Faith & False Hope: Insidious Faith Healers Exposed: Thomas Westbrook (Holy Kool-aid)
Abhijit: Hey everyone. Welcome back to Rationable Conversations. Today we are going to be talking about something shown in the movie Trance. If you haven't seen it, this is going to be all about faith healing, and we are going to get deep into it and rip it apart from the inside. And for that I'd like to welcome Thomas Westbrook, who's got the channel Holy Kool-Aid. So welcome, Thomas. It's great to see you again.
Thomas Westbrook: Thank you so much for having me. It's good to see you too. I think the last time that we saw each other was at the FFRF conference and CSICon, like a month before that; it's been a while. Almost a little less than a year.
Abhijit: Exactly. A little bit less than a year. I don't know why I'm looking at my watch for that. It's just this distinctive thing, but it was a really great meeting. But it was really great meeting you and I honestly, like, bumped into your channel a few times here and there and I'd soaked it in.
You have this tremendous wealth of information when it comes to especially Christianity, and every video is educational. I don't even know how you get all the animations done. I have ADHD.
Thomas Westbrook: Yeah, it's what happens when you're raised in a religion. Such a young age, and your parents are fundamentalists. I had missionary parents, and for them it was the most important thing. Every single morning I was brought up with a Bible in my hand, having devotions in the morning where we'd get together as a family and read the Bible and pray and sing worship hymns and stuff, and I memorised huge chunks of it by the time I was 10.
So you don't go through that kind of a childhood and upbringing without getting a significant amount of exposure to religion and not just the holy book itself, but a lot of the surrounding church history and the context in which the book was written. once I became an atheist, I started getting exposed to more ideas surrounding things like neuroscience and the psychology of belief.
In the ancient history of the Near East, you start learning about these cultures and time periods and the different artefacts and archaeological remains. You start getting a big picture, and that has allowed me to piece this stuff together and see how much my childhood and the things that I was taught growing up hold up to scrutiny.
Abhijit: That is intense. You were born in Azerbaijan, right?
Thomas Westbrook: I was born in LA. But growing up overseas, I got to do a lot of travel to after my childhood. So I went to do a study abroad in Russia. I did a study abroad in Kazakhstan, and while I was there, I was actually working with.
A missions organization. I was still very much a Christian. That was my last effort to see if I could make something of my faith and see if God worked some way in some noticeable way in my life, in the lives of others. And by the time I was done with that, I was already on the cusp of leaving my faith.
And within about a year or two of that, I was an atheist. I'd been watching many different, Ted talks science documentaries and listening to podcasts I stumbled into atheist YouTube and there were too many questions that were unanswered or had really bad answers from the Christian perspective.
I couldn't look the other way any longer.
Abhijit: So how did the process start? Like when was that moment when you just started saying wait a second. Were you trying to challenge your own beliefs? Or did you just stumble upon YouTube videos or something
Thomas Westbrook: I thought faith was the ideal. It was, you take this stuff without questioning and that was the sign of a good Christian even when there are hard questions, you still believe in spite of contrary evidence, cuz like God has a plan. And now I think that is incredibly, in a way, immoral, at the very least intellectually dishonest.
I think that we should go wherever the truth leads because truth is important and if something is true, it withstands scrutiny. But there were a couple of points when I was younger where I had people push me in the direction who were other Christians that allowed me to start questioning.
So I had a youth pastor that at one point said, if you're exposed to a lot of. Evidence around evolution and realize the earth isn't 6,000 years old. And people did actually evolve and that was the process that God used cuz he was an old earth creationist. You don't have to throw out your faith. You can look at this and say, Genesis is allegorical. these stories are metaphors And there's value in them, but the scientific evidence still stands. for him, science and faith weren't contrary.
Then as I got older, that was when I was in high school. Then in college I was working as a church camp counselor and one of my fellow counselors, he was giving his testimony and talking about how he was trying to prove his faith. And he believed that. Truth withstand scrutiny. And so that's something that I say a lot on my channel and in interviews because I genuinely believe that is the starting point if you ask a Christian straight up, do you think that the truth can be scrutinized and it'll still be true, almost every single one of them without question will say yes.
And they assume that the evidence is gonna lead them in the direction of the Bible. And if it does, great, but you should be open to changing your mind. I think everyone should be intellectually honest enough to be willing to change their mind and to not be afraid of going where the truth in the evidence point and lead.
And so that was a point where I started to take that in. And then as I was reading the Bible more and learning more about science, it was this slow thing where suddenly I realized that I didn't think that everything in the Bible was literally a hundred percent true. That was a huge moment where I was like, I can't believe I just said that out loud. And then I started learning more about psychology. I started learning more about things like sleep paralysis and what it is. It was something that I had experienced and thought was demons at the time because for those who aren't aware of what sleep paralysis is, it's when you are falling asleep or just waking up from sleep and you're in that stage where you're half asleep, half awake, your brain sends signals to your body to paralyze your muscles
and sometimes that system can not work and you get people who will sleepwalk But there's also times where. You wake up and it doesn't kick off, And so you're still paralyzed and stuck to your bed. But your sense of proprioception, which is your body's self-awareness of where your limbs are, is out of whack.
And your prefrontal cortex, which is the region of your brain responsible for cognitive reasoning and logically piecing things together, is still half asleep. And so your body is sitting there like feeling like it's floating. Sometimes you feel a weight on your chest and you start having these hallucinations because you're mid dream, half awake, half asleep.
you'll have these hypnopompic or hypnogogic hallucinations depending on if it's as you're falling asleep or waking up. they can be really dark and terrifying and anxiety inducing. And so you might think that there is like a demon in the room or in some cultures, depending on the various folklore
For some people they've had hallucinations about an old hag or about a succubus or an incubus or something, or ghosts demons. After the Roswell incidents, there were a lot of stories that sounded exactly like sleep paralysis, but were about aliens. And so as I started to learn about this when I had previously as a Christian who was like, I thought I was.
Saved by God and like untouchable by the devil. Cuz I was under God's protection and yet I had a sleep paralysis experience where I'm like, I feel like the devil is in the room and there's like a demon somehow pinning me down. And I'm like crying out in my mind. Like just sincerely like going Jesus.
And focusing my eyes on this cross and it's not doing anything. And I'm like, that should have worked. Why am I still frozen in this paralyzed state? Completely helpless. it was only after I understood that this is a well known phenomenon that neuroscience has an explanation for and you can do brain scans and see chemically what's going on that I started to lose a lot of my beliefs in demons and hell and Satan it was one thing led to another that also didn't square with the idea of an all loving God. Why would an all loving God create hell?
Why would a just God create an eternal punishment for finite crimes? There was a lot of factors that kind of played into it, but once the fear of hell was removed and I started to learn the history of how it had been manmade, then all of a sudden you lost the stick. That was like the fear keeping you in the faith.
Without the evidence there, compelling me to stay, it was only a matter of time before I basically was like, eh, I can take the good bits, but I don't have to swallow all of it. Whole
Abhijit: man. That's gotta be quite a journey. And it's, it must be like, it really like bends your brain and challenges you because you, as you're uncovering the kind of beliefs that you hold and genuinely accepting that a lot of it doesn't hold water. fortunately, I never had to experience that. I've experienced it in different ways, which are less consequential to my person or my state of being, or my state of mind. But that is traumatic. I heard about hypnogogic and Hypnopompic sleep Paralysis from Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World.
