#599: Constance Cumbey

Constance Cumbey is a legend among conspiracy theorists, but most famous, perhaps, for having repeatedly accused Texe Marrs and Pat Robertson of stealing from her. In 1983 Cumbey, then a lawyer, published the classic The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow: The New Age Movement and Our Coming Age of Barbarism, which pretty much launched the Taliban fundie scare of New Age bullshit, and simultaneously lost Cumbey all possible shreds of academic credibility due to its promotion of several marvelously incoherently insane conspiracy theories.

The main feature of the book is the attempt to blame the New Age movement on Benjamin Creme, theosophy, and Nazism, and attempting to portray said movement as an insidious (correct), highly organized (hardly) and unified conspiracy to overthrow the US and replace it with a Nazi regime. The New Age cult’s alleged tenets are ecumenism, holistic health, New Thought, humanistic psychology, Montessori schools, modernism, secular humanism, and zero population growth, and any advocate for any of these is obviously a member of a hierarchically organized cult. Unitarian churches and health food stores are the “New Age recruiting centers,” the Guardian Angels is the New Age movement’s paramilitary organization, and “the New Age Movement has complete identity with the programs of Hitler.” Indeed. (She has a blog where she expands on these issues, but I am not inclined to link to it.)

The prophets are Creme and Alice Bailey, who according to Cumbey founded New Age while awaiting the new “messiah” named Maitreya. Hence, all secular humanists are secretly awaiting Maitreya. According to Cumbey Maitreya is most likely the Antichrist. Others believe Maitreya is an imaginary piece of fluff nurtured in the largely incoherent minds of Benjamin Creme and others of his ilk, but Cumbey doesn’t really have the mental capacity to recognize that people can have false beliefs – New Age beliefs, for instance, aren’t really false on Cumbey’s view; instead they usher in Satan.

Some (random) examples of people who have been inspired by Cumbey and her identification of Maitreya and the Antichrist are

- one Harry Walther, who identifies the Antichrist/Maitreya here (not recommended; the color and font schemes are rather uncomfortable for eyes and mind).

- One Jeffrey K. Radt, who weighs in here.

 - Another one.

- Some people engaged in this rather … disturbing discussion (hey, it’s from Rense.com – what did you expect).

Cumbey has also claimed that the rainbow sticker (for gay rights) was a secret identifier used by New Agers to identify each other. Here’s Cumbey on other religions than her own:

“While there are certain superficial similarities among most religions, orthodox Judaism and Christianity stand in direct opposition to every other belief system. It is safe to say, however, that nearly all non-Judeo-Christian religions are extremely similar because, as the Bible indicates, they come from one source, the ‘god of this world’ – Satan himself.”

Diagnosis: Wailingly insane. She seems to have had a substantial impact on the reason-challenged parts of the fundie universe, though it is unclear whether her lasting influence is detrimental or actually sufficiently self-defeating to end up being overall positive.

#588: Gabriel Cousens

Gabriel Cousens is a health writer who describes himself in the following manner:

“Dr. Sir Gabriel Cousens, M.D., M.D.(H), D.D. (Doctor of Divinity), Diplomate of American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine, Diplomate Ayurveda, a physician of the soul, teaches and lives the sevenfold peace. To the process of awakening and healing, Gabriel Cousens, M.D., M.D.(H), weaves a background as a holistic physician, medical researcher, world-recognized live-food nutritionist, psychiatrist, family therapist, homeopath, Rabbi, acupuncturist, Ayurvedic practitioner, expert on green juice spiritual fasting and detoxification fasting, ecological leader, Reiki master, internationally celebrated spiritual teacher, author, lecturer, culture-bridger, world peaceworker, to give a unique holistic approach to nurturing the hungry soul.”

That ought to tell you quite a bit about what kind of cretin we are dealing with here. Cousens’s work, in all its glory, centers around New Age woo and bullshittery (a mixture, it seems, of sycophancy and criticism of those whose unsupported claims differ from his own – e.g. Johnny Lovewisdom (criticism) and Adi Da (endorsement)). A mainstay of his particular kind of woo is Raw foodism, and he employs a wide arsenal of crackpottery (particularly the Gerson protocol) and New Age religious fluffery to prop up his advice, as well as primitive medieval vitalism: the uncooked baby carrot is “alive”, while the cooked carrot is “dead”; Hence, cooking and pasteurization “kill” food, and raw food is “living”. Why it would be an advantage that the carrot is alive is not entirely obvious, but Cousens does at least have pictures of the auras of energy surrounding the food to prove it. His rainbow diet is aptly featured here.

