As a reminder I do believe in God and I do believe most mediums are fake.
John Edward - psychic or what?
- Thread starter RemieV
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Slowvehicle
Membership Drive , Co-Ordinator,, Russell's Antin
Robin:
Since you are still here, however you chose to celebrate today, I wish you peace and joy.
Awwww, thank you, Slowvehicle! Same to you! : )
pakeha
Penultimate Amazing
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So Robin, that's really not related to the thread topic, which is about JE. Why are you trying to divert attention from the topic?
Your personal religious beliefs aren't relevant here, Robin.
This thread is about whether JE is a conman victimising the bereaved.
Remember?
dafydd
Banned
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He is a lovely man who charges no fees for getting in touch with dead people and passing facile messages on to their families.
Ah, OK. Thanks for the response. I know your OP was a long time ago... have you figured anything out since then, or is this one still unsolved?
I went to McDonald's and was (unsurprisingly) thinking of their signature sandwich, the Big Mac. I ordered a big order for 6 people, and miracle of miracles, the minimum wage employee accidentally put an extra Big Mac in the bag. Or I misspoke. Or I'm misremembering. Or we sorted the order wrong. Or I grabbed an extra bag by mistake.
Therefore God.
As I said with the ridiculous "new fridge" example, if the spirits and God are so pedestrian with their supernatural activities, they really need a new marketing guy. At the very least, they could do email or twitter for example. These examples and stories are just so lame! Thor threw LIGHTNING BOLTS FROM THE SKY, for Pete's sake. God bonuses you the occasional Big Mac or tells your dead dad about your appliances? Super lame.
Therefore God.
As I said with the ridiculous "new fridge" example, if the spirits and God are so pedestrian with their supernatural activities, they really need a new marketing guy. At the very least, they could do email or twitter for example. These examples and stories are just so lame! Thor threw LIGHTNING BOLTS FROM THE SKY, for Pete's sake. God bonuses you the occasional Big Mac or tells your dead dad about your appliances? Super lame.
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Fast Eddie B
Philosopher
Robin,
In the spirit of the holidays, let me apologize for the tone of my post. I'm really not bitter nor contemptuous - more aggravated, but a brief bio may help explain...
I was born in 1949, making me 63. From about the age of 12 I was exposed to all sorts of things - coming of age in the late 1950's and 1960's.
Those were heady times. Some of the stuff I read was Baba Ram Dass, Alan Watts, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Carlos Castaneda, de Jardin, The Chariots of the Gods, The Search For Bridey Murphy, and on and on. I tried then and try now to have a really open mind towards things spiritual and paranormal.
But I was also reading Martin Gardner and Carl Sagan and the like, and gravitated more to the science-y stuff. But as Pixel42 said, I try not to be a nay-saying cynic either - I would love it if some of this "woo" stuff were shown to be legitimate. The science fiction I immersed myself in often included "mind" stuff, and within that context I did and still do accept the possibilities of all sorts of weird things.
However, most real phenomena yield pretty well to the scientific method. But over the years, things like telepathy and psychokinesis and the like seem to resist definitive "proof". It seems like nailing Jello to the wall. If, in fact, someone can move something with their minds, or transfer thoughts one to the other psychically, it should be fairly straightforward to measure - certainly easier than measuring cosmic background radiation or how much light is bent by the sun. I mean, science is pretty good at teasing out really tiny effects if they're real.
So, doing the math, I've spent about 50 years trying to sort out this sort of thing. I'm an atheist, but a hopeful atheist because some possible Gods could be pretty cool (but not the Judeo-Christian one, who's a bastard to my way of thinking), and I'd prefer that my death within a few decades doesn't just mark THE END. And I'm a skeptic, but a hopeful skeptic because weird stuff is cool and I like to think strange discoveries still await us.
I will compose a more specific followup post, but let me summarize by saying I get frustrated when people say, "So and so can do "X", but really can't do it under "Y" conditions". Special Pleading is all the hucksters and deluded individuals can fall back on when their attempts to prove their powers fail - as they historically have. Your mention of real powers that for some reason can't be shown under lab conditions just sorta set me off - I've heard it SO many times before.
