WOOO IS EVERYWHERE

(From Facebook.)

I wasn't able to attend the meeting of our free thought group last week and missed out on meeting someone who came with flyers and business cards obviously hoping to proselytize among us for a following. There are a lot of people like him in the Sedona area, each set on promoting their paticular brand of wooo. He was not at all impressed by our secularness and concentration on proven scientific facts. Here are selections from an email he sent to the leader of our group:

"For the past 35 years I have been to over 50 countries, traveling and spending time with Native American medicine people, Canadian medicine people, Peruvian Shamans, an Eskimo medicine man, psychics, channels, complimentary therapists and literally hundreds and hundreds of other healers and therapists worldwide.

I have also developed ways to heal the underlying root cause of diabetes, allergies and cancer. These are very logical approaches, however I doubt if any western trained doctor would validate my work.

I have also been invited to work in holistic chiropractic and medical clinics to help in cases where the traditional practices could not solve the challenges. What I have seen and experienced in the past 35 years, including physically seeing spaceships, has humbled and stretched my logical left brain to the point where I had to honor my right brain and my intuition."

Why he shows up at our meeting with his flyers, etc. instead of taking his momentous achievements to the AMA and other peer reviewed and rigidly monitored organizations is a question I would like answered. He told Ron, our defacto president that he has cured cancer. I'm sure the medical world would love to see documentation of that and be able to duplicate the wonderful things he claims to have done. Maybe they could even give a research chair to some of those medicine men, etc. he mentions.

This kind of thing has been going on since the beginning of time. We even see it in the pages of the New Testament.

For prime example, along comes Saul whose name got changed to Paul. He freely admits that he never met someone named Jesus, or ever exchanged a single word with him. Yet, his writings are the main foundation upon which the christian religion is based. He even gives details of the "last supper" at which he was totally absent and it surprisingly parallels rites common to some other sects of competing savior/hero religions.

But, in this new thing he first tried to stamp out, he found something he could promote as a special revelation to him and went around to synagogues and other places of meeting and discussion and slowly built up a following for himself. Among those intrigued by his message would sometimes be someone with an active and questioning mind who gave credence to wooo wooo tales and was also very rich. They often provided a comfortable place for Paul to stay with all the perks that particular aristocrat could offer. Not a bad life at times and he got to preach what entered into his deluded brain and often to write it down. He says he got these things revealed to him by Jesus personally in Arabia. Hmmmm.

Arabia seems to be a common cauldron of wild-eyed divine revelations. A few centuries later, a guy by the name of Muhammad got some other crazy stuff there while holed up in a cave talking, he says, to an angel. I had an uncle by marriage who got similar things through his bad case of shizophrenia and died in a boarded up apartment with aluminum foil covering every opening.

Anyway, we definitely are secular free thinkers. That does not mean we're going to go hieing our behinds off after every cooky pitcher of wooo that happens by. We go with history and science. We demand proof of claims, not bombast.