#903: Madonna

A.k.a. Madonna Louise Ciccone

A.k.a. Esther

We introduced the topic of celebrity loons in our last post, and once that topic is broached it is hard to avoid giving an entry to Madonna (and yes, we do feel compelled to cover some of these celebrity loons, since they actually have quite a bit of influence). Madonna is of course famous for being a proponent of Kabbalah; that is, for her own version of Kabbalah, which reduces a complex form of Judaism and mysticism to mainly be about wearing a red string around one’s wrist and believing whatever shit Madonna wants to belive at any given moment. According to traditional Orthodox Judaism women are prohibited from studying Kabbalah, but given her interpretation of Kabbalah, it is doubtful that Madonna has actually violated that rule.

An obviously loon-wooey aspect of Madonna’s fashionable quasi-religious nonsense is her promotion of Kabbalah water, which has nothing to do with Kabbalah but is promoted by a cult called The Kabbalah Centre as a “dynamic, living fractal and crystalline” form of mineral water. Apparently a process called Quantum Resonance Technology “restructures the intermolecular binding of spring water,” and after the salespeople has meditated over it they sell it, expensively, to rich people, including Maddonna, who paid quite a bit to fill Kabbalah water into the central heating system of her mansion (also here and here) and who thinks the mystical water can solve the radiation problem at Chernobyl. It would at least be as effective, one thinks, as Koranic water.

In 2004 Madonna wanted to change her name to Esther, after her mother, to “attach myself to the energy of a different name.” It did apparently not really catch on.

Diagnosis: I suppose it might be said that Madonna is a victim of a scam – but she also perpetuates it, and is obviously guilty of that kind of grandness of ego that makes her perceive her actions as profound in virtue of the very fact that she elects to perform them (i.e. of course her “version” of Kabbalah” is deep – after all, the fact that a person as respectable as her is into it, is enough to confer profundity onto that version).

#902: Shirley MacLaine

Celebrity crazies are a dime a dozen, but Shirley MacLaine is crazier than most. An actor of some fame in the 1960s and 1970s, she became a New Age woo-meistress in the 1980s, writing several books (Out On a Limb, Dancing in the Light) that were unfettered by such conservative standards as reason, rationality, truth, and accountability, and which (nevertheless) helped popularize a plethora of insane New Age beliefs. And MacLaine made sure she ran the full gamut from reincarnation to channelling.

Now, although her earlier woo was particularly concerned with reincarnation, transcendental meditation, channeling and past-life regression, she has lately been mostly focused on UFOs, and in her 2007 book Sage-ing While Age-ing she discusses her alien encounters and witnessing of Washington DC UFO incidents in the 1950s (curious that they weren’t reported before). As for channeling MacLaine and the ABC television network must be held partially responsibility for the fame of JZ Knight. In 1987 ABC did a mini-series based on MacLaine’s book Out on a Limb, in which MacLaine converses with spirits through channeler Kevin Ryerson. One of the spirits who speaks through Ryerson is a contemporary of Jesus called “John”, who speaks, rather than Aramaic, a kind of fake Elizabethan English. “John” tells MacLaine that she is co-creator of the world with a god, which MacLaine accepts because, remarkably, this is a belief she has expressed earlier (i.e. that she is a god). It is pretty remarkable, isn’t it, that “John” told MacLaine exactly what she wanted to hear. Proves that the channeling works, right?

MacLaine briefly lived with Dennis Kucinich, who is known to be more than a little susceptible to woo himself.

Diagnosis: Moron, and so egotistically oriented that the fact that she believes that p is sufficient evidence-for-her that p (indeed, she explicitly claims that she can create her own reality – which is, in fact, a rather common claim among reason-challenged people despite its obviously contradictory force). I suppose the grandness of ego is an important factor in explaining the attraction between celebrities and mystical powers.

#901: John MacArthur

John MacArthur is an insane fundamentalist Baptist, hyper-Calvinist and dispensationalist endtimes preacher, known for leading the Grace Community Church, for his radio program Grace to You, as author of several fundamentalist tracts, and for being on the Council of Reference for the British creationist organization Truth in Science (though he is American), which – as the name implies – is vigorously opposed to both truth and science. Of evolution, e.g. in his book The Battle For the Beginning, MacArthur has said that that Christians “ought to expose such lies for what they are and oppose them vigorously.”

