godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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Maybe because it's not there.
Proof of Life After Death!!
- Thread starter Robin1
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- john edward mediums psychics
Maybe because it's not there.
wollery
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Robin, may I respectfully suggest that you take a step back and consider that if you find a post to be a personal attack full of intentional misrepresentations, or written in a mocking hurtful style, but nobody else sees it, then just maybe you're reading too much into it.
If you're the only one who can see something that you claim to be obvious then maybe it isn't obvious.
Maybe what you are seeing isn't in the post, but in your mind.
If you're the only one who can see something that you claim to be obvious then maybe it isn't obvious.
Maybe what you are seeing isn't in the post, but in your mind.
In fairness to Robin in regard to the perceived attacks by meg, I think we are misunderstanding her thought process. Robin is using the same mindset but different tactic of other believers I have dealt with and reminds me of one in particular who got very angry when I continued to dissect his statements and to look at the individual claims within them. He said something along the lines of "Stop tearing apart each sentence and look at the whole post!"
That's how Robin looks at both her posts and our posts. She does not see a specific lie or misrepresentation within meg's posts; she sees the entire posts as misrepresentations, not because of individual facts within them but because of the picture they do not paint.
To make it more specific, Robin's description of the McDonald's experience relied only a little bit on the physical act of ordering one thing and receiving something extra; ditto for the pina colada. What it relied on was her emotional state at the time, her thoughts and feelings before ordering, and her emotional reaction once the mistaken but improved order was received.
It is that meg's description does not mention the emotional aspect, the sernedipitous thoughts and emotions surrounding the event, that Robin thinks turns it into a misrepresentation, and from her point of view the misrepresentation can only be intentional.
It is a holistic approach from her perspective; from ours it is not. Robin legitimately feels the affront and is incapable of seeing why we do not.
Or something else; I've been wrong lots of times before.
That's how Robin looks at both her posts and our posts. She does not see a specific lie or misrepresentation within meg's posts; she sees the entire posts as misrepresentations, not because of individual facts within them but because of the picture they do not paint.
To make it more specific, Robin's description of the McDonald's experience relied only a little bit on the physical act of ordering one thing and receiving something extra; ditto for the pina colada. What it relied on was her emotional state at the time, her thoughts and feelings before ordering, and her emotional reaction once the mistaken but improved order was received.
It is that meg's description does not mention the emotional aspect, the sernedipitous thoughts and emotions surrounding the event, that Robin thinks turns it into a misrepresentation, and from her point of view the misrepresentation can only be intentional.
It is a holistic approach from her perspective; from ours it is not. Robin legitimately feels the affront and is incapable of seeing why we do not.
Or something else; I've been wrong lots of times before.
Interesting thoughts, Garrette.
Robin, if you disagree, you could simply copy / paste (using the multi-quote feature as noted) the GLARING and DELIBERATE misrepresentations of your stories here. I am not the first to tell you that meg's summary agrees with my own recollection. My iPhone has been pocket-playing music like a champ lately, and yesterday I got a free martini. Was that my dead uncle or just life?
Robin, if you disagree, you could simply copy / paste (using the multi-quote feature as noted) the GLARING and DELIBERATE misrepresentations of your stories here. I am not the first to tell you that meg's summary agrees with my own recollection. My iPhone has been pocket-playing music like a champ lately, and yesterday I got a free martini. Was that my dead uncle or just life?
Recovering Agnostic
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This is an excellent and very perceptive point. I often bore people by talking about Kevin Nelson's book The God Impulse (I suppose it made a profound impression on me, which would be ironic), but he makes a similar point about spiritual/ecstatic experiences and Near Death Experiences - there's nothing objectively remarkable about them, but they seem to involve triggering something which creates a complete change of mood in the subject.
One example he gives relates to a group of guys playing pinball. At some point, they began to notice/perceive that the ball was bouncing around in time to the music that was playing at the time, and continued to do so until shooting between the flippers and going dead at the end of the song. They all felt that it was a special experience in some way, but refused to talk about it for years because they realised it sounded ridiculous.
