Another relatively small fish, Keith Barr is a faith healer (i.e. practitioner of the Judeo-Christian
brand of reiki) located in Clarkston, Michigan, who practices exactly the kind
of faith healing that James Randi takes up in The Faith Healers.
Barr is perhaps most notable for having a substantial Youtube presence, where
you can see him promote his services backed up by claims to have healed
hundreds of people of ”cancer, blindness, even the effects of Agent Orange”
(apparently Comcast refused to run a cable ad in which he claimed to bring
sight to the blind).
”Jesus
said, you have to pray and have no doubt. It requires a tremendous amount of
faith,” says Barr, though in reality it probably requires exactly enough to get
the effects of confirmation bias and wishful thinking going. Regression to themean probably does the rest, though the blindness thing may admittedly require
something more. Fortunately, there is always the faith healer escape hatch when the healing doesn't work –
you just didn’t have enough faith. Barr is briefly discussed here.
He is
also a promoter of Intelligent Design Creationism: ”We should not allow the
howls and protest of those fearful of a scientific study of creationism and
intelligent design to stop scientific progress. They are fearful of their bias
and materialistic world view being challenged,” says Barr. And he has produced
a DVD titled ”Amazing Scientific Secrets of the Bible”. It might have helped if Barr had the first clue about science, but then again, perhaps not.
Diagnosis: Hardcore fundie and tireless opponent of critical
thinking skills. Given his healing practice he is actually moderately dangerous
even though his influence is probably not very widespread.
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