TagReligion

The True Face of Faith Healing

faith healing

The image above was taken by the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office. In it, Rebecca Wyland is holding Alayna, who has a massive growth completely covering her left eye. The growth, a hemangioma, is a mass of blood vessels. Some infants are born with them, and they are typically corrected while very small. In this case, the Wylands chose not to take their daughter to a doctor. Instead, Rebecca Wyland anointed her daughter with oil and wiped off the discharge from Alayna’s eye each time she changed the child’s diaper.

At this point, the growth has begun to erode Alayna’s eye socket, and may have caused permanent damage to her eye.

Both parents have been charged with first-degree criminal mistreatment, a Class C felony which may earn them each five years in prison.

Meanwhile, the Wylands are trying desperately to regain custody, even offering a plan to ensure the child gets medical care, including such ideas as a live-in supervisor of sorts, or regular visits from state employees to check up on them.

Secular Daily News: The True Face of Faith Healing

(via OVO)

The Bible Doesn’t Say Jesus was Crucified, Christian Scholar Claims

Historical Jesus

I’ve read before that although the Romans kept meticulous records of crucifixions, there is no surviving record of a Jewish radical from Nazareth being crucified in the claimed time period. I don’t have references handy, but I can dig some up if anyone’s interested. Christian scholars, when presented with this lack of evidence, have sometimes argued the lack of a record is due to the fact that Jesus was crucified by Jews, not by Romans. However, this Christian scholar actually argues that Jesus wasn’t crucified at all:

The legend of his execution is based on the traditions of the Christian church and artistic illustrations rather than antique texts, according to theologian Gunnar Samuelsson.

He claims the Bible has been misinterpreted as there are no explicit references the use of nails or to crucifixion – only that Jesus bore a “staurus” towards Calvary which is not necessarily a cross but can also mean a “pole”. […]

The ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew literature from Homer to the first century AD describe an arsenal of suspension punishments but none mention “crosses” or “crucifixion.”

Mr Samuelsson, of Gothenburg University, said: “Consequently, the contemporary understanding of crucifixion as a punishment is severely challenged.

“And what’s even more challenging is the same can be concluded about the accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus. The New Testament doesn’t say as much as we’d like to believe.”

Telegraph: Jesus did not die on cross, says scholar

(via Dangerous Meme)

However, I would expect the Romans would have kept records of all executions, crucifixions or not, though I suppose the “he was executed by Jews” caveat would still apply.

Samuelsson also claims “That a man named Jesus existed in that part of the world and in that time is well-documented. He left a rather good foot-print in the literature of the time.” My understanding is that there are no surviving contemporary accounts of Jesus, but I could be wrong.

(I still subscribe the “composite character” theory of Jesus – he was based on several historical Jewish radicals, not a historical single person, and later sexed up with Pagan mythology to make Christianity more palatable)

See also:

Paul Verhoeven’s book on Jesus

The God Who Wasn’t There

Jesus Never Existed

What Did Jesus Do?

The Historical Jesus FAQ

Grant Morrison’s Indian Mythology Comic 18 Days, Interview and Preview

18 DAYS by Grant Morrison and Mukesh Singh

18 DAYS by Grant Morrison and Mukesh Singh

For the 18 Days version, we took the Mahabharata’s descriptions of vimanas and astras very literally as accounts of ancient advanced technology and created a vision of the battle at Kurukshetra which combines traditional images of the Mahabharata with a kind of Vedic sci-fi approach which adds a new freshness and modernity to the story. This version is less about trying to create a historically-accurate representation of conflict in ancient India and more about emphasising a timeless, universal and mythic vision that has as much to say about the world we live in today as it does about the past. The transmission of the Bhagavad Gita at the heart of the story opens the way for a metaphorical spiritual understanding of the conflict as the war between desire and duty, the material and the spiritual, that is fought every day by every human being.

The Gita, with its direct, no-nonsense guide to living in the odd universe we all share, is at the very heart of the story, in the sense that everything else revolves around that moment when Krishna lays it on the line for Arjuna.

