The Black Vault - He's got a crusade against con artists

He's got a crusade against con artists

By Peter Hirschfeld Times Argus Staff

MONTPELIER – If beauty is truth, as Keats assures us, then why does James Randi have such a tough time selling it?

The professional skeptic has for decades been a thorn in the side of fortune tellers, faith healers and purveyors of all things paranormal. Despite his best efforts to save gullible citizens from bank-draining con games, Randi seems to toil more in infamy than acclaim.

"Billions of dollars are swindled from people every year all around the world by scam artists out there," Randi said from his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., recently.

The Amazing Randi, as he's known, arrives in Montpelier on Saturday to deliver a lecture at the Unitarian Church on Main Street. A magician by trade, Randi appeared regularly on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and hosted his own long-running television show in the 1960s and 70s. He's perhaps most famous for exposing Uri Gellar, the Israeli-British performer who became a sensation in the U.S. in the 1970s for his alleged ability to bend spoons with his own psychic powers.

"These charlatans are doing a great deal of harm, particularly to vulnerable people," Randi says. "They're gullible and naļve, and I'm trying to make them less gullible and naļve."

Faith healers, who promise miraculous cures in exchange for considerable cash "donations," and psychic mediums, the most famous of which charge $750 for a 20-minute phone conversation, are favorite targets of this reality-obsessed lecturer. The piles of death threats he sends bi-weekly to the FBI, Randi says, indicate some people really can't handle the truth.

"The truth is not very attractive to a lot of people," Randi says. "They'd rather have mythology and falsity because they find it more comforting. They need it to be true because it's a great comfort to them to believe in nonsense."

The skeptic's James Randi Educational Foundation offers a $1 million prize to anyone who can provide objective proof of the paranormal. So far, Randi says, "I don't hear anybody banging down the door to get the $1 million, and you have to wonder why."

Randi, a sort of Better Business Bureau for the black arts, says it's time the government regulate an industry that devastates the finances of vulnerable citizens.

"These are swindles, outright swindles, and we can't get the Federal Trade Commission … to do anything about it," he says. "We should have some protection from state and federal agencies. People should at least be informed."

The government, in fact, now serves to legitimize the flummery hocked by profit-minded faith-based groups, according to Randi.

"This faith-based initiative the White House is preaching is not getting us anywhere," Randi says. "Rationality is out the window and superstition and mythology have taken over. I think it's a very dangerous way to behave."

Randi delivers his lecture at 7 p.m. Saturday. A showman by trade, he's likely to enliven the talk with his own mind-reading and magic abilities (for which, he assures, there are perfectly rational explanations).

Randi doesn't have anything against god (any of them), he says, nor does he have a problem with innocuous trickery. But he does take issue with people who peddle the paranormal for profit.

"My experience has been that when people become relieved of some of these false notions, these delusions they have … they come to me and say 'what a relief,'" Randi says. "Reality is not cruel and it's not nice either. It just doesn't care one way or another."

http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070928/NEWS02/709280319/1003/NEWS02

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