My mom used to take me to her psychic readings when I was a little boy. Even at that young age, I could tell the psychic was full of crap. Her damn parrot was more informative and entertaining.
Hey, Luke! Well, since even every believer acknowledges that there are plenty of fakes out there who scam the public, you could very well have been right about the person your mom went to.
My wife went to a psychic when we were first dating. She thought it was real. So I sat her down in front of the computer and came to this here web site. This was years before the forum. Anyway, Randi had a sample psychic reading he used to demonstrate the Forer effect on this web site at the time. My wife read it, and about a minute later, a skeptic was born. She was furious. Wanted to go back to the psychic and beat her 35 bucks back out of the psychic.
No comment, since I have no way of evaluating the reading your wife got. In any case, skepticism is a good thing. Hard cynicism is what I find counter-productive.
Sometimes I think believers are hardwired to believe.
No doubt, some are. I notice you didn't use the word "some" to qualify your comment the way I did. Very "black and white" of you.
I take the word of those who say John Edward's shows aren't heavily edited. I can believe it. Even if they were edited shows, the readings are still so weak that you have to have a really strong desire to believe to buy into it.
Still, editing of the show was always a major point of contention with some posters here. I don't know how many "Crossing Over" shows you watched over the course of the several years it ran, but I think I saw nearly all of them. And again, even if I were less than impressed with the readings that others received, (which isn't the case) I would have a difficult time explaining how JE could possibly have come up with at least 8 extremely specific and accurate validations that applied to me, one right after another, with not one miss included, and all that without one single word of feedback or acknowledgement from either myself or my husband.
And BTW, as I've said, that information John Edward spat out included 4 complete, exact names, including the name Tom, (the name of the deceased, my father-in-law) my maiden name, (Alexander) my daughter's nickname, (Dolly, who is Tom's granddaughter) and at the very end, sounding extremely exasperated that my casual on-line friend, Bill, (atmytv from tvtalkshows) couldn't make sense of any of it, my own first name. (Jackie)
So much for skeptics' claims of vagueness and generalities. That was an outstanding reading by any measure. And those were just the names. John also correctly identified at least 4 other details specific to our family. Talk about things that make you go HMMM! Not so easy to dismiss something like that, especially in such a large venue of thousands of people and no assigned seating.