Newsarama: Grant Morrison Wages War Using Indian Mythology for 18 DAYS

Military Police Meets Zen Buddhism

buddhist police

The government of Espírito Santo, a state located in the southeast of Brazil, is experimenting with a new training routine for some of its military police officers. Instead of learning about new combat techniques, policemen are developing interpersonal relationship skills, emotional balance and discipline in a Zen Buddhist monastery, located 70km from the state capital, Vitória.

PSFK: Military Police Meets Zen Buddhism

What did Jesus do?

Jesus

Adam Gopnik reviews recent literature deciphering the gospels:

And yet a single figure who “projects” two personae at the same time, or in close sequence, one dark and one dreamy, is a commonplace among charismatic prophets. That’s what a charismatic prophet is: someone whose aura of personal conviction manages to reconcile a hard doctrine with a humane manner. The leaders of the African-American community before the civil-rights era, for instance, had to be both prophets and political agitators to an oppressed and persecuted people in a way not unlike that of the real Jesus (and all the other forgotten zealots and rabbis whom the first-century Jewish historian Josephus names and sighs over). They, too, tended to oscillate between the comforting and the catastrophic. Malcolm X was the very model of a modern apocalyptic prophet-politician, unambiguously preaching violence and a doctrine of millennial revenge, all fuelled by a set of cult beliefs—a hovering U.F.O., a strange racial myth. But Malcolm was also a community builder, a moral reformer (genuinely distraught over the sexual sins of his leader), who refused to carry weapons, and who ended, within the constraints of his faith, as some kind of universalist. When he was martyred, he was called a prophet of hate; within three decades of his death—about the time that separates the Gospels from Jesus—he could be the cover subject of a liberal humanist magazine like this one. One can even see how martyrdom and “beatification” draws out more personal detail, almost perfectly on schedule: Alex Haley, Malcolm’s Paul, is long on doctrine and short on details; thirty years on, Spike Lee, his Mark, has a full role for a wife and children, and a universalist message that manages to blend Malcolm into Mandela. (As if to prove this point, just the other week came news of suppressed chapters of Haley’s “Autobiography,” which, according to Malcolm’s daughter, “showed too much of my father’s humanity.”)

New Yorker: What Did Jesus Do?

See also: Paul Verhoeven talks about his new book on Jesus

(Thanks Paul)

Texas re-writing history books for the entire country

Greatest Texan Ever
Art by Matthew Clay-Robison

“We are fighting for our children’s education and our nation’s future,” Dunbar said. “In Texas we have certain statutory obligations to promote patriotism and to promote the free enterprise system. There seems to have been a move away from a patriotic ideology. There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections.”

Those corrections have prompted a blizzard of accusations of rewriting history and indoctrinating children by promoting rightwing views on religion, economics and guns while diminishing the science of evolution, the civil rights movement and the horrors of slavery.

Several changes include sidelining Thomas Jefferson, who favoured separation of church and state, while introducing a new focus on the “significant contributions” of pro-slavery Confederate leaders during the civil war.

How does the effect the rest of the country?

The curriculum has alarmed liberals across the country in part because Texas buys millions of text books every year, giving it considerable sway over what publishers print. By some estimates, all but a handful of American states rely on text books written to meet the Texas curriculum. The California legislature is considering a bill that would bar them from being used in the state’s schools.

Guardian: Texas schools board rewrites US history with lessons promoting God and guns

(Thanks Katie Monster!)

Update: Some doubts about Texas’s national influence on textbooks from the Texas Tribune (via Jon Lebkowsky)

The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

Vincent Ocasla claims to have “beaten” SimCity by creating an amazing city with population of 6 million and no roads (only subways) that lasts for 50,000 years.

I’ve a quote from one of your Facebook status updates here: “The economic slave never realizes he is kept in a cage going round and round basically nowhere with millions of others.” Do you not feel that sums up the lives of the citizens of Magnasanti? (And you might want to set your Facebook to private by the way.)

