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Hello from a non-skeptic

Charles Boden said:
... but you guys know zilch about mediumnity and spirituality. Maybe I can contribute a little in that respect... :)
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There is a massive combined knowledge about these subjects on this board, and it has been demonstrated to you continually in this thread. You just don't happen to agree with the conclusion.
 
Robert Oz said:
Do a Youtube search on "Derren Brown cold reading" and you'll be astounded by how amazingly convincing these techniques can be.
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Thank you Robert Oz for this .. I'd never seen this before .. very impressive .. Derren Brown writes "detailed" information for about 6 or so people .. and each one is shocked by his accuracy, claiming 85% -90% .. then he has them switch papers, and they see that he's written the same thing for each of them.. very well done. Thanks for recommending this!!
 
rwerdja said:
Thank you Robert Oz for this .. I'd never seen this before .. very impressive .. Derren Brown writes "detailed" information for about 6 or so people .. and each one is shocked by his accuracy, claiming 85% -90% .. then he has them switch papers, and they see that he's written the same thing for each of them.. very well done. Thanks for recommending this!!
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You're welcome, but there's more.

The truly mind boggling performances are his live reads (a la John Edward). In particular, there's one done in a dark studio with a story about an elevator and another with Derren dressed as a clown and approaching a stranger in the street to describe a childhood memory where the stranger in the street almost drowned.

Truly remarkable.

The near drowning prediction made me smile, because I had previously read Ian Rowland's The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading, which specifically discusses near drowning predictions.
 
That's the Forer effect, rwedja; it's what makes newspaper horoscopes so popular! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect

Charles, I trust you are having a good time with your guests. Don't worry about replying to everything all in one go, just get to posts as you have time.

Nobody here is trying to attack you or belittle your experiences; what we are trying to do is to get you to see that you need to dismiss all possible rational explanations before you start considering supernatural or paranormal explanations. Coincidence, confirmation bias, large numbers, memories, cold (and hot) reading... you need to read up and understand all these things so that you can understand why sceptics tend to disbelieve paranormal explanations in favour of more prosaic ones.

Your English is good, whether it's your first or second language, and as well as the wikis on cold reading and confirmation bias etc, I'd recommend that you read this book: Attack of The Unsinkable Rubber Ducks. As well as being a rollicking good fictional story, it's a fascinating insight into the methods employed by "psychics". Now, you may be utterly, utterly convinced that the mediums/psychics you have encountered are completely sincere, and that they have real power. I'm not necessarily expecting you to change that view, and certainly not overnight, but I hope that if you employ some critical thinking, and educate yourself by following some of the links provided, you'll see that what you thought was supernatural may not be.
 
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Charles Boden said:
The event of Diana's death having happened just seven days after what was said to me was what clearly retained in my memory exactly what had been said, and why I remember to this day the exact words.
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Are you really telling us that _after_ seven days you actually "really" memorized the exact wording of that prediction?

Sorry, but as far as human memory goes, 7 days is a damn long period. Doubt that? Go to a police station near you, and ask them about witness reports, how accurate they are. You have 5 people witnessing an accident, and get 5 different stories, and that is shortly after the incident happened!

What colour had the coffee mug you used 7 days ago for breakfast? How many coffees did you have 6 days ago? What newspaper articles have you read, and what did they tell? If you can't remember any of these things with 100% accuracy, then you can't possibly have remembered that "prediction".

Greetings,

Chris
 
Robert Oz said:
Fixed that for you. The prediction made was not as specific as your statement suggests.





Twelve years is a very, very long time. Did anyone at the spiritualist centre know that you were born in Scotland or that you may have been distantly related to the royal family or that you believed you were a reincarnation of a member of the royal family?
Surely after twelve years, at least some people at the centre knew a lot about you.





Firstly, forgive me if I doubt that you can remember a prediction, word for word, made years ago. As RSLancastr mentioned in his post, memory is fickle and changes over time. It is quite possible that what you now remember as being a reading that included a distant family link may have initially been some added flavour to the prediction knowing you were born in Scotland. Not a link through familial relationship, but a link through nationality.

However, as mentioned above, even if the prediction included a family link, it would not be surprising if, after twelve years, many people knew a lot about you.

