Katelyn Shoemaker Pseudoscience Final Exam 5/8/2012

Essay 1 Wishful medicine is a very big scam that many people tend to believe. It is the acts of making people believe that they are being healed by people praying for them and being able to call to God for them in order to ask for healing and forgiveness. This way of being healed is also referred to as an alternative form of health care in the sense that it is not covered by insurance companies and it does not require any real and traditional medical treatment. In addition to not being real medicine, this form of healing is usually free as in does not cost anything monetary. Faith healing though is not free in the sense of emotions. People who are sick with things such as cancer, AIDS, arthritis, and a very wide range of topics come to the faith healers expecting to be healed of their ailments and sadly they usually leave without being healed at all rather they are just fooled that their illness is gone. The human mind is extremely powerful in the sense that if you want it bad enough you can believe that it will happen and you can actually trick yourself into thinking you are better. This form of alternative medicine really does just this. People believe that the faith healers can cure the incurable diseases and this is ultimately what kills them in the end. Todays version of faith healing and what America has experienced in the 1920s to the 1950s as far as faith healing goes is very similar. During the pre-modern times tent revivals were a common event for people to experience. Tent revivals were very carnival like, being that they were held in these huge tents with a stage and chairs for the audience and the faith healer would come on stage and do his show. The faith healer would call out to the crowd saying Lucy, Lucy with arthritis please stand up come to the stage and be healed! Lucy would then come to the stage and he would lay his hands on her and she would be healed being pushed

Katelyn Shoemaker Pseudoscience Final Exam 5/8/2012

backwards into someones arms to break her fall. Modern faith healing is not much different although the medium through which it is portrayed does differ. Electronic faith healing is the trend of the current times. Evangelists will get approved and have a television program produced portraying the same gist of the old times tent revivals. There is an audience and the faith healer on the stage doing his act. All in all, the modern and the old times faith healing are almost identical. Modern television faith healing though is an extreme sad scam. Oral Roberts is an evangelist healer that is currently affiliated with the Methodist church. He has his own television program where he does his faith healing. People can call in and he has prayer cards from them and he prays with them over the phone and claims to cure all problems for that person by praying for them. He constantly asks for donations and people religiously send them into them because he claims that he can see and speak to God. Roberts says that he began to be able to speak to God when he himself was cured of Tuberculosis at the age of seventeen. He first started his faith healing business in the 1950s with tent revivals where he could mingle with the audience before the show started and this was in order to find out sneakily what was wrong with people before the show. He would then take the information and either commit it to memory or even write it down so that he could call these people out during the revival to heal them. Roberts always made sure that he separated the extremely sick and impaired people from the others to make himself look good. People in the audience would also fill out prayer cards in which were used during the show to call out people of their illnesses. It is just truly sad because he was convincing innocent sick people that he was healing them of all their aliments without traditional medical practices. These people would give him money even if that was their last two dollars in their pockets because they thought he was a direct connection to God.

Katelyn Shoemaker Pseudoscience Final Exam 5/8/2012

Oral Roberts is an extreme case of faith healing at its finest. He can persuade people that he is speaking directly to God and in turn they are vulnerable to him and he takes their money. He is only in it for the money and this is proven by the opulent lifestyle that he and his wife live. Roberts is very blunt about his outlook on faith healing. He even promises that not only will he heal and guarantee medical miracles but he has the power to fix your financial problems as well. What most people do not realize though that is just a scam to actually take your money and put you in more financial problems. As far as asking for money goes though Oral Roberts is a very classic example of what is called seed faith. Faith healers will tell their audience that they need to plant the seed of faith in God by donating x amount of money. Roberts gives his audience two options of helping with seed faith. The first is sending in a donation with a prayer card and he promises that he will personally pray for you. The second is for people to call up a prayer partner that in exchange for a donation via credit card phone processing that the prayer partner will personally pray for you. This seed of faith ensures them that they are doing good for God and that they are helping the healing ministry when in fact they are just helping to fatten Roberts wallet. This seed faith non sense makes people believe that they are personally having contact with God. It makes people believe in nontraditional medicine and in the end they are extremely fooled by this when they are broke and still having medical problems. All in all, this is just a money getting scam from people taking advantage of vulnerable people. Essay 5 The thought that things like Aliens, ESP, ghost and psychic readings might be true really seems to intrigue our society. People want to believe in these topics as to find some sliver of hope that there really is more to life out there than meets the eye. The Gallup Poll does surveys

