesn't work on everybody in fact Darren will tell you many of the tactics he uses for hypnosis or otherwise don't work on everybody there are some triggers there are some things that you have to have there are some I think personality characteristics there are some things well beyond my realm of knowledge but if you get people like that who are impressionable who are in a moment of suggestion where they are vulnerable and you put the environmental pieces in place and you tell them anything they'll believe it and that's why the Oral Roberts I didn't really get to him during this show Oral Roberts has a soft spot for me because he was evangelist in the 60s and 70s Oral Roberts University exists in the city in which I grew up I used to work in the in the building the hospital building that he that he was supposed to be a hospital you're right he said Jesus told him appeared to him at nine hundred feet tall said that you have to build an 800 foot tall city of faith hospital in Cancer Center it's my way he raises the money he goes crazy just a few years the hospitals in bankruptcy this a few years they're like twenty five million dollars in debt so God can appear to him and tell him that it's his charge to go out and build a hospital but God cannot then keep it solvent and it ignores the larger question why would a faith healer like Oral Roberts need a hospital he's a faith healer why do you need hospital beds then IVs and prescription medication why do you need a nursing staff he's going in healing God's using you as his conduit Oh makes me crazy thank you so much for being a part of the show I feel like I was kind of all over the place but it's still been a tremendous pleasure James Randi on the show and talking about your personal experiences and and overall I know that these guys will always exist they'll always be out there but it's our charge it's I think it's on us to try to to bring that Bell of the alarm bell to say look look you're still hurting you still have cancer you still have the affliction you are still confirmed you still are not healed maybe somebody down the pike will listen maybe that seed of doubt we planned will later on come to fruition and become something where they question it themselves that has happened before if you have a suggestion for future podcast I could sure use your help because we've covered a lot of topics I really enjoyed the subject based shows I want to do another whatever show in the next month or two where we just talk about whatever I think we've had some people who talked about let's talk about prayer you know we can I don't know if we can spend a whole 90 minutes talking prayer everybody realizes that prayers it is what it is we exchange anecdotes left and right I don't want to bore anybody to tears I was thinking about doing a show where it's I just call it totally off the subject and I came from morning radio we talked about everything every day all the time we just talked about life this stuff and I thought about just just to give everybody a break would it be nice to do a show where all we just do is just kind of just talk about whatever we take atheism right we take religion off the table I doubt it'll stay off the table I'm sure somebody will bring it up but um just you know whatever we talked about talked about the state of the world we can talk about something wild that happened in your life something crazy so funny story is something I don't know you think people would go for that you think they they turn on me for changing that the entire theme of the podcast for 90 minutes would they consider it a waste of a week if you have a suggestion drop by your Facebook page and make a note or you can drop me an email at editor at the thinking atheist dot-com thank you so much for being a part of this community for being a part of my life for helping to encourage me and just keep on keepin on Oh see here next week and Tuesday nights from now on on the thinking atheist radio podcast follow the thinking atheist on Facebook and Twitter watch dozens of original videos on the thinking atheist YouTube channel and visit our website for resources links contact information the editors blog and more the thinking atheist calm [Music] you

Channel: TheThinkingAtheist

Views: 82,996

Rating: 4.8773007 out of 5

Keywords: Atheist, Atheism, Agnostic, James Randi, The Amazing Randi, God, faith healers, divine healing, religion

Id: rrpGYE8QA2M

Length: 80min 35sec (4835 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/LiquidSnape]

More Links Blogtalk Itunes

[u/Alt_f4_]

Commenting to come back to later