bil

Did anyone see last night's 'Enemies of Reason'?

Dawkins was looking at alternative therapy, crystals, angels and the like. A truly depressing programme because it showed just how many people will believe any old cack without ever seriously thinking about it.

They showed a spiritualist meeting where the shaman (there's just no other word except possibly con artist) carried out one of the most blatant pieces of cold reading I have ever seen in my life.

'I have a message from someone whose name begins with C, or D, or E, or F or some other letter of the alphabet, he was in a car crash, or was it a stroke'... and so on until I could just scream.

The most horrifying part of this was that the congregation, or as I like to think of them, the 'Marks' sat thru it like a flock of sheep, with not a single one showing the slightest disquiet.

Of course, bullsh*tting people and fleecing them has always been a source of rich pickings, just look at all the shamans, priests and other con artists that leech a good living off the slow and the stupid, but nowadays it is as if people are throwing money at these people without the slightest thought in the world.

You wouldn't buy a kilo of apples without checking to see if they were ripe and unbruised, so why so uncritical?

I remember one programme that had in it one of the 'HoFs' ( hard of thinking) who had a display of crystals, all of which had 'Special Powers'. She pointed to one and announced that that particular crystal kept the room warm.

Everyone nodded and showed not the slightest concern. Personally, were I in that room my first thought would have been to feel the radiator, and if it wasn't warmer than the ambient temperautre of the room, I would have got out of that house tooty sweety. Reason being that the only thing I can think of that would have that kind of output would be a powerful source of hard radiation, and I wouldn't want to be anywhere near that without my lead underwear on.

Oh, and before one of the HoFs suggests that something else other than lethal radiation was causing the crystal to emit serious heat, then I would advise them to get hold of a shed load, because there would be a lot of money to be made, and probably a Nobel Prize into the bargain.

jimenato

HoF - new one on me!!

I'm used to the term "Woo". It can be a non evidenced belief e.g. "Homeopathy is just so much woo" or it can be the person who holds those beliefs "She's a woo - always going to mediums".

A derogatory term but is sometime held as a badge of honour by woos.

It is thought to be from the noise a ghost makes. Also, could be "Waste of Oxygen".

missile

There is only one HoF>

Mitzyboy

Yes .... only one .... something to be thankful for

whitelinen

13 years under a labour government, what do you expect?



As for Dawkins, has he never smiled? or trimmed his eyebrows?

I couldnt believe how scruffy those people were.

bil

So under this tory regime, people will become more intelligent? I've heard of Labour being blamed for some weird things, but that takes the biscuit.

Retards have been believing in astrology for thousands of years, despite it being ludicrous beyond belief.

The planets have an effect on you? What effect? The chair you are sitting on exerts more gravitational influence on you than does Mars for example.

I loved what a US commedian said. -"Consider how dumb the average person is, then realise that 50% are even dumber than that."

Last night's Dawkins was very interesting in one aspect. They were testing dowsers, using a double blind test. Not one single one did any better than guesswork, and what was amazing was that each and every one was at first flabberghasted, and then quickly rallied with a series of excuses as to how they were indeed the real deal, and that the test wasn't significant .

Not just trapped in a belief system, but delusional to boot.

bil

HoF = Hard of Finking.

As in, 'I fink, therefore I am finking. I fink........'

whitelinen

I thought the test was ridiculous and could not understand why nobody mentioned that dowsers look for bodies of underground water not half a litre in a plastic bottle above ground.

I have twice used the services of dowsers in the UK to find water on different properties and each time were successful.

Although I think astrology is hocus.pocus I do however fit the description of my star sign to a T

whitelinen

IMO The rate of regression has been deep and fast under Labour, I doubt much or indeed anything can be done to stop the rot.

jimenato

There has for many years now been a million dollar prize put up by the James Randi foundation for anyone who can prove that they can do something "supernatural" and dowsing certainly fits that description. If they can do it, they win the money. If they can't they don't win the money. Simple.

whitelinen

Dowsing has nothing whatsoever to do with anything ¨supernatural ¨otherwise the prize (if there is one cos I dont click on links) would have been claimed long ago.

HBG

Unfortunately, I didn't see the programme, but it's a subject that interests me. There's not much I believe in, certainly not the notion that one God is better than the others. But I do believe that science doesn't explain everything, and have a strange, unexplained feeling that there may be a parallel universe.

I'm not going to say any more in case someone sends round the men in white coats.

OK, one more thing then. I believe that there is a vast saloon bar in the sky for departed souls, and occasionally I hear them calling me to hurry up and join them. And the beer's free.

bil

Nope. Science explains everything, because science is about finding out what things are, where they are etc etc etc.

If there is a god, or a parallel universe, then it will possess properties. If it has properties, then those properties are measureable. Science measures, it's what it does.

HBG

If I said that I had a message back from the parallel universe (they're not supposed to send messages back), would that be sufficient scientific proof? I wrote it down at the time, It frightened the life out of me, because I had attended the funeral two weeks earlier.

bil

Proof is a serious matter. It has to be verifiable and repeatable.

I once went to a medium that was most impressive, and did no cold reading.

Near death experiences are very interesting. To demonstrate proof tho would require quite some work.