Quite a significant, such a good book. Amazing book. Yeah. And I read it relatively later on in my journey as a skeptic, but it's just so enlightening. Even then when you think, his perspective puts things in perspective
Thomas Westbrook: A lot of times when people ask me to recommend a book when they're just starting off on their journey in skepticism that's the go-to book that'll point them to, because it covers so many different things someone might believe in psychic phenomena they might believe in U f O sightings, they might believe in bigfoot or conspiracy theories or whatever the case is, that book does a really good job of just covering all of it. But it was written in the 1990s. Carl Sagan passed away, I think in like early nineties. And there's new things that have come up since then. I don't think the flat earth movement was really much of a thing back then.
as I was learning these things and exploring them, I wanted to share my journey of how I was figuring out whether or not something was true where the evidence pointed for other things, just because I don't consider myself a Christian anymore, that doesn't necessarily mean that I am skeptical of anything else.
I could still believe in palm reading astrology and tarot cards. I could still believe that Ouija boards somehow connect us to ghosts in the afterlife. I could believe in, u f o sightings and all sorts of paranormal things from like water dousing to psychic surgery. the world of alternative medicine is huge too even in certain atheist circles, there's a lot of scams and a lot of fraud that takes place by people who are selling some sort of supplement or some sort of product that really hasn't been tested at all. And so in my journey, my goal is not just to destroy one religion or take out my anger from having been lied to, for years as a Christian, it's, no I really want to go over the truth leads and explore topics that I may never have even had any exposure to until a few months ago. But it sounds fascinating and I wanna know what do we know about this
Abhijit: I started off more with alternative medicine when I, first started writing but I figured there's a whole planet full of stuff. I thought I'd keep away from religion for a while.
after I came to the F R F meeting, I was like, you know what? I think we need to tackle religion as well, not in a way that is offensive or derogatory but in a genuinely intellectual way. And see what the problems are in general. Have some super bad ideas.
Thomas Westbrook: Religion has a way of making people defensive more so than a lot of beliefs. Now, that's not to say that there aren't people who get very defensive about things like some form of alternative medicine, If they're in some kind of an MLM selling essential oils or something and believe that this can cure cancer they can make that part of their identity and get very defensive. it almost mirrors religions. But I think anyone in any faith shouldn't be threatened by honest inquiry. if someone is saying, Hey, this argument you're putting forth for your faith is a bad argument because it commits these logical fallacies. these particular things you are using to reason from as the foundation of your belief are completely unsound.
And if you really want to go where the truth leads as someone who's religious, then you shouldn't be afraid of that. Someone saying, Hey, look, I think that you can develop better arguments. I'm gonna show you where this particular argument that you have is committing this logical fallacy. So it is a bad argument. I think back when I was a Christian, I would've seen that and gone, okay, yeah, I don't want to have bad arguments. I don't want to reason illogically. I don't want to come up with something to try to convince someone based off of an argument that is not evidence-based or that is literally committing some sort of logical error. And so while people do get defensive, I think if you're respectfully able to just point that out and be like, Hey, look, here's where I think that this argument goes awry, can we come up with a better argument together maybe, or can you maybe go back to the drawing board and think through this position? Because I think that if you genuinely have this life altering belief, then it deserves to have better arguments than what you just put forth.
Anthony Magnabosco
Abhijit: Absolutely. we have these conversations in such a variety of ways, like especially Anthony Magnabosco, I did have him on.
If you guys haven't watched my Anthony Magnabosco video link is in the description. But so he and I connected with the way he helps people understand how they came to believe, what they believe. it's guiding them down a path to questioning their own beliefs to see if they hold water.
He's not intentionally trying to dismantle their beliefs It's just a questioning process. And that, I think is very powerful. Have you tried it?
Thomas Westbrook: done it with Anthony in San Antonio, I think once before
But it's been a while. I do love that approach and I think at the same time as we are asking other people to have that openness, to have their mind changed, we ourselves should be open to reexamining our own positions to make sure that they hold water, to make sure that we're not mistaken and that we're not misled.
Because there are positions that, I've changed my mind on in, the last few years. If we approach them from a position of, Hey, I'm open and willing to have my mind changed. If they themselves are not, at the very least, other people who are around or watching might be able to see the difference between your two levels of intellectual honesty.
Where if one of you is Hey, I want to go wherever the evidence leads, do you have a good argument for me? I'm willing to listen. I'm willing to hear it, and I'm willing to take it to heart. Are you willing to do the same? if they're not, if they just say, no, I believe this no matter what.
I'm not changing my mind. I'm not budging an inch on it. This is who I am. This is what I believe. This is the right thing to do, and you have an approach that's open. Then that contrast is often stark enough that people watching are like, yeah, one of these people is not being intellectually honest here.
Abhijit: And that's very important to keep in perspective because even now, like things like logical fallacies and biases and stuff like that, like I understand them, but I don't always have the ability to apply it in the situation. And of course, I never tell a person that you are making this logical fallacy because that is a sure ass way to piss someone off.
Thomas Westbrook: I think there are healthy ways to point that out without necessarily being like, you are illogical. It does have a way of being almost like tossing cold water in someone's face and saying in no uncertain terms you are an illogical person because you did this, you said this illogical thing, and they're gonna get defensive. a lot of times they're not even going to hear what you say. They're not gonna stop and piece it together. They're not gonna google the specific logical fallacy and figure out what it is and apply it to their own argument. But I think you can do the same thing where you walk them through that thought process. In a more roundabout, diplomatic way.
For example, there is a logical fallacy called an equivocation fallacy where you might use a word in two different parts of your argument. if you were to lay the argument out in a logical form, like as syllogism you might have something like all S are P or something and then that might be premise one, and then you're like, no P are Q
And then you might have the final one be like, so all S are Q or no S are Q or some S are Q it's just basically like having really simple ways of putting it. an example of that might be the cosmological argument that's like everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause. And so you might look at that specific argument and be like you're committing an equivocation fallacy. And they're gonna be like, it's not a fallacy. It's logical because everything has a cause and stuff. And they're not necessarily gonna understand what that means or what you're trying to say there.
But if you point out that you're like, wait, when you say that everything has a cause, can you show me something else that has emerged from nothing. Like you're saying that the universe popped into existence out of nothing, so it was caused ex-nihilo, from out of nothingness, and you are comparing that to things that simply have changes of state.
So maybe this cup drops because it has the forces of gravity acting on it. Maybe it has the intentionality of me letting go and so it falls and it changes in position. So that might be a change in state where it falls from here to here. And so you can say, what is the cause of that? And you can point to different things.
Yeah. it's not coming into existence from nothing. The other is everything that we see around us already exists. as it changes in state, it's due to, Newton's laws of motion or the laws of physics you can point to those causal aspects. you're looking at two different meanings of the word cause. you can't just use. Those as if they are the same within a logical structure. if you point that out to someone when you're having a debate with them, rather than just being like you're committing an equivocation fallacy, if you simply say okay, you're saying that the universe was caused from nothing.