I can see Robin in the position of those guys, getting angrier and angrier as people point out that it was just a game of pinball, that our brains are very good at forming patterns where none exist, coincidences and serendipity are bound to happen given the number of people in the world, the player may have either deliberately or subconsciously influenced the course of the ball, and so on, because they all miss the point that for her, this was a special experience on some level that can't be explained. And of course, it can't be discussed either, because it's unique to her.
Unfortunately for Robin, Nelson also does a very good job of analysing and explaining how our perceptions can be very unreliable, and how certain neural traits can make us all too ready to interpret experiences as spiritual or deeply significant, regardless of their nature or any boring objective explanations.
Has Garrette got it right, Robin? Are the misrepresentations that you see in other people's posts that they focus on the actions and ignore the feelings and emotions surrounding the actions?
Look, nobody wants to deny you your feelings or emotions. Bereavement and loss is hard, it hurts like nothing else, and nobody is seeking to undermine that. If you get comfort from believing that your dead relatives can communicate with you by means of playing music on your iphone or giving you a free drink, then that's fine, keep that comfort and I hope it helps you deal with your loss. Just don't expect other people to see these things for anything more than the normal set of coincidences and mundane everyday happenings that everyone experiences, whether they've lost someone or not.
All the actions that you've described do have mundane explanations. As someone said upthread, if a coincidence has a million to one chance of occurring to any person in a year, it'll happen six thousand times a year - that's a lot of people experiencing something very unlikely. In the US alone, a million to one chance will happen around 315 times in a year, almost once a day. Something that is very unlikely will actually happen quite often, simply because there are so many of us living on the planet.
Not all of those coincidental events will have meaning to the person to which they happen. Last week when a nurse called me by my mother's name (reading off the wrong part of a form), it didn't mean to me that my mother, who has been dead for over 20 years, was trying to get in touch with me. Someone else who was accidentally called by their dead mother's name might well feel that it was a message from their mother. The difference is not in the event, but in the emotions and feelings experienced by the person witnessing the event.
John Edward, just like every other 'psychic' is not in touch with dead people, he's just an experienced showman with a talent for cold reading. You can of course support and believe him all you want - but don't expect anyone else to see him the way you see him. If it costs you money, that money just lines his pocket and you will not get any great insights into an afterlife, because even if there is an afterlife John Edward can't get in touch with it. He's a fraud, and not even a very convincing one if you look at full transcripts instead of edited highlights - or if you are not caught up in the excitement of a live show.
Nobody is trying to attack you here. You brought your experiences here as something which demonstrates life after death to you; those experiences aren't enough to demonstrate life after death to sceptics or people exercising critical thinking. This is not attacking you or mocking you, merely pointing out that what is proof to you doesn't reach the standard of objective evidence which would be required to overturn everything science understands about death. Every anecdote you've brought here (and I have read your blog and all the comments) is explicable in terms of cold or hot reading, pattern-seeking, confirmation bias, coincidence, and the law of large numbers (to name but a few). Pointing that out is not being mean to you or denying your grief at your bereavements.
Look, nobody wants to deny you your feelings or emotions. Bereavement and loss is hard, it hurts like nothing else, and nobody is seeking to undermine that. If you get comfort from believing that your dead relatives can communicate with you by means of playing music on your iphone or giving you a free drink, then that's fine, keep that comfort and I hope it helps you deal with your loss. Just don't expect other people to see these things for anything more than the normal set of coincidences and mundane everyday happenings that everyone experiences, whether they've lost someone or not.
All the actions that you've described do have mundane explanations. As someone said upthread, if a coincidence has a million to one chance of occurring to any person in a year, it'll happen six thousand times a year - that's a lot of people experiencing something very unlikely. In the US alone, a million to one chance will happen around 315 times in a year, almost once a day. Something that is very unlikely will actually happen quite often, simply because there are so many of us living on the planet.
Not all of those coincidental events will have meaning to the person to which they happen. Last week when a nurse called me by my mother's name (reading off the wrong part of a form), it didn't mean to me that my mother, who has been dead for over 20 years, was trying to get in touch with me. Someone else who was accidentally called by their dead mother's name might well feel that it was a message from their mother. The difference is not in the event, but in the emotions and feelings experienced by the person witnessing the event.
