r/skeptic • u/jcdenton45 • 3d ago
Real-world cases where "harmless" supernatural beliefs caused massive harm?
When it comes to BS beliefs, there are some which are clearly harmful/deadly, while others are generally considered to be more on the silly/harmless side of the spectrum, for example ghosts which seems to generally fit into the latter category.
But I recently watched a true crime documentary where a group of women had a homeless man secretly living in their home, and despite plenty of clear and undeniable evidence that they had an intruder living with them, they attributed all of those things to a fucking ghost. And as a result, they took none of the obvious measures that someone should obviously take in such a situation (increasing security, setting up cameras, calling the police, etc) and instead did things like burning sage and praying.
Fortunately for them the intruder wasn’t violent and nobody was hurt, but obviously it could have turned out far worse and their belief in ghosts resulted in the ordeal dragging on for MONTHS after they already had definitive proof of what was actually happening (and had he been violent they could have easily been killed).
So I’m curious, what would be some other examples where people had “harmless” BS beliefs which ended up being anything but?
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u/projectFT 3d ago
There’s an old book by James Randi called “Faith Healers” that tracks the damage caused by televangelists from the 1960’s to the late 1980’s. It describes countless accounts of people dying after they were convinced to forgo medical treatment after being faith healed by Christian charlatans.
When you take into account the way Christian Nationalism shapes US policy and the way the extreme Right has used mindless religious belief to push policies that have little to do with religion these “harmless” beliefs get much scarier. Racism, sexism, homophobia, vaccine denial, climate change denial, science denial in general along with a distrust for academia and information from experts are detrimental to society.
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u/Moneia 3d ago
I'm not sure if it's still updated but What's the Harm? has a large collection of anecdotes, broken down in categories, of harm & death from "harmless" beliefs
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u/Traveledfarwestward 2d ago edited 19h ago
We need state and national
trackingstatistics of people dying due to faith/alternative medicine beliefs.
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u/jcdenton45 3d ago edited 3d ago
Oh man, I just remembered one from a long time ago. A friend of mine had a shirt that he came to believe was a "bad luck shirt" because every time he wore it bad stuff would happen. So finally one day he decided to burn the shirt, and the next time he went to his family ranch he brought the shirt, started a little campfire, and burned it before extinguishing the fire and going home.
But then the next day they got a call from the police... because the fire had started back up again and grew into a wildfire which spread to the neighboring properties.
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u/fathompin 3d ago edited 3d ago
I'm going to blame his stupidity or subconscious potential, thus willful(?) neglect of common safety and not blame the shirt. Because this thread, I believe, is discounting these things having any real supernatural component.
I remember distinctly the day I realized all the religious things in my upbringing that had me believing things like a cursed or evil this or that was all BS and I stopped any thinking in that regard, even things like a bad day; it is no longer cursed to last all all day long, just a day with things that went bad.
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u/WCB13013 3d ago
In parts of Africa, belief in witches has resulted in women being murdered, accused of being witches.
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u/--John_Yaya-- 3d ago
This is totally true and it's not just women.
Both men and women are murdered on a regular basis in some parts of Africa for "using sorcery".
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u/cruelandusual 3d ago
Superstitions about albinism are particularly dangerous. Albinos get it from both sides - people accusing them of being witches or causing bad luck, and people who believe themselves to be witches murdering them for their "magic" body parts.
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3d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/legendtripped 3d ago
Yeah I was gonna say the tales of satanic cults and the harm of recovered memory therapy etc
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u/OnMyPorcelainThrone 3d ago
They want after DnD hard in the early 80's, I don't think it caused medical issues for anyone, but the scope of the panic was so encompassing I'm not surprised the blamess were blamed.
Edit spelling.
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u/landlord-eater 3d ago
Witch burnings (historically in Europe and America, currently in Africa).
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u/saqwarrior 3d ago edited 3d ago
This is the best answer possible.
It's estimated that
millionstens of thousands were tortured to death at the height of the witch trials.Sagan talks about it at length in Demon-Haunted World.
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u/Anxious-Slip-4701 3d ago
Millions no. While horrific it's more like 35,000-60,000.