Precisely that. Technically, no one is leaving or coming into the city. Population growth is stagnant. Sims don’t need to travel long distances, because their workplace is just within walking distance. In fact they do not even need to leave their own block. Wherever they go it’s like going to the same place.

Heavy.

There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle – this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.

Viceland Games: The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City

Vincent Ocasla’s site

Ocasla was inspired in part by the Kowloon Walled City

A Born-Again Christian Ex-Outlaw Biker and His Hunt for the Leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda

Sam Childers

Sam Childers is known in these parts, and back home in Pennsylvania, simply as the Reverend Sam. He is not your typical evangelical Christian missionary, nor, as a white American, is he your typical African warlord. Childers is a former drug dealer and outlaw biker, with tired eyes framed by grizzly muttonchops and a walrus mustache. He claims divine justification for what he does. In firefights, he says, God sometimes tells him when to shoot. He speaks country-singer American, with plenty of grit, and he recounts, over and over, the same stories from his bar-brawling days. He lifts weights, favors army fatigues, and keeps a .44 Magnum tucked in the small of his back. Harley tattoos stretch down his thick arms, and “Freedom Fighter” is airbrushed on the back of his truck. He once owned 15 pit bulls. He seems suited more to bending steel in a motorcycle shop than to saving souls in Sudanese villages.

In 1992, Childers was born again, having promised his wife he would come to Jesus if God granted them a child. A child was born. Leaving behind a life of drugs and crime, Childers set up a hardscrabble church in rural Pennsylvania. In 1998 he used his meager savings to take his first missionary trip to Sudan. He ended up near the border with Uganda, where a complicated and bloody conflict—one of Africa’s so-called forgotten wars—has been raging since 1987. At the center of the fighting is the Lord’s Resistance Army, a guerrilla group led by a Ugandan named Joseph Kony. The L.R.A.’s stated goal is to overthrow the Ugandan government and install a theocratic state based on the Ten Commandments. That effort has entailed systematically ignoring at least one of the commandments, Thou Shalt Not Kill. Most of the others have been breached as well. This forgotten war is the continent’s longest running. It spills across the border from Uganda into Southern Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo as the L.R.A. scours the region for conscripts and supplies.

What transformed Childers into a zealot was, as he later wrote, “a metal disk about the size of a dinner plate.” A land mine had been placed along a road near the town of Yei, and a child made the mistake of stepping on it. Childers happened upon the torso. In time, he liquidated his construction business, sold his pit bulls, auctioned his antique-gun collection, and mortgaged his home to help pay for regular trips to Sudan, where he began spending most of his time. He became obsessed with the fate of the thousands of children who have lost their parents to the fighting. In due course he would set up an orphanage in Sudan. But it was Joseph Kony who grabbed his attention. “I found God in 1992,” Childers says, in what is by now a ritual formulation. “I found Satan in 1998.” He has vowed to track Kony down and, in biblical fashion, to smite him. He has been trying for years. But this specific ambition has led to a broader entanglement in the region’s conflicts. Childers is now helping to feed and supply the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (S.P.L.A.), and he has made his home in Uganda available to the rebels for a radio-relay station. An arms depot stands at the heart of his orphanage. Childers also maintains his own paid militia force—a platoon of seasoned fighters recruited from the S.P.L.A.—and for his efforts, he says, the government of Southern Sudan has named him an honorary commander, the only white man to achieve that distinction. The Ugandan and Southern Sudanese militaries give Childers wide latitude to roam an increasingly bloody militarized zone.

Vanity Fair: Get Kony

(Thanks Josh)

Alejandro Jodorowsky Interview from Vice

Alejadro Jodorowsky

Where does your knowledge of religions come from?

From my father, in a way. He was an atheist. When I was four he said to me, “God doesn’t exist.” It gave rise to an incredible fear, so I started to read anything that could soothe me, metaphysically speaking. All religions, all esoteric movements, alchemy, the Kabbalah, I read about all this. Except astrology–that always pissed me off.

