Now I’ll be the first to admit that there are circumstances under which it would be acceptable to fire a teacher for wizardry.  Maybe if he was trying to entice one of his students to enlist as a thief with a group of dwarves on a quest to reclaim their lost treasure from an ancient and fearsome dragon.  That’s the sort of dangerous thing that middle school students probably aren’t ready to handle.  Firing would be justified if if he was trying to kill one of the students to create a seventh horcrux that would make him an all-powerful immortal evil overlord.  I’d even say firing was justified if he was using his magical powers to banish students to the magical land of Oz.

But for making a toothpick disappear?  That’s just plain stupid.  I’d be willing to bet that there is a fundamentalist Christian child at the bottom of this who complained about the magic trick in the first place because everyone knows sleight of hand is an abomination before the Lord their God, but for a school system to actually fire someone over a magic trick is just further proof of the downfall of reasonable civilization.

If there’s something strange in your neighborhood, who ya gonna call?  The Easington Town Council in Britain, I guess.

The trouble all started over the Christmas Holiday with supernaturally levitated evening-gowns taking a stroll through the house and then escalated to menacing whispering, symmetrical book stacking, massive unexplained undersea sponge migrations, giant Marshmallow Men demolishing Central Park West, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!

I might have confused the BBC story with the 1984 blockbuster Ghostbusters in that previous paragraph, but it still doesn’t sound any less ridiculous.

Sadly, we still haven’t reached the most ridiculous part of the story.  A sensible local government would just ignore these crackpots for the superstitious nutjobs they are, but the Easington Council decided to hire a medium to come in and perform an exorcism of the home.  I’m pretty sure that this is the first incident of a municipal government taking a proactive stance against the supernatural since the infamous New York City v. Vigo the Carpathian, though the methods and results were less spectacular in this case:

I put down a circle of salt, asked the family to be present and I have now sent him on his way.

Don’t cross the salt.  That would be bad.

Source: BBC News

Via: The Scientific Indian

Technorati Tags: skepticism, ghosts, ghostbusters, britain, exorcism