Kabbalah: Making Scientology Look Almost Normal.

You know there's something wrong with a "religion" when they charge $24.99 for a piece of red string just because it's been "blessed". Claiming such mental heavyweights as Madonna, Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher, and Britney Spears as followers doesn't help either. But now BBC reporter Tony Donnelly is proving just how whacked out Kabbalah really is. You'll never look at the Material Girl the same way again.

After Donnelly was persuaded to spend $1,600 on Kabbalah water (that ever-healing tonic that sure is helping those tsunami survivors right about now) and religious texts written in Aramaic (that's right, Mel Gibson's favorite tongue), he attended a "weird religious service" also attended by Madonna. After some prayer readings and light chanting, the Kabbalists faced east, put their hands in the air, and began "crying out 'Cher-er-er-er-nobyl' at the top of their voices. They thought they were curing Chernobyl of radiation, using the power of Kabbalah to drive away the evil–and one of the biggest rock stars on the planet was joining in the chanting." A rabbi at London's Kabbalah Centre also told Donnelly what the problem was with the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust: "They didn't use Kabbalah." Uhh, ok. If only someone had thought to give Hitler a red string, all that messiness could have been avoided. Sounds about right. Scientology's not looking so weird anymore, is it? Score one Travolta.