Hum…did you have a script for The Holy Moutain?

I had a frame but I made up the story little by little, every night.

You were said to shoot after taking magic mushrooms…

No, well… Actually, only one scene was shot after taking shrooms. And we messed up. We had to reach a holy place, the top of the pyramid. The actors and I decided to be as mystical as the place we were in. But I made a mistake, I did not force my cameraman to take magic mushrooms as well. He was sober. He saw us and laughed at us as you laugh at drunkards. He decided to put a distorting lens, to shoot us in a ridiculous, psychedelic way. It was a shitty effect on a beautiful, rare, and clean scene which you should not touch. So we climb the pyramid, guided by our supra-conscience. Once there I scratched the ground and I extracted a stone, a cube which we brought on the top. On the top we found a little flower, a very little flower: it was magic, pure. And the fucking cameraman put a distorting lens to capture that, as if we were monsters.. I wanted to kill him.

I realized what he did too late, we were in wild, virgin territories, I only saw the rushes once back in New York. I fled from Mexico because they wanted to put a bomb in my flat, yelling I was evil. I had 30 hours of film you know, he ruined more than a third. I was fool to believe that if the technicians were clean, they would work correctly. But on the contrary, they did not understand a thing about the movie, there was no communication between us and them. They looked at us as if we were wild beasts and thought they could do anything with the camera. When I think about what we messed up, I feel sick.

Vice: NAKED BLOODY CORPSES, CHARROS, SHROOMS, AND THOSE WHO MADE THEM MONSTERS

Beyond Growth – Technoccult interviews Duff McDuffee and Eric Schiller

Duff McDuffee
Above: Duff McDuffee

Eric Schiller
Above: Eric Schiller

Duff McDuffee and Eric Schiller run the blog Beyond Growth, a site dedicated to bringing some much needed criticism to the modern “personal development” business. Duff and Eric joined me via instant message from Boulder, CO and Belingham, WA respectively to answer some questions about the field.

Klint Finley: I suppose we should begin by first talking a little bit about “personal development” – what is it, how did this business emerge?

Duff McDuffee: You mean the field itself?

Klint: Right. Personal development as a business.

Eric Schiller: Duff is probably a bit more of an expert on that particular question, but I’ll add my thoughts to his response.

Napoleon Hill holding a copy of his book Think and Grow Rich
Napoleon Hill holding a copy of his book Think and Grow Rich

Duff: Ok. Well, from what I understand it largely emerged in the early 20th century when New Thought religious ideas became popular and were applied to worldly success. The basic idea was contained in such books as Think and Grow Rich and As a Man Thinketh.

The notion was that you could create stuff with the power of your mind. The correlary is that if you aren’t getting what you want, you need to do a kind of mental hygeine and clean up your stinkin’ thinkin’ (to quote Zig Ziglar).

So you have people like Napolean Hill, who died broke by the way, writing books on how to get rich by visualizing and affirming one’s future wealth.

Eric: In Douglas Rushkoff’s book Life Inc. he argues that ‘personal development’ or self help found its place in corporations, in order to help the remaining staff become more efficient after job cuts.

Thus personal development has deep capitalistic roots, based in becoming more useful for society, and or your particular corporate persuasion.

The Bobs

Duff: Yes, an excellent point Eric. Books like Who Moved My Cheese encouraged employees to “embrace change” and stay positive while they were being downsized for no fault of their own to make short-term profits for stakeholders. Barbara Ehrenreich covers this too in Bright Sided.

Whether or not this was intended, personal development functions as a perfect religion for capitalism. Pray for money and consumer goods and social status, and take 100% responsibility even when your circumstances are largely determined by social structures and institutions that are not in your direct control.

Eric: The early gurus cherry picked from Maslow and Jung – whatever ideas sounded good at the time.

Duff: Today’s gurus still do

Klint: OK. So how does this – or does it – tie into other areas like “self-help,” “lifehacking,” and, most recently, “lifestyle design”?