People either can or cannot move things with their minds. They either can or cannot send thoughts to one another. They either can or cannot converse with the dead. For now, until rigorously demonstrated, I'd say the rational default position is the "null hypothesis" - there's no "there" there until proven otherwise.
Anyway, bygones and I hope you end up teasing out the "truth" about these things one way or another.
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Fast Eddie B
Philosopher
I spent a few years on a site called "Skeptiko". Started out promising, but ended up going downhill. That's neither here nor there, but...
...on that site was a lady who claimed she could make a "PK wheel" turn using her mind. And that further, she had already demonstrated it in rigorous lab conditions.
This piqued my interest - how cool would it be if she really could? A whole new field of physics/psychology/something could open up. I could picture her on the cover of Nature.
A also thought about how cool it would to be involved even peripherally with such a discovery. My wife still has some contacts at the University of Tennessee - she did research there some time ago. If she could talk to the right person, maybe we could get an undergraduate or someone to take on setting up the experimental protocol - it seemed to me then and seems to me now it should be pretty straightforward. I thought if we could replicate her prior results, we could possibly be onto something. Not to mention a million dollars from James Randi!
Anyway, I made the offer even though Knoxville is a couple hours away. Want to guess what happened? If you guessed "nothing", you win!
That's why I'm frustrated. Watching so many people over so many years make so many claims and never had anything concrete to show for it has nudged be closer to cynicism fro skepticism - but hope springs eternal!
...on that site was a lady who claimed she could make a "PK wheel" turn using her mind. And that further, she had already demonstrated it in rigorous lab conditions.
This piqued my interest - how cool would it be if she really could? A whole new field of physics/psychology/something could open up. I could picture her on the cover of Nature.
A also thought about how cool it would to be involved even peripherally with such a discovery. My wife still has some contacts at the University of Tennessee - she did research there some time ago. If she could talk to the right person, maybe we could get an undergraduate or someone to take on setting up the experimental protocol - it seemed to me then and seems to me now it should be pretty straightforward. I thought if we could replicate her prior results, we could possibly be onto something. Not to mention a million dollars from James Randi!
Anyway, I made the offer even though Knoxville is a couple hours away. Want to guess what happened? If you guessed "nothing", you win!
That's why I'm frustrated. Watching so many people over so many years make so many claims and never had anything concrete to show for it has nudged be closer to cynicism fro skepticism - but hope springs eternal!
Batvette, allow me to rephrase what I think is the main objection to this line of thinking: your belief is based on criteria so loose that it makes the existence of the alleged phenomenon indistinguishable from its non-existence.
Precisely. The original claim is that the ability is so frequent and so obvious that to deny it is willful blindness, but after questioning the claim morphs into an ability that is rare, vague, and unreliable to the point of non-existence.
xterra
So far, so good...
Fast Eddie B, please clarify. Was it nothing because the person refused to be tested or was it nothing because the tests showed no ability?
Also, did you investigate her claim of supposedly providing a demonstration under "laboratory conditions," whatever those were. (I am guessing that you're quoting her here.) Did she in fact give you enough information that you could have found verification of her claims? ETA, not of her claim of success, but of her claim of having been tested.
If anyone could show telepathy or telekinesis to be real, I would also be thrilled. I've always wanted them to function – and have admired the James Schmitz “Telzey” stories. Schmitz had a good grasp on how to explain telepathy (that he couldn't do) to people who couldn't do it.
As it is, I've become not more cyincal but more … umm, bored, I guess … with the various claims that recur with depressing regularity. I do not doubt for a moment that Robin and batvette and even RemieV believe that what they experienced is “real.”
However, if it can't be replicated, it isn't real. This goes for claims of religiosity, of homeopathy, of quantum entanglement as a mechanism for telepathy.
And for claims in science: Wouldn't cold fusion have been a boon to all humanity? Weren't we all hoping it was real?
