Can Black Magic Kill You? It would seem not.
March 21st, 2010
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Pandit Surender Sharma is a well known Indian guru who claims to have magical powers which he can use to do any number of amazing things. Among them is the ability to kill with magic and spiritual energy alone. Well known Indian skeptic and debunker Sanal Edamaruku didn’t buy it and went so far as to challenge Sharma to kill him on live television using only his magical powers. Surprisingly, Sharma took the challenge, but warned that Edamaruku was asking for a painful death.
You really don’t need to understand the language to see what happens:
Needless to say, Mr. Edamaruku is still alive and well. The only problem he has encountered during these kind of challenges has been the occasions where he has had difficulty keeping a straight face and fighting back laughter.
I really love when people like Sharma are actually willing to prove their powers – it never does actually work, but it’s fun to watch.
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 21st, 2010 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Good Science, Just LAME, Paranormal, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 21st, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Stupid is, as stupid does. But how is this different from praying over the sick and dying? Many that would condemn this as utter rubbish, will believe they can talk the universe into changing course if they beg hard enough. Why they can’t see that it is exactly the same is a real mystery to me.
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March 21st, 2010 at 9:38 pm
DV82XL said:
It’s actually more complicated than that. Due to the placebo effect, if the target *believes* it works, it may do so. Praying (or appearing to do so) over a sick or dying person may help if the person believes it to work. Sanal Edamaruku wasn’t affected because he didn’t believe – but it’s well-known that if the victim believes, it can screw up their day.
“She turned me into a newt”. It may be a funny Monty Python line – but go research “penis theft” or “thanatomania” for a fascinating example of how screwed up a person’s thought processes can get and what the outcome can be.
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March 21st, 2010 at 10:02 pm
Valdis Kletnieks said:
I was recently treated to the spectacle of watching my uncle’s wife and her sisters constantly praying over his bed while he was incubated and gurgling out his last breaths. He lasted through three days of this and died anyway, whatever she believed.
Magic doesn’t work.
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March 22nd, 2010 at 1:56 am
DV82XL said:
May I ask what their conclusion was? That they did not pray hard enough?
I’m guessing they thought that God heard their prayers but decided it was his time to go or something. In that case, there are some other logical implications. Does god take prayers into consideration when deciding if someone is to die? In other words, does praying at least increase the probability that god will change his mind?
Does praying harder increase the probability even further? IF this is the case, how can you ever be sure it’s not your fault because you didn’t pray quite hard enough?
Also, doesn’t this seem very unfair? What about those who don’t has as many people to pray as hard for them? What if someone becomes ill and dies before their relatives can be informed that they’ve taken ill and need prayers? Isn’t it unfair that they should not have the benefit?
Then again, if it is all part of god’s great plan, then why pray at all? Isn’t god already decided? There’s no point in begging the umpire once the call has been made!
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March 22nd, 2010 at 2:03 am
Actually, I believe that someone once did a study on the health outcomes for European royalty of various stripes to see whether or not all that prayer from the public in their favour (God save the king/queen) which was publicly mandated for so long actually produced any statistically significant results.
Apparently it didn’t.
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March 22nd, 2010 at 2:08 am
Finrod said:
That’s a little surprising. I mean, how do you seperate royalty into control groups? They already are set apart from the public by virtue of the fact that they’ll be expected to get the best medical specialists and the best living enviornment that can be bought at any price.
To play devil’s advocate here, maybe god is a lot like many people when it comes to asking for something. If you ask for something and he says no, you can resort to begging and maybe he’ll do it just to shut you up, but if you go too far, then begging turns to nagging and he just gets fed up and won’t do it out of spite.
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March 22nd, 2010 at 2:15 am
drbuzz0 said:
I’ll see if I can find the reference. It might have been in one of Dawkins’ books.
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March 22nd, 2010 at 5:19 am
DV82XL said:
As the Russian (I think) proverb says – pray to God, but keep rowing to shore. God may help you if you ask, and if he’s happy with that, but if you don’t bother to do what you can off your own back then perhaps you don’t really want it all that much.
Sometimes, to ‘do what you can’ is to just accept that it’s time to go.
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March 24th, 2010 at 10:50 am
I’m not sure why there’s such an extreme aversion being expressed towards prayer for the dying or gravely ill.
Does it work? Not that I’ve ever seen, at least in the sense of having any tangible effect on the outcome of the patient’s condition.
But with the exception of those fringe nutcases who forgo legitimate medical treatment in favor of prayer, what’s the harm in it? If it serves to comfort both the patient and their families and give them hope, it’s surely serving some purpose, even if it’s not measurably affecting the patient’s health.
I realize the very existence of prayer is a grave affront to the delicate sensibilities of the devoutly anti-religious. I’ve been there, I get that. I have no use for prayer myself. But it’s pretty lousy to sneer at people in pain who turn to prayer as a last resort, if medical science has already done everything it can.
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March 24th, 2010 at 11:21 am
apotheosis said:
Well I could say that as long a my being an atheist seems to be a grave affront to the delicate sensibilities of the devoutly religious…..
However the issue is not someone who prays when thing are indeed hopeless that is the issue. It is that this behavior is indicative of a way of thinking that is broadly dangerous, because it is not limited to just those situations. The fact that there are people who believe that events are under the control of some unseen supernatural hand is grounds for concern when in more important things, they subordinate logic to dogma.
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March 24th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
This nicely sums up everything there is to say about the supernatural:
http://xkcd.com/718/
Satan_Klaus
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March 30th, 2010 at 12:13 pm
Why didn’t Mr. Edamaruku take the opportunity to grimace, groan, and then throw himself to the floor, thrashing about and frothing at the mouth?
The reaction of the “guru” when he stood back up and said “Kidding!” would have been priceless……
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August 31st, 2011 at 4:59 am
I have some doubts … pls reply to this mail
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