Why don’t atheists believe in God? You and I might respond by pointing to the complete lack of evidence, but “breathing therapist” Nevşah Fidan Karamehmet offered a rather unique explanation during an appearance on CNN Türk (the Turkish affiliate of CNN).

Atheists don’t believe in God, she explained, because they can’t breathe properly.

… Karamehmet, a self-claimed breathing therapist, suggested atheists had no breath in their rib cages for a reason related to “magnetic fields” there. “Radical atheists come to my seminars. There are many serious researches conducted to find the relations between breathing and thinking. For example, atheists’ abdominal breathing is perfect but there is no breath in here,” she said, pointing at her rib cage. “There is a bulge in the rib cage. It is like there’s a stone in there.”

After the “radical atheists” take her classes, she went on to say, they learn to breathe the right way, and wouldn’t you know it, many of them magically find God by the end. (The chyron in that image above roughly says, “faith is associated with breath.”)

For what it’s worth, atheists don’t breathe differently from other people. There may be people of all faiths and no faith who are stressed out and possibly have shortness of breath, but you can’t hear people breathing and tell me what religion they are. And as many atheists will also tell you, meditation isn’t only for the religious.

All of that is to say Karamehmet is full of it. She’s spouting pseudoscience under the guise of expertise. It’s not surprising that a breathing therapist points to — wait for it — breathing as the solution for what supposedly ails people.

Let’s just hope she doesn’t do the same thing when talking about the causes of cancer and Alzheimer’s.