#1692: Dominic Halsmer

Dominic M. Halsmer has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from UCLA and is currently Professor of Engineering and Dean of the College of Science and Engineering at Oral Roberts University, which is, of course, a cargo cult institution and not a real university by any stretch of the imagination. As befits someone in a position like this, Halsmer is – like so many other signatories to the Discovery Institute’s petition A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism – not a scientist but a cargo cult scientist, who is “studying how the universe is engineered to reveal the glory of God and accomplish His purposes.” In particular, Halsmer is a creationist, and much of his, uh, output consists of attempts to apply engineering concepts in support of intelligent design; the results are primarily published on the Internet. Casey Luskin was apparently very impressed with a paper by Halsmer arguing for an “engineered world” published in the International Journal of Design & Nature and Ecodynamics (of which we know little – it may be a real journal but certainly doesn’t sound like it; the volume including Halsmer’s paper also included an anti-evolution rant by young earth creationist (and engineer) A. C. McIntosh), which you can read about here and seems to mostly be a regurgitation of Paley’s old watchmaker argument that points out the “biofriendliness” of the universe (oh, yeah) and referring to Hoyle, apparently in blithe and total unawareness of the critical literature on these issues.

Diagnosis: Another religious fundie and non-scientist who really, really wants his religious ramblings have anything to do with science – with the results you’d expect. Halsmer seems like a rather obscure figure, but Oral Roberts University is one of the more significant pretend universities in the US, and deserves exposure.

#1691: Steven Halpern

Although early, comprehensive introduction to opera and twentieth-century symphonic music can only make you a better person, the so-called Mozart effect is a myth. Unfortunately, many people (Don Campbell in particular) didn’t receive the memo. But I guess what Steven Halpern is promoting isn’t really the Mozart effect, but something he has … invented himself. According to his website, which looks precisely the way you would expect given the contents, Halpern is a “GRAMMY award-nominated composer, recording artist and researcher” (oh, yes). Indeed, he is the “founding father of modern sound healing whose music relaxes the body, quiets the mind and soothes the soul.” Methinks there may be rival claimants for that epithet, and what Halpern offers is really not more original than desperate marketing by way of trying to link his rubbish (I haven’t heard any of the music, I think, and don’t want to; it’s rubbish) to any minimally popular contemporary fad. What’s the fundamental idea? Apparenty Halpern’s goal is to replace everyday background noise with sounds that resonated better with the chakras, no less.

“After being initiated into what he has described as a ministry of healing music, Steven was encouraged to scientifically validate the extraordinary effects his music was having on listeners. This became the focus of his graduate studies [strange … he doesn’t say where … why is that, you think?], and his landmark research exploring the connections between sound, consciousness and healing were the first to employ the more subtle and sophisticated new technologies of brainwave biofeedback and Kirlian (aura) photography … Since 1975, Steven Halpern, Ph.D. has been a popular speaker at leading holistic health and complimentary healing centers and conferences worldwide.”

Yes, Kirlian photographies were his data. “Sophisticated” is not the right word choice in this context. And where is this trainwreck leading, you may wonder? Well, it takes us by things like “subliminal affirmations”: “By combining my relaxing music with subliminal affirmations, we create a more powerful program that focuses on a particular outcome that supports your goals. … The series of positive suggestions are spoken normally, but mixed very softly into the music. You don't audibly hear these affirmations, but your subconscious mind does, and responds accordingly!” He also offers “brainwave entrainment”: “When done correctly, as you'll experience with Aural-Sync™ brainwave entrainment soundscapes,” you will obtain healing effects, sometimes so powerful that although the recording crew was “blown away, and we all anticipated the public’s response when the segment aired,” the effect “was ‘too powerful’ and did not make it through the final edit.” Almost exactly like magic and televangelists raising people from the dead in Africa when no one is watching.

But you’ve already guessed where it ends up, haven’t you? Oh, yes: It’s quantum! “Based on his own spiritual and health-related experiences, Steven discovered secrets of combining ancient sound healing traditions with quantum biology and energy medicine.” Nope: not the faintest clue what quantum mechanics may be. Or biology.

He has also written a couple of books, Tuning the Human Instrument and Sound Health.

Diagnosis: Oh, yes, it’s ridiculous. But Steve Halpern is a ridiculous guy, and so is his audience – of which there are, apparently, plenty. I am reluctant to call him “dangerous”, however.

