#2249: Scott Shifferd

Scott Shifferd, jr. is the minister of Dean Road Church of Christ in Jacksonville, and a creationist. Like most creationists, Shifferd doesn’t remotely understand evolution. Rather he regurgitates talking points from young-earth creationists who really, really don’t understand evolution either. The results are dismal. Shifferd’s top ten reasons “why evolution is false” read like a series of self-parodying jokes; but then Shifferd never cared about reasons. He cares about the Bible. For instance, one reason for why “evolution is false” is the “Pagan Origins of Evolution: Evolution emerged from pagan mythology and was promoted among Greek philosophers like Anaximander […]”; indeed, apparently (ostensibly according to 1^st century BC sources) “one of the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians was that evolution was the origin of life describing swamps and marches being impregnated with life and the early beastial life of men living in caves, gathering food, discovering fire, and developing unintelligible sounds into languages.” This is … not the theory of evolution, and his “reason” would of course not have been a reason, but a familiar fallacy, even if it were. Then (after a couple of other, similar non-sequiturs) we get the familiar ones: did you know that “[e]volution rests on refuted conjectures and frauds.” Why? Because all “missing link[s]” (no, he doesn’t know anything about evolution) have turned out to be hoaxes, like the Piltdown man. And Haeckel’s embryos. And so on. It doesn’t matter that the claims have been refuted a thousand times already. This was never about accuracy, truth or honest assessment.

Elsewhere Shifferd has argued that atheism is false because evolution cannot explain morality. We can probably safely conclude that Shifferd has taken as few (philosophical) ethics classes as (science-based) biology classes. 

Of course, Shifferd wouldn’t know what “science-based” means: “Atheists uses pseudo-science to support their assertions. Science is observable and testable, but the evolution of many kinds and life arising naturally from non-living material is not observable or testable.” This, of course, is not remotely how it works. Science is based on hypotheses being tested against the observable data the hypothesis predicts, not that the contents of the hypotheses are observable – that’s sort of the whole point of science, to learn something about stuff that go beyond direct observation from the testable consequences of claims about such stuff. And “the evolution of many kinds” is, indeed, very much testable. (Abiogenesis, of course, is not part of the theory of evolution.)

Diagnosis: Ok, so this is probably just another village idiot speaking to his congregation, and he probably doesn’t really care about understanding the stuff he is talking about. It is still nonsense though, and he deserves to be called out on it.

#2248: Lisa Shiel

Lisa Shiel first made (sort of) a name for herself as a frequent commenter on various science-related blogs, committing the most beautiful illustrations of fractal ignorance and misunderstandings you can imagine. In 2009, she channeled her efforts into an apparently self-published book, The Evolution Conspiracy vol. 1: Exposing the Inexplicable Origins of Life and the Cult of Darwin. Shiel has a masters degree in library science. She does not understand evolution. According to the blurb (we won’t pretend to have read the actual book), Shiel’s work is ostensibly novel in that she sets her religious beliefs aside: “Instead of criticizing evolution in an effort to promote her personal beliefs, she’s chosen to examine evolutionary theories and the evidence attached to them through a secular lens.” That may be the case, but is hardly a guard against deranged nonsense. As Shiel sees it, “[t]he theory of evolution involves numerous complicated and confounding strands,” which is somewhat contradicting her claim, on the blurb for the book, that evolution is “deceptive in its simplicity” and that “anyone can understand evolution”. How many strands? “almost as many strands, I dare say, as DNA itself” (so: two; dare we suspect that Shiel’s knowledge base on DNA is somewhat shaky?). For instance, scientists are now talking about genetic driftas a major driver of evolution – clearly this must be bollocks; it is apparently also unscientific since “no one has ever reproduced the creation of a species via either natural selection or genetic drift,” which is, needless to say, not quite how testingworks in science. Moreover, “toss into this mess the recent discovery that some species ‘evolve’ genetically while remaining unchanged anatomically,” and “the recent discovery that cryptic species can fool us too – two creatures look identical, but their DNA identifies them as different species.” At this point it is only right and proper to toss up your hands and declare conspiracy. At least she is refreshingly straightforward about her contempt for science; young-earth creationists tend to try to talk their way around that part.

