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Hello from a non-skeptic

Charles Boden said:
Obviously there's no winning with you guys, because your minds are already set!!!!!!!!
...
You guys really don't know what you are talking about...
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Charles, you've produced not one bit of verifiable evidence, only a couple of bits of anecdotal examples--one of which can be easily explained by the ideomotor effect--brought up an old case of a psychic detective which you read about in some tabloid and that is easily debunked, invoked a bunk pseudo documentary that few if any actual scientists take seriously, tried to resurrect long-disproven theories that plants have consciousness and that this can be measured scientifically, among other silliness I may have forgotten about, and you complain we don't take you seriously?

I suggest you put aside your spiritualism and take a class or two on critical thinking and the scientific method before you come back and tell us we are the ones who don't know what we are talking about.
 
Charles Boden said:
Oh, for crying out loud... My youngest son was just three months old. The age difference between him and my daughter is of exactly one year and one week (10 May/17 May). Just quite how often does that happen? So I am told that she is expecting another child. I ask if some confusion is being made and if it is not my three-month-old son she might be seeing. I am told "No, it's another child..." I get home, tell my wife what was said to me, and we take the uttermost care from then on. Turns out she's already pregnant. And you want me to believe it was "mere chance" or a "lucky guess"?

Obviously there's no winning with you guys, because your minds are already set!!!!!!!!

I am told that "a member of that Royal Family you have connections to is going to die this week. Pay attention to whom it might be..." This was seven years after I had had the confirmation at the age of 30 (therefore 15 years after the episode of the Ouija event) of a possible past lifetime as Bonnie Prince Charlie, and you claim that this prediction was vague? Almost 20 years later I find that I am also genealogically a descendant of King James IV, and still you state that the prediction was vague?

I am sitting at a bar, pondering upon a discussion in Carol Bowman's forum as to whether it is not solely we who create the reality around us, wondering if this might be true and that this might perhaps mean that there is no God, and then in the very first encounter with the medium I have mentioned, incorporated with the spiritual entity who told me of my wife's pregancy, she asks me: "What was that s*** you were thinking? There IS a God..." And you want me to believe in your "random chance" theories? How could she have known what I was thinking???!!!

You guys really don't know what you are talking about...
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Think of it this way. Would you say that a clock showing the correct time is evidence that it always shows the correct time? What if someone said that it was right on two occasions that they checked? The problem is that even a broken clock is right twice a day. Two prophesies from one person aren't necessarily more helpful than two reports of a clock being right. We would need to have a better idea of how many prophesies this person made and what the overall success rate was before we could determine whether there was anything really there in the same way that we'd want to check a clock at many different times to make sure it was working properly.
 
I have always been a strong believer in UFO's, ghosts, psychics etc etc, but after stumbling upon this forum the other day my beliefs have taken a complete u-turn.

There are some extremely smart people on here.
 
laddsy said:
I have always been a strong believer in UFO's, ghosts, psychics etc etc, but after stumbling upon this forum the other day my beliefs have taken a complete u-turn.

There are some extremely smart people on here.
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Welcome, and flattery will get you everywhere.:D
 
Charles Boden said:
What are the "random chances" that something like that should have been said to me precisely seven days before Diana's death?
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I already answered this, and I provided a link. Just the chance of the Queen Mother alone dying in that week was one in two hundred. Add together the chances of each of the other members of the royal family passing away that week and the odds are better than one in two hundred.

Now ask yourself this: In all of the world, do you think that there are a total of at least 200 people who have ever heard a prediction (right or wrong) about a royal dying? Do you think that 200 people have had a psychic tell them at some point that some member of the royal family would die soon?

Because just ONE of those predictions had to be right. There are 199 other people on earth not logging onto the internet and not talking about a prediction coming true. There are 199 other people not impressed with some medium's abilities. And just ONE of them had to hear the right words at the right time to turn him into a true believer and send him to the JREF to talk about that uncanny prediction.

See, it's wrong to ask what the odds are that YOU would hear that prediction and have it come sort of true. The right question is what the odds are that SOMEBODY would hear some prediction that would come sort of true.

