Would you rather see someone delivered of a devil; or would you rather understand all the ways that deliverance works? Would you rather see deliverance, or would you rather understand it? Both would be nice, but you'd rather see it. Sometimes we lose our privilege of being overwhelmed, because we have to figure it all out. A great example of this, is a great magician. I was in Las Vegas, and I went and saw Penn and Teller. Penn and Teller are ridiculous! Here was their first trick. This is how they warmed the crowd up okay. I just thought it was icebreaker for the crowd. They come out on the stage, they throw ping pong balls into the thing. Obviously one is marked. Somebody gets the marked ping pong ball, some random person. They said: sir, do you have a cell phone? Yes, I do. Would you come up? Have you ever met us before? No. So you testify to all these people you've never met us before? Yes, absolutely. Alright, so you have a cell phone? Yes, I do. Can we see it? Yes. Alright, put it back in your pocket.
Then what they do is, they talk to him, and in the course of talking to him, they pick his pocket; and I thought that was the whole thing, because people were still walking in. I just thought it was like, we're having a laugh at this guy's expense, and they're doing it in a hilarious way right - like they are making a fool of this guy in just a hilarious way. Like it's less than a minute. Forty seconds later, they say: where's your phone? He said: oh, and so he can't find his phone, and so they say your whole job in life was to bring your phone, and you've lost your phone right? Of course he's going: well I - and so I thought that was the whole joke. I thought that was the whole thing. They said: my goodness, do you have a friend? Yes, I have a friend. Where's your friend? Sir, would you - do you have a phone? Yes. Would you call the guy please? Yes. So the guy picks up his phone, rings the guy's number. A box underneath a seat in the 25th row starts ringing. They say: oh, there's a box ringing, bring it up here, because they're not going to go get it, so they pass the box up. So everyone in the audience handles this box, so you could see it's a real box right.
They handle it all the way up. It's a Styrofoam box that's taped shut. They take a camera, and put it on the box, and put it on the big screen. They take a knife and cut open the box. Inside that box was a block of ice, with a fish frozen solid inside the block of ice. They took a hammer and broke the ice. They had the guy call the phone again, the fish was ringing. They took a knife, they cut the head off the fish, and pulled the guy's phone out of the frozen fish. All this took place in two minutes - so I sat there and went YEAH! That's awesome! But there were people around me, who lost the privilege of being overwhelmed at a skill very well-practised, because they had to know how that happened. How did that happen? Who cares how that happened, that was - did you see - that was brilliant. That was unbelievable! That was awesome!
And Penn Jillette is the most vocal about: there's no such thing as spiritual power; like he says: anybody in Vegas claiming to have true spiritual power is a criminal.He said: these are well-contrived, well-practiced illusions, that we have practiced hours and hours and hours on, over 38 years, so we don't get caught. If we showed you how we did it, you wouldn't be that amazed. The amazing part is not how we did it; it's that we don't get caught doing it.