Which then brings the prediction back to the death of a member of the royal family, which we have already covered as not being all that extraordinary a prediction for a psychic to make. Good luck for being around for one of the few times that a psychic actually managed to score a hit.





I strongly suggest you start another thread on reincarnation (or ask a moderator to split this one). Otherwise this thread will become a mish-mash of multiple beliefs.





Numerous hits after TWELVE YEARS at a spritualist centre?! This is statistically insignificant. How do you think I would do, with no psychic powers whatsoever, if I spent several hours, once a week, for twelve years making predictions? What if a group of JREF posters got together spending several hours, once a week for twelve years making predictions? It would be downright bizarre if we DIDN'T score many hits. Even some real long shots (like the death of a member of a royal family in the coming week).

This, more than anything, tells us that your experiences are nothing out of the ordinary.
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Maybe they read his book:
http://www.freado.com/read/7923/descendant-of-kings
 
:D
It looked too polished for a one off for the likes of us. I cut and pasted a random sentence and google led first here, then to the book. Something seems smelly around here.
 
Charles Boden said:
The hits have been explained away by numerous posters since the very beginning of the thread. I'll repeat them for you, seeing as you claim not to have seen them: Random Chance.

As I said, not in my case. The degree of "hits" was far beyond any random chance.
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But you have to prove this. So far, you haven't done so.

Of the thousands upon thousands of predictions any person hears (and, since you were in some sort of spiritualist group, the greatly increased number you heard), some of them Will Come True.

Believe me, I am neither insane nor stupid. It took me a very long time before I truly came to believe that anything extraordinary might be happening...
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Who said that you were insane or stupid? You are imagining persecution where none exists.

Your mistake is thinking that low probability events cannot happen. In fact, low probability events happen all the time. They are guaranteed to happen. The Detroit Tigers will win the World Series. The fact that they haven't won in 26 years (and have only won 4 times in 116 years) doesn't change anything at all.

Sorry, but again I will have to ask you to trust me when I say to you that this was not the case.
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But you have given us no reason to trust you.

Please tell me why random chance is insufficient to explain away the hits you are counting.

As I said, the sheer proportion of them... They were just too many to be discarded as mere chance.
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What was the proportion?

He might know about quantum physics, but you guys know zilch about mediumnity and spirituality. Maybe I can contribute a little in that respect... :)
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This is the same false assumption that a lot of paranormal believers make about the posters here at JREF. In fact, Charles, we know a lot about mediums and spirituality. Many of us are ex-believers, and the rest have spent a lot of time researching these areas.

Don't underestimate the knowledge of the people here. We have everyone from high-school students to multiple-Ph.D. holders, and none of them are exactly new to discussions of the paranormal.
 
Sledge said:
I know what you're thinking, punk. Did I eat six cakes or only five? Well to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I'm feeling a bit sick anyway so I won't have another. More tea, vicar?
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Well, these being the most powerful cake slices in the world, they can blow your head clean off so you're wise to stop there. Everyone knows that there is never an odd-number of cake slices left in a packet of Kipling slices, because they come wrapped in twos. So I reckon you ate six cakes. ;)
 
Charles Boden said:
Firstly, I must say that I too was skeptical of anything paranormal for a number of years until I had my own personal evidences...
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And yet:

As you know, practically since childhood I have lived under the strong impression and assumption that I once was whom I have shared with you as having been... This has held the strongest of grips upon me ever since I can remember. I have also carried with me, almost throughout my entire lifetime, a craving desire to somehow put right what in previous times I may have done wrong.
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Jacobite/message/8374

Methinks we are wasting our time trying to argue some sense into this guy, whether he is pitching his book or not.
 
Maybe he's a politician? You know, "Never let the truth get in the way of a good speech" and such.
 
And so we inevitably arrive back at presumably the two most accurate predictions made over a course of twelve years in a weekly gathering of mediums:

1. Your wife is pregnant with a girl; and

2. A member of the royal family will die within a week.

We, of course, do not have a hit/miss tally recorded for these twelve years, but must nevertheless take the word of a true believer that the mediums were really, really accurate. Maybe even as accurate as Derren Brown.
 
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