He is also an advocate of Nouthetic Counseling, which stresses the Bible as a sufficient tool for counseling people with mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety. Indeed, MacArthur rejects psychological theories and techniques, considering psychology and psychiatry to b contrary to the Bible. Our Sufficiency in Christ: Three deadly influences that undermine your spiritual life, for instance, rejects psychology, claiming that “[s[uch a thing as a ‘psychological problem’ unrelated to spiritual or physical causes is nonexistent,” and of people who seek out secular mental health professionals that “Scripture hasn't failed them – they've failed Scripture.” To emphasize, he points out that “True psychology [i.e. “the study of the soul”] can be done only by Christians, since only Christians have the resources for understanding and transforming said soul. The secular discipline of psychology is based on godless assumptions and evolutionary foundations and is capable of dealing with people only superficially and only on the temporal level ... Psychology is no more a science than the atheistic evolutionary theory upon which it is based.” His stance has, needless to say, caused some controversy, the most notable of which was the first time an employee of an evangelical church had ever been sued for malpractice. MacArthur has, needless to say, no background in or knowledge of psychology (nor evolution).

Equally needless to say, perhaps, is that MacArthur is not particularly open to theological disagreement. Catholicism, for instance, is “a Satanic religious system that wants to engulf the earth,” and Roman Catholic “priests are broken, shattered, tragic, sad, disconnected people; no past, no present, no future.” He is furthermore offended by the fact that atheists celebrate thanksgiving since he finds it incomprehensible how atheists can be thankful for anything – the fact that they seem to be grateful must thus mean that they really know that God exists, and that makes them not atheists but worshippers of (or at least deluded by) Satan. (He is still offended.)

His stances on politics are pretty much what you’d expect. The fact that people’s sexuality is not controlled by the church down to the most intimate detail is evidence that God has abandoned America (“You know a society has been abandoned by God when it celebrates lesbian sex”). Apparently Obama is also evidence of God’s judgment, and so is the Democratic party (the “party of sin”), because that’s what counts as a political argument to wingnuts such as MacArthur (as so many other wingnut pundits, he is pathologically unable to see that arbitrary and negative attempts to classify political opponents as evil are not quite equivalent to offering a reason for disagreement based on fact, analysis, or argument).

Diagnosis: Belligerent, hateful madman whose lack of aptitude for truth is only matched by his narrow-mindedness. A breathtakingly dense fellow – and a dangerous one, for MacArthur seems to have quite a few followers.

#900: Barry Lynes

Barry Lynes is perhaps the most prominent heir to the inventor and crackpot Royal Raymond Rife. In the 1930s Rife claimed that by using a specially designed optical microscope, he could observe a number of microbes which were too small to visualize with previously existing technology and reported that a 'beam ray' device of his invention could weaken or destroy the pathogens by energetically exciting destructive resonances in their constituent chemicals. As his Wikipedia article laconically puts it, Rife's claims could not be independently replicated. Rife, of course, blamed the rejection of his ramblings on a conspiracy involving the American Medical Association (AMA), the Department of Public Health, and other elements of “organized medicine”, which had “brainwashed” potential supporters of his devices.

Rife’s claims should, as such, have been allowed to die. But of course, no claim about the healing powers of anything is ever allowed to die if it is ever noticed by the altmed crackpots, which it generally is. In 1987 Lynes revived Rife’s claims in the book The Cancer Cure That Worked – Fifty Years of Suppression, which claimed – predictably – that Rife had succeeded in curing cancer, but that his work was suppressed by a powerful conspiracy headed by the AMA. After the book’s publication, a variety of devices bearing Rife’s name suddenly popped up to be marketed as cures for diverse diseases such as cancer and AIDS. (Electronics Australia found that a typical “Rife device” consisted of a nine-volt battery, wiring, a switch, a timer and two short lengths of copper tubing, which delivered an “almost undetectable” current unlikely to penetrate the skin.) Several marketers of other “Rife devices” have subsequently been convicted for health fraud (e.g. James Folsom and John Bryon Krueger), and in some cases cancer patients who used these devices as a replacement for medical therapy have died. Rife devices are currently classified as a subset of radionics devices; that is, as the worst of the worst of pseudobullshit.

Rife’s work lives on not only in the efforts of Barry Lynes, but also in the works of the late Hulda Clark and the woo of Diane Spindler, and is staple fare for all debunkers of cancer quackery.

Diagnosis: Arguably classifiable as “evil”, Lynes’s promotion of woo is the kind of crankery that actually harms people. He may not be among the more famous loons in the US, but he is certainly among the more obviously dangerous ones. 

