Esoteric: intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest

Even a small cult can be incredibly profitable. There’s this freaky alternative medicine quack in Australia who runs a scam called Universal Medicine — his specialties are “esoteric breast massage”, “esoteric ovary massage”, and “connective tissue therapy”. My first objection has to be that he doesn’t understand what “esoteric” means.

The esoteric principle is that we are love – innately and, unchangeably. The principles of the esoteric way of life date back to the oldest forms of knowledge and wisdom. Whilst ancient in their heritage, the principles of the esoteric life in human form have not out-dated themselves in relation to what is required of mankind to live in harmony and thus arrest any wayward conduct that does not build brotherhood within and amongst our communities everywhere.

The esoteric means that which comes from our inner-most. It is the livingness of love that we all carry equally deep within and it is this livingness that restores each and every individual back into the rhythms of their inner-harmony and thus from there, the love is lived with all others.

You want to know more? Here’s a short documentary on Serge Benhayon, the guy who founded it. He’s a bankrupted ex-tennis coach with no medical degree, not even the slightest training, and he came up with the idea for his ‘therapy’ while sitting on the toilet. But he’s also the reincarnated spirit of Leonardo da Vinci, so you can trust him. Right.

He’s raking in $2 million a year, and he has 700 followers. I’ve got more followers than that! You slackers have not been sending me a sufficient fraction of your income. All you have to do is go to my donation page and type in the amount of $3000 and click send, and if 700 of you do that, I’ll have made somewhat more than Serge Benhayon. Even better, unlike Serge, I promise not to fondle your breasts and groin or stick you with acupuncture needles.

Ick. That sounds like a threat. Even if you don’t send me any money, I promise not to do that. I think I just realized why I’m not getting rich. I’m not extortionate enough.

Anyway, one of his many laughable comments in that video is this one:

I can’t be brainwashing intelligent people and educated people.

Ha. Intelligent and educated people are just as easy to fool as anyone else. You just need the right hook, and you can sucker ’em right in. (Damn, again — just realized another reason I’m not making a fortune is that I’m not tapping enough suckers with the right bait.)

Case in point: it turns out that Benhayon has followers in the University of Queensland medical school who have been pissing pro-UM stories into the scientific literature.

Mr Benhayon’s acolytes include Christoph Schnelle, a UQ faculty of medicine researcher who was the lead author of three articles on UM health practices.

He and eight co-authors are now under scrutiny for an alleged failure to declare their roles in what has been described as “a dangerous cult” by Professor Dwyer, who is now based at the University of New South Wales.

The ABC has obtained video of four of the researchers publicly advocating UM practices, including two doctors.

Two more researchers are presenters at the Benhayon-founded College of Universal Medicine.

The others are a naturopath and a psychologist who practice at UM’s Brisbane clinic, and a director of its UK-based charity.

See? You can fool educated people.

By the way, Benhayon calls the ‘esoteric’ practices of Universal Medicine the “Way of the Livingness”. More like the Way of the Banality.

Flattery will get you smacked

Noel Plum is one of those ignorable pests who I’d normally disregard, but he suckered me in with a title illustration of his recent rant about Kevin Logan, Kristi Winters, and me. Apparently we’re a trio of supervillains.

Cool! It’s not at all how I think of myself, but comic-book-style flattery will get you attention. So I made a short video to point out his silliness.

Maybe this will start a trend of YouTube anti-SJWs making more cartoony cartoons of me. That would be amusing.

A double-wide in Pahrump, Nevada is haunted now

The grandfather of all the mass-media conspiracy stories and paranormal nonsense has died — Art Bell has become a ghost and floated up in the sky to be with the aliens. Some of us will recall Coast to Coast AM from the 1990s, when Art presided over a collection of the freakiest dingleberries on Earth, gullibly broadcasting every improbable story any yahoo with a phone wanted to call in.

One could literally trace every woo claim, urban myth, and conspiracy theory of the 21st century to its appearance on Coast to Coast AM. The notion that comet Hale Bopp was being shadowed by a UFO (which inspired the Heaven’s Gate cult suicides in 1997) was given no small amount of credibility on the show, as was Remote viewing, EVP, Mel’s Hole, and End Times predictions too numerous to count. Bell created an art form out of giving the craziest of the crazy their individual 15 minutes of fame. According to The Washington Post in its February 23, 1997 edition, Bell was at the time America’s highest-rated late-night radio talk show host, broadcast on 328 stations. In 1999, Bell co-authored The Coming Global Superstorm, upon which the movie The Day After Tomorrow was based.

He was last century’s less mean-spirited Alex Jones. Now dead.

David Silverman fired from American Atheists

I told you this was coming down. Buzzfeed just published the news that Silverman has been fired for financial malfeasance and sexual assault. The personal accounts from several women are sordid, to say the least — you can go read the article for the terrible details, but it sounds like this was a case where there was no doubt about what needed to be done.

It’s terrible news for organized atheism. David was a friend, and was an aggressive, effective promoter of fierce atheism. He was also imperfect — he antagonized some people, and American Atheists made some bad decisions under his leadership, trying to court conservatives at CPAC, and supported some questionable billboards.

None of it matters. The documented behavior is intolerable. I heard some of the stories from the whisper network, but nothing I heard was as horrible as the truth.

Banned by Answers in Genesis!

There is a home-schooling conference — ugh — going on in Calgary right now, which had invited Ken Ham as a speaker — ughugh. Paulogia, a very Canadian (that is, polite to a fault) critic of creationism, bought a ticket to the event and was planning to attend and listen, nothing more.

