Among them include
Oral Roberts
Jim Bakker
Pat Robertson
Peter Popoff
W.V. Grant
Randi mentions the various tricks they used, such as
1) hiring wheelchairs and having people who could walk sit in them, so when said healers asks them to stand up it looks like they are healed
2) having staff members talk to potential "healees" prior, and telling the faith healer prior to the show, so that it looks like the faith healer got the revelation about details from God. One of them Peter Popoff had an ear piece with details being sent to it electronically.
3) Making a shorten leg grow longer by a) telling a patient they had shorten legs when the patient didn't even realise it, or b) using loose fitting shoes, so they can push the shoe back in one leg, making it look like the other ("shorten") leg grew longer.
Note : A particular funny case was of an Evelyne Green who was healed by W.V. Grant of a shorten leg (which was supposedly secondary to a back problem that she never knew she had). Any way Grant tried the same healing trick on her years later, and she finally realised that if he lengthen her leg again, wouldn't she now have one leg longer? The fact that it took Green a second time to know something was up despite the fact she had never observed herself having a shorten leg should give you an idea of the intelligence of these people.
4) Deliberately confusing the terms legally blind and fully blind. That is those who are legally blind can still make out a few details, such as number of fingers being held up. So when this "fully blind" person magically can see the number of fingers held up by the faith healer (as they always can) it makes it look like they have been cured.
I recommend this book. I really like how they had a man dressed up as a woman and was healed of uterine cancer by a faith healer.
However that wasn't the main point I wanted to raise in this thread. I want to particularly talk about their victims.
In short I can't bring myself to empathise with them much. Is this wrong? Let me extend it.
I will describe which particular victims I find it hard to empathise with. These are the victims who still believe they got something. There is another class of victim I will talk about.
Case one - an elderly woman and her daughters. The mother was "healed" by a faith healer who promptly broke her walking stick in a theatrical show which would make Shakespheare proud. The woman was now afraid to walk without her stick but she and her daughters still felt the healing was successful
Case two - a man who felt he was healed of his diabetes, even though he still continued to take insulin
Case three - I think I will just retype excerpts from the book which was broadcast on CBS-TV's news program "West 57th" in 1986. It sums up the mentality better than I could
To get into the possible mindest of such people, I will quote from one of W.V. Grant's stage hand John Le BlancHost : Now, I saw you get up out of a wheel chair. Was that a miracle?
Woman : Not exactly, because I wasn't crippled - I wasn't completely crippled, but I - I only got difficulty to walk and so far I think I feel much better.
Host : You mean whose wheelchair was that, that you got out of?
Woman : that was from here. I didn't come here with - no.
Host : Do you own a wheelchair?
Woman : No.
Host : That's not your wheelchair?
Woman : No.
Host : Don't you think its kind of funny that you come here, sit in a wheelchair, and then he makes a big deal of getting you out of a wheelchair that you don't even own?
Woman : I- I can't tell you. I believe in miracles anyway.Now I pray for this and I believe.
The whole thinngs is money. Some people just want to be taken. It seems like they like to be taken
The old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice (by the same method) shame on me. This is of course, ignoring the fact that they shouldn't have been fooled in the first place.When I saw all these people doing all these crazy things, it just hit me. These people - they don't care! They're looking for something. They're looking for someone to guide them, to show them the way. I don't know what they're looking for. They don't know what they're looking for. And you just can't talk to them!
To sum up the reasons why people have such gullibility
1) the want to be tricked (because their need to believe is so strong).
2) they really are this stupid (without a desire to be tricked)
Point 1 is easy to justify why I shouldn't feel sympathy. If its what they "really want", then its their right to do stupid things.
Point 2 I can argue along the same lines as why we laugh at people dying in the Darwin awards.
To me, being tricked by such an obvious scam in terms magnitude of idiocy doesn't seem to be much different in magnitude than say in the Darwin awards. In the case of the Darwin awards, we laugh at the stupidity of such people. Why should we not laugh at the stupidity of these people buying into faith healers? The only difference is that there is fraud involved, in which case the faith healer should be charged.
The other class of victims, are the ones who realise they had been had and do sue the faith healer.
To quote from the wiki article on Jim Bakker (who was later convicted)
I guess I can empathise with these victims more than the previous group. However I still find it hard to do so. Personally if they won or lost the law suit, it wouldn't make difference to my sense of outrage because I see them as partially responsible for the consequences. To me this seems no different that smokers suing cigarette companies.On July 23, 1996, a North Carolina jury threw out a class action suit brought on behalf of more than 160,000 onetime believers who contributed as much as $7,000 each to Bakker's coffers in the 1980s.
To elaborate a bit more, I don't have a problem with smokers who started smoking way before the dangers of smoking were well known suing. Whether they would still have made the same choice is hard to say, however the fact is they didn't have all available facts to make an informed decision. However in this day and age, where cigarette packaging says in big words "Smoking kills" there is no excuse. You have the information, you made the wrong decision (and a bleeding obvious one at that).
The same applies to these people who flock to faith healers.
You can observe that faith healers only have anecdotal evidence.
You can observe that you gave your details to others prior to the performance, and thus reason that it is possible that they in turn gave it to the preacher. Occam's razor certainly suggests this explanation over a supernatural one (even if you believed in a supernatural explanation which gives the preacher divine revelation).
You can reason that there is no way to demonstrate whether someone has been healed without knowing what they had in the first place (especially with people who were suddenly told they had disease x which doctors never noticed before).
In short, if they are mentally competent (ie not suffering from some mental illness) they have no excuse for their poor judgment and thus not deserving of a lot of sympathy.
-- Asuka
)
There is a christian university named after this man, who chose to be known as "Oral Roberts" after becoming a minister. Seriously. This kind of comedy's fit only for MAD TV or a national lampoons movie, not reality.