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Unless I misunderstand, RemieV does not believe that JE demonstrated anything paranormal. Rather, she doubts the explanations provided and admits she does not know how he did what she saw him do.
xterra
So far, so good...
Garrette,
My error. Thanks for the correction.
(I still don't believe he does anything paranormal.)
My error. Thanks for the correction.
(I still don't believe he does anything paranormal.)
My gut tells me Remie may believe differently...Not an easy road Remie...but is anything important ever easy? And by the way I am so looking forward to sharing a pina colada (spelling correct?) with you on the island of Woos. And if not, I do appreciate the kindness and respect you've shown me in my thread and here. Peace.
wardenclyffe
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Batvette,
I will again use your analogy of someone who has great strength in an emergency, but would never be able to compete in the Olympics. I really like it because it is an effective metaphor for what we are discussing.
dlorde offered an explanation for how such things can happen. That explanation sounds plausible, but we can't really know because no one's there to test the hypothesis during the emergency situation.
But what we must also fold into the analogy is the fact that we do actually have real Olympians who compete every four years and the perform feats of strength, agility and speed that have never been recorded before. World records are broken all the time at the Olympics and at other competitions in between.
That suggests that there should be real "psychic athletes" as well. And, indeed we have many who claim that they are and they have many people who've witnessed their powers to back them up. John Edward is an obvious one, but Silva's another. I'm not familiar with his work, but it sounds like he claimed to have these abilities. If he didn't, he claimed that he could teach others to have or enhance these abilities. And I assume he did it for a price.
But, every time these "psychic athletes" are offered the chance to jump the hurdles or do a back flip or hit the bullseye, they decline. Surely, if Silva's techniques worked, one of his students would have stepped forward by now.
That's, I think, what makes people frustrated when they here another story of an amazing coincidence which is attributed to the paranormal.
If it's real, there must be a psychic Jesse Owens or Michael Phelps or Nadia Comenici. But where are they?
Ward
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
Mine says otherwise, but I'm sure Remie will let us know.
The road to belief in woo is a very easy one, which is why so many millions travel it. It's the road back to reality that's difficult as it requires not just a willingness to doubt something you'd really like to be true, but the capacity to understand difficult (and often counter-intuitive) concepts like probability theory and the effects of cognitive biases. There are many who make the journey successfully however - there are several of them contributing to this thread - so there's hope for you yet. All you really need is strength of mind.
Fast Eddie B
Philosopher
Sorry if I left that vague.
In spite of a specific offer, made in good faith, I never heard back from her or anyone.
As far as the specifics of her claim, I don't recall them. I don't even remember her name. I do remember she made other claims, such as having an energy field or such that made lights burn out. And claims of talking to ghosts.
I did not know what a "PK Wheel" was when she made the claim. Pretty sure you can search for them on YouTube, and see both credulous and explanatory demonstrations.
When I left Skeptiko, it was with a commitment to never return. My only contact now is a thread on the SGU Forum - "Is Skepiko Dead?". Alex Tsikaris (sp?) presents himself as one thing, but turns out to be something very different. It's a shame, because the site and forum had promise.
If anyone is interested, just go to the site and search for "PK wheel". I think her name just popped into my head: Sandy.
The easiest road you can take involves switching off logic and going with what feels good. No hands on the wheel required
What bugs me most about these smarmy stage performers is that in revealing what they do, their cold and hot reading, their trading phony memories for cash, in detailing how they play their slimy games, you necessarily risk disillusioning the grieving and emotionally vulnerable. This of course is entirely the fault of the charlatan, but as we've seen time and again the derision is saved for the person who points out the charade.
This is a very good point. If it's real, there has to be a few world-class psychic "athletes." And we'd know about them too; they wouldn't parrot the same old cold/hot reading schtick that a Van Praagh or an Edward trot out. No, they'd do something unique and unequivocal, and if we know anything about human nature, some would be even bigger pricks then the current crop of fakers.