Indeed, Shiel is currently promoting herself as an “author of paranormal adventure fiction and nonfiction,” and her most popular work may not be her confused anti-evolution rants, but her books Backyard Bigfoot and Forbidden Bigfoot: Exposing the Controversial Truth about Sasquatch, Stick Signs, UFOs, Human Origins, and the Strange Phenomena in Our Own Backyards, in which she not only criticizes the mainstream position that “Bigfoot are nothing more than large, bipedal apes” and argues that this is “merely disinformation”, but, according to an Amazon reviewer, “gives her arguments on why she believes Sasquatch has metaphysical properties.” Apparently the book lays out her views on fairies and crop circles, too. She has written several novels as well. Probably more than she thinks. 

Diagnosis: Exceptionally confused, but probably harmless.

#2247: Maya Shetreat-Klein

Yes, she is a genuine MD. But no: you should not take medical advice from her. Maya Shetreat-Klein is the author of the book The Dirt Cure: Growing Healthy Kids with Food Straight from Soil”, detailing the eponymous dirt cure, a health regimen Shetreat-Klein apparently developed through dealing with her own son’s ostensibly mysterious illness at one year old, an illness that apparently caused a sudden delay his development. Through her work, she – according to herself – “began to uncover the surprising roles food play in many modern childhood (and adult) ailments.” According to Shetreat-Klein, modern food production, with pesticides and GMOs, are to blame; at least “there is mounting evidence that these food transformations are some of the root causes of illnesses manifesting in childhood and beyond.” “There is mounting evidence that X” of course means that X hasn’t been established with any significant degree of likelihood (but that Shetreat-Klein and her ilk are certain that it will be established regardless of the state of the evidence), and usually that there is little evidence beyond poorly designed studies in predatory journals. (Apparently her son’s illness was caused by soy allergy; “once she removed it from his diet, his development went right back on track as if he’d never faltered.”)

The Dirt Cure blames the food and pharmaceutical industrial complexes (she has plenty of conspiracy theories and shill gambits for you) for filling our foods with toxins, and describes “the mounting evidence” (yes, again) of how these toxins are provoking huge rises in chronic childhood illnesses, as well as cancer and illness in adults. Perhaps the worst villain is RoundUp, which she ties to Agent Orange and which she – damned be the evidence pretty conclusively showing the opposite – thinks is stored in the body to make us sick. Apparently everything was much better 200 years ago, when we knew exactly what we were eating and the average life expectancy in the Western World was 35.

Now, in fairness, the main thesis of the book, that sterile environments contribute to the prevalence of allergies, does actually have some evidence to support it. But Shetreat-Klein really isn’t concerned with the state of the evidence; she takes the thesis as a starting point for fully embracing appeal to nature as a guiding creed. And it’s not like exposure to germ will only help prevent allergies, as Shetreat-Klein sees it: it will help boost your health and energy, too

Shetreat-Klein seems to have abandoned her medical training more or less completely in favor of random appeals to nature (where “nature” means whatever she wants it to mean). Currently she subscribes to terrain medicine, a long discarded view of medicine that once became the basis for naturopathy, and her website describes her as “neurologist, herbalist, shaman, astrologist” (no less). And of course, once you start down the path to the dark side, it is hard to stop. Shetreat-Klein has for instance given talks on “Herbal Medicine in Pediatric Neurology” (as well as a talk on her dirt cure) at the anti-vaccine and quackery summit AutismOne.

Her website is pretty illuminating: you’ll get a special offer on the “Shetreat 28 day cleanse” (we didn’t bother to check the new price) and an invitation to “learn which healing practice will help you connect with the Earth.” She even has something called “The Intuition Prescription”, a masterclass that will help you “[t]une into your inner voice, tap into the power that resides within you, and find balance between science and the sacred”. We wager a guess that there won’t be much of the former in her “balance”. Oh, and then there are the “6 Ways Drumming Heals Your Mind, Body and Spirit.” In short: this is what post-truth looks like in a medical context.