#1690: Robert Hall

Robert Hall is a pastor at Calvary Chapel Rio Rancho and (surprise) an anti-gay activist. At a 2013 Family Research Council event, “Stand with Scouts Sunday”, to oppose the proposed resolution that would end the Boy Scouts of America’s ban on gay members under the age of eighteen (featuring politicians such as Gov. Rick Perry and Rep. Steve Palazzo), Hall warned that the push to end the ban on gays is a sign of the End Times and will ultimately make America “self-destruct.” Because, you know, Hall doesn’t like gays and anything that Hall doesn’t like will bring about the End Times. Which he ostensibly does like but still warns against.

Hall is also a creationist, and when the Rio Rancho school board’s initially adopted a policy that would allow discussing “alternative ideas to evolution” in science class only to walk back on the idea, he was not pleased. According to Hall, there is a bias within school systems that protects the teaching of evolution (an “unproven hypothesis”) while discrediting creationism by calling it “religion in schools,” which it is, regardless of whether pastor Hall adamantly asserts that “it’s a scientific movement” or not. In particular, according to Hall, there’s a conspiracy afoot, “a chokehold on the educational system and certain scientific outlets by evolutionists,” something that he, as an end times pastor and advocate of a literal reading of the Biblical, is in a particularly privileged position to discern.

Hall accordingly launched his own lecture series, which featured luminaries like John Doughty, a mechanical engineer and adjunct professor in scientific apologetics at Trinity Theological Seminary in Albuquerque. According to Doughty himself, he “was trained in evolution,” but “found out there was another model that made a whole lot more sense – and that was the creation model,” ostensibly because of the laws of thermodynamics, no less (no, he doesn’t even faintly understand the basic principles of evolution); according to Doughty creationism fit within the thermodynamic laws better, which, if you think about it, is a spectacularly silly thing to say. “The Bible is first and science is second,” said Doughty: “The Bible stood on its own merit for centuries before science arrived on the scene.” Indeed.

Diagnosis: Yes, another one. Stupid and evil and fanatic nut.

#1689: Ralph Hall

Ralph Moody Hall was the deranged idiot who served as the United States Representative for Texas’s 4th congressional district from 1981 to 2015 (Democrat until 2004; Republican afterward) and who was apparently trying to demonstrate beyond doubt that Texas’s 4^th congressional district is composed largely of morons (he’s done a pretty good job of that). Hall notably served as chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology from 2011 to 2013 because he is clueless and would be unable to distinguish scientific reasoning and evidence-based conclusions from a broomstick if his life depended on it, and because the party he served evidently hates science.

Hall, who doesn’t like the conclusions scientists draw from their data, says that scientists “concoct evidence to obtain grants” – in particular climate scientists, who systematically tend not to come to the conclusions Hall has deluded himself into believing. In particular, Hall doesn’t believe climate change (if it exists – the earth might be freezing, according to Hall) is in any way manmade, since “I don’t think we can control what God controls.” (Remember, again, that this was the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.) He did emphasize, however, that “I’m not anti-science, I’m pro-science. But we ought to have some believable science,” where “believable” of course means believable to Ralph Hall, who has already demonstrated that he is a moron and a conspiracy theorist. Also climategate, and the fact that this purported conspiracy has been as thoroughly refuted as the earth’s flatness is something he can easily dismiss by claiming that the conspiracy just goes even deeper, encompassing also everyone who investigate the conduct of professional scientists and come to conclusions not in alignment with the conclusions he has persuaded himself into believing through non-rational reasons. He has also threatened to subpoena scientists who come to conclusions he doesn’t like.

Instead of accepting the scientific consensus, Hall presents his own perspectives. Of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 men and was an environmental disaster, Hall said: “As we saw that thing bubbling out, blossoming out – all that energy, every minute of every hour of every day of every week – that was tremendous to me. That we could deliver that kind of energy out there – even on an explosion.”

He wasn’t alone. Hall’s House Committee on Science, Space and Technology also included young Earth creationist and global warming denialist Paul Broun, Todd Akin, who is most famous for his idiosyncratic beliefs about human anatomy, and Dana Rohrabacher, who thinks the solution to global warming is to clear cut forests. The Vice-chair was Jim Sensenbrenner, who believes the Earth is cooling but not that CO₂ is a pollutant: If it were, says Sensenbrenner, we’d all “need to put catalytic converters on all our noses. The fact that people think CO₂ is a pollutant … basically goes into propaganda.” He has also referred to the scientific consensus on global warming as a “massive international scientific fraud.”

Diagnosis: Befuddled but raving old lunatic (and no, it’s unlikely to be pretense) whose lack of critical thinking skills border on the impressive, even for the group of peope he usually associates with. He’s out now, but may have provided us with a lasting and harmful legacy.