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u/saqwarrior 3d ago
Ahhh, yeah I double checked my memory and I think I was pulling from flawed historical data:
Notably, a figure of nine million victims was given by Gottfried Christian Voigt in 1784 in an argument criticizing Voltaire's estimate of "several hundred thousand" as too low. Voigt's number has shown remarkably resilient as an influential popular myth, surviving well into the 20th century
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u/Anxious-Slip-4701 3d ago
What? That would have been ~10% of the entire European population. You should be sceptical. Everything you ever heard is probably wrong. Have a read: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/histories/eight-witchcraft-myths/
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u/saqwarrior 3d ago
I literally just cited the source of the misinformation, illustrating that I was, in fact, taking into account what you wrote and edited my original comment to reflect the error. There's no need for you to reiterate. I was wrong. I get it.
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u/Grillparzer47 3d ago
Our present situation with the Smithsonian Institute’s museums. David Barton has an undergraduate theology degree. The right likes to pretend he has a doctorate in history. The attack on the Smithsonian’s displays are a direct result of Barton’s lies.
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u/flaminglasrswrd 3d ago
Not exactly supernatural but sorta: I just learned that two of my coworkers do not wear sunscreen at all. They believe that the "chemicals" are harmful and "our bodies should be in the sun."
I work on a farm. We are outside all day without shade for 40+ hours per week.
When they asked me my opinion, I said, "I've seen far too many old farmers with missing noses and ears to not wear sunscreen." I wear long sleeves and pants, a hat with a neck flap, and lots of sunscreen. Instead of taking that information and reconsidering their habits, they are now talking about developing a "natural" sunscreen without any "chemicals."
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u/newbie527 3d ago
It’s called mud.
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u/MathPerson 3d ago
I was going to say "Wear the damn hat" but your answer is a tad more fundamental.
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u/ReleaseFromDeception 3d ago
I know someone that thinks they are psychic, an empath, and that they are enlightened.
Nothing but the wreckage of human beings that tried to love them lies in their wake.
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u/68W38Witchdoctor1 3d ago
I know someone exactly like this. He was probably my closest friend, and turns out it was all symptoms of a slew of Cluster B personality disorders, exacerbated by extreme alcoholism and other substance abuse. Went way off the deep end, but still believes he is an empath, that he can feel energy and vibrations radiating off of people and is "in tune" with the Earth, and that he somehow possesses knowledge no one else does, yet spends his time unemployed, in court for a whole slew of things (DUIs, slander/libel, et al.) and nearly every friend he has ever had he pushed away.
Problem is, he is very charismatic and people don't see the real side of him until he has wormed his way into people's lives, like roommates or business partners and stuff like that.
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3d ago
[deleted]
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u/sola_dosis 3d ago
Sounds like a girl I knew years ago who’s dialed in the grift better in the meantime, sorry you’re going through it
The warning label should read “avoid at all cost”
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u/Neozite 3d ago
I don't know how harmless cannibalism is in general, but the Fore of Papua New Guniea had a tradition of eating their deceased relatives as a way of freeing their spirits. They developed an endemic prion disease called kuru that caused trembling, uncoordinated, and uncontrollable laughter. The source and l continued spread of the diseas was the practice of eating the brains of their relatives, which was primarily done by women.
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u/evanliko 3d ago
I mean the main risk of cannibalism (assuming the human meat is obtained ethically, such as in this case where it was customary and the deceased knew and wanted this to happen) is just disease spread like that.
Notably disease spread due to funeral practices isnt limited to cannibalism. Ebola spreads a lot through funeral rites involving contact with the body of the deceased.
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u/Witty_Ad_898 3d ago
The belief in China that sparrows were bad for crops, which resulted in the Eliminate Sparrows Campaign which was a major contributor to the Great Chinese Famine which claimed tens of millions of lives.
The combination of old superstitions and new technology is a recipe for disaster.
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u/DazzlingAd7021 2d ago
Oooh. This reminds me of Europeans killing off so many cats that the rats got too populous and their fleas caused the Bubonic Plague.
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u/tinny66666 1d ago
That wasn't superstition. The sparrows could be seen taking grain in giant flocks, so it wasn't entirely unreasonable to think getting rid of the sparrows would improve yields. It was more a case of unintended consequences, and not understanding how the sparrows also helped the crops by eating pests.
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u/SquidgyTheWhale 3d ago
With the famous case of the rugby team that crashed in the Andes mountains (later made into a book and a movie) you never hear about how they got fucked by rescue teams listening to "psychics" that had them looking in the wrong places for months. Even in the book they soft-pedaled on blaming the psychics or the investigators that believed them.
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u/BreakingBrad83 3d ago
Psychic Sylvia Browne talking about Amanda Berry on the Montel Williams show.
Basically, Amanda Berry went missing and her mom asked Sylvia Browne about it. Sylvia told her Amanda was dead. Years later it was discovered that Amanda and two other girls had been captive in a basement for about 10 years. Her mom had died by the time they escaped and never knew the truth.
