Boss Foxx said:
Is this guy anything like that Peter Popoff character?
Peter Popoff was busted by CSICOP about twenty years ago. They sneaked into the auditorium with a tiny radio scanner and discovered his wife reading to him through a tiny receiver from the information cards that the attendees so helpfully filled out on their way in.
The person on the stage would identify herself as Ima Duntz and after a short pause filled with holy gestures he'd say something like, "Ima, Jesus tells me that when you get to heaven he'll be waiting at the gate with a big platter of macaroni and cheese because he knows you love it. He also says that God wants me to rid you of your back pain because he loves you. Do you have back pain, Ima?"
It's a tribute to the accuracy of the self-selection mechanism for attendance at these revivals that absolutely no one ever said, "Hey didn't I write that on the little card the nice man at the door handed me?"
He was excoriated, run off of his TV show. And two years later he was back, with many of the same congregants, doing pretty much the same stuff.
People love these guys and don't want to be distracted by the facts.
CSICOP is the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. James Randi used to be affiliated with it but when the charlatans he exposed right and left started suing the organization in addition to him, he had to separate to keep it from being sidetracked by the constant court battles.
Randi is a stage magician and the tricks used by faith healers, mediums, palm readers, water dowsers, coal walkers, spoon benders, and the lot are simply the stock in trade of stage magicians. A mix of science (anyone can walk on hot coals if they do it fast enough because the heat transfer is very slow), cold reading (a person with good "people skills" can guess an awful lot about you by the way you act, dress, talk, etc.), technology (the radio transmitter behind the stage), optical illusions, the power of suggestion, and the rest of it.
Some use it to help people who are comfortable with the trappings and wouldn't go to a conventional psychotherapist or financial counselor, like many astrologers and curanderos. Some use it for entertainment but don't mind fooling the gullible, like TV "wrestlers." Some get off on the ego trip of acquiring a cult of iconoclastic mystery, like a few controversial figures who might sue
me if I named them.
Others take advantage of people's religious convictions and use their donations to buy fancy houses and cars. My wife says that for these people, the televangelists and their helpers with the alien hairdos are their family, and when they see them wearing new dresses they bought with the money they sent them, they feel a sense of pride and accomplishment that they can't get from anything else in life. Sometimes her insights into human nature and the gracious way she makes peace with stuff like this are so humbling to me.
