Faux-science and spirituality-abuse — is it so easy to get a research paper?

I am generally very open-minded about stuff related to meditation and spirituality and all this extra-scientific business. This includes my attitude towards God and religion — I am fine with concept of God/religion because people get happiness/peace of mind by believing in God and engaging in religio-spiritual stuff. Pragmatically, this is reason enough to continue doing it, even if it is at the cost of some intellectual dumbing down.

But, every now and then, I find absolute trash which just increases my dislike for this whole school of thought. Is furthering your culture so so important that you resort to specious arguments, fallacious reasoning and just pure drivel to make people believe you? It is really tragic that Sanskrit, a beautiful and fine language that has so much to offer, has to bear being taken apart by idiots with silly reasoning and misbegotten motives.

Case in point: http://paper.ijcsns.org/07_book/200808/20080825.pdf

The paper attempts to modern-scientifically conclude that "steadiness in the mind is achieved by chanting OM, hence proves the mind is calm and peace to the human subject". This is apparently important because "our attentiveness and our concentration are pilfered from us by the proceedings take place around us in the world in recent times".

Even if you were to ignore the terrible English (I am not being pedantic — the sentences are indeed so badly formed that you can't even figure out what they intended to convey), the whole paper is full of baloney:

First of all, the whole paper takes it for granted that OM is like the most awesome thing eva. Its powers are indisputable and unexceptionable. We humble mortals can at most take random frequency transforms. Never once is there an attempt to question the dogmatic beliefs.

The Introduction is full of the typical faux-scientific-religious-spiritual mash that arbitrarily uses vague terms likesteadiness of mind or purification of speech and then tries to bolster the half-baked theories (or just plain assertion) using scientific terms like resonance, energy or thermodynamics.

The second section Concepts and Techniques Utilized in the Proposed Work continues to wax lyrical about the OM mantra and claims that "Those who chant OM will have a powerful, sweet voice" and "Those who do meditation of OM daily will get tremendous power. They will have lustre in their eyes and faces." I swear I am NOT making this shit up!

Finally, one comes to know what the hell they did when we reach the section Steadiness Analysis Of OM Mantra Chanting. They applied a couple of wavelet transforms to the sound file of a person chanting OM, and then showed that once you make him do it a gazillion times (the paper says "a few days or weeks"), two consecutive OM sounds have almost identical wavelets. Cutting the fluff away, this basically means that if people chant OM a few thousand times, their steadiness improves, i.e. all their OMs will star sounding almost exactly the same. This has been considered to be conclusive proof that the OM mantra leads to steadiness of mind and is the proverbial answer to the life, the universe and everything.

The Summary again reiterates the perceived benefits of reciting OM (as if Sections 1, 2 and 3 and parts of Section 4 weren't enough), and the authors have the frigging nerve to end their paper with the line "As a final point, we have confirmed scientifically the accomplishments of OM chanting in reducing the stress from the human mind."

Out of the 16 references, 3 are to papers and 3 are to sites such as Wikipedia and are there to explain meanings of terms that he has used in the paper (Time Frequency analysis etc.) The rest are to random religio-spirituality sites extolling the OM mantra. Wow.

Now, idiots from all around with read such papers, and the media would say "SCIENTISTS PROVE OM MANTRA WORKS". The Sanskrit fanatics would use it to claim "SANSKRIT IS THE MOTHER OF EVERYTHING", and yet another bunch of people would live with misguided notions about a language and culture that deserve much more than these trashy faux-scientific-papers that restate the dogmatic obvious and spread propaganda in the name of Science.