Are there other things that we know of that came into existence from nothing? it feels like we're using two different terms there. And that doesn't quite work for me. I think that there's more diplomatic ways of doing that.
Marker faith healing
Abhijit: that is an alpha level skill though, which I haven't developed yet, I think it's just about experience and kind of getting into things more consistently. the reason why we are talking is because you apparently have been doing a lot of research on faith healers.
So what got you started on that?
Thomas Westbrook: I was raised in an environment that wholeheartedly believed that. I wholeheartedly believe that. And I've been to faith healing meetings. I've had people pray over me. I've had, quote unquote miracles that I experienced so I've had situations for example, I just did a video recently where I was telling drew this story from a genetically modified skeptic, another YouTuber.
Where I went to this church retreat and everyone there believed in faith healing I had this accident and broke my toe and asked someone to pray over my toe. And it's like literally like sticking out, protruding out of my foot. he had all these claims that, he was a prophet and could heal people of different things.
people would have an upset stomach and he'd pray over them and suddenly it wouldn't have an upset stomach anymore. And there were a lot of things that could be attributed to a placebo effect. When you have physical contact with someone, your body releases oxytocin. Which is called the love hormone, but it's more than that. it has a calming, soothing effect. so you've got this whole chemical explosion in your brain in this incredibly high adrenaline situation where you're in a faith healing rally and you're anticipating it.
So you've got all this dopamine, the reward chemical of the brain going off, I want my miracle. And there's all this pressure then you have everyone watching and there's this expectation of healing he is suddenly laying on his hands and you're getting this hit of adrenaline.
And so you're gonna have a natural pain numbing effect when someone like lays hands on you in the power of God. And the adrenaline is going to counteract, it's natural analgesic. A natural painkiller. It's gonna counteract a lot of the pain from something that you're experiencing.
I had in the past experienced things that I thought was faith healing, where my shoulder had some pain in it and someone said a prayer over it and it felt like it had gone away. And then I was like, no, it hadn't. in this situation where my toe was basically broken and protruding out, up and out of my foot, I'm sitting there going can you pray over it and make it better?
And I wholeheartedly believed it and I was super right with God. I was in a place where I was praising God and wanting a miracle and all this stuff. And he just looks at it and he is I feel God wants to use this as a lesson for you. Cause he knew in that moment that he was full of crap and he didn't have the ability to just Pray and have the toad crunch back into place, like it's being set by a doctor.
But that was the kind of miracle that I thought existed. failure healers will claim that they are able to heal someone's cancer. they might be able to get rid of the pain in the moment and then the person stops taking their chemo and radiation treatments, stops going to see the doctor and within a few months or a year, they're dead.
And a lot of this stuff is the numbers of it. Are absolutely gigantic, but no one talks about it because they don't want their testimony to harm the faith of others. They still believe in God, and they just think that maybe it was God's time for them, or maybe they didn't have enough faith, or maybe there was some sin in their life.
And so there's a lot of shame surrounding why were they not healed? Why did God not choose them? Was he just calling them home? And so these charlatans will go from city to city, sometimes having massive meetings, packing out stadiums, bringing in millions of dollars, flying around in private jets, and staying in hotels that cost 15,000 a night.
And they're raking in money from the Bible belt, which is often the most poor region of the us. And then they're going to other countries, sometimes they'll have huge rallies in India. throughout various countries in Africa. They'll rake in a fortune and then they get away with it because it's just practicing their religious faith.
And they're sending people home to die after they have received thousands of dollars in tithes and donations from desperate people who think that if they give to these ministries that God is gonna bless that seed of faith, that money that they're investing in the ministry and that God is gonna, as a result, cure them.
And it doesn't happen. And so there's a huge amount of harm, like the bodies there, there is a trail of bodies, a mountain high behind most of these big name faith heals. And it is legal genocide at its worst.
Abhijit: Absolutely. it's reprehensible if there was an actual term like evil.
it should apply to these guys because they are taking advantage of the weak, the vulnerable and giving them false hope that is more likely than not just aggravate their condition or hasten demise, which is absolutely disgusting
Thomas Westbrook: in a moment when the people are the most desperate.
Yeah. And they're preying on some of the least educated parts of the world They are preying on people who are have tried other things sometimes, or maybe they don't, they can't afford to try other things, and yet they will go into debt to give their last penny to these faith healers.
Yeah. And there's no refunds. There's no legal measures that people can really take. And when they have tried to take them to court, then these faith healers have massive legal teams and have an entire network of other pastors with political connections to make sure that it absolutely gets buried in the courts and they can like lobby for more quote unquote religious freedom.
And I think if you're religious, I understand why non-religious people or people of other faiths would look at this and be outraged by it because it's understandably maddening. But I would argue that if you're a Christian you should be even more furious about it.
Here you have people that are in the name of your faith, in the name of your religion and in the name of your God, scamming people out of fortunes, absolute massive amounts of money so that they can live extravagant lifestyles. And doing it to the detriment of their health.
people are dying or having, severe damage maybe they have a condition, they are barely able to walk or have a broken bone now this faith healer's coming in telling them like, oh, remove your crutches and throw away your canes and your wheelchairs and just walk.
You're gonna be healed. in the moment they have a rush of adrenaline and feel like they're fine and hobble around. then they go home and permanent damage can result because they're supposed to isolate that limb while it heals, now it has, damage that results and it's not able to set properly or it shifts And you can have a lot of harm. A great example is people who had neck braces. Maybe their neck was cracked or broken, it's fragile and needs to heal. And these faith healers will be like, you're healed and remove the neck brace and throw it away.
then they'll shake them about and jostle them about as this demonstration of God's healing power. And it's like you're literally taking someone who potentially just had a spinal. If you've ever worked as a lifeguard, like when someone hits their neck in the bottom of a pool, if they're not completely paralyzed, they're lucky.
But you gotta be really careful. I worked as a lifeguard for a while where you go in and are holding the person's neck very carefully as you're trying to get them out of the water and keep their head above water while you're floating.
And then once you get them out of the water, it's involves like a backboard that's slid in and you put them against it. you have to be super careful to keep the neck straight and not jostle it about
Because if in that situation it's moved unnecessarily, it can cause permanent damage to the spine that can result in paralysis if the person wasn't already paralyzed from the accident. And now you have people who are maybe in a condition, recently out of the emergency room, going to these faith healers, being told that they're cured, and then just Jostled about, and it's, absolutely criminal that they do this, get away with it.
Abhijit: this movie I was telling you about, it's called Trance and it came out a few years ago it shows the journey of a guy who gets pushed into being a faith healer. he becomes a superstar and loves the attention and genuinely thinks, He's helping people.
But then he does, of course, have a crisis where he starts questioning his own abilities if he's actually healing people there might be some people like that at the beginning of their journeys. But it's very hard to believe that, most people would genuinely believe that otherwise they wouldn't be moving around as much.
At least from my perspective.
Thomas Westbrook: I do not think that every single faith healing practitioner knowingly knows that they are defrauding people. However, I do think that I wanna be careful cause I don't wanna be sued. Because in the States, you can't just outright call a specific person a fraud or a liar or a con artist.
And if they're litigious, they can come after you. But that said, I think that almost all Of the top hundred or top thousand or all the big name megachurch faith dealers know exactly what they're doing.