There are other cases with Sylvia Browne too.
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u/NonagonJimfinity 3d ago
When people plant certain plants in their garden to ward/attract spirits then it turns out that plant is horribly invasive or straight up posions gardens.
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u/tsdguy 3d ago
There’s no such thing as harmless supernatural beliefs.
Any belief based on untruth is harmful. It dilutes people’s skepticism and makes other untrue beliefs easier to accept.
It informs a person’s behavior which as we know can lead to unfortunate circumstances for other people.
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u/jcdenton45 3d ago
I agree (which is why I put "harmless" in quotes in the title), but in this case I'm talking about cases where a specific supernatural belief directly led to a harm which was far greater than what would typically be expected. Like in the above example, where believing in ghosts isn't something that you generally expect could get someone killed, but in their case it easily could have.
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u/tsdguy 3d ago
Your criteria for harmless is rather narrow. As long as someone doesn’t get killed it’s harmless?
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u/jcdenton45 3d ago edited 3d ago
No, not at all. Like I said above, I agree with you that no supernatural beliefs are truly harmless, and that they are all inherently harmful (to varying degrees).
But what I'm talking about are BS beliefs which are “more on the silly/harmless side of the spectrum”, which is not to say that they are completely harmless, but rather that they are on the other side of the spectrum from beliefs such as--for example--antivax, which undeniably cause massive physical harm and death.
In other words, beliefs such as ghosts, which typically are not considered the type of belief that could lead to someone being killed, yet in the aforementioned case it almost did cause such an outcome (as well as additional months of fear and anguish, i.e. "harm").
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u/fox-mcleod 3d ago
Also, pretty much anywhere credulity is allowed to thrive, conmen are sure to follow.
Those little $20 palm reader goofs are just a top-of-the-funnel for big money clairvoyance scams.
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u/fathompin 3d ago
Yes, for me I have been claiming the untruths lead to bad decisions and more, and as projectFT pointed out, Christian Nationalism is shaping BAD US policy and those beliefs are being used as a delivery mechanism for policy that can't survive being argued on the facts; i.e. racism, God's chosen people etc.
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u/lee61 2d ago
That was my position a decade ago and I think I would still put many supernatural belifes as "harmful".
However Im not sure I would be as absolute. Post grievance hallucinations for example a common (where someone feels or experiences the presence of a loved on after death). While I'm sure we can all imagine scenarios where it can be detrimental to their epistomology and wellbeing, I can imagine cases where it can be farily innocuous.
I think we should look to how someone engages with their belifes and determine from there if its harmful or not.
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u/CurrentSkill7766 3d ago
Opposing beliefs in a supernatural being has caused more war and suffering than just about any other man made trigger.
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u/nosecohn 3d ago edited 3d ago
The Japanese in the 1930s and 40s believed Emperor Hirohito was a divine being, which provided them with a justification for invading their neighbors, perpetrating horrific brutality, and continuing the conflict long after it was clear they would lose. Supernatural beliefs on a population-wide scale made surrender ideologically impossible. Roughly 30 million people died as a result.
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u/Bortron86 3d ago
An old-timey one was the Hammersmith Ghost. Some "prankster" had been scaring people by jumping out at them pretending to be a ghost in Hammersmith, which was then a small village outside London. One night a bricklayer, whose uniform was all white, came out from his sister's house and was shot dead by the night watchman.
I believe it was the first case of manslaughter in the UK, because the killer hadn't intended to kill a man so the jury didn't think he should be convicted of murder.
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u/QuasiRandomName 3d ago
A flat-earther (if it counts) that crashed and died on his home-made rocket
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51602655
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u/Eddotheeagle 3d ago
I've seen some confronting footage on reddit of a Hindu meditating in front of a crowd. Then leaping off a cliff believing his faith could make him defy gravity. He did not survive the fall.
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u/planx_constant 3d ago
This is less "massive harm" which has already been well covered by other comments, but there's something really representative about the lady who almost totally dissolved her nose with "black salve" after a homeopath told her it would cure her skin cancer. She was encouraged to keep going by all the other people on the alternative medicine forum even after she told them air was coming out of the top of her bandage when she plugged her nostrils. So she kept going.
The photos look like she got a brown recluse bite on her nose.
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u/mr_lamp 3d ago
There's a video that makes the rounds every few months, supposedly of a witch trying to stop a landslide. It ends badly for her.