Diagnosis: Yes, she is somewhat marketing savvy and knows how to tap into fashionable new age trends. You really, really shouldn’t take medical advice from her, however.

#2246: Richard Sheridan

Perhaps this entry should be considered more of an intermission from our regular fare. Richard Sheridan is a local colorful of Dallas known for disrupting (or frequently speaking before) the Dallas City Council proceedings, making broad accusations of electronic vote fraud and claiming that a county commissioner “serves Satan.” Indeed, in 2015 Sheridan even ran for Mayor of Dallas and received an impressive 28 votes. Not entirely pleased with the results, Sheridan’s used his concession speech – on a voicemail left for local reporter Dan Koller – to declare how “extremely happy” he was that “Sodomite” Leland Burk lost to Jennifer Staubach Gates; Sheridan was apparently displeased that reporters hadn’t focused sufficiently intensely on Leland Burk being gay, whereas Sheridan himself “think I did a pretty good job of communicating to voters.” Then he proceeded to tell Koller, the reporter, that “you, sir, are cunt, bitch, coward, Mr. Koller. Dan Koller is a cunt, bitch, coward. And I don’t think you have one testicle, sir. You’re a sorry-ass, you’re a disgrace to our city, you’re a propagandist to the Sodomites […] And when I see you, I’m not sure what I’m going to do, but minimally your eardrums will hurt, you motherfucker. Because the word fuck means abuse and if you’re in the gay lifestyle, the mothers that bring their children up in the world, wanting to do good, want to live a good life, and you go with the Sodomites? You motherfucker, cunt, coward Dan Koller.”

In 2016 he pled no contest to incidents of spray-painting “666” graffiti targeting the gay community. Sheridan called the spray-painting “an act of love” and claimed that the “rabid” gay community was persecuting him over the incidents in a bloodthirsty quest for vengeance: “this is what will happen to anyone who dares to call out the immorality of the Gay lifestyle, to reference the Bible in saying that the Gay community is violating Gods laws,” Sheridan lamented.

In 2013 Sheridan ran for the District 13 seat on the Dallas City Council, gaining some attention for handing out posters at a council meeting that showed pictures of three openly gay candidates covered with an X, and later stating that “God’s voice was heard in Dallas Saturday. No openly gay LGBT City Councilmember!!”

Diagnosis: No more than a village idiot, though not, apparently, a particularly pleasant specimen. 

#2245: Christie Marie Sheldon

We admit that the only reason we became aware of Christie Marie Sheldon, is because ads for her services started showing up on facebook. According to her ads, Sheldon “is an intuitive healer and medium that’s conducted over 10,000 private consultations [“30,000” by 2019].” Based on her experiences, she has “handpicked her most powerful and transformational energy tools to create her Love or Above Spiritual Toolkit, a source to help others become a ‘magnet’ for love, joy and abundance.” To access the toolkit, you apparently need to access her website Love or Above, where you’d be forced to confront the profound question “ARE YOUR VIBRATIONS HELPING OR HURTING YOU?” Yes, it is an instance of Betteridge’s law of headlines, and the answer is “no”; according to Sheldon, however, “[y]our personal vibration frequency could be the ONE thing holding you back from abundance, happiness and success. Discover how to raise it, so you can finally start living from the vibration of Love or Above.” It really couldn’t be.

“Ever notice how some uncannily lucky people can almost effortlessly attract good things into their lives?” asks Sheldon. Apparently the reason they succeed has nothing to do with opportunities, resources, savviness or skills. It is because of how they vibrate. All emotions, says Sheldon, vibrate at a particular frequency – shame, for instance, vibrates at a frequency of 20. She doesn’t provide any units. We’re talking that kind of frequency and that kind of webpage. More positive emotions, though, vibrate at, well, more. Willingness and acceptance are 310 and 350, respectively, and if you vibrate at 1000, you are an “Enlightened Master.” According to her measurements, the vibrational energy of the Earth is currently 207, somewhere between “Courage” and “Neutrality.” 

