Thursday 7 February 2008

Deluded fools or genius scam artists?

Whenever I read Orac's posts about woomeisters I'm consumed with envy that I can't think of such brilliant scams and make my fortune.

And then I find there are other "holistic", New Age, "spiritual" types that aren' machiavellian at all. Just deluded and a bit sad. (Still making money tho')

Take these poor devils at One Heart Resource Center. I found their site while following a lead on the fantastic full-colour photograph of Jesus story. Yes, a photograph of Jesus.

I found a link to a page on their site where they have been completely taken in by an Indian magician and con-man called Sai Baba. Sai Baba has miraculous powers. He can manifest small objects and ash. By the same token, my uncle George was also an avatar because he could make coins appear from behind my ear. And our fireplace should be a place of worship given the amount of ash it produces. The gods are odd aren't they? Do they bless their chosen ones with the power to heal cancer and restore missing limbs? No, they grant the ability to make rings appear.
Anyway, this Sai Baba produced some glossy phot paper, and a colour picture of Jesus miraculously appeared on it. This miracle photo, given to an Australian dupe whose name has been hidden to protect her gullibility found its way to Ramala Center in Glastonbury, England. Oh, no, sorry, I misunderstood. A COPY of the photo found its way to the Ramala Center in Glastonbury, England. Our intrepid founders of the One Heart Resource Center took a copy of this copy back to the States from where they sell copies of it for $10 a pop.
Mind you this was back in about 1997 as far as I can make from the web page, because the page is no longer linked to from their site, but it is still on their server, and I found it thanks to Google indexing all their pages.
Their current site has this page regarding the Jesus photo. They state thqt the photo is now available free as a pdf. The reason for this seems to be that this same photo has cropped up in the past in other miraculous ways. So probably not worth the $10 then.

The level of these people's self delusion can be seen on their home page. One of the founders, Ruth Hanna died in January 2007. (or passed over to a higher plane, as they put it) Reading through the site it becomes clear she died of cancer.
She had dedicated her life to holistic and alternate methods of heqling and self awareness, and yet was powerless in the face of her own illness. The web page describing her illness tells how she fell for a quack cancer therapy called Insulin Potentiation Therapy (IPT). Quackwatch descibes why this therapy is quackery.

Sometimes the woomeisters are downright bad. Other times I think the honestly feel they are trying to help. They are wrong. One Heart seems to be an example of lives wasted.

4 comments:

aims said...

I'm back again Stew and shaking my head with a smile on my face. I like the way you think!

King Aardvark said...

Isn't it sad when completely out-to-lunch people can still make money on crap like this and you have to bust your hump at the tile factory?

said...

Your blog is too kewl.

You may enjoy the iconoclastic crap at moi's blog and/or
Fan Club.

Stay on groovin' safari,
Tor

AC Chase said...

Batshit crazy people love connecting with other batshits. Lots of money to be made at the expense of such people.