Eric: Personal development and self help are effectively the same, personal development is a more recent name for the same thing.

Duff: They are all synonyms as far as I’m concerned, rebranding.

Eric: Life hacking is different, but I think it is in effect, part of the same trope. Life hacking is a branch of hacking culture, it is really technologically based, but is all about “bettering oneself” so it has taken on the goal of PD or self help.

Duff: “Lifehacking” seems to me to be another name for geeking out on consumer gadgets and software for the most part. I mean if you really want to hack your life, do Vipassana meditation, or read Hegel, or take acid (not my preference, but that will seriously hack some stuff up).

Tim Ferris
Above: Tim Ferris goofing off while his employees do all his work.

Eric: The strange place is where the lifestyle designers and the life hackers collide, there you get people like Tim Ferris

Duff: Lifestyle design is interesting because only the privileged count as designing their lives. When a Mexican immigrates to the U.S. in order to have a better life for himself and his family, it isn’t lifestyle design. In fact, most lifestyle design focuses on 1st world young men with laptops who do freelancing living in developing nations to get a good exchange rate.

Eric: Yeah, lifestyle design itself is very priveledged, and only high-end consumers tend to get into it. They believe it is not consumption, but in reality it functions as a higher almost more evil form of consumption.

Duff: Part of the lifestyle design ethos involves an “escape from corporate jobs” which is of course nonsense. The first thing a lifestyle designer does is create an LLC in his or her own name, then engage in personal branding, and often exploit cheap overseas labor. The corporate ethos has been driven deeper, not avoided.

Klint: Well, it’s been escaped for the person doing the designing – but not for anyone who’s being outsourced to.

Duff: Right. So lifestyle design is really in the same boat as those business books on how to think like a CEO. But it plays off a countercultural branding.

Klint: Well, let me ask you guys this: is there anything so wrong with wanting to escape the corporate 9-to-5? Are they really hurting anyone by bringing business to these countries?

Eric: I think that question isn’t really getting at what is going on on these blogs. Tim Ferris offers to his readers “escaping the 9-5” but in reality, he hasn’t done it himself. To him, “work” is doing stuff you don’t like, and the rest is fun. To him, a lot of the “fun” makes him money. Ferris works his butt off on his image and his books.

Klint: You’re right, becuase most of what’s actually going on, so far as I can tell, is these guys are going around having a blast and selling shady “info products” to marks with the promise that they can do what they do.

Eric: Ferris is offering a facade to his readers, that they can “make it” by doing very little work. This is really not a new idea, and has been offered in a multitude of self-help/business bookis.

Duff: What’s remarkable about Tim Ferris is that in his book he openly brags about cheating at Tango and martial arts. He used a radical dehydration technique to enter a much lower weight class, then pushed his opponents out of the ring and won on a technicality. This is the kind of business sense he is teaching–how to exploit loopholes in the rules for personal fame and profit.

It’s not really that surprising that Ferris is therefore the guru’s guru when it comes to shady internet marketing schemes that promise get rich/lifestyle quick.

Jonathan Mead
Jonathan Mead. What a rebel!

Eric: Additionally “escaping” is an extension of the American dream, of beating capitalism and making it your bitch. It isn’t an emancipatory dream like Ferris likes to pitch it. Someone I’m critical of, Jonathan Mead took Ferris’ ideas further and claimed that he was part of a “revolution.” This is a bigger problem.

Chris Guillebeau is also guilty of ‘revolutionizing’ lifestyle design. The problem is that it makes business as usual capitialism seem like a new revolution to the consumers, thus making it impossible for a real anti-capitalist movment to take hold. People are mesmerized by the same old promises.

Seth Godin

Duff: The revolutionary rhetoric really goes all the way back to Seth Godin, the ur-guru of personal development bloggers. Godin encourages marketers to use the techniques and rhetoric of grassroots political organizing to sell your info products to 1000 true fans. Instead of white papers, you get these PDF “manifestos” which are all a variation of a neo-liberal capitalist manifesto.