He had his ticket revoked. He was personally contacted by both the head of AiG Canada and the president of the homeschooling association to inform him he wasn’t welcome. What an amazing honor!

The whole story is here:

Someone has finally figured out Jordan Peterson

Elizabeth Sanderson’s explanation makes perfect sense.

Never before have I encountered such a complex, intelligent, and daring work of satire. This “Jordan Peterson” character is the most cutting-edge performance art I have ever encountered. No sincere leftist commentary has ever exposed the link between seemingly banal conservativism and borderline-fascism in such an easily understandable way. This one-man-show is the bumbling Canadian answer to Laibach. As an expert in pseudo-academic nonsense, I have to salute my superior on this one.

“Jordan Peterson” is a work of parody known as stiob: “an overidentification with the person or idea at which it is directed and that it is often impossible to tell if stiob is sincere support, ridicule, or a mixture of the two.” Stiob arose from the late Soviet years, during the Brezhnev era. There are many eerie similarities between that time and our own – the government was largely ran by a cadre of septuagenarians, wages had stagnated, yet all official narratives insisted that there was no alternative. The horizon of possible futures was closed. Into this fray, a new form of parody emerged, one that was often indistinguishable from the thing it was criticizing.

Take, for example, the Slovenian industrial band Laibach. Their artwork and performances are rife with totalitarian imagery, which leads many to wonder whether or not the band themselves are fascist. Laibach can be seen as an example of “stiob”, employing a strategy of subversive affirmation or over-identification in order to tease out truths that cynical distance could not. It is not “satire” as we would usually understand the word.

I’d never heard of “stiob” before, but it seems to be a real and useful term. So I’ve also picked up a new addition to my vocabulary!

Despite his recent notoriety, the most towering accomplishment Peterson leaves behind is his earlier book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. This is the greatest academic practical joke ever conceived. Despite its name and intimidating 500+ page length, the book manages to pull off the impossible, and leave the reader with no meaning whatsoever.

It reads like a cross between Joseph Campbell and Timecube, interspersed with diagrams of the auto-fellating dragon of chaos. Peterson seems hellbent on finding every hokey pseudo-science and subsuming it into his personal worldview. Jungian psychology, evolutionary psychology, social Darwinism… the man has spent decades on what is fundamentally unprovable quackery. It’s sprawling, pedantic, repetitive – a commentary on the demand for quantity over quality that has become so common in academia today.

Move over, Boghossian. Maps of Meaning is the satire you wish “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct” could have been. You missed the mark by failing to notice that the social movement ripe for parody is the centrist/alt-right/pseudo-skeptical gang you belong to.

For years I’d been hearing leftists claim that conservative thought is always mobilized in defense of the ruling classes. In response, many right-wingers have taken to insisting they are, in fact, “classical liberals”, and that their politics flows from a respect for freedom and markets rather than defending the powers that be. Enter Jordan Peterson. On the surface he seems like a milquetoast conservative. But when it comes time to defend inequality, Peterson points to animal hierarchies as a justification. His individualism does not arise from a place of ethical consideration, but out of biological essentialism and social darwinism.

The bumbling professor, despite all of his appeals to the contrary, keeps accidentally rediscovering fascist ideas.

There are moments where he almost breaks character – take his story about lobsters, in his more recent book. Peterson knows nothing about biology, but he plunges forward with complete confidence, shamelessly preaching an understanding of evolutionary psychology that sounds like it was ripped straight from a Pick Up Artist forum.

If taken seriously, he is moronic and dangerous. But taken as a work of intellectual Outsider Art? Goddam brilliant.

Dang. Am I going to have to rethink my opinion of Peterson?

At least I’m not going to have to rethink my opinion of his followers — all dupes.

OrbitCon starts tomorrow!

You can see the lineup for this weekend’s online social justice conference at the Orbit. It should be good! I’m not presenting, but quite a few of the FtB crew are joining in.

I am helping out a little bit, though — I’m hosting the talk by Sarah Levin on How to Incorporate a Secular Values Message into Your Advocacy on Saturday at 11 Central. I think that means I’ll be running interference on questions, which you can submit in advance right here. Actually, all the talks have associated pages where you can post questions, so do that for anything that tickles your fancy.

Arrgh, Bergman!

I had this terrible debate with Jerry Bergman years ago, and a video was hosted on YouTube by someone else (thank you very much!), and I just put a copy on my own channel. Here it is. You may have already seen it, and I summarized it long ago. This is the debate where Bergman announced that carbon was irreducibly complex, and therefore proved that the universe was designed, and that atheists have been protesting and getting removed from schools the periodic table of the elements, a persecution that he documented in his rambling, awful book, The Slaughter of the Dissidents.

Also, by the way, lots of credit to Mark Borrello, the moderator of the debate, who I thought did an exemplary job of giving both sides fair and equal time.

But this debate was also critical in defining my antipathy to debate, and it’s in those words, “both sides”. There are not two sides here. They are not equal. There is a reasonable, evidence-based side (in this case, mine) and there is a whining man-child side where “facts” can be made up as you go, and debate is a scheme designed to elevate nonsense to the same level as science. This is not sour grapes; I think, by any estimation, I “won” this debate to the point where creationists in the audience came up to me afterwards to admit it, although usually with the excuse that Bergman was bad and a smarter Christian debater would have clobbered me. I also don’t think it was my talent that won out, though — I don’t think I’m a particularly good debater — but just that even in a format contrived to give the weakest arguments every benefit, science is hard to overcome.