#580: Gene Wall Cole

Due to the untimely demise of celebrity physicist Samuel T. Cohen, whose contribution to the myth of Red Mercury cannot be exaggerated, we move on to the “visionary, author, speaker, composer, teacher, metaphysician, motivator, and musician” Gene Wall Cole, who is perhaps best known for his promotion of the Jesus Diet for a healthy, thin life (Jesus was thin, right?). His book “Jesus’ Diet for the Whole World” has been claimed to be “from deep inside the Vatican Vaults!” but it is unclear to what extent the claim is supposed to be true. From its description on Cole’s website: “If you are one of the millions of readers fascinated with the historical implications raised in The Da Vinci Code and found yourself wanting more; if you are one of the millions of people struggling with weight issues and haven't found a program that fits, […] then Jesus' Diet is a must read.” That’s the logic and generally sensitivity to evidence and reality permeating Cole’s contributions to civilization.

He’s got plenty of other tricks up his sleeve as well. His main project seems to be something called “THE awakening imagiNATION”, a “growing community that lives by Einstein’s motto: ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’ [which one suspects is taken slightly out of context] Using mere words to convey such a message is almost a contradiction [?], but when you have found water in a desert full of thirsty people, you have to shout – THERE IS WATER HERE!” No, I have no idea what he is talking about, but neither, it seems, does he. But then, the whole thing seems to be based on Cole having reached a higher level of wisdom: “We are learning to speak with an uncanny logic that can't be denied, but with an inner knowingness and ecstasy that portrays deeper meaning.” Motivational speakers are supposed to utter sentences devoid of content in a motivational manner, but Cole appears to have taken this principle to hitherto unexplored levels. According to his website Cole can be hired to “help prevent truth decay,” by telling people to “Follow Your Dreams.” He also seems to advocate Oprah for president, but I am not completely sure given his recurring problems with coherence.

Diagnosis: Exasperating, but probably not particularly dangerous.

#513: Shmuley Boteach

Shmuel ”Shmuley” Boteach is an outspoken, Orthodox rabbi, author, TV host and public speaker. He has appeared on Oprah, and was a personal friend and spiritual advisor for Michael Jackson (I’m not sure that’s anything to put on a CV, however). He is even pretty liberal in many respects, including being a promoter of tolerance for other faiths and an outspoken champion of gay rights. He has admittedly even said some clever things about alternative medicine, and it does appear that even some reasonably people view him as, well, essentially a reasonable guy.

Boteach is, however, no such thing as reasonable. Despite his comments on alternative medicine, his credulous support of fake psychics, notably Uri Geller, is rather well known. Even more importantly, Boteach is a hardcore creationist, and uses this as a premise in arguments for the existence of God that run something like this: “There is a God because evolution is impossible, and God is the only reason people are moral. And Hitler,” usually backed up by “Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. Evolution cannot have love. All morality comes from religion. Hitler, Hitler.” Boteach is also the proud recipient of The Chopra, a Golden Woo Award (awarded for The Woo responsible for the most drivel and containing the most logical fallacies; Boteach shared it with Dinesh D’Souza) for his performance in the debates in which the previous “arguments” for God were presented.

Here’s Dawkins responding to some absurd complaints against him from Boteach: 

Diagnosis: Shrill godbot and rabid, fuming enemy of truth and reason.

#493: Alex Benzer

A.k.a. Ali Binazir

Todd Bentley is Canadian and therefore disqualified. Alex Benzer is of course not comparable in terms of the kind of forceful challenge to reality he represents, but he should still be considered a mild nuisance for any civilization building project. Benzer is one of Huffington Post’s “medical experts”, which means that he is not remotely an expert on health, but a dating guru, hypnotist, and Master Practitioner of NLP (a “degree” with a trademark is always a cause for suspicion).

Yes, Benzer has a real MD degree as well, but when you’re the author of “The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman’s Guide to Embracing Your Inner Goddess & Finding the Fulfillment You Deserve”, and “The Tao of Dating: The Thinking Man's Enlightened Guide to Success with Women,” a reality-based approach to reality has been left pretty far behind. He has also called Michael Bernard Beckwith “a spiritual teacher of our times”. That pretty much settles it. (Ok, the neurolinguistic programming had probably already nailed that coffin pretty firmly shut already.)

Here are Benzer’s absolutely nonsensical points about how traveling in Europe can be therapy, one of which is how entering a country with another currency makes you develop your empathy with the poor since you are literally penniless until you find an ATM. Yep, that’s the general tenor of his blathering; he pulls his advice out of rather dark places, and is apparently not very good at it.

Diagnosis: Benzer may be more of a clinically empty puff of contentless self-help fluff than an actually unhinged loon, but when you spew garbled, empty nonsense like he does, you ought to be held accountable. Another mortal blow to Huffpo’s trustworthiness when it comes to medical matters – if any were needed.

#182: Barbara Marx Hubbard

Nope, she’s apparently not related to that other more famous Hubbard. Barbara Marx Hubbard is the current President of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, author of several books and featured in the 2006 film “Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within”, a ‘documentary about rediscovering an enchanted cosmos in the modern world’. Yes, it’s woo, and it’s the quantum type – full-fledged ‘What the bleep do we know’-style.

She claims that humanity, having ‘come to possess the powers that we used to attribute to the gods’, is presently in a critical and dangerous ‘Late Transition’ to ‘the next stage of human evolution’, a transition that was commenced with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima. The idea is ‘Conscious Evolution’, the ‘evolution of evolution, from unconscious to conscious choice’, in other words ‘an awakening of a 'memory' that resides in the synthesis of human knowing, from spiritual to social to scientific as the only solution"

That kind. Read her conversation with the equally fluffily gullible Jeff Mishlove here, or her interview with Dennis Hughes (publisher of Share Guide, The Holistic Health Magazine and Resource Directory) here to get an idea. She is, in other words, your typical new age (“futurist”) bullshitter, an accomplice of Deepak Chopra and Michael Bernard Beckwith who employs scientific concepts she doesn’t begin to (or try to) comprehend, filling them out with wishful thinking and what she wants from post-modernism.