While there is nothing necessarily wrong with selling stuff on the internet and making a living doing it, to pretend that this is a revolutionary political act is ludicrous.

In more than one PDF white paper “manifesto” that I’ve read, the authors have specifically said that one should not vote or engage politically in any way. Steve Pavlina has said similar things. Most personal development bloggers advocate for avoiding the news because it is “negative.” All these things combine to destroy our political power by solely focusing on personal power.

Klint: I always thought that militant apoliticalism was a way of appealing to more people by avoiding taking any controversial political stance.

Duff: Could be, yes. But within that apparently apolitical view, when you scrape past the surface, is a radical neo-liberalism.

Eric: Klint, have you read the Porto Davos essay by Zizek? His notion of liberal communism fits perfectly to these lifestyle design gurus.

Klint: I haven’t read that essay, no.

So it sounds like it’s a pretty greasey business. Is there any value at all in it – is there anyone out there in that business worth commending?

Duff: Sure, there are some. I like Scott H. Young for the most part, although I don’t agree with him on a lot of points.

Eric: There are some people we like, but it really isn’t cut and dry to derermine who. I think it is important for individuals to develop themselves, but there is a lot of merit to the idea that you cannot just read what someone is telling you to do, and then directly apply it to your life. There is some barrier there, that prevents the ideas from becoming real habits.

Lucy from Peanuts

Klint: OK. So where does life coaching fit into this?

Duff: Life Coaching is interesting. I was a life coach for a while.

Life coaching feels really good for both coach and client. It’s really easy work and you get paid really well. It’s like being a therapist with only sane clients.

Klint: And without having to get a master’s degree. Or any degree for that matter.

Duff: Honestly, I think people really benefit from coaching, probably because we are so alienated that many people never have any meaningful conversations in their lives at all. But it is waaaaaaaaaay too expensive, and quickly becomes a massive ego trip and a huge financial scam. I don’t think there is any significant difference whatsoever between a $40/hour life coach and a $5000/hour life coach.

Another potential problem with coaching is that it outsources our meaningful conversations to specialists. If you have a Big Win in your life, who do you share this with first–your wife, or your life coach? Maybe your wife is stressed out and not that good of a listener anyhow. It is more efficient to share with your coach who will celebrate you unconditionally. But this takes away intimacy from your marriage, increasing your alienation.

Klint: So you don’t think that life coaching should be regulated like professional counseling?

Duff: Not really, no. I don’t like regulating meaningful conversation.

Eric: “Life coaching” is very broad. Most “life coaches” in reality are business coaches.

Duff: Yup.

Eric: Overall few focus on personal problems like getting along with others, self-esteem etc. These people are in it for the money.

Duff: The field overall is highly problematic and structured like a pyramid scheme. The most “successful” coaches are meta-coaches, i.e. they coach coaches on building their practice.

But within that, there are some really great people who are very helpful to their clients.

Eric: I asked a coach recently what the breakdown was of his clients, and a lot of them were bloggers and life coaches themselves. Very masturbatory.

Duff: To be fair, many healing professions are circle jerks. Massage therapists often have many massage therapists as clients

Klint: I can imagine if you spend all day giving massages, you’re really going to want a massage at the end of the week.

Duff: Yeah, my lady is a massage therapist. She needs her own bodywork to do bodywork on others. You get really sore.

BTW, my life coach is currently in jail for running an illegal Ponzi scheme.

Pyramid scheme

Klint: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that Duff, in relation to regulation Because if this guy is found guilty and sentenced and goes to prison – he could come right out and go right back to life coaching.

Duff: Sure. But he wouldn’t go to prison for life coaching fraud, but securities fraud. If he robbed a house he shouldn’t be barred from driving a car. Two different fields.

Klint: Yeah, but do you really think someone who goes to prison for securities fraud should being giving life advice?

Duff: I actually have a blog post in the works about this. The issues are complex and the facts aren’t all in yet. I’m not sure anyone is qualified to give life advice. But some people are pretty good at listening and asking poignant questions.