#1688: Stephen Che Halbrook

Well, Matthew Hagee may be an utterly deranged loon, but for frothing, sadistic bloodthirst and evil he probably doesn’t hold a candle to Stephen Che Halbrook. Halbrook runs something called the Theonomy Resources and is a teacher at The New Geneva Christian Leadership Academy, a “college-level” “school” endorsed by people like Gary DeMar, Ray Moore of Frontline Ministries and the Exodus Mandate, and Mark “we must base our laws on faith, not reason” Rushdoony, the vile spawn of R. J. Rushdoony himself. Halbrook is the author of a 2011 book called God is Just: A Defense of the Old Testament Civil Laws (oh, yes, precisely), which is apparently an extension of a Master’s thesis presented at Regent University in 2008. The book, which is hardcore even by dominionist standards, promotes the idea that government should use the Old Testament moral code as its basis for civil law, including the death penalty for blasphemy, idolatry, sabbath-breaking, disobedient children, adulterers and gays. Apparently having capital punishment for violators of biblical law benefits society, as Halbrook sees it, but his understanding of the word “benefits” seems to be unidiomatic.

And yes, he advocates the death penalty for disobedient children: “To all this we must add that capital sanctions for those who repudiate parental authority protect the family from treason. Many today would think capital punishment for treason against the family is extreme, but on the other hand, capital punishment for treason against the state is a necessity.” I don’t think you need us to point out some flaws in that analogy. And for breaking the Sabbath? “Given the evidence that criminality begins with Sabbath breaking, we see the importance of the Sabbath capital sanction. Fear of execution by the state deters many would-be criminals from embracing a life of crime and executing innocent people. Thus the more lax society becomes regarding the Bible’s penalty for Sabbath-breaking, the more society can expect to contend with crime. ‘[T]he wages of sin is death’ (Rom. 6:23), and so we shouldn’t be surprised that the wages of the heinous sin of Sabbath breaking on a societal level results in death on a societal level,” which may just be the most amazingly malicious and delusionally insane passage ever recorded on the Internet. Ok, his justification of the death penalty for blasphemy comes close: “In sum, the purpose of civil government is not primarily to defend the rights of man, but the rights of God. God’s rights over the state entail the state’s requirement to recognize God as Lord over the state (i.e., the highest political authority), and the state’s requirement to execute God’s wrath in His prescribed manner. This in no way diminishes human rights, but increases them. As we can see from the necessity of theocentric laws that we discussed, to disregard God’s rights —which are the rights from which all human rights derive — is to disregard man’s rights. And what right of God is more fundamental than not to be blasphemed?” Just think about it. Halbrook didn’t. Will his master’s thesis supervisor please go have a chat with some real grownups? (Halbrook probably shouldn’t be let near anyone, grown-up or otherwise.)

And the gays? Ah, Halbrook’s chapter on homosexuality is riddled with quotes from Scott Lively’s book The Pink Swastika, and endorses Lively’s claim that Nazism is a “sodomite movement.” Not that Halbrook really needs the connection to justify his conclusion about gays: “justifying sodomy on the grounds of it being a private act doesn’t work, because it contributes greatly to a society’s cup of iniquity that can result in God’s destruction of that society. What good is it for a society to promote the freedom for all to participate in the lifestyle of their choice if a society isn’t around to promote it?” Ah, yes: what good is allowing sodomy if God is going to destroy society over it. Apparently capital punishment for sodomy will also help sodomites themselves by preventing them from committing suicide as a natural consequence of their sinful lifestyle. Which is, in a deranged sense, true.

And yes, if you wondered: Halbrook does think that stoning and burning are proper methods of capital punishment.

The book has been endorsed e.g. by Buddy Hanson, the Alabama representative to the Exodus Mandate, a home school support group, who said that “With God’s grace, God Is Just: A Defense Of The Old Testament Civil Laws will be used to bring American Christians to repentance and back to honoring God’s Word through their daily decisions.” Halbrook actually refers to Hanson to justify imposing biblical laws on a society: “By not ‘imposing’ Christian beliefs on others, we allow them to ‘impose’ their beliefs on us […] Pluralism is no less impositional than other political system – and actually, it is potentially the most impositional […] pluralism naturally tends towards outright totalitarianism, and even imperialism.” And no, this is not a parody. At least Halbrook also denounces the Christian right for lack of integrity.

Diagnosis: Yes, there are people more extreme, fanatic and ideologically pure than Boko Haram. And please maintain your distance to this one; love and compassion will probably be futile.