Posts Tagged Merseyside
Biblical Healing: Coming To A Town Near You
Posted by Marsh in Merseyside, Pseudomedicine, Religion, Skepticism on October 1, 2009
Flyer for the Revival Fellowship. Click for big.
Last weekend I was handed a flyer on the street for something called the Revival Fellowship. Well, that’s not strictly true – it was actually a friend of my girlfriend’s who was given the flyer, with the specific reason that she knew it would annoy the hell out of me, and she was right. Because the Revival Fellowship is a ‘prayer heals’ kind of organisation, going so far as to make some extraordinarily outrageous claims. The flyer – which is a pretty well-made affair, I might add (you can view it right there on the right) – claims to be ‘Totally Different from anything you’ve heard before’. Bold claims. Turn the flyer over, and you’ll see the happy faces of various healees (it’s not a word, I know, but I like it). Beside the face of the first healee, the flyer proclaims:
“After prayer, Russell was healed from a severe food allergy and Autism. He now leads a completely normal life”
This struck my girlfriend as odd, and it definitely strikes me as odd. First of all, I like how the statement goes with the big claims first – namely that he was healed from a severe food allergy? Wow, that’s an amazing claim! Oh yeah, and he was healed from the hitherto-untreatable autism too, but that’s by the by… And that’s not the only extraordinary claim. Read the rest of this entry »
The Daily Mail says ‘Don’t Worry, She’s Not Foreign’
Posted by Colonel Molerat in Merseyside, Religion on September 29, 2009
On Wednesday, I wrote about the vicious pillow fight between a pair of Christian hoteliers and their Muslim guest. I had reservations about taking either party’s side – both seemed frustratingly petty and argumentative, and the greater issue seemed to me to be the danger of using the police to forcibly resolve silly arguments.
Well, today the Daily Mail have released an update, in which they interview the Muslim woman involved, Ericka Tazi. She is a recent convert to Islam, being brought up a ‘staunch Catholic’ until a year ago (maybe one day she’ll settle on something sensible). The odd thing about the Mail’s approach is how they desperate they seem to be to separate her religion from any ‘foreign’ connotations. They quote her saying:
I only took up the Muslim faith a year ago. And it had nothing to do with my husband. Although he was born into the Muslim faith, he is as English as I am. He goes around in jeans and T-shirts and has even got a season ticket for Everton
Wow! He’s got a season ticket for Everton! He’s more English than me! The Mail seems, as always, utterly confused. “He may be Muslim, but he’s not foreign!” How bizarre (yet, of course, expected) that the Mail isn’t worried about the oddness of a person’s beliefs, just as long as they make sure they are thoroughly English. Read the rest of this entry »
It ain’t easy being green.
Posted by Colonel Molerat in Merseyside on September 9, 2009
Greetings, dear reader! What did you say? You’re an eccentric millionaire looking to employ a sceptic-IT-technician-cum-media-something to keep you company in your doting years, and you’re offering access to your wine cellar (and vintage gins) for nothing more than the provision of a little evening conversation and the odd compliment or two?
Certainly! I’d be delighted to fill that role! Fetch the decanter and I’ll start right away!
For the audience here who are not eccentric millionaires looking to keep me in exquisite comfort for the rest of their lives, let me explain…
At the last Sceptics in the Pub (on Thursday) I offered to try and write a blog post each week in time for Sunday. However, I wasn’t counting on the rather panicky Friday I would have, and the worry that would lurk at the back of my mind for the rest of the weekend. Read the rest of this entry »
UFOs Spotted Over Lake District. Really. UFOs. No Fooling. OK, Maybe SOME Fooling…
Posted by Marsh in Media, Merseyside, UFOs on June 16, 2009
So the Lake District is the latest area of England to be visited by UFOs. Following on from the ones spotted in Shropshire, Cambridgeshire, London and… erm, well… Merseyside. Yes, Merseyside. That sound you can hear is us, dropping the ball on that one. Aliens in our back gardens, and there we were out ‘mobbing’ local ‘psychics’. Boy were our faces red.
But as it happens, the Merseyside UFOs weren’t aliens, after all. I’ll let you have a moment to stop reeling from that shock revelation. Done? Good. They were countermeasure flares deployed in a navy training routine. Even the woo-tastic Telegraph is happy to go with this explanation, so it must really hold water – give those guys half an inch of wiggle room and it seems they’re the first ones to don their tin-foil hats and hum the theme tune to the X-Files. And the BBC are not much better – ‘Do-Dee-Derr-Derrr…Do-Dee-Do-Derr-Derr-Derr…‘ As it happens, I was half-way through an ‘it’s probably something straightforward’ type post when it emerged that it was, in fact, something straightforward. ’Oh,’ thought I, ‘that’s that then. No need to write on UFOs, it’ll be ages before another one of those comes up.’ But UFOs, like buses and clichés, rarely come along one at a time… Read the rest of this entry »
Joe Power: Psychic Detective… although not a detective, and not psychic
Posted by Marsh in Joe Power, Merseyside, Psychics on May 22, 2009
The Liverpool Echo today runs a charmingly-sympathetic feature on local corpse-finder and celeb-séancer Joe Power.
For those of you with good memories for niche outré pieces of pop-culture tat (and why the hell wouldn’t you?), Joe was the chap who chatted with a posthumous John Lennon back in 2006. The reason why many of you wouldn’t have known that – coincidentally the same reason that all of modern science wasn’t turned entirely on its head, causing scientists and philosphers the world over to fall to their knees, beating their breast and cursing their wasted lives in pursuit of damned reason – was that he didn’t actually talk to John Lennon. John Lennon’s dead, he’s not talking to anyone these days, least of all Joe Power (his name gets better the more you say it aloud. Joe Power. Joe Power). More details on that can be found all over the internet. Go ahead, check, I’ll wait.
These days Joe tends to use his ‘powerful gift’ (because his name’s Joe Power. Good punning, Liverpool Echo) to help police with their investigations – the latest being his help in locating Madelaine McCann. Joe Power says:
“I believe I have seen the face of the person who abducted Madeleine and it is not dissimilar to the sketch which the detectives released after help from Jane Tanner”
So his psychic ability appears to have led him to confirm the information police came up with on their own and which they have been working on for a while now. Handy. Coincidentally, my own psychic ability leads me to predict that the River Mersey is wet, that the sky is blue, and that Joe Power is a fraud. If he can retrodict, so can I.
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