Friday, April 07, 2006

Psychics who prey on the grieving ought to suffer the same fate

Grigory Grabavoi, the Russian who promised to resurrect the children who died in the Beslan siege in September 2004 has just been arrested.
NTV television said police had burst into a seance on Wednesday night and dragged the self-proclaimed healer away through a back entrance despite opposition from believers.
So much for breaking news from the beyond. Grabavoi should continue the seance in his cell and interrogate the spirits why none of them bothered to tell him to skeddadle. (Maybe Sylvia Browne had warned them of this con man and conspired to have the competition eliminated).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Police "dragged the self-proclaimed healer away through a back entrance despite opposition from believers"

It always gets me, the "supportive believers". Is there some psychological mechanism that makes folks cling more tightly to an absurdity the more absurd it is shown to be? Such as young earth creationists? If these sad sacks have paid this guy some serious rubles, then they will defend him more, typically.

Folks get pissed off, even sue or prosecute, if someone sells them something concrete that doesn't work, like a car, but if it is abstract or huge, like a war or a god or a connection to their dear dead, and if they invested heavily, like their life savings, or their child or their husband or their faith, then they often do not demand restitution or apology, and even defend the people who hurt them and theirs in the first place.

Okay, that WAS a run-on sentence, and it DID go awandering, and I AM talking about the US/UK war in Iraq as much as about this one creepy psychic.

Sigh.