As referenced in the story about this month's Rob Sherman Television Show, Denver-based fire-and-brimstone evangelist Bob Larson goes around the country conducting "Spiritual Freedom Conferences." During the conferences, he claims to perform exorcisms. However, just as rodeos are simply animal abuse for entertainment and profit, Larson's exorcisms are simply psychological abuse of the mentally retarded, mentally ill and mentally unstable for entertainment and huge profit. It's a really sick, pathetic way to make a living, and he does this act almost every weekend, throughout the year.
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This month's television show presents a discussion about the Spiritual Freedom Conference that took place last weekend in Schaumburg, Illinois. Today's Liberal News and Commentary article also discusses that conference.
The conference was held over two days, Friday evening and Saturday afternoon, January 19-20, 2001. The Friday evening event was free and open to the public. Free, that is, until the grand finale. More on that, later.
About two hundred people attended. About half were men, half were women. About twenty attendees were Black, which will be relevant later in this story. The rest were either White, Hispanic or Asian.
At the beginning of the conference, Larson played a video of one of his "exorcisms" to suggest to the audience how a person undergoing exorcism should act when they are being exorcized. Later, Larson conducted an "exorcism" on Frank Finley II, a member of the Army Reserve from Indiana. Finley was brought on stage to have demons extracted from his body. Finley complained about his marriage before confessing that he had recently committed adultery. Finley screamed, groaned and cried, all uncontrollably, just like he learned to do in the movie at the beginning of the evening. Then, Larson invited any women in the audience who had committed adultery to come up to the stage so that they could forgive Finley as proxies for Finley's wife. Nearly every Black woman in attendance went up to the stage to confess that they all had committed adultery, too. One or two of the White women also went up to do the same. I was surprised at how the vast majority of Black women claimed to be adulterers.
After Finley had been "forgiven" by the other cheaters, Larson dabbed "Holy Oil" on Finley's head and declared him to be demon-free. Finley then went back to his chair in the audience, while he and most of the rest of the audience celebrated that Finley was now free of demons. Hurray, hurray!
What a crock! Would you want to be on Interstate 90 when this guy got behind the wheel to go back home to Indiana? Would you want to be in the same Army Reserve Unit when this guy is running around with a weapon of mass destruction slung over his arm?
Of course, at the end of the "free" evening entertainment, Larson claimed that it had cost him eleven thousand dollars to rent the hotel's small conference room for the evening, so he wanted the audience to make a "Faith Donation" of double that amount, twenty-two thousand dollars, to cover his costs and to provide him with working capital to carry on his work. Afterwards, I asked the on-duty hotel manager how much it really cost to rent the room, and he said, "Several hundred bucks."
Admission to the conference on Saturday was a whopping sixty-nine dollars, and Larson pulled in several hundred paying suckers for that one. At mid-afternoon, he decided to perform an exorcism on a woman who was about thirty years old, about five feet tall and weighing perhaps three hundred pounds. She was obviously a psycho, because she was carrying a small white teddy bear with her, and you could see the scars all over her arms and legs from the slash marks she had made while engaged in previous acts of self-mutilation and attempted suicide.
Larson played her like a fiddle. What he does is look for bi-polar personalities. Those are people whose moods swing from extremely happy to extremely depressed. Doctors often medicate these types to try to moderate or eliminate the mood swings by keeping them in the middle. That's why they often look like zombies. Larson, on the other hand, works them over, psychologically, to trigger and accentuate the mood swings.
Larson whipsawed this one back and forth for a good half hour. She was panting, groaning, screaming, yelling and crying, banging her hands and head against the wall, and eventually rolling on the floor in agony while vomiting all over the herself and the carpeting. After she passed out from hysteria, Larson swabbed her with his magic holy oil and declared her demon free, to the delight of the audience.
While the shrinks try to minimize or eliminate mood swings in these types of sickoes, Larson does everything he can to generate the greatest possible mood swings for personal profit. All this in the name of freedom of religion and free enterprise.
The least that the federal government can do is require that the staff of snake oil salesmen like Larson do pre-interviews with his victims to determine if they are under the care of a psychotherapist. If they are, he should leave those types alone. Also, the feds should ban the collection of money at these types of events. They can do that, because this is a commercial, for-profit event. If Larson wants to pass out donation envelopes for people to mail in later, that's one thing, but the feds should ban collecting the loot right after he's worked the crowd into a frenzy. Similarly, at trade shows like the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas or the Housewares Show at McCormick Place in Chicago, selling is generally banned. You can take orders for future delivery, but you can't exchange money for products or services right there, other than ancillary services like meals or shoe shines.
If you'll send me e-mail supporting this proposition, I'll forward it on to the members of Congress that I speak to about this obscene problem. Without you corroborating my interest, Congress will just say, "Oh, Rob Sherman, you're the only one that feels that way, so we're not going to do anything about it." Your message can be very brief, even something like, "I share Rob Sherman's concerns about traveling exorcists. Please support legislation that will protect citizens from the financial scams and psychological abuse of traveling exorcists."
I wouldn't care if Larson conducted his "exorcisms" for the entertainment of normal people by performing his exorcisms on other normal people, sort of like a circus freak show. Unfortunately, mentally ill people tend to gravitate towards these kinds of shows in the real belief that Larson is serious. They think that Larson can actually help them, when, in reality, it's just a scam to separate the mentally damaged from their money by abusing them until they can't think clearly.
I've never before seen so many zombies in one place at one time, and he does this, week after week, over and over. What a sicko way to make a living, extracting huge sums of money from the gullible.
Sure, churches do the same thing each Sunday, selling false hope for big bucks, but at least that's more of a fair fight. A far greater percentage of church-goers have the mental faculties to know better, while most of those attending Larson's show were clearly mentally defective. Also, most churches are not fly-by-night, here today-gone tomorrow operations like Larson Ministries. Most churches even return a portion of their profits to the community in the form of charity to the needy.
Here's how to contact me to express your support for federal legislation to provide citizens with more protection from the Bob Larsons of the world. Please also consider a modest contribution to help ensure that I have the resources to keep doing these kinds of things, but you're not expected to send me the kind of money that Larson asks for. Today's message cost me about eleven dollars in web-hosting, internet access fees and other overhead, not the eleven thousand that Larson claims to pay for one day's expenses. I pay $325 per quarter, or about $3.60 per day, for web hosting to my internet service provider, which includes Domain name maintenance and e-mail services within my domain name. Plus, I pay $39.95 per month, or about a $1.30 per day, for internet access to AT&T Broadband. Add in a modest six bucks or so for other overhead, such as telephone, heat, electric and computer equipment costs and you're up to about eleven bucks per day. In the spirit of Bob Larson, would somebody like to send me twenty-two bucks to cover two days' worth of web and overhead costs?
Rob Sherman P. O. Box
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