Abhijit: Absolutely. And it was Peter Popoff, right?
who James Randy exposed and very clearly exposed. I think It was definitely in the newspapers.
Thomas Westbrook: It was on the Daily Show, which was the biggest show of the time. on Live tv he showed this faith healer who claimed to have divine revelation and the ability to miraculously heal people.
He was a televangelist who had Probably hundreds of thousands of followers He's blasting out his programs on TV. People all over the US and the world are tuning in. This guy is getting these pieces of information that is like, how in the world could he get this?
And he's saying things like is there someone here in the audience named, Mary Williams, who lives at 123 North Main Street or something? He is, he's getting their address, their name, their condition, and then telling them they're healed.
In addition to what I was saying earlier about all the neurochemicals firing from being in the heat of the moment, you're adding to the placebo effect by having people believe it even harder. Because how could he possibly know this? It must be divine, it must be a miracle.
But he had an earpiece and his wife before the service, the congregants were going around collecting prayer cards from people and having them fill out name, address, information. Why are they here? What do they wanna be healed from? it was all the stuff he was getting from his wife who's going in a back room and through the earpieces, reading off these prayer cards to him.
And he is word for word quoting his wife. And what Randy was able to do is tap into the radio signal and record his wife saying it to him over the earpiece and then him repeating it. But he was far from the only one. There's a very famous faith healer named William Branham, who's an idol among a lot of these modern church movements, a lot of the huge faith healing televangelists like Kenneth Copeland one of the wealthiest pastors, if not the wealthiest in America.
He was part of Donald Trump's Evangelical advisory committee. He ran the Trinity Broadcasting Company and has all these shows that he puts out.
Abhijit: guy who was trying to blow Corona away with the breath of Bob?
Thomas Westbrook: Yeah, It was that guy.
Abhijit: Whenever I see him, whenever I saw his interview with this journalist who was saying like, you have a private jet and all of these things, and how can you justify it? but I swear like I, if you take just his face, put a pair of horns on him, Like Satan.
the kinda crazy look he has in his eyes. I don't know, maybe I'm just projecting on this, but I swear that guy looks spooky and he looks evil. He looks evil and he behaves exactly as evil. Sorry, sorry for interrupting. You carry.
Thomas Westbrook: But Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, who I believe is Palestinian or Jewish in origin, then migrated to Canada and the US lives in the wealthiest neighborhood in California on beachfront property in a multimillion dollar mansion, flies private jets has, takes vacations to do buy-in, stays in like these $20,000 penthouses and stuff.
It's ridiculous the amount of money that he has yet every single one of them. Talks about this dude, William Braham, as if he had this incredible, miraculous anointing of God they have to because he was a faith healer who's going around and is incredibly well connected and plugged in to all of these other faith healers at the time
Like one of the huge magazines at the time was called The Voices of Healing by in this magazine around 200 faith healers that are all contributing to the magazine talking about when their next faith healing appointment is and stuff.
And William Braham was the one that initially started that magazine and was the inspiration for other faith healers in the movement. People like Oral Roberts were very closely connected to him, but he also was the inspiration of Jim Jones, who went down to Jonestown and had the cult down there and the massive massacre that killed almost a thousand people.
He also was the inspiration for Colonia Dignidad in Chile, it was an area where people were basically would disappear to in this compound. And they were tortured and killed. And there's, I think there, there's like another cult as well and a dark history he was ordained by one of the grand wizards of the kkk racism was huge in the ch like, not that it still doesn't have roots in the church today, but like at the time the Klan was like super well connected to the faith healing movement.
And so this guy, William Branham. He used prayer cards just like Popoff did. WV Grant, another massive faith healer used prayer cards just like Popoff did. Jack Co was one of the biggest, he had the biggest tent because they used to set up tents just outside of cities, and tens of thousands of people would show up to these faith healing rallies in these huge tents that would go from city to city and stay for weeks at a time, having meetings every single night.
Jack co used prayer cards, it's such a common trick that's used and like they just, without saying it, they're just like, oh no, we're, yeah, Peter Popoff abused the system, but we actually use it. people will tell stories about times where like they put down one thing on the prayer card that wasn't accurate and he read off that information and it didn't pan out.
he's obviously getting it from the prayer card and not from God It's that type of stuff that is still going on to this day. it's similar to psychics that perform hot reads on people where ahead of time they will get a list of all the attendees that have purchased tickets online to their upcoming psychic reading.
Who do you want to connect with? Who's the loved one that you're here to talk to today? Oh, your grandpa just passed away. Okay. They might have information that people fill out before they go into these readings, but they can also get a list of all the attendees and see, who can we find on Facebook that has their privacy settings disabled?
So we can literally go through their timeline and learn all these bits and pieces about them and then go and tell it to them. faith healers are able to do these same modern day surveillance tricks. In addition to the old school techniques like prayer cards and earpieces.
And so you start seeing these connections between people where they're using the same techniques and they're all talking each other up as a great person of God. And they're all using the same scams and cons, but they don't want to admit it even to each other.
And so they just play the act as if it's all real. And a lot of times their staff coming into it think okay I'm joining the Ministry of God. And very quickly realize that it's a moneymaking operation. And so you have exposes that are done when journalists will come in and you'll have staff members who are literally scared to come out because either they're worried it'll negatively affect the faith and they still believe that, or they're still Christians, but they think that this particular person is just.
A bad actor that they're just a bad apple and that it's just them, or it's just them and a few other faith healers, but that's not real Christianity. And so they don't want to come forward or they're genuinely afraid of the repercussions because these faith healers have massive resources. and oftentimes have like non-disclosure agreements that people have to sign and if they come forward detailing the abuse and how, these people are running these massive money making operations.
Some of them will say things like, I never once saw anyone genuinely get healed. I heard story after story of people who went home, stopped taking their medication and died, and we don't talk about that there's instances where with Benny Hinn he was basically exposed on, I think it was a B, C, did this whole expose on him?
I think Inside Edition did as well. Where people, or no, it was, I think C B C Canada that did this specific one I'm talking about where this girl who had this complex curvature of her spine to the point where she was in a wheelchair and could not move anything except a little bit of her hands and definitely couldn't walk, is trying to get to the front to have Benny him pray over her.
And this other guy, Justin Peters, who is a Christian by the way, exposes a lot of these faith healing charlatans. He has a condition where he is barely able to walk with canes. both of them tried to make it to the front. Benny Hinn has spotters. He has henchmen or bodyguards that are like no, you can't go up to the front.
they don't want those people on stage. They want the people who maybe have a little bit of pain in their knee or have something that is impossible to detect in the moment, but they can say, oh, I was cured. Your diabetes is healed. How are you gonna know that? Oh, it's cured.
Are you gonna do a blood sugar test on the spot? And if it's too high or too low is he gonna be like yeah, God has already healed it, you need to go home and eat something or let your blood sugar come back down. And then the diabetes, you're not gonna see any signs of it.
God is starting to work in your life. they don't want the people on stage who are noticeably ill or who have any amputation. They're not gonna try to regrow a limb. they make sure that they can't get on stage and they screen them and keep them off stage. Reinhard Bonko was another one used to do these massive rallies throughout Africa and other parts of the world. predominantly in Africa. he was German, but passed away in the last decade or two. he would have these huge rallies and also had screeners that would only let specific people on stage to add to the act.