Diagnosis: Another professional propagator of amazing new-age, feel-good gibberish. Her methods seem to be confirmation bias and wishful thinking. She has some followers, but her real impact is uncertain.

#173: Louise Hay

Louise Hay is the founder of the Hay House publishing firm, whose vision is to make humanity as stupid as remotely possible. It is devoted to publish the most insane self-help authors, woomeisters and gurus (and is financially pretty successful), in addition to sponsoring tours, radio shows and forums. Their area of specialty is quantum woo and the Law of attraction. Among their authors are Sylvia Browne (who has already been covered), Esther Hicks (who will be covered shortly) and Doreen Virtue.

Louise Hay herself made her success with this kind of bullshit, of course (strongly influenced by “researcher” Ernest Holmes, the delusional Florence Scovel Shinn and snowflake Maharishi Mahesh Yogi) most famously with “You Can Heal Your Life”, from 1984. She is a certified practitioner of “religious science”, mixing Christian fundamentalism with the flakiest ideas from oriental spiritualism, such as reiki. The central tenet of “You Can Heal Your Life” is that those who are sick have themselves to blame for it, and if they are unable to cure themselves, it is because of their psychological shortcomings (“we are each responsible for our own reality and "dis-ease"”). A standard and devious strategy for promoting woo, favored by Oprah, Chopra and others. For instance, according to Hay birth defects are a result of bad karma in a previous life.

She also claims to have cured herself of cancer through positive thinking and woo, but no one has ever been able to verify that she even ever had cancer.

Her life has even been made into a movie.

Diagnosis: Seriously deluded crackpot and peabrain who thinks religious-based intuition is on par with evidence. Her tireless promotion of stupidity, and her resources, makes her dangerous even apart from the popularity of her own inane dribblings. Her advice does actually appear to cause concrete, physical (and psychological) harm to real people.

#72: Deepak Chopra

A.k.a. The King of woo woo

The arch-bishop of woo himself, and probably one of the most influential (and flaky and zealous) crackpots chugging along today. A prolific author of New Age/self-help books (and a regular contributor to that absolutely abhorrent cesspool of anti-science, Huffington Post), Chopra is famous for using poorly understood (or not understood at all) vocabulary from physics, particularly quantum physics, mixed with “Eastern knowledge”. His writings are usually centered around woo-y claims along the lines of “recognize your inner beauty and the quantum entanglement will cure you”. Ardent opponent of “materialistic science” which hasn't yet recognized the ancient wisdom of Eastern spirituality, reincarnation, homeopathy and such. Earns a lot of money.

His most common inference rule is The Galileo Gambit (“scientist uniformly reject my ideas, but hey! Remember Galileo; his ideas were also reject by the scientific community [well, the church, in fact] back in the days; therefore I am right and everyone else are close-minded). An antidote is available here.

Some examples of his style: Chopra bashing skepticism (that is, Chopra fighting against logic and scientific inquiry – spot the fallacies): ; Chopra being taken on by Michael Shermer; Chopra on ”only spirituality can save the world” (and as Myers points out, Chopra neglects to tell us how); Chopra failing to deal with criticism; Chopra ”proving” that there is an afterlife; Chopra in general (this is part 3; links to the earlier ones); Chopra failing critical thinking yet again.

Well, I guess you get the point. This is a guy so utterly unable to grasp the foundations for critical thinking, so completely out of touch with reason, rationality and the ability to distinguish evidence from wishful thinking, that he must set some kind of record.

Diagnosis: This guy is seriously dangerous; he’s been claimed by Time magazine to be one of the 100 most important people of the 21st century; he has a huge following (Mikhail Gorbachev referred to Chopra as "one of the most lucid and inspired philosophers of our time"). His grasp of reason, critical thinking and reality is more tentative than Jack Chick’s, however, and the lunacy he represents might in the long run be even more dangerous than the Discovery Institute.

In short, he is probably the most influential loon in our Encyclopedia, and among the most dangerous (with Cynthia Dunbar and David Barton and some others).

#18: Michael Bernard Beckwith

Beckwith is a New Thought minister and founder of the Agape International Spiritual Center in Culver City, California, a New Thought church with 8000 members. Beckwith was one of the featured teachers in The Secret movie (hence an automatic consideration for inclusion in our encyclopedia); teaches meditation and “scientific prayer”, speaks at conferences and seminars and is the author of numerous books. Beckwith is a prophet of the infamous Law of Attraction, a crackpot idea in pseudo-scientific dressing about how positive thinking metaphysically attracts success. When Beckwith says "There's enough for everyone. If you believe it, if you can see it, if you act from it, it will show up for you. That's the truth", it is not meant metaphorically. The same goes for "There are laws of the universe and if you practice them they will respond to you." No, Beckwith, that’s not how it works.

Beckwith’s main project is to combine the most fluffy ideas from the world’s religions with New Age thought – and then proceed to declare it “science”; the epitome of New Age flakiness, in other words.

It should be mentioned that Beckwith is a serious contributor to various charities and environmental issues; unfortunately his ridiculous metaphysical rantings might overall have more adverse consequences than his contributions to social issues have positive consequences.

Diagnosis: Professional snowflake with delusions of grandeur and a serious shortage of critical thinking skills; quite an impact, but it is unclear to what degree his metaphysical gibberish contributes to his influence.