To back up her claims, she cites William Braud of the “Mind-Science Foundation”, who “found” that the life spans of red blood cells could be increased by having their owners “think positive thoughts about them”, and “Dr.” Masaru Emoto, no less. What either “experiment”, even if they were anything but laughable nonsense, would have to do with Sheldon’s love vibrations is unclear.

As of 2019, you are invited to “Join Mindvalley’s Beloved Intuitive Life Coach On A Series Of Monthly Online Group Sessions As She Works With Your Energy Field, Wipes Out Your Abundance Blocks – And Aligns You With The Infinite Prosperity & Success The Universe Wants You To Have.” It is probably not free.

Diagnosis: No, seriously. This is a scam, aimed at the gullible or people in difficult situations (or those looking for “empowerment” and “bonding”). Christie Marie Sheldon is a piece of shit. At best, her website serves as a nice illustration of what post-truth rhetoric looks like or of Harry Frankfurt’s analysis of bullshit.

Hat-tip: Skeptophilia

#2244: Dutch Sheets

One of the central figures in the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), Dutch Sheets is an anointed and apparently re-anointed (“with a fresh impartation of Holy Spirit”) “teaching apostle”, self-appointed prophet and hardcore dominionist. Sheets is critical of the current state of American churches, claiming that they spend too much time and effort on values, creating communities and supporting families, and too little time on the church as a legislative body – as God’s government on Earth. Sheets blames Satan for the current situation, but also King James, who ostensibly used trickery to downplay the church’s dominion over the government and legislation – “kind of like our government that is trying to sell us separation of church and state,” says Sheets. Accordingly, Sheets sees it as part of his role to “raise up an army” willing to make a real effort to help the church’s in their attempt “to take over everything and rule the earth completely for the Lord,” while mocking those “little sheepies” focusing on the caring and pastoral work of the church. 

And according to Sheets’s own “prophetic visions”, Jesus has called upon Christians to take over government: “Through my recent re-commissioning […] and other prophetic revelation, the Lord has confirmed to me that the door to the governmental arena – and to Washington DC, specifically – is again wide open.” For the 2012 election, Sheets accordingly expressed his support for Christian model and moral beacon Newt Gingrich. Before the 2018 midterms, Sheets reported that God told him to “war for this nation” and declared that “the kingdom of God is invading the United States of America.”

Sheets is also a firm believer in the powers of prayers. For instance, as Sheets sees things, his and NAR figure Chuck Pierce’s prayers during a tour of the country led to the capture of Saddam Hussein. Moreover, Sheets’s prayers have apparently been a primary cause of various Supreme Court vacancies. “God had assigned me to pray for the Supreme Court” and told Sheets that “the greatest stronghold of the enemy ruling our nation was in the Supreme Court” for “there is no gate that has allowed more evil to enter our nation than the Supreme Court.” Meanwhile Democrats opposed Kavanaugh because “they hate President Trump because he is helping turn around the Antichrist agenda they love.” At present, Sheets is praying for God to kill more Supreme Court judges so that Trump can fill the vacancies.

Like most other NPR prophets, Sheets’s main strategy to achieve his political goals is, as suggested, prayers, including holding prayer rallies and arranging conferences to “save America”, with names like the “Appeal to Heaven Conference” (because “America’s narcissistic independence from her Creator has left us spiritually and morally bankrupt”).

Sheets also has called President Obama a “Muslim president” and said his election is bringing the judgment of God, and that “God has now turned us over to our enemies for a season”. Prior to the 2012 election, he proclaimed that the “systems of anti-Christ” that have bound the nation would be broken – he was accordingly disappointed with what actually happened, and promptly declared that God’s wholesale judgment was about to rain down on this nation because “God has put up with all of the mocking He intends to from Barack Obama”. (As for the “mocking”: “who could ever forget the mocking spirit demonstrated by our president when he decorated the White House with rainbow colors”). The election of Trump in 2016, meanwhile, was a miracle and a sign of God’s mercy, and Sheets has a warning for those who – due to the influence of evil spirits, of course – resist Trump: “You will fail! … The Ekklesia will take you out. The outpouring of Holy Spirit will take you out. Angels will take you out.” (Sheets’s rhetoric tends to be a bit violent and bloodthirsty.) You see, Trump is apparently already chosen by God, who is soon going to give him visions like St. John of Patmos, he of the Revelations; Sheets is “confident” that this will happen because a friend of his had a dream before the 2016 election in which she saw Trump sitting in a hotel room, weeping as he read the Bible. Dreams purportedly had by unnamed friends are apparently a major source of information on the state of the world for Sheets.