Abhijit: Yeah. How similar this sounds to alternative medicine, but it's a lot more insidious, a lot of the alternative medicine practitioners know the limits to which the confirmation bias the placebo effect and regression to the mean will work. they give you a little bit of something, and eventually things get better. or at least you think they're getting better. But when it comes to things like cancer, they wouldn't dare say, don't take your medicine along with this.
I think it's a very similar mechanism in the minds of the people who believe in this because, a lot of the responses I got when I've challenged alternative medicine is very similar to religious backlash. When you criticize somebody's belief systems and it is that deeply ingrained that people it's literally, it's the faith is the only thing that keeps them strapped into that belief. Whether it's alternative medicine, whether it's ketogenic diets, whether it's faith healer actually working.
Thomas Westbrook: I think now I'm gonna throw them a bone. And I'm gonna say one thing that I think there's a position that many of them hold and put forward that is a very good argument.
And that is they'll say things like, but our medical system is so fundamentally broken, and I've tried all these other things and I've tried doctors and nothing has been working, and I just feel sicker. Or I'm not getting better Or it's prohibitively expensive and I can't afford it.
And I hear those arguments and I truly empathize. modern medicine is not perfect, and I'm not gonna pretend like it is. I think that if you catch it early enough, then sometimes it can be beaten and that's the best shot we have to beat cancer using something that has been medically tested and tried
Cuz other stuff that you throw at, it's this is something that either, and I think it was, Tim Minchin that said alternative medicine by definition is something that either has been proven not to work or hasn't yet been proven to work. And once it has been proven to work, it's no longer alternative medicine. It by definition is medicine. Exactly. I'm not opposed to certain alternatives. if it makes them feel better and they're turning to prayer in addition to doing the medically responsible thing, then, okay.
Or even if the person is you know what, I'm just tired of feeling like crap from chemo and if I die. I empathize with that position. I'm like, okay, I get where they're coming from and if they don't want to go the medical route anymore, that's their choice.
I genuinely believe that is their choice. I don't think that it's their choice when they're making that decision for their children or grandparents. I think that's child abuse or elder abuse. But if someone is making an informed, conscious decision that they don't wanna seek medical treatment for themselves, that's their decision.
What I think, where my empathy entirely runs out is when it comes to the faith healers themself that are fooling and tricking people so that they are not making informed conscious decisions, but they're making a choice based off of manipulation. They're making a choice based off of false information, and it's lining the pockets of con artists and charlatans But I do think that while there are problems with our medical system, and it's not perfect, the solution is not to turn to known charlatans or things that don't work.
The solution is to fix our system in the US make healthcare available and affordable for everyone. invest more globally in healthcare to the point where we have cures for things look at how medicine has advanced in the last hundred years, and if we invest more in research and improving cures then we can have better systems also having more doctors medical professionals and nurses who take time to sit with the person and listen to them, hear their frustrations and complaints and what they're struggling with, rather than just being like, Hey, we gotta get you in, get you out.
We're understaffed and everything is so expensive and so just like we have to see as many people as possible right now, and you've got 10 minutes to basically have me like, write down a prescription and throw it at you. I think that system sucks. It doesn't work. People are frustrated and tired of it, and so I empathize there.
But the solution is not snake oil.
Abhijit: I think it was Brit Marie Hermes. she used to be a naturopath and I think she's spoken at either Tam or CSICon at some point
Thomas Westbrook: I've seen her talk at CSICon
Abhijit: the thing that doctors need to learn from alternative medicine practitioners is that they should be present and discuss the problem, make the patient feel cared for, and understood.
Yeah, because it's so many doctors these days, maybe it's the pressure of, earning a certain amount. Maybe it's the pressure of having just too many people coming to you and not enough resources to manage it all. Because I know I have a whole ton of medical problems and there are times when I have to sit for four to five hours waiting for a doctor to see me.
And when I do see him, he's got two other patients lined up before me inside his office. He just wants to keep that line moving, and I'm sure he wants to care more for his patients because he's a good doctor. He just doesn't have that bandwidth. There's just too much demand and too little supply.
especially in India where we have far too few doctors attending. per a hundred thousand people, I think we have way below the W h O recommended number, Yeah. So it's really heartbreaking to see that. And I think that's another reason why a lot of Indians do tend to also believe in autotech medicine. But fortunately we have a medical system which is a hybrid between private and government control. the government controlled hospitals are horrible.
But what the government does well is that they make sure that the prices do not skyrocket. they have limits on certain essential medicines for certain conditions to make sure that people are able to access that.
But in the US this is the one thing, like everybody looks up to the US with such admiration in so many ways, and it's obvious that when it comes to medical research, when it comes to medical science, the US is definitely still one of the leading countries. They are doing amazing work that way.
A lot of the studies that are coming out, a lot of the research that is being done, whether it's epidemiological, whether it's RCTs, a huge bulk of this is coming outta the US and yet you have a medical system which is just completely based on profit and it is completely unregulated. And I think that is such a travesty.
Thomas Westbrook: oftentimes because it's set up that way, the US is so terrified by the word socialism Any kind of social welfare program can easily be shot down by medical companies if they don't want to see that change because it affects their profits, they can simply fear monger and be like, this is socialism.
we don't think of our police system as socialism, yet it's paid for by the public to take care of a particular aspect of society, we're spending trillions of dollars on military spending. I didn't choose where my tax dollars went, but my money is going to protect this nation.
And also to set up military bases all over the world whether you think it's a good thing that keeps global peace, or a vestige of colonialism That's a topic for a whole nother time. But that money is going towards something that like you are paying for, you are paying for the roads.
even if I don't have kids in school, my taxes are going towards these common goods for society, these common infrastructure elements, and everyone needs healthcare. Everyone needs to go to the doctor, and yet we're terrified of having some kind of medicine or some kind of government, whether it's government subsidized or public option or whatever the case may be.
We're like, oh no. It has to be purely private commercial interest. And so whether you live or die comes down to how valuable are you in terms of net worth and how much money you make, and how much of your paycheck you're willing to sink into the bottomless hole of medical insurance.
Abhijit: The weird thing is we see this moving away from modern medicine in other situations as well. Africa, many countries have the same system as the US when a lot of the pharmaceutical companies have absolutely no regulation.
They can charge whatever they want and it is up to the people to get insurance. basically their lives are in the hands of the insurance people and they have a market saturated with alternative medicine. So I'm not surprised there is a lot of faith healing happening there as well because a lot of the countries have been indoctrinated into Christianity and I think the Vatican has also taken a lot of interest in these countries because they see a lot of opportunity there.
So people are just I think there's a lot of superstition in many of these countries when it comes to, not just medicine, but like L G B T people and H I V, et cetera, et cetera. This is absolutely horrific, but they're prime pickings for this sort of stuff.
on the other hand, you have Europe, which may not be into that much faith healing. Put there into every other form of woo that you can imagine every other way of healing yourself with coconut oil and God knows what else?
Thomas Westbrook: I think It depends on the country. Yeah. Because some countries especially in the US our knowledge of geography is absolutely atrocious.