And those odds are very close to 1 in 1.

What were the odds that a shy, retiring carpenter would be picked from obscurity to play Han Solo? I have no idea. What are the odds that somebody was going to play Han Solo? Pretty darn good.
 
Charles Boden said:
Oh, for crying out loud... My youngest son was just three months old. The age difference between him and my daughter is of exactly one year and one week (10 May/17 May). Just quite how often does that happen?
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Apparently more often that you think: my father and my uncle are 11 months apart, and my grandmother (R.I.P.) didn't claim any miracles or extraordinary circumstances surrounding the respective births of her two boys. You see, after a woman gives birth, if the man and the woman were to...oh, never mind :rolleyes:
 
Charles Boden said:
Oh, for crying out loud... My youngest son was just three months old. The age difference between him and my daughter is of exactly one year and one week (10 May/17 May). Just quite how often does that happen?
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All the time. In some third-world countries it is the norm.

It's not like it's a virgin birth or anything...
 
Charles Boden said:
You guys really don't know what you are talking about...
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Well, there's certainly one way to test that claim. Since this person is so great, please contact her and invite her to come here and verify the claims you have made and all the many others she must have gotten right. Better yet, have her immediately sign up for the million dollar challenge. She's a sure winner.

Will you do that?
 
laddsy said:
There are some extremely smart people on here.
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That's me, mostly. You don't see it because of how skilled I am, but I'm carrying quite a bit of dead wood around here.

Incidentally, a woman who has 5 children in a 15 year span will spend about 200 weeks out of 780 pregnant. So, a random guess about a woman's state during that time has about a 25% chance of being right.

Reduce that to a 10 year span, and the odds go up to better than 1 in 3.

How about this - there are 95 million births in the world each year. There are 3.4 billion women in the world - about half of those are between 15 and 50. So, 95 million births divided by 1.7 billion candidates means that a random guess that a woman on earth between the age of 15 and 50 will have a child in that year is better than 1 in 20.

Damn, those are good odds.
 
Olowkow said:
Welcome, and flattery will get you everywhere.:D
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It will. Adhering to such rigid systems is basically a huge ego stroke.

Of course weird things will keep happening but if the skeptics shout long, and science keeps scrambling to catch to keep the lid on phenomena, safely contained with rationality so not one person in the world is left to muse over 'weird things' maybe the weird stuff will go away on its own.



If it doesn't I sense the world would implode. I had no idea, absolutely no idea, the thought of psychic phenomena generated so much fear and subsequent ego attack. Or so many subconscious religious behaviors.

I've seen more petty crucifixions and persecutions in this thread when someone doesn't goose step in alignment with their precise thinking. More than any number of Christians could produce on their own , yet skeptics claim they are above all that nonsense.

Are you all REALLY sure you have purged yourself of that crap . I mean what is the difference between persecution in the name of god and persecution in the name of rationality?

I mentioned core beliefs and suspending beliefs a million threads back. Maybe someone will get what I mean now.
 
Look, Charles, I'm going to be straight with you and explain a little something to you about your wife's pregnancy. All that's required for a woman to get pregnant again after a pregnancy is ovulation and a little sperm. Women can ovulate again after pregnancy in as little as three weeks after giving birth. A lot of women are still having postnatal discharge at this point, which would help obscure what would usually be a very light period anyway. Three weeks until fertility in some women, Charles.

Doctors recommend not having sex until after the 6-week checkup because it gives the woman some time to heal from the physical trauma of birth, and because during that 6-week period she's at a much higher risk of bacterial infection. Most women who don't breastfeed ovulate some time around the 6-week checkup---and the 6-week checkup is when the doctor lifts the no-sex edict and reintroduces birth control measures.

After 6 weeks it's safe, but then the mother has a brand-new baby waking her up all hours of the night and a squirming, howling, crapping little reminder of how badly it hurts to give birth, which is enough to put most women off their game for quite some time after that. The thing is though, Charles, that just because most couples choose to wait between pregnancies most of the time doesn't mean they couldn't get pregnant again if both parties were willing to try, as you found out for yourself.
 