Apparently Cousens is the founder of the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center, “the world's leading spiritual, vegan raw and live food retreat center,” and the author of Simply Raw: Reversing Diabetes in 30 Days, in which he claims that enzymes are food-qi and that treating diabetes is easy. It is discussed here. He’s got … anecdotes to back it all up, endorsements by one Joel Fuhrman – who appears not to know the first thing about reality – and plenty of thoroughly false and rather random-sounding assertions. In the accompanying video he does tone down the woo a little to make it more mainstream (without making it anywhere near reality-based), but both the video and the “Raw for Life” Encyclopedia on his website feature “expert” commentaries from Morgan Spurlock, Mike Adams and Gary Null, which shouldn’t exactly confer much authority to his claims.

Cousens has been involved in a lot of nasty bullshit over the years, including raising some controversy over his fantastically crankycellular therapy, and he has been responsible for at least one death, though according to Arizona’s board of homeopathic medicine (yes they have one) Cousens wasn’t guilty of malpractice by their standards – “standards of homeopathy” aren’t much to write home about, though.

With one David Wagner Cousens has also written Tachyon Energy: A New Paradigm in Holistic Healing. No, it is not evidence-based; and yes, it is quantum woo taken just a few steps further.

Diagnosis: A staunch enemy of humanity, Cousens is a monstrous supercrank who unabatedly continues his campaign to fool people into ruining their own lines. Repugnant.

#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.

#576: Stephen Co & Eric Robins

Stephen Co and Eric Robins are the authors of Your Hands Can Heal You: Pranic Healing Energy Remedies to Boost Vitality and Speed Recovery from Common Health Problems (with one John Merryman), and that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about them. Prana is the Indian version of chi or reiki, and just as solidly based on anything but reality. What Co and Robins propose is thus a form of energy healing based on the New Age understanding of energy as a form of fuzzy, buzzing cloud of metaphysical vapor, or, in other words, on a less than coherent version of medievalist vitalism, which medieval practitioners believed in because they were stupid, lacked any idea of scientific method, and were severely short on imagination (as Dennett puts it: “Vitalism – the insistence that there is some big, mysterious extra ingredient in all living things – turns out to have been not a deep insight but a failure of imagination”). I’ll leave it to readers to determine what that makes of Co and Robins, though it should be noted that their book has sold pretty well among the usual groups of more seriously critical thinking-challenged flapdoodlers. It can indeed be reasonably said that vitalism, in all its fluffy incoherence, is the root of all “complementary and alternative medicine” (for instance acupuncture).

Eric Robins (a board-certified urologist), at least, has produced some “amazing” anecdotes (though the link is not to his anecdotes) reflecting how his techniques will seem to work to those who don’t understand why anecdotal evidence is problematic, underpinned by how “following his beliefs” rather than science seems to have had beneficial effects – as does what he calls having an open mind, which is of course not having an open mind at all (this is what having an open mind amounts to) but being severely rooted in confirmation bias and similar psychological mechanisms bound to lead anyone who cares about truth seriously astray.

Stephen Co’s credentials are less deceptive. Apparently “Master Stephen Co is the senior disciple of Grand Master Choa Kok Sui and one of only two Master Pranic Healers in the world.” He and his wife Daphne started the first pranic healing in the US, and apparently he’s got plenty of students.

Their work has been praised by none other than C. Norman Shealy, Carolyn Myss, Iyanla Vanzant, Marianne Williamson, dr. Oz, Deepak Chopra, Mark Victor Hansen (author of Chicken Soup for the Soul), Gay Hendricks (author of Conscious Love and Achieving Vibrance) – just to situate their contribution.

Diagnosis: Idiots. And though I’m sure their intentions are the best, they are actually rather dangerous (and no, there are no “positive placebo effects” of such crackpottery and bullshit).

#573: Dawson Church

Dawson Church is a “researcher” in the field of energy medicine (which is firmly based on the New Age understanding of "energy" as a tangible cloud of fluff) and author of Communing With the Spirit of Your Unborn Child, Facing Death, Finding Love, Soul Medicine and The Genie In Your Genes. In other words, if snowflakey energy woo is your thing, Dawson Church is your man. He earned his doctorate (non-accredited) in Integrative Healthcare at Holos University under the mentorship of none other than neurosurgeon C. Norman Shealy, and can also pride himself on a “postgraduate Ph.D.” in Natural Medicine, as well as a “clinical certification” in Energy Psychology. Impressive.

Church is the founder of Soul Medicine Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to “research, education and therapies that link consciousness with healing,” and which offers the Iraq Vets Stress Project for veterans seeking energy psychology treatments. They publish the journal Energy Psychology: Theory, Research, Practice, Training (which is not PubMed indexed). Church’s main schtick appears to be Gary Craig’s Emotional Freedom Technique, an especially silly brand of the completely unsupported idea of thought field therapy (there is a useful discussion here).

Diagnosis: As far into loonland as crackpots go. The stuff he pushes has nothing to do with reality, but he seems to try to make up for that by pushing it particularly ardently.