I think part of that is because the US is so isolated from the rest of the world that getting a one-way ticket to Europe Asia or Africa, costs stupid amounts of money. so people will go to other states, whereas in Europe, you can hop on a train and go to 10 different countries that are all surrounding you within a weekend trip
Super cheap. so you get more exposure to more cultures countries and languages and things. So that said, whenever people lump in they'll talk about Africa is just like this homogenous blob, one big country. Yeah. Think of it as a country. And so they'll just lump it in and they'll do the same with Europe.
I want to avoid that there are parts of Europe like former Soviet countries under the Soviet Union, there was definitely, while there were scientific advancements specifically where the government wanted to invest, namely like the space race and physics in other areas, you had a tremendous amount of pseudoscience and oftentimes government endorsed pseudoscience and a lack of education surrounding it.
So you had ideas like Lysenkoism, which was this notion that Mendelian genetics, Playing a role in, crops you think about it and you're like, okay, we need to make sure that the right conditions are there.
we can look at how these plants have traits passed down genetically and find the right forms of irrigation With Lysenkoism this guy had connections to the state and he put forth this theory that plants function in a more cooperative way and they all want to work together.
And so if you just plant more plants next to each other, they'll share resources more effectively it resulted in massive famines and a lot of people died, but anyone that questioned his pseudo biology was sent to the gulag exterminated or kicked out of academia and science.
And so it was this unquestionable aspect of the Soviet experience for decades. if you go to certain areas of Eastern Europe or Russia there are
The paranormal, the supernatural. Pseudoscience, they come from a more secular background where under the Soviet Union, there was a lot of suppression of religion. And so there's various flavors of pseudoscience where the education system has failed then.
And if on the other hand, you go to, the uk you're not gonna get lysenkoism, but you might have a astrology or something. Cause you've got that all over the papers. You go to somewhere like Finland and there's a much higher focus on education and more people are seeking out higher levels, of education, like master's degrees and postdoc research
And so you see a little bit less of it. And I think it just really depends from country to country and which form of pseudoscience is big, where. it varies, but none of us are immune to it. We have to constantly be vigilant and apply our tools of scientific skepticism to make sure that we don't fall prey to
Abhijit: Absolutely. in your research, encountered other religions that have been practicing faith healing?
Thomas Westbrook: There's for starters it's not uncommon within Islam. Faith healing is an aspect that if you believe in miracles in any religion and believe that God wants you to be healed it's ripe for taking advantage of.
there is a particular Muslim faith healer. I forget the name of him, but he would go around and do these faith healing stunts. I wanna say it's fairly common within Sufis. I forget specific sex within Islam that it's more prevalent than others. But in Hinduism, there are certain miracle claims are you familiar with Satya, Sai Baba?
Abhijit: Everything he knows.
Thomas Westbrook: So he would perform I'm sure you're familiar, but for your audience who's not, he would basically say I just pulled this, speck of holy smoke out of the air or something. And he would make these prophetic predictions he was this guru that claimed he had these supernatural powers.
He said he was the reincarnation of some holy person And I wanna say he also claimed to perform various healing.
Abhijit: Like faith healing. Absolutely. he was the one who would go around and have little bits of ash. He'd have ash pellets, which would be hidden in his palm and he'd crush.
Thomas Westbrook: I think I said smoke, but I meant ash.
Abhijit: So they, he'd crumble those and put them into people's hands, and that is supposed to be some sort of holy ash. I saw him in another video where he's supposed to have produced a golden egg from his mouth. he goes into this kind of trancey look.
takes a towel in his hand puts it to his mouth. And then out of his mouth, he comes out with his egg and like the towel was, the egg was in the towel all the time. very easy to demonstrate. trick he used to do was I think this was also caught on video where he would produce a gold necklace out of seemingly nowhere.
Thomas Westbrook: But Abhijit, check this out I'm gonna produce something more impressive than a golden egg from my mouth. It was a remote control.
Abhijit: You had it in there all the time.
Thomas Westbrook: Me and Satya
Abhijit: Yeah, man. That was very convincing you've got a future.
Thomas Westbrook: Didn't he also wrongly predict the date of his death?
Abhijit: Yeah, I think he did. This happened unexpectedly. he has been exposed multiple times. there was an entire film made with Sanal Edemaruku who I interviewed recently.
Thomas Westbrook: He's the same guy that found the Mary statue that looked like it was crying in India, and exposed that it was actually a sewer leak from nearby water. And people were collecting the tears and drinking.
Abhijit: I thought it was of Mary, Mary crying, but actually it was a statue of Jesus on the cross.
Dripping down from his feet because you couldn't see clearly because the statue was quite tall. And only the feet were in the vicinity of where people could make it out. And it was dripping. And people were taking droplets of that they were being distributed by the priests Oh, it's so gross on their mouths. People were putting it in their hair and why?
Thomas Westbrook: It was like a toilet pipe that was leaking, wasn't it? Exactly. But when he exposed that the result was not, oh man, we're so glad that you caught this. he had to leave the country cuz he was getting death threats over it.
Abhijit: Absolutely. there were cops from Mumbai who said that, I know where you're, hiding. I will come there and personally break your arms Or you can come here yourself and we'll arrest you putting in a jail cell and I'll put you in with somebody who will ensure you don't survive the night.
so after a lot of running around and hiding in different places, because apparently this church had managed to get a lot of these what we call in India, who are basically fists for hire. they were pretty much everywhere. he managed to sneak into the Finn Embassy where there was a minister of foreign affairs.
I'm forgetting his exact designation, but this gentleman said, come to the embassy now and I will get you a tourist visa. he took the tourist visa and went to Finland. he thought he'd be there for a couple of weeks until the cool down But that never happened. He couldn't even come back for his mother's passing.
She was on her deathbed. he called the bishop in Mumbai where this church was, and he requested can we just have a truce for a few days? I just want to see my mom. She's probably not gonna last through the week. And then I will leave. He said if you apologize, there will be no problem.
Thomas Westbrook: I apologized. For what? He wasn't the one giving people toilet water to drink.
Abhijit: Exactly. Apologize publicly to he said that at first it was apologize publicly, but then later on it says, you would just have to apologize to me privately that you are sorry for insulting the church and everything is gonna be fine.
Thomas Westbrook: The church insulted itself
Abhijit: Exactly. But they don't see it that way. They think that they had to put blame on him somehow. So when his mother got a drift of this, his mother through his sister, told her that if he apologizes and comes, don't let him in. So he stayed in Finland
Thomas Westbrook: because she didn't want him To sacrifice his integrity in order to see her.
Abhijit: Exactly. Now that is powerful stuff. when he told me that I literally had no idea what to say. he made a film with Robert Eagle for the BBC called Guru Busters they exposed Satya Saibaba in this one. They did a lot of video coverage of these fake tricks. they went around the country from the southernmost point to the north, going from village to village, meeting people who were trying to do faith healing and black magic healing in village.
Thomas Westbrook: This is in India? Yeah, in India. Okay. So he managed to come back. Now granted the whole thing with the statue was what, 10 or 20 years ago?
Abhijit: Yeah. the statue was in 2012, relatively recent. so 11 years, this was in the nineties. And he went across the country and he not only debunked them, he showed the people around these charlatans, they said, gather around.