Charles Boden said:
I am told that "a member of that Royal Family you have connections to is going to die this week. Pay attention to whom it might be..." This was seven years after I had had the confirmation at the age of 30 (therefore 15 years after the episode of the Ouija event) of a possible past lifetime as Bonnie Prince Charlie, and you claim that this prediction was vague? Almost 20 years later I find that I am also genealogically a descendant of King James IV, and still you state that the prediction was vague?
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What exactly is your connection to the British royal family again? You have a common ancestor some 15 generations or so in the past. Not exactly a close connection. For all I know, you could be more closely related to me. That, and the fact that you (along with many, many other people) believe you were a royal yourself in a past life.

Put it this way -- would they think they have any connection worth noticing to you?

Also, what on earth does that prediction mean? "Pay attention to whom it might be." It's just meaningless but sounds spooky. Mostly alerts you to keep your eyes open for any death of any royal person anywhere.

So maybe if she was lucky and the elderly aunt of a prince on an island somewhere died that week, you were primed to notice the news and file it away. Then, maybe a few years later you might have recalled a past life on that very island, and realized the connection. See how any of a number of possibilites could count as a hit? And if it was a miss, no loss for the medium -- people will keep coming back and only really pay attention to the hits. There's no way to lose for the medium, all kinds of ways to win, and sometimes by luck she'll win big.

Think of this. One week (give or take) before Diana's death, there were psychics and mediums all over the world giving all kinds of predictions to lots of people. The vast majority of which did not pan out, or only did because they were sufficiently vague or common. In one little corner of the world, you visited a medium who happened to hit on a prediction that, as it turns out, kinda sorta came true. Whereupon you think "Aha! There really is something to this after all!" Ignoring all the completely useless utterings of all the other psychics all over the world.
 
Loss Leader said:
Incidentally, a woman who has 5 children in a 15 year span will spend about 200 weeks out of 780 pregnant. So, a random guess about a woman's state during that time has about a 25% chance of being right.

Reduce that to a 10 year span, and the odds go up to better than 1 in 3.

How about this - there are 95 million births in the world each year. There are 3.4 billion women in the world - about half of those are between 15 and 50. So, 95 million births divided by 1.7 billion candidates means that a random guess that a woman on earth between the age of 15 and 50 will have a child in that year is better than 1 in 20.

Damn, those are good odds.
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Here's some even better odds: I went to a psychic once when I was 25. She told me that "someone you know is pregnant, but doesn't know it yet." Pretty safe bet, huh, that a 25 year old woman will know someone who's in her first few weeks of pregnancy.
 
Its really interesting how the mind works and plays tricks on you. I remember last year I started believing in all that Blossom Good-child crap about UFO's. I read so much about it and started believing all the channeling messages. I then started to see UFO's in the sky from the back yard. I told everyone about it only to realise later that it was actually headlights from cars in a nearby street throwing up weird reflections on an antenna of a double story house. Anyway I have a lot more stories like that which most can be easily explained.There are others I cant explain, but I am now sure there is an explanation.
 
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laddsy said:
Its really interesting how the mind works and plays tricks on you. I remember last year I started believing in all that Blossom Good-child crap about UFO's. I read so much about it and started believing all the channeling messages. I then started to see UFO's in the sky from the back yard. I told everyone about it only to realise later that it was actually headlights from cars in a nearby street throwing up weird reflections on an antenna of a double story house. Anyway I have a lot more stories like that which most can be easily explained.There are others I cant explain, but I am now sure there is an explanation.
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This would be a fascinating subject for its own thread.
 
laddsy said:
Its really interesting how the mind works and plays tricks on you. I remember last year I started believing in all that Blossom Good-child crap about UFO's. I read so much about it and started believing all the channeling messages. I then started to see UFO's in the sky from the back yard. I told everyone about it only to realise later that it was actually headlights from cars in a nearby street throwing up weird reflections on an antenna of a double story house. Anyway I have a lot more stories like that which most can be easily explained.There are others I cant explain, but I am now sure there is an explanation.
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The cool thing is, once you start getting into how people make those mistakes, it's even more interesting and fun than the UFOs were in the first place.
 
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