John Edward, just like every other 'psychic' is not in touch with dead people, he's just an experienced showman with a talent for cold reading. You can of course support and believe him all you want - but don't expect anyone else to see him the way you see him. If it costs you money, that money just lines his pocket and you will not get any great insights into an afterlife, because even if there is an afterlife John Edward can't get in touch with it. He's a fraud, and not even a very convincing one if you look at full transcripts instead of edited highlights - or if you are not caught up in the excitement of a live show.
Nobody is trying to attack you here. You brought your experiences here as something which demonstrates life after death to you; those experiences aren't enough to demonstrate life after death to sceptics or people exercising critical thinking. This is not attacking you or mocking you, merely pointing out that what is proof to you doesn't reach the standard of objective evidence which would be required to overturn everything science understands about death. Every anecdote you've brought here (and I have read your blog and all the comments) is explicable in terms of cold or hot reading, pattern-seeking, confirmation bias, coincidence, and the law of large numbers (to name but a few). Pointing that out is not being mean to you or denying your grief at your bereavements.
meg
psychic reader
Very good points Garrette,
Rather fascinating, isn't it? That someone that professes to have a Masters in Library Science can't seem to figure out where the information is in a paragraph? If a library patron comes in asking for a book about plumbing, or beekeeping, does she just point toward non-fiction and say, "You're just going to have to read them all."?
Kind of reminds me of those people on Extreme Hoarders, who's homes are filled floor to ceiling with a complete mix of trash and nice things because something went wonky (please pardon my lack of the proper psychiatric term) in their brains, and now they have terrible difficulty discerning what is trash and what is valuable.
Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "The cool thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."
In other words, Robin, if your anecdotes are about real unusual events, if we strip out all the stuff in your stories that's only about your belief and your feelings, what's left should still be details of an unusual event. When we strip out the details of your events that are only about your beliefs and feelings, we have nothing left but common everyday occurences.
To state it even more plainly..
1. You paid money to a professional cold reader who gave you a good cold reading performance.
2. Your mother read an article about some slippers.
3. Your neice witnessed part of the annual monarch butterfly migration, which occurs every year in August and September in your latitude.
4. McDonald's gave you a free Big Mac by mistake once.
5. You won a Pina Colada in a cruise raffle.
6. Your iPhone plays music randomly, as do many thousands of other iPhones. It is a known problem.
Rather fascinating, isn't it? That someone that professes to have a Masters in Library Science can't seem to figure out where the information is in a paragraph? If a library patron comes in asking for a book about plumbing, or beekeeping, does she just point toward non-fiction and say, "You're just going to have to read them all."?
Kind of reminds me of those people on Extreme Hoarders, who's homes are filled floor to ceiling with a complete mix of trash and nice things because something went wonky (please pardon my lack of the proper psychiatric term) in their brains, and now they have terrible difficulty discerning what is trash and what is valuable.
Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "The cool thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."
In other words, Robin, if your anecdotes are about real unusual events, if we strip out all the stuff in your stories that's only about your belief and your feelings, what's left should still be details of an unusual event. When we strip out the details of your events that are only about your beliefs and feelings, we have nothing left but common everyday occurences.
To state it even more plainly..
1. You paid money to a professional cold reader who gave you a good cold reading performance.
2. Your mother read an article about some slippers.
3. Your neice witnessed part of the annual monarch butterfly migration, which occurs every year in August and September in your latitude.
4. McDonald's gave you a free Big Mac by mistake once.
5. You won a Pina Colada in a cruise raffle.
6. Your iPhone plays music randomly, as do many thousands of other iPhones. It is a known problem.
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tsig
a carbon based life-form
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I have read them, people have offered you helping hands and you batted them away with a baseball bat.
OK people, let me walk you through one of Meg's GLARING and DELIBERATE misrepresentations of my stories. First you must reread my blog, "Is It Just a Dream... Or Something More?" Here's the link:
http://yorktown-somers.patch.com/blog_posts/is-it-just-a-dreamor-something-more
K, have you read it yet?