I will show you the same trick he's doing right in front of you. And I don't have any powers. he would expose them one after another. It is absolutely amazing. There are a few clips of this on YouTube, which I'll link in the description,
Thomas Westbrook: an Indian version of James Randy
Abhijit: Exactly. And he was a great friend of James, Randy, apparently. James, as soon as he'd boarded the flight, he messaged Randy and said of flight to, Finland. He messaged Randy and said I'm heading to Finland now. And, so Randy immediately put out a post saying that Sanal is safe, he's headed to Finland he's gonna be fine.
He's finally managed to get outta the country. they had him at Tam after that, and he gave a talk himself at one of these things. I'll send you the link to the interview.
And it's quite a right man. They should turn that into a movie. It would pay to work. And it's amazing. Those news clips are still up there on YouTube where he's arguing with the people from the church. And he actually had to be moved to a private room during that conversation because one of them tried to attack him.
Thomas Westbrook: showing their Love and compassion
Abhijit: Exactly. So yeah, he's been fighting the good fight for a very long time, and from Finland, he hasn't missed a beat. He's still making a lot of videos and exposing a bunch of people. we're all in the same boat, but man he's done a hell of a lot of work to fight against this sort of stuff.
so anything else you wanted to add about your research in faith healing? Are you gonna make a full video or a series of these, or are you already in there?
Thomas Westbrook: right now it is a series, but it's partially done. I have a number of videos exposing psychics.
I did a really long video on Jack Coe, which was like one of the early. I talked about him a little bit earlier in this interview that would set up these massive tent rallies and revivals and his story is wild and I feel I was the first one to really cover it in its entirety accurately. There's a number of people in the history of faith healing that like William Branham that are just very well connected and tied to a lot of the modern faith healers that I want to expose how far back the fraud goes and how widespread it was. This wasn't just one or two bad apples.
This was like every single one of the big name faith healers. It was cool. It was like traveling snake oil salesman. And so I want to go back and cover more of them. I have a video that I have an early access version of for patrons, but it's basically just the script. me reading the script, I don't have all the edits and B-roll and cutaway footage but it's on a specific scam that's one of the Faith HEAL's favorite go-to and longest running scams in faith, healing history.
And I talk about all the aspects of it that make that work, how it works. I also have videos on the psychology of belief and the tools and tricks they use and how we fall for it and how sometimes even faith healers themselves can fall for their own thing.
I don't think all of them, especially the smaller ones who are not, massive multi-millionaires, have drank their own Kool-Aid and genuinely believe that sometimes they're healing people and sometimes it is a miracle even if it's fully explainable.
Yeah. So that's kinda what's in the works. eventually, if this gets enough momentum and I have the resources, I would love to turn this into a documentary and just flush out the topic and explore all the things that I've been gathering for my channel.
But just in a really well produced format that I can put out on Netflix or Hulu or HBO
Abhijit: needs some clean fact-based stuff.
Thomas Westbrook: you know there are a few shows that explore the more science side of things, but they're few and far between compared to Hey, here's Gwyneth Paltrow promoting her new vagina eggs
Abhijit: God, that was so disgusting.
But this actually reminded me that this is at the British mentalist called Darren Brown. he did an entire documentary, about how he trained a guy To become a faith healer. he showed him all the tricks of the trade, and let him loose in the Bible belt.
And yeah, people believed it until he had to come out and say that I am not, I'm not your guy. I haven't generally done any of these miracles. I just know the tricks and I've been fooling you all along. And they didn't believe him.
Thomas Westbrook: Or a common Christian response is, okay, you were using trickery to try to replicate what God is doing authentically whenever Randy would replicate the psychic acts or telekinesis and paranormal things he would show how this can be done without magic.
that's the power of setting up tests the James Randy Educational Foundation is famous for its million dollar challenge, where they offered a prize to anyone who could, under scientific controls, prove that they had any kind of supernatural or paranormal ability.
And for 50 years, like no one was able to ever claim the prize. But that's not the only such prize that's existed. There's numerous organizations around the world that have similar skeptics, prizes for people who can prove the paranormal. time again, challengers come forward trying to prove themselves and come up short.
And I would be a little cautious when setting up a prize like that, a new one. even if you're a scientist, you need to have very Good measures in place to account for trickery because if someone is really good at slide of hand and magic and you don't have a magician on staff who's good at spotting that, and you let them bring their own props and handle and swap things in and out and have a ton of items on the table and you're not filming the whole thing there's a lot of options for the trickster to fool you even if you think they're trustworthy.
Abhijit: Yeah. that's a great point because I think only somebody of Randy's caliber who knows how to do tricks and magic through and through who knows how slight of hand is conducted, and of course, he was an extraordinary mind above and beyond that would be able to see through every possible.
Thomas Westbrook: Who's phenomenal at that today.
Abhijit: Oh
Yeah. I saw him in 2018.
Thomas Westbrook: he has come up with tricks for Penn and Teller, like the famous bullet catch in the mouth trick. He came up with that. He has built tricks for Trick Angel I believe David Blaine, And he's got his own show. he headlines in Las Vegas and it seems like he's reading people's minds, but it's all trickery.
When he was fresh outta high school, him and this other guy, Steve Phillips, who was also a magician, actually went into a lab. for years this lab was testing for psychic abilities. these two kids fooled the scientists because they weren't putting safeguards in place to make sure that there wasn't trickery.
And when they did, the more safeguards that they put in place, the weaker the effects they were able to get from these boys. they're having to think on the fly and come up with different ways to trick people. And I think for a while he was managing the million dollar challenge for Randy and doing the tests
Abhijit: there was a story I heard recently, I think it was on the skeptics guide about a project that James Randy had put together with EK and one more guy.
Thomas Westbrook: Probably Project Alpha.
Abhijit: Yeah. Project Alpha. So this guy I keep forgetting his name, but I remember the name of his band, ninja Sex Party. I think he's the bassist.
Thomas Westbrook: not familiar with the band.
Abhijit: I think I met him in 2018, but then I haven't been in Touch
Thomas Westbrook: Love it. The question is, if it's a ninja sex party, would you even know that other people are in the room or are you just
Abhijit: you hear a whisper,
Thomas Westbrook: You don't see anything. You just hear, oh God.
Abhijit: I think it was Brian Wecht and I think he is making a podcast series on Project Alpha and like he's gotten
Thomas Westbrook: Wait, are you sure it's not the world's Greatest Scam podcast? Yes, it's a phenomenal series.
both of the hosts live here in Austin it's Brian Brushwood. if you've been on YouTube you've probably seen scam School where he would go around and explore different scams and things. And then Justin, Robert Young as well, both have done politics, podcasts
And they put together this podcast called world's greatest con where they'll explore various scams and the production quality of it is just off the charts. It's phenomenal. And they even flew out to Las Vegas and did in-person interviews
Abhijit: Yeah, this is exactly what I heard about, so I can't wait to check this out. This sounds so exciting. Ryan Brushwood on a quest to find the world's greatest con, how to fool Hitler, when is the perfect story, perfect in the flesh, there are a couple more episodes which are coming out.
