Mediums, clergy, psychics are all crooks. To better demonstrate what I am talking about, I'll quote few paragraphs from now a free book written in the 1976 "The Psychic Mafia" by a medium/ psychic who decided to come out clean.
Quote:And the money. . .
Well, it poured in. I discovered that people will pay any price to communicate with their dead loved ones.
I remember a woman who came to our first service, Bertha Jenkins, who had lost her only son. She was thrilled beyond measure to find that through my mediumship she could talk to her beloved Jack. Until then her life had been hopeless. We put the stars back in the sky– and she repaid us amply.
Though she wore tennis shoes and dressed like a rag-picker, she gave large amounts to the church– which is to say, to Raoul and me. If she was pleased with sitting, she would leave two hundred dollars. And when we started talking about building a church edifice, she called me to her home and handed me a paper bag. It contained six thousand dollars. (She believed there was only five thousand dollars, but we kept the extra and didn’t tell her.)
In eight months Bertha gave us another five thousand dollars and, of course, her son in spirit, Jack, always encouraged her in the good work she was doing.
Before Jack was through with his mother, she had given us thousands of dollars.
Eventually, she became a little suspicious of Jack’s repeated urgings that she give even more to the church. Possibly I was overeager and had pushed too hard.
At one point during a seance she said, “Jack, I want you to call me what you used to call me.
...
One medium’s husband dealt in dubious antiques. With his wife’s help he sold a credulous woman, with more money than brains, an ordinary communion chalice as the authentic Holy Grail! Price two thousand dollars.
...
Mediums live under great tension. They are estranged personalities because of the nature of their work– cheating people. Loneliness and secrecy are a way of life for them. They can’t afford to have close friendships, except with other mediums, and these are rarely if ever true friendships. The spirit of professional competition is too great.
As a matter of fact, the rivalry and jealousy among mediums is almost unbelievable. Each one wants to be better than the other and, of course, to make more money. And I was no different.
...
There is no way of accurately computing the money from which people were separated at Chesterfield.
One of the saddest stories was of a woman who gave a large sum to the camp because of spirit urgings through Mable Riffle. Then she returned home and found that her house had burned to the ground. She came back to the camp and asked Mable if she could redeem part of the donation. Mable flatly refused.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