#899: William Lyne

William Lyne is a conspiracy theorist with a specialty in UFOs. That is, Lyne thinks the UFO phenomenon is a conspiracy: “Don't Be Deceived by the Propaganda Surrounding ‘UFOs’,” says Lyne. “Flying Saucers are MAN-MADE Electrical Machines! ‘Space Aliens’ are Pentagon-Created Delusions.” Apparently the Pentagon has fooled us all into thinking the aliens and UFOs are real, which tells you a bit about what circles Lyne walks in as well.

You can visit his page here; you’ll even be congratulated for visiting it: “CONGRATULATIONSS! You reached this site despite a conspiracy between covert government agencies and internet bosses (YAHOO AND THE CIA ARE LOVERS!), a conspiracy to violate the American Bill of Rights, by violating free speech and free press rights, by excluding from search engine listings, those exposing the government's dissemination of false alien and paranormal propaganda, through UFOlogists, to conceal exclusively man-made flying saucer electric propulsion technology.” Apparently the fact that his page doesn’t show up first when you’re searching for “UFO” is evidence of a conspiracy. Note also the part about government propaganda through UFOlogist – apparently the ufologists control the media and public opinion, and Lyne’s claims conjure up fleeting images of the leading scientists and politicians of the US bowing down to Nancy Lieder and Michael Salla. There’s a nice, terse summary here. I haven’t seen his youtube videos “Nazi-Tesla UFO’s” (a series, in fact) or “Tesla Free Energy Nazi UFO Elite Bloodline Secret Government Occult”, but I suppose they’ll provide a summary of his findings (here  and here).

Apparently Lyne has researched UFOs for “over 48 years”, and his methodology is summed up by the slogan "IF IT WASN'T TRUE, IT WOULDN'T BE SUPPRESSED!" I don’t think that is a particularly useful methodological principle for uncovering the facts of the matter.

Diagnosis: An ardent fighter for, well, at least he is fighting his quixotic battles with impressive persistence and conviction. It doesn’t really matter that much what it’s for, since he is unlikely to win many converts in any case.

#898: Ron Luce

Ron Luce is the founder of Teen Mania Ministries, one of the scariest organizations in the US, its BattleCry Campaign and the Acquire the Fire (ATF) youth conference. TMM is an evangelical youth organization that promotes fundamentalist Christianity and theocracy by focusing on the more feral, aggressive elements of Christianity: “You guys are freaks of a whole different breed ... You guys are a bunch of wild animals. Man!” as Luce is fond of telling his disciples (the idea is apparently that adrenaline rushes are appropriate substitutes for being possessed by the Holy Ghost). Nonetheless, Luce views his organiztion as a counterforce to modern popular culture (pornography, violent video games, sexual content on television and in the media, gay marriage, and the secularization of America and so on), and as a combat force against the “purveyors of popular culture,” who he deems to be “the enemy ... terrorists, virtue terrorists, that are destroying our kids,” who are “raping virgin teenage America on the sidewalk, [while] everybody's walking by and acting like everything's okay.”

TMM’s mission is “To provoke a young generation to passionately pursue Jesus Christ and to take his life-giving message to the ends of the Earth.” The group has been actively involved in various political issues, especially in opposition to various atni-discrimination and civil rights measures. TMM is also heavily involved in blatantly racism-fueled missionary campaigns targeted e.g. at the violent barbarians that count as indigenous people in South America, and in blatantly dishonest and sexist abstinence-only purity programs.

The ATF and BattleCry producers have accordingly adopted a militaristic tone, accompanied by the display of military imagery and, at one such event, the use of simulated weapons (it is really, really hard to avoid doing a Godwin here). The BattleCry Coalition includes, or has included, prominent Christian Right leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ted Haggard, Chuck Colson, Joyce Meyer, Jack Hayford, Kay Arthur, Jack Graham, Greg Laurie, Josh McDowell, Tommy Barnett, Bob Reccord, Kirk Franklin and John Maxwell. Its official allies and supporters count Sam Brownback, Rick Santorum (the connection is described in some detail here), Sean Hannity, Benny Hinn, Gary Bauer, Hank Hanegraaff, Dennis Rainey, the American Family Association, Trinity Broadcasting Network, the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition.

The TMM Honor Academy is an internship program for high school graduates and college students run by Dave Hasz to recruit youths for theocracy.

There is a fine TMM resource here.

Diagnosis: Absolutely rabidly deranged madman with a lot more power and influence than is good for him or civilization. One of the most dangerous and unabashedly evil persons alive today.