Aidan Moffat's written a song for you

Smash The Mystic Industry - by Aidan Moffat

My favourite book as a boy was The Hamlyn Book Of Ghosts, an anthology of eerie stories and convincing (to a child) snapshots of apparitions, and I studied every page. There was a chapter on Harry Price, the famous paranormal investigator and ghost-hunter, and I dreamed of growing up to be a Ghostbuster long before Bill Murray convinced me it would be the best job in the world. Like most young boys, I was obsessed by monsters and ghouls and I insisted that I be allowed to watch horror films at a very young age, becoming far too familiar with Hammer Horror before my tenth birthday – Peter Cushing was an early hero. Then there was my love of The Omen and its two sequels and, of course, John Carpenter’s Halloween, which I first saw as an eight-year-old and still remains one of my all-time favourites.

I’m thirty-six years old now and I don’t believe in these things anymore: I’ve grown up. I’ve decided there’s no such thing as ghosts or spirits or monsters or an afterlife of any kind. We are all just decaying organic matter with super-evolved brains, and the sooner everyone realises how ridiculous the ideas of spirituality and religion are and chooses to use their limited time on our four-and-a-half-billion-year-old planet to make it a better place while they’re still on it rather than worry about spending eternity in a fairy tale, the better.

You don’t need a theological lecture from me, there far are more qualified and intelligent men who can do a much better job: Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris for starters. Nor do you need me to bang on about the fraudulent world of psychic mediums – I kind of did that last week. If you’re interested in finding out more, then I suggest you search for James Randi on YouTube, or visit his site, www.randi.org. Randi, like his hero Houdini before him, is an ex-magician who dedicates his time to exposing the truth behind the lies and phonies of the mystic industry.

So, rather than attempt to write an essay about my feelings towards spiritualism and faith, I’ve decided to offer you a song. You may or may not know that song-writing – and singing – is what you might call my day job. I don’t know if you’ll like it, but hopefully it will keep you at least marginally amused for its brief duration. You’ll hear Derek Acorah’s name in there, and also John Edwards and Uri Geller, who was a particular target of James Randi in the Eighties. I also mention the Baby Whisperer, whose real name is Derek Ogilvy and he claims to have the ability to read infants’ minds. He doesn’t.

So here you go…

Aidan Moffat - Smash The Mystic Industry

[audio:http://viceland-assets-cdn.vice.com/wp/?attachment_id=8768]