But it sounds very exciting and I say this every time James Randy's name comes up, but in 2018, I managed to shake his hand and take a selfie, I look up to him so much. He's the guy who basically turned my brain around when I watched his he and Richard Dawkins within a week of each other, showed me things about homeopathy
And made me question that if I was wrong about that, what else am I wrong about?
Thomas Westbrook: Even if you know how homeopathy works and you are, opposed to the quackery of alternative medicine, I don't know what it's like in India, but in the US you can go to a pharmacy and you'll have two products that look almost identical and one of them is half the price and you're like, oh wow.
It says it cures headaches and then you pick it up and start reading the box and it has like cures headaches. And then there might be like a tiny little asterisks and it says this product hasn't been tested or approved by the F D A. And you look at the back and it's these complex sciencey sounding ingredients.
And then you look it up and it's all homeopathic nonsense.
Abhijit: the thing is they're sneak, they get ya. we don't need to fool people. People actively go towards the homeopathy because they build it. It's as simple as that. We don't have any disclaimers on any bottles.
The government has promoted it to fight covid. When the first lockdown started we had government issued posts, saying you should take arsenic album to boost your immunity So yeah we've got it. An institutionalized pseudoscience department.
Thomas Westbrook: We have people who stick their head in the sand and claim that the vaccine has aborted fetal tissue in it and won't touch it.
Abhijit: Fortunately, most of India didn't get to that part, but we still had a lot of Indians who believe that nonsense who were hesitant to take the vaccines.
But fortunately most of them did.
Thomas Westbrook: Vaccine hesitancy in India though, is significantly less than the us right? Because like you have had, I wanna say that India Has had more recent cases of polio, than the us And so people saw just how powerful firsthand vaccines were at eradicating and preventing such a horrible condition.
Exactly.
Abhijit: that's why I still have it in my mind. My brother still has the scar of the inoculation on his leg. There's up till a certain year, 19 75, 19 76 is, I think while the campaign was running it was government mandated that you have to get the polio vaccine no matter what.
And by the next generation, people would've forgotten about it. It would've become just as alien because it works so well.
Thomas Westbrook: Let's, and now it's completely eradicated from, I believe every country, but Afghanistan.
Abhijit: It's pretty much eradicated all the way through.
Now what happens is, in some forms of the vaccine, it comes out in the poop and reinfect people where the vaccine itself somehow manages to reinfect people. but this is only in countries where there's polluted water and where people are in contact with polluted water
Thomas Westbrook: Yeah. Cuz I'm seeing that the only two countries where it remains endemic is Afghanistan and Pakistan. And part of the difficulty there is that, with the war in Afghanistan and the trickle over into parts of Pakistan, a lot of these areas are so rural and hard to reach levels of fundamentalism or terrorism make it more difficult for humanitarian workers to access and to educate people on the vaccine and give them vaccine and stuff.
And without that infrastructure sure. It's really hard to actually vaccinate at scale
Abhijit: countries. Yeah. And there are some who actually believe that having this sort of a vaccine is a sin. So that complicates things as well. I think we've done a lot but I can't wait.
This is just the tip of the iceberg, right? we've got the rest of your series which is gonna come out. Send me the links, I will put them in the description, and I'll send people over to check out your whole Faith healing series.
Thomas Westbrook: right now it's all in a playlist.
no matter when people listen to this or watch this video that playlist link will be active, as I make more videos, they will be added to the playlist.
Abhijit: Save the playlist,
Thomas Westbrook: world.
Abhijit: At least fight against faith healers.
Thomas Westbrook: Hey, at least, we try, and I think the notion that. I think very early on I had this, I don't know if it's misguided notion that I can save the planet, I can, make a difference and stuff. And I think that on the one hand it's so crazy that you could call it misguided At the same time, I think that people who have the drive and the passion to really work to make a difference are the ones who actually do.
And you look at the course of the last, seven years now since I really started doing my channel full time it's reached, over 30 million people And that has a ripple effect where my videos will influence other content creators, inspire other people to make channels.
They make videos talking about similar topics and other topics that reach more people. And then these conversations ripple throughout. Society. So someone who's seen, one of your videos or one of my videos goes and has conversations, they bring up the points and the arguments that we make and they direct people back to it, or reference certain things or go to the original material.
society as a whole, has had a shift where even just in the last decade, we've seen how common and acceptable it is to be an ex evangelical, a former Christian, an atheist, deconvert, deconstructing. All of these things are becoming so much more common and less stigmatized, and people are having these conversations more openly and publicly.
And I think it's because of the work that both of us are doing, because it makes it okay to talk about And it gives people the ammunition. So even if, we laugh about changing the world, and I think that some of that is, comes from a almost toxic. I don't think that's healthy. But I do think that we can stimulate a global conversation that equips people with the tools they need to combat misinformation and live better informed lives.
Abhijit: If there is someone watching whose family member has been going to faith healing camps of some shape or form, how can we convince this family member to either not go, or how can we make the best of that bad situation
Thomas Westbrook: Yeah. there isn't a one size fits all answer to that because for some people I would say, if they already have their heart set on going to this thing and you can't stop them from going then at least try to convince them to, don't throw out your medication. Like it's okay to still see a doctor
At least not overnight, you're not gonna change their mind on their faith But you could use arguments that they would hold to about how, truth is not afraid of evidence. If God has healed you, then wouldn't it be a greater testimony to go and actually get tested and make sure that the cancer's gone.
now you've got a powerful testimony. you can go and be like, look, the test came back negative. But if the tests come back positive, you can still believe in the things that you already believe you can still continue going to your faith healing rallies, and you can still pray But we know that this medication helps and, please don't stop taking your medicine.
A lot of times people will stop and then it's too late and there is a trail of bodies. my aunt was a victim of faith healing ideology and lost her life because of it. I haven't told that story on my channel yet, but I recently found out from my cousin that had she not believed in faith healing, she could still be with us today.
These stories are so common. you go to my channel and read the comment section and it's just one testimony after another of people who have lost loved ones because of these sharks and these charlatans. I would just say to a loved one please, you have a family.
You have people who love you, you have loved ones. this is not untreatable. At the very least, your best shot is going and getting medicine. Empathize with them, get on their level, relate to them, compassion and empathy are key if people know that you care and you're doing it from a place of love and not a position of superiority, they're gonna be much more open to listening and taking the things you have to heart.
And so that would be my advice is just empathize with the person. But even if you can't change their mind on something, see if you can still at least get them to continue seeing the doctor. And it might just save their life.
Abhijit: Man. Thank you so much for coming on. That was incredibly enlightening.
His channel is wholly Kool-Aid with a K, and you have to check out his whole channel. It's incredibly enlightening, but especially about the faith healers, the playlist will be there and I will put the link in the description.
Thomas, thank you so much, man. It was great catching up with you again. Great to see you again,
Thomas Westbrook: and hopefully we'll have to connect again
Abhijit: Yeah, hopefully October back at Secon. Yeah, that'll be fun. Take care. Catch you later. And everybody, thank you so much for watching.
This has been Thomas Westbrook from Holy Kool-Aid, talking about faith healing and a whole bunch of other stuff If you really enjoyed this, then please hit that like button. Subscribe to this channel for more interviews like this, and we will see you next week.
Until then, be Rationable.