(please stick with this one–its long, but real good!)
Since The Radio Happy Hour aired this past Tuesday on BlogTalkRadio, I’ve been getting a lot feedback regarding what happened approximately 53 minutes into the show. (Click here and scroll over until the player reads 53:00)
At that point in the show, our guest, Psychic Boy, a self-professed medium who can communicate with the dead, is discussing what the spirit world says about Adolf Hitler. He begins his thought by asking the question: “Adolf Hitler: a jerk or an evolved soul?“
Psychic Boy then goes onto explain that if Hitler had been “given the task of shaking up the planet at that particular time” that “only an evolved soul would have signed up for that.” He backs that theory up by siting “old biblical teachings” that claim there was a curse upon the Jewish people that states that after the “mass exodus” (which I assume he refers to the exodus from the desert which we ironically commemorate during Passover starting tomorrow) that there would have to be a “mass sacrifice.”
I called the theory “horrible” and his spirit guide “anti-semitic” and Witchy Woman (Psychic Boy’s wife who was also on the show) disagreed with the assertion as well. Psychic Boy made it clear the he does not believe the theory either, though he claims his “spirit-guide” can not an anti-Semite but also not a liar, only that the spirit guide says that the above mentioned “old biblical teaching” claiming that the bible says that God will leave the Jews from exodus but the price they’d have to pay later on for that was to have, as Psychic Boy put it, “six-million, or whatever, number it was, leave the planet at the same time” was the reasoning behind the Holocaust “on this planet.”
I dismissed that statement with a joke (a funny one, but still an avoidance of the issue.) Many claim that I should have held Psychic Boy to task for mentioning and even entertaining that theory. At this point, I agree with that feedback.
At the time, what he was saying sounded suspect to me but I didn’t have the knowledge of the Old or New Testament to discredit him. That shouldn’t have stopped me from challenging him.
After my research into the matter, I wish I had. According to what I’ve been able to conclude, through online investigation and direct questioning of clergy and theologians, there is no passage in Scripture, either Old or New Testament, that asserts any such thing.
One pastor who followed up with me through email said the following:
“In my theological opinion, your psychic may communicate with spirits. The New Agers call it channeling. (Contrary to many people’s opinion, New Agers may or may not be Christian. Many New Agers are simply the latest version of Gnosticism mixed with the occult) Most theologians would term it some type of demon possession, or obsession, and there are passages in the N.T. that speak of ‘doctrines of demons.’ The psychic, in my opinion (and I am not an expert in demonology), is being misled, misguided and used as a pawn — if he really is communicating with spirits. Or he’s a charlatan.
The available literature on the subject is voluminous.
My estimation of his statements: arrantly anti-semitic, fascist and racist. He may not subscribe to anti-semitism himself, but his words certainly foment it.“
I will not go as far as to call Psychic-Boy an anti-Semite. At worst, he’s been grossly misinformed by whatever church or branch of Christianity he believes in. But I will say that the theory he proposes is anti-Semitic and dangerous.
Assigning a Biblical reason behind the genocide of six-million Jews and hypothesizing that Hitler may have been “an evolved soul” is insulting to not only my grandparents who suffered first hand in concentration camps and everyone else who was personally touched by the Holocaust but also to everyone who believes in the Old and New Testament that was irresponsibly misquoted.
By clearing this up, I hope to do my tiny part in keeping the memory alive for all that lived through the Holocaust in hopes that nothing like that ever happens again.
I invite Psychic-Boy to stop by and apologize or retract his comments.
UPDATE: 4/5/06 Psychic Boy and Witchy Woman discussed this controversy last night on their show Laughing Through the Veil (click link to hear.)
If you ask me, they made matters worse. Much worse.
But then again, none of us are as enlightened as they are so there is no way we could ever understand.