Now, how does what I wrote in that blog about my Nana's message to me that "slippers" would be the proof that she really did visit me match Meg's accurate and thoughtful description of it in #2?
Meg wrote , "She dreamt about her Nana and some slippers. Turns out her Nana actually HAD some slippers."
Now you tell me, how is what Meg wrote in that second sentence NOT glaringly and deliberately completely misrepresenting the point of my story? My proof was never that my Nana actually HAD some slippers. My proof was the "Gray Slippers" article that my Mom had read and saved to show me...because the story reminded her of Nana!
Now, also notice how Meg chose to capitalize the word HAD in "Turns out her Nana actually HAD some slippers." Why the capitalizing and emphasizing of the word "HAD" especially given the fact that my Nana actually having slippers was not what "turned out" happening AT ALL. What reason could Meg have possibly had to actually capitalize the word "HAD?" Hmmmmmmmmm. I'm SURE she meant it in a nice way. Nice touch, Meg. What actually "turned out" happening was the "Gray Slippers" article...NOT that my Nana "actually HAD some slippers." I never said anything about my Nana having slippers AT ALL in that blog. In fact I said something quite different...I said my Nana telling me to remember the "slippers," at first, had absolutely NO meaning to me at all. I couldn't figure out why Nana would say "slippers" would be the proof. Until...the "Gray Slippers" article.
And yes, I could spoon feed you more examples just like this, but quite honestly, I no longer believe you are worth the time I would have to put into it...and of course, you wouldn't "get it" anyway. And please let me be very clear that with my last statement I am excluding once again the people who disagreed with me, argued with me, bantered with me, and even joked with me... but yet managed to stay honest and kind and respectful through it all. I appreciate it...and you. Very much.
Oh and also, as for the rest of you, don't even bother trying to engage me anymore...I wouldn't come back here if John Edward paid me.
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tsig
a carbon based life-form
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What an utterly futile post.
Posting to tell us you're wasting your time posting?
(You need to work on those... dramatic pauses.)
Nay_Sayer
I say nay!
Sure lets take a look then shall we?
This is directly from your blog.
You dreamt about slippers, This fits #2 perfectly.
Got any more?
ETA: I see your issue was with the second part of #2.
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godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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Based on that blog post, meg's restatement of what you wrote was incorrect.
Instead of saying your grandmother had some slippers, she should have said your mother read an article about slippers.
meg
psychic reader
Yes. I corrected the slipper story at 10:36am.
(My emphasis)
It seems that the requirement of an open mind is actually a demand that the mind should be closed to the possibility that there was nothing insulting in those posts ...
I never said said you're being paid. You brought it up, which is interesting.
Sorry for engaging.
Not really.
ExMinister
RSL Acolyte
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OK, I'm out too.
I will take my "purposely dishonest and hurtful behavior" elsewhere.
I would flounce but I don't do flouncing well (and no that is not a mock, that is a joke). You good people carry on.
I will take my "purposely dishonest and hurtful behavior" elsewhere.
I would flounce but I don't do flouncing well (and no that is not a mock, that is a joke). You good people carry on.
Marcus
Illuminator
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Yes, I get it. You're not going to admit reading any of the responses to this post. You're going to Have the Last Word, and Take Your Ball and Go Home.
The people here have treated you with a lot more respect than you have given them.
malicus
Graduate Poster
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Robin, for what it is worth, I think your being here does add to the forum. I thoroughly enjoy reading your take on issues.
Also for what it is worth, I do feel you're taking things too personally, in an extremely impersonal setting. Frankly I have been pleasantly surprised by the outbreak of clear, thoughful, rational and moderate tone of posts which have outbroken since your snarky (yes it was
) 'gorilla' post replying to Meg. This has been a champion read, making me realise and analyze my thought processes in seeing patterns and signs relating to my loved departed dad. I do not for one moment believe in any of them, he's dead, but I do smile each time a memory floods back from the most innocuous of happenstances.
Wish you well, keep engaging.
Mal.
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
I'm not reading your darned blog. If you want to discuss something here, post it here.