Gary: Young, Psychic and Possessed

Just a few quick notes on the above documentary that went out earlier this year. It featured Gary Mannion, a 20-year-old man who believes he is in spiritual content with biblical figure Abraham, and can heal people via his energy. Emeka Onono follows Mannion for two months in an attempt to determine whether or not Mannion can do what he claims to.

In conclusion, Onono find no evidence that Mannion has had any effect over his patients. He cites difficulties in acquiring cooperative former patients of Mannion, but those few that he did manage to get in touch with provided medical records that indicated Mannion could not be isolated as a causal factor in their recovery.

This is, I think, a point that the film doesn't do much to underline. It walks away from Mannion with the supposition that Mannion does indeed believe his abilities to be genuine. What is particularly sad is that it's perfectly reasonable, however mistaken, for Mannion to hold this belief. Unlike Onono, Mannion has not pursued to the same degree of scrutiny, the medical history before and after his intervenion in these patients' lives. Onono revealed that most patients were receiving conventional treatment at the same time. The cause celebré of the evidence was a gentleman suffering from alzheimers who had actually shown signs of recovery prior to Mannion's treatment. From Mannion's point of view, he sees patients, many of whom no doubt complain that their treatment or GP is in some way failing them, he treats them and soon after they show signs of recovery. Without the troublesome additional data of official diagnosis and treatment, Mannion falls easily into the trap of availability. He is only aware of his own treatment and so, to him, that treatment must be the chief cause of the recovery. Even if he grows to doubt this over time, he will find himself in a position where his life and income revolves exclusively around his supposed ability to heal - he becomes intensely invested in his claims, so giving up those claims becomes increasingly impossible.

This is the stuff that really fascinates me. If we assume that with a few exceptions the people who practice such alternatives to medicine genuinely believe in what they do, then we ought to be looking at how this belief develops and is sustained, rather than whether or not these treatments work, when invariably they do not.

I Believe in Public Transport

The so-called "atheist bus campaign" rolled out recently and the predictable flood of complaints has begun. The ASA, who handle complaints about advertising in the UK, have received 150 or more messages from disgruntled members of the public. According to the Guardian 39 of them weren't even about the ads themselves, but about reportage covering the campaign.

The more valid complaints have been about offensiveness, and more of that in a moment, but the ever-hilarious Stephen Green of Christian Voice notoriety has decided to plump for a "truth and misleadingness" basis for his grumble. This is an interesting tact to take. Sadly, many of the commentators who have suggested that the arising adjudication will hinge on Green, or anyone for that matter, proving the existence of God, are mistaken. The advertiser has to prove its claims, and not the plaintiff. However, the claim in question is that there "probably is no god". Demonstrating the improbability of the existence of a deity will be much more straightforward than proving the inexistence of one, something Green seems not to have realised, blinded, no doubt, by his own faith.

What I find more interesting is the idea that the ads are offensive. The claim is not specific to any religion, something which is perhaps muddied a little by being in uppercase - the sentiment is clearly that there is likely no lowercase-g god. It may be that to a member of a particular religion that this makes no difference - no god logically means no Jehovah, no Allah, no Krsna, no Thor, no Mithra and so on. Where it does become significant is as part of the wider picture. Here's an ad for a church. Its suggestion is that Jesus is real, and alive today. It's advocating a God that is false in the eyes of other religions; and yet these ads do not receive complaints from members of other religions. You won't find many column inches decrying this blasphemous bit of advertising.

The tired old cliché came out for an airing, based again on the above misunderstanding. Would the campaign have been given the go ahead if the slogan had been "there probably is no Allah"? That is already what the campaign says; the Humanists do not want to single out any particular god - it'd be a wasted opportunity, and would misrepresent their beliefs. The rebuttal to the cliché would be "if this was a campaign for Allah, would you still find it distasteful and offensive?"

For whatever illogical reason, there is something more inciteful about an atheist campaign, and whatever that might be, the complaints arising from the ads, if upheld, will open the floodgates for atheists and others to complain about equally offensive and unsubstantiated pro-religious ads. I suspect that the ASA will be aware of this too, and rather than creating a de facto ban on any form of religous advertising outright, will choose instead to tell the complainants that they really need to be a bit more tolerant about other people's beliefs, and that, really and truly, it's not always about them.

EDIT - 21/01/09 The ASA decided not to pursue the complaints.