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Lawsuit charges sweat lodge guru and Oprah promoted James Ray has "evil mind"
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Property of Angel Valley Ministries where three people
died during James Ray's "Spiritual Warrior" program. (AP
Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
The lawsuit filed by a survivor of James Ray's "Spiritual Warrior" program, Sidney Spencer, charges that Ray has an "evil mind".
It is believed that there may be many more lawsuits filed against Ray stemming from the deadly sweat lodge fiasco of October 8.
Spencer's lawsuit states, "Defendants acted outrageously with an evil mind by consciously pursuing a course of conduct knowing that it created a substantial risk of significant harm to others."
For more than 36 hours prior to going into the overheated and poorly ventilated sweat lodge, Ray's customers, who each paid him between $9,000 and $10,000 to take part in his Spiritual Warrior program, were deprived of food and water by James Ray and his employees and associates. The lawsuit reads, "Defendants made fraudulent misrepresentations and omissions constituting deceit to Plaintiff Sidney Spencer concerning their knowledge, expertise, purpose and intent with respect to “Spiritual Warrior” activities including the 36 plus hour deprivation of food and water and the sweat lodge ceremony."
Spencer also charges in her lawsuit that she paid Ray over $30,000, plus, at the sweat lodge incident, "Defendants took Sidney Spencer’s watch and bracelet being valued in excess of $10,000".
In order for the deaths of the three victims to have meaning, we need to learn something from this tragedy. We need to learn something that will prevent others from falling victim to con-artists like James Ray.
The only thing that protects us from deception is our God-given reason. If the victims had strongly embraced and constantly used their reason they would be alive today. Their reason would make them question claims made by one of the defendants in the lawsuit, Angel Valley Ministries. As just one example, on their site they make this statement while describing their real estate in an attempt to lure customers to their ranch: "It is about entering a place where powerful earth energies are present and active. It is about connecting with the invisible realms. It is about being at a place where the veil between the dimensions is thinner than in most other places." If the victims had not abandoned, or at least suppressed, their God-given reason they would have asked for and demanded answers for questions that would require evidence to prove the stated assertions.
James Ray's customers were told that Indian tribes used sweat lodges as a way of generating visions. They should listen to reason and they would have realized that visions, like dreams, are meaningless. As the thoughtful and altruistic Deist and one of America's founding fathers Thomas Paine made clear, dreams are what happens in our minds when we and our reason are asleep and imagination is allowed to run unchecked by our reason. They, and "visions", are nothing more than that. It is folly to give importance to something that doesn't deserve it.
One powerful example of visions not being worthy of our attention is the vision the Sioux Indian medicine men said they had just prior to the battle/massacre of Wounded Knee. They believed that by doing a Ghost Dance for four or five consecutive nights they would have a vision. The vision they had promised a resurrection of their dead ancestors and an Indian promised land here on earth minus white people. They also believed based on their visions that the Ghost Dance Shirts they wore while doing the Ghost Dance would protect them from being shot by the soldiers. A medicine man even told Sioux warriors that the bullets of the White American soldiers would not hurt them. Like James Ray, he was dead wrong.
It seems that the big three Abrahamic "revealed" religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, all help to set people up to be victims of cults and of con-artists like James Ray. They do this by requiring their followers to give up or to suspend their God-given reason in order to believe what their "revealed" religion is teaching. For example, in order to believe that Joshua made the sun stand still to give the Hebrews more time to slaughter their neighbors, to believe that Jesus walked on water, or that Mohamed flew up to heaven on the back of a Buraq, we need to let go of our God-given reason. We can't believe these, and many other unreasonable claims made by "revealed" religions while still using the gift of reason which God gave us. This rejection of our reason sets a precedence which allows us to repeat this harmful and unnatural act. The only way to prevent it is to never give up our God-given reason, not for religions, not for governments and not for celebrities.
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