Katelyn Shoemaker Pseudoscience Final Exam 5/8/2012

periodically on the general American public to see what is really going on in peoples brains out there. The most recent poll I could find from the year 2005 shows that forty one percent of people believe in ESP, this was followed by thirty-seven percent of people believing in the phenomena of houses being haunted. This numbers may not seem very high but when looking at the overall population this is just short of half of the American public believing in ESP and ghosts, two phenomena that are extremely questionable. The main topics that the Gallup Poll revealed that people believe in were ghosts (whether they haunt houses or come back from the dead), ESP, astrology, telepathy, and reincarnation. All of these topics are current very media present in society so that is probably why people have the tendency to want to believe in these topics. There was a research project done in the year 1985 that really revealed general things about how students view these kinds of topics. The project was called the Cult Archaeology and Creationism research project. Professors involved in this project conducted surveys in their classes that looked at the students backgrounds, how strongly they appeared to accept these beliefs, and there were also a variety of questions dealing with the mass media in general. The sample size was 979 students and all of these students were from many different geographical locations from all over the United States. The students were mostly freshman and this was because they havent really been exposed to the real college atmosphere yet. They were surveyed in topics such as UFOs, ghosts, ESP, evolutionism, creationism, magic and aliens and there answers were agree somewhat, strongly agree, disagree somewhat, disagree strongly and undecided. Overall the results of this project showed that many students were undecided about

Katelyn Shoemaker Pseudoscience Final Exam 5/8/2012

many of these topics. There were patterns of belief such as if they were taught evolution in high school. Basically their background had a lot to do with how they answered the survey. This project really revealed that as time goes on in college and as more and more students become more cultured in society they develop a better (or worse) understanding and opinions on certain topics. If this survey was done on maybe a junior or senior class the results would be much more different. As students take courses in college such as philosophy or even science courses they will develop a better understanding on life. Their critical thinking approach will be more developed and this will change the way they think in general. The acceptance of general phenomena among college students varies greatly. The younger and more inexperienced you are the more likely you are to fall into the traps of the media and social constructs that tell you to think a certain way. As time goes on however, older college students or upperclassmen have a different critical thinking approach that helps them to solve these questions about questionable phenomena. Essay 6 The availability of sources to understand or even try and explain pseudoscientific beliefs today is very accessible. The media and society in general have an open mind about the possibility of the paranormal and topics of the like. People are extremely intrigued by these topics and this is possibility why there is such availability to these phenomena. There are four basic sources for the acceptance of todays society dealing with these pseudoscience beliefs. The first is people having cognitive biases which basically mean how people think about things of reasoning and how people perceive topics from person to person. This is a huge source because it

Katelyn Shoemaker Pseudoscience Final Exam 5/8/2012

controls how these topics are viewed and it helps to create their own perceptions about these sensitive topics. With the outburst of literature on topics such as the paranormal, UFOs and the psychic phenomena, people in general are easily swayed into believing. The outburst of television programs is also another way that the meanings of reasoning and perception can be distorted. Television is such a heavily influenced medium because many Americans think that if they see it on television and it is not portrayed in a fictional form then it must be true. A great example of this is the show Paranormal State on A&E. At the beginning of each episode there is a line that reads all phenomena in this show is real and accurate. People believe this whether it is really true or not. Humans brains are also known to try and make sense of any phenomena that is happening. We like to think that most things can be explained so instead of denying the fact that something appears to be what it is not we would rather look at it and make sense of it in some possible way. This is shown in a great way when people claim to see the face of Jesus in things like spaghetti or on the back of someones vehicle drawn in dirt. People will look at these images of Jesus from every single angle possible just to make sense that it does look like Jesus. Another example of this is the face on Mars story. Photographs were taken of Mars and many people claimed that the photo looked like there were faces on Mars when in fact they were just overview photos of mountains and valleys. The hope for extraterrestrial life makes people see things that are not really there. Another source of reasoning would be sheer coincidence. This is a classic case of the phone ringing and it being you sister when you were just thinking about her. What people do not really think about it sometimes that just happens because how many times were you thinking about your sister but she did not call. People also like to be confident about their judgments but they do not consider the alternative solutions to the problems at hand.

Katelyn Shoemaker Pseudoscience Final Exam 5/8/2012

The second source for pseudoscientific believes is the influence of sociocultural mechanisms or society at large. The environment that we live in today can simply be a cause or an outlet for this type of phenomena to be believed. There is a lot of stress in peoples lives and this can be a trigger to believe this phenomena. This also plays in with the fact that in todays society there is a real loss of the concept of traditional religions. People today seem to care less about their faith than we used to in the past. The third source is simply the lack of good education and critical thinking skills. The school systems today have a different view on how they teach students to think. Rather than teaching students how to think, students are basically being taught what to think and to not create intellectual thoughts themselves. Students today do not seem to know the concept of reading in between the lines to reach a conclusion. No one seems to really look into where this information about pseudoscientific believes are coming from. Alternative ideas are not presented and this is portrayed in a black and white scenario in which students only know what is right and what is wrong. Finally, the last source for this availability of phenomena is media coverage in which there only aim is to make money and not portray accurate information. We live in a world today where people really do believe almost everything that is shown in the newspapers, magazines, books and television. The aim of these producers and publishers is to make money off of these topics so what they print is not the focus. The focus is what they will make money on. This is very damaging to the general public because most of these shows feed into cultural myths and make them more believable to the widespread public. They leave out some very critical information that would change the views of people if shown.

Katelyn Shoemaker Pseudoscience Final Exam 5/8/2012

All in all, todays modern society is much damaged from the sources of pseudoscientific belief today. People are very easily persuaded by the media and other social constructs to believe the information that is portrayed to the public. Without these four major sources, people may not think the same way today about these topics.