America is facing divine punishment for other sins, too: for instance, God will beat up America for

the promotion of “homosexuality, abortion and socialism” and the “toleration of immorality and perversion” as well. No, Sheets was not happy with the Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality, which he asserted would result “in the breakdown of families, along with the devastating effect this will have on children.” (Exactlyhowallowing homosexuals to marry will lead to families breaking down is left a bit unclear, of course. As always.)

Dutch’s brother Tim Sheets is also heavily involved in the NAR. Tim Sheets is apparently an expert on angels, and has led fundies in prayers for God and his angels to take out the deep state. And like his brother, Tim Sheets regularly talks with God, though God seems to be saying some very strange things to him.

There is a decent Dutch Sheets resource here.

Diagnosis: So frenzied by bigotry and bloodthirst that it is often difficult for him to stay coherent. One of the most evil people in the NAR, which is, again, one of the most thoroughly evil organizations in the Western world. Extremely dangerous.

#2243: Robert Sheaffer

This is an important entry. Robert Sheaffer is a writer and skeptic who has written sharp and illuminating articles, e.g. for Skeptical Inquirer, about such topics as UFOs and creationism. But Sheaffer is also an example of the remarkable powers of compartmentalization – though good at identifying the fallacies, sloppy thinking and denialist gambits employed by creationists and various conspiracy theorists, he effortlessly, and ostensibly without noticing, falls into employing the same tricks himself when talking e.g. about global warming.

Sheaffer is a global warming denialist, and has tried on an impressive number of global warming denialist PRATTs. Sheaffer has for instance suggested that global warming is due to the sun (it demonstrably isn’t), that there has been no warming since 1998 (false, and it really doesn’t take much background knowledge to recognize the stupidity of that claim), that we’re really heading into a new Little Ice Age (a stupid claim on many levels), that the “hockey stick” is broken (false and irrelevant), that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today (most likely false, and also irrelevant), that the IPCC was wrong about Himalayan glaciers (well, yes: there was, in fact, one minor error in a very long, technical document), that Michael Mann performed a trick in Nature to “hide the decline” (false, but a really good example of Sheaffer’s lack of understanding and his willingness to parrot nonsensical denialist talking points without bothering to try to understand them), and that the IPCC was wrong about Amazon rainforests (they were not; they did fail to properly refer to the studies that say precisely what the IPCC said about Amazon rainforests – this should be pretty illuminating).

So how, according to Sheaffer, did climate science go so wrong? Well, climate scientists must be lying about global warming to obtain research funding. Which makes sense: if you, as a student, don’t have scruples and want to get rich, go into weather and atmosphere research and make sure you stick to consensus (rather than the kinds of claims the oil companies, say, would have liked to hear): that’s where the money is! (hat-tip: R. Allen Gilliam. Sheaffer is also a consensus denialist; after all, he is able to name two or three people with credentials that disagree with the mainstream view, so “it is disingenuous to speak of a ‘consensus’”, which is exactly analogous to the claim the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture makes about the theory of evolution in biology. Also, “given that unknown factors have caused previous climate changes, how can we be certain that these same unknown factors are not active today?” Similarly, we suppose, for science in general: after all, scientific results are never certain and there is always the possibility that some hypothesis we haven’t thought about would explain the observed data better. 

Sheaffer has also made numerous strange claims about feminism, an area he evidently knows nothing about.

Diagnosis: A striking example of how people who are apparently intelligent in one area can go on to violate even basic rules of critical thinking in another, especially one he knows little yet has nonetheless formed strong opinions about. Unfortunately, the utter lapse in reasoning on global warming suggests that one needs to show some care when encountering Sheaffer’s work in other areas as well.

Hat-tip: Jim Lippard