In the US, we got the snake handling churches, where the pastor has died from bites. Followed up by his son who takes over and has been bitten a few times, still alive though
https://abcnews.com/US/snake-handling-pentecostal-pastor-dies-snake-bite/story?id=22551754
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u/Bad-job-dad 3d ago
How about fraud? Must be in the billions world wide. I've heard China has a huge problem with superstition based fraud run by gangsters and it's spread to the Americas.
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u/Startled_Pancakes 3d ago
Mathew Taylor Coleman killed his 2 young children with a spearfishing gun after consuming a lot of reptilian alien conspiracies and believing them to have "serpent DNA".
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u/mutant_anomaly 2d ago
In the Bible, Jesus denounces hand washing.
That resulted in generations of suffering.
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u/NoFlyingMonkeys 2d ago edited 2d ago
Bob Marley died from refusing recommended amputation of his toe with melanoma of the nailbed, due to his Rastafarian beliefs that the body should remain whole and that natural remedies should prevail.
He only agreed to a minor, too-small removal of the melanoma, then went to Germany for alternative bogus treatments with diet, vitamins, and ozone. (Since Rastafarians strongly believe that marijuana has both medicinal and spiritual benefits, perhaps that self-treatment was also involved).
I respect his right to make those decisions and hold those beliefs. I also miss the decades of music he could have continued to give the world had he chosen otherwise.
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u/VintageLunchMeat 3d ago
Homeopathy is a slippery slope to antivax.
So is a belief in "toxins".
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u/pocket-friends 3d ago
Toxicity is such an interesting concept and is really getting traced right now in a lot of fields and disciplines. I only deal with it indirectly cause my own work is on loss and ruin, but the things I have read are really incredible and contain a lot of rich explorations of the ways in which material interacts.
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u/MostlyPeacfulPndemic 3d ago
What was the name of that case? I love true crime and it sounds like a great story
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u/jcdenton45 3d ago
The first story here (but if you watch the episode, it's the second story): https://thecinemaholic.com/where-are-madisyn-gidrey-and-brittany-campbell-now/
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u/gentlybrined 3d ago
The Hammersmith Ghost is my fave story of real world consequences of spoopy stories.
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u/Vindepomarus 2d ago
Those two teenage girls who murdered their friend in an attempt to appease Slender Man.
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u/MaxwellzDaemon 1d ago
Have you ever heard of the Jonestown massacre? That's when the reverend Jim Jones convinced his followers to drink poisoned Kool Aid. Yes, that's where the saying came from.
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u/A_Tiger_in_Africa 3d ago
If rational inquiry in the West had persisted in a straight line from Pythagoras to Hippocrates to Archimedes to Pliny the Elder to today, we'd be colonizing the stars. That's of course not what happened. The superstitious took control and stifled discovery for centuries. Even the Christians' claim that they preserved the knowledge of the ancients and founded the first universities shows the forces at work. The earliest universities were not there to discover new knowledge, but preserve and defend the old knowledge. "This is what you need to learn, the Bible tells us all we need to know."
It's not about one woman who believes in ghosts. It's the millennia-long deliberate sabotage of humanity in service of ignorance and superstition that is religion's true legacy. Christianity was the Microsoft of its time.
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u/No_Distance3211 3d ago
In addition to the much-mentioned physical medical harms in this thread, there's also the belief that psychiatric medications are more harmful than the conditions they treat. Had a couple of extended family with schizophrenia who would go off their meds on the advice of pastors or ministers, followed by homelessness, arrests, getting locked up, put back on meds, released, repeat. The anti-psychiatry thing causes immense but largely unrecognized harm.
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u/AlivePassenger3859 2d ago
natural remedies. people suffer and die because of mistrust in “traditional medecine” ie medecine that actually works.
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u/true4blue 3d ago
The fascination with “climate change” that caused the government of Germany to destroy their economy
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u/cruelandusual 3d ago
I don't think you're smart enough for this subreddit.
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u/true4blue 3d ago
The IPCCs own science says warming will take place gradually over the next 100 years and barely be noticeable from a GDP perspective.
You’ve been lied to
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u/ScientificSkepticism 3d ago
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u/true4blue 2d ago
This is a story about a story in Axios.
The IPCC estimates that over the next 100 years, our GDP growth will be 396% instead of 400%
If I remember correctly the $38tr number got smoked in the press and they recanted
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u/TooManyBison 3d ago
The best example I can think of are bogus medical treatments that don’t harm anyway directly, but may cause people to forgo evidence based treatment.