Eric: Who should be giving life advice anyway? It all comes down to the dispersion of a variety of ideologies.

Duff: Agreed.

Eric: Securites fraud just means that they broke the rules of capitalism.

Duff: The funny thing is his “Dharma Investments Group” was making similar errors as the big wigs. Who’s fault was the bubble anyway? Certainly fraud is fraud, but when the conservative bankers are doing similar things, all the normal rules go out the window.

Eric: Capitalism encourages people to stretch the rules, some people just get caught. I’d consider a full-of-air guru to be a worse person than someone comitting securites fraud.

Duff: It’s a spectrum of fraud and we’re all on it. Personally I think we can’t go much longer with interest-bearing currency before the whole monetary system collapses.

Klint: I don’t know the details of what that guy got himself into, but it’s hard for me excuse a guy who’s getting normal people to fork over their savings for some investment and then basically stealing their money. It doesn’t really matter what level he’s playing on…

Duff: I understand. It looks really bad for him! I certainly won’t be receiving his services anymore. But I stopped going to him about 5 years ago anyhow.

Klint: …that sounds like someone who’s pretty ethically challenged, y’know?

Duff: Or manic. Making impossible promises.

Klint: But yeah, he could get out of jail, move to another town, assume an alias, never have to disclose any of this… It’s very problmatic I think.

Eric: My point is that gurus do similar things. They take lay people and promise them all sorts of things, lead them on, and then leave them with nothing. James Ray was convincing his followers to go into debt to pay for his $10,000 seminars.

Klint: But to be honest, I don’t think there’d be a decent way to regulate life coaching anyway.

Duff: I don’t think so either. Some fields like coaching/healing and miracle cure supplements will always consistute the wild west …that and spirituality, faith healing, charismatics, etc. And yet, that is what is beautiful about these things too. You get these really wild characters with amazing insights or healing abilities or compassion etc. in the same arenas with the psychopaths and scam artists.

A total shitbag
Above: a complete and total shitbag

Klint: So it kind of leads me to another question – does it really matter that much? If people are willing to shell out obscene amounts of money for whatever – personal development products, life coaching, snake oil… are they basically getting what they deserve?

Duff: Well, personal responsibility does come into play to some extent, but we don’t want to go as far as blaming the victim.

Eric: I think they’ve been effectively brainwashed. So I suppose the question is, does a brainwashed person deserve the consquences of things they did not initiate?

Duff: I went to this particular life coach out of my own greed to be a wealthy life coach, for example. But his investors in his scheme retain their legal rights to sue. One of the reasons I like living in Colorado is that there is little regulation over healing practices and therapies. You can practice as an unlicensed psychotherapist here. So we have tons of innovative approaches to healing and changework. Yet the flipside is we have tons of new wage snake oil and BS. It goes together.

So…I’ve got to run now as I’m meeting up with someone. Hope that is ok. You guys can continue chatting if you’d like. I enjoyed this and would be happy to do it again. Let me know when it is posted, Klint!

Klint: OK, thanks for your time Duff!

Duff: Thanks to you too for the suggestion.

Klint: Do you guys have any further plans or is Beyond Growth winding down?

Eric: We’ll see. A lot of the reason we haven’t been posting much lately is that we are bored of where the field is going, and it is difficult to get excited about the same old. Both Duff and I had dreams of writing books and being guru-like long before we started BG.

I’ve thought about opening it up to more authors, or changing the scope a little. Once we start writing again we’ll definitely be taking a different direction. Less harsh criticism, more covert, careful writing with perhaps a few more ideas for people to ponder. Just going after gurus gets a bit tedious after a while.

Considering how harsh we are, we’ve been recieved very well by the community though.

Recommended Beyond Growth posts

The 4-Minute Mile and the Myths of Positive Thinking

Social Media: Moving Towards A Brave New World? (Here are my comments on this post)

The Dark Side of The Secret: Reading James Arthur Ray’s Sweat Lodge Disaster through a Magickal Lens

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