Strange how you assured everyone you were ready to let your spiritualism thread die because you were resigned to being unable to make your point. If my memory is correct, you even disavowed trying to establish that you were right. Then you hijack the thread that was justifiably split from yours, to continue trying to claim that your critics are wrong and only you can be right. It seems you just can't stand not being the center of attention.
Unless all you people have spent over twenty years attending spiritualist churches like I have, you are not qualified to have an opinion.
Nonsense. Unless you've spent forty years, as I have, studying the quirks of religion, the principles of critical thinking, and the methods people use to fool one another,
you are not qualified to have an opinion. Your opinion is simply based on a different sort of experience than that of your critics regarding the same phenomenon. Steeping yourself credulously in something is not always the best way to inform a defensible opinion.
In those years I received many evidential messages, Accurate information only I could have known. It was more than hot or cold reading.
The whole point of hot and cold reading is to convince the rube that only he could know the information that was presented, and therefore that the reader is a miracle-worker. It's really no different than a stage magician going to extreme and creative lengths to preclude all the ways in which the audience might think he really isn't sawing the nice lady in half. All it requires is him thinking of one way the rube doesn't imagine it could otherwise be done. As we belabored in the thread where this discussion belongs, you really don't know the extent to which those techniques can be practiced, nor the degree to which they are successful. Since your critics approached the problem not from the point of view of belief in the claims, but from a position of being willing, able, and qualified to test those claims, they naturally arrived at a different conclusion than you did.
But the question is less about which side of a debate is properly informed by experience and more about which side has the best evidence. Our best evidence is the admission from the practitioners in general that they use a variety of tricks to achieve seemingly miraculous feats, and that nature of these tricks isn't that hard to discover. Your best evidence is just more claims, specifically that there exists a vast alternate reality that can be seen and heard only by specially anointed people, a world that cannot display any logical consistency and can be described only by silly bastardizations of sciency-sounding terms, yet manages to have real (albeit somehow still undetectable) effects on the physical world while deftly remaining magically hidden from scientists eager to discover it.
It's really not hard to see what the most defensible answer is here.
