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30th April 2014, 10:05 AM | #241 |
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I would have gone with hot reading. I'd have gotten your name and place of birth from one of the other spiritual channelers and then checked parish records (listings of births and deaths) to see if I could find out more about your family. I'd then try to get ahold of your birth certificate. In many US jurisdictions, birth certificates list the number of previous children from the mother. Do British birth certificates follow that format? With that information, I'd look for birth and death certificates for the older brother.
I am not insisting that what I described is exactly what happened, I am merely building on dlorde's suggestion that non-psychic explanations exist. |
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30th April 2014, 10:08 AM | #242 |
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Most of my views and statements about the spirit world come from what I remember hearing at trance lectures by the late Ursula Roberts a spiritualist medium who worked in the spiritualist association in London during the 1970's.
As It happens I do have the transcripts of a number of those lectures. I also remember another message I was given in a church by another medium. She told me I had recently done a blue and white painting, and that the spirit world had inspired me to do it. She then said I did not think much of it. I am sure I had not discussed doing this painting with anyone in the church, never the less she knew I had done one, and even that I did not like it. It is an unlikely subject for a fishing expedition, as how would she even know I painted. |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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30th April 2014, 10:10 AM | #243 |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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30th April 2014, 10:16 AM | #244 |
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Fake psychics have admitted that one method that they use is sending someone to the victim's house on some pretext. A quick glance around the exterior and interior can be very revealing. In fact, sometimes the person sent to gather information would filch a small but quite recognizable object. Weeks or months later the spiritualist would meet with victim at the spiritualist church and through sleight of hand, "rematerialize" the object . If one is not aware of the trick, it can appear quite amazing.
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30th April 2014, 10:16 AM | #245 | |||
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So do you really think that the mediums don't share information on you with each other?
Have you ever heard of Lamar Keene and his book the Psychic Mafia? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._Lamar_Keene
http://www.drspeg.com/courses/00-paranormal/tpmb.pdf
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Physical mediumship isn't very common these days as it was then because of repeated exposure of fraud. It's mostly just "messages" now. Maybe they don't make very much money from public events but they are advertising for their private readings which can be lucrative and regular, and the attention of people means a lot to some people, as well some people have convinced themselves that their frauds bring comfort to the gullible. It doesn't really matter, it would be simple to eliminate all suspicion of fraud by actually testing the mediums scientifically in a controlled setting to truly eliminate alternative explanations. This is indeed what Gary Schwartz tried to do. But sadly, he seems to have flown the coop, see the refutations of his work by Ray Hyman. I'm confused with the idea that you believe that absolute proof of survival is somehow banned by the spirit world. That's contrary to the goals of spiritualism "proof of survival" and people who worked with Gary Schwartz. But I guess if you're willing to believe anything you're willing to believe anything. |
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30th April 2014, 10:26 AM | #246 |
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I remember Thomas Johanson the former president of the spiritualist association, saying that one reason the spirit world do not provide absolute proof of their existence is that more people might commit suicide.
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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30th April 2014, 10:36 AM | #247 |
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30th April 2014, 10:42 AM | #248 |
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Well Scorpion, all you're doing is telling stories. If the average person hears a hundred such stories, it can be compelling. But the problem is that none of them are proof on their own, none of them are beyond alternative explanations, and we do not have the full facts and situation, even you cannot be sure of what you told who when despite what your memory tells you, or what information the person might have been able to find out or research on you. We can easily eliminate all of these problems by doing controlled experiments. Gary Schwartz actually tried to do this, but there are problems with his approach.
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/how_no...fe_experiments Apparently spiritualists believe that the JREF prized is rigged. Do you think that you could design a scientific test that would prove mediums are for real? |
30th April 2014, 10:50 AM | #249 |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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30th April 2014, 10:51 AM | #250 |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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30th April 2014, 10:52 AM | #251 |
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Traditionally, the spiritualist tradition discourages suicide by warning that it will put you in a dark place in the afterlife that is even worse, for a long time, (like taking your own life dooms you to hell in Christian theology) or doom you to repeat the experiences in a future life. If this were even remotely true than they wouldn't try offering any proof at all! The operation is set up to convince people that survival exists. No, this is an extremely sad excuse offered by people with a lack of creativity in their dealings with their gullible listeners. Better to stick with the two traditional excuses a) That the negative energies of the skeptics will interfere with testing and b) it's obvious to everyone who has a good heart.
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30th April 2014, 10:58 AM | #252 |
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Why should we be looking for the simplest explanation instead of the one with the most evidence? If mediums can really communicate with the dead, it should be simple for them to prove this.
You're looking at it all wrong. What is the most likely explanation for the fact that mediums cannot prove their abilities when all possibilities of guessing and fraud are removed? |
30th April 2014, 11:21 AM | #253 |
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Scorpion,
Why did you stop regularly attending the spiritualist church decades ago? And what reignited your interest in it? And why was your interest reignited enough to come here, but not go back to church? Ward |
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30th April 2014, 11:33 AM | #254 |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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30th April 2014, 11:54 AM | #255 |
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30th April 2014, 01:18 PM | #256 |
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Last edited by Daylightstar; 30th April 2014 at 01:38 PM. Reason: Redundant "this" after "taken" removed. |
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30th April 2014, 01:34 PM | #257 |
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Scorpion, considering your signature:
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A 16 inch telescope can show you more stars during the day than you can see with the naked eye during the night. Your god can not be seen, nor can the 'truth' of your claims concerning post-mortem communication through a so called medium ..... |
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30th April 2014, 05:12 PM | #258 |
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30th April 2014, 05:21 PM | #259 |
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dlorde, with regard to point 4, the medium was from out of town, and I had never seen her before. My mother had never been to the church, and was not a spiritualist.
Even this simple statement shows how difficult it is for you to use a bit of critical thought process. How do you know any of these things?? The only way to "know" is to do things in a controlled fashion, which is what we have all been suggesting here. It is irrelevant whether you knew the spiritualist or not. What would be far more interestting to know is the circumstances that led you to her. I would be very surprised if you told me you had zero contact with this church before hand. The key question, therefore, is not whether you knew the spirritualist, but whether the spiritualist knew something about you. Unless you randomly walked into a church in some never-before visited place, and just dropped in unnacnounced on some unsuspecting medium (a scenario hard to fathom, since then how would you even know the person was there or was a medium??) Then, the spiritualist had some prior knowlege of you, even if it was just a short period of time beforehand. I'd be surprised that you got some sort of meeting with this person completely unnanounced, in a setting where noone had any knowlege of you. But go ahead, surprise me! |
1st May 2014, 04:46 AM | #260 |
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The church where I had the message about my brother was a church I regularly attended. But the medium was someone I had never seen before.
However I have "dropped in on unsuspecting mediums" in other churches up and down the country, and on occasions I have still had evidential messages, even in strange churches with unknown mediums. |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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1st May 2014, 05:17 AM | #261 |
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Delurking to ask futile question:
Scorpion, is there anything we could say that might make you doubt that medium actually learned about your brother from the dead? Relurking. |
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1st May 2014, 05:18 AM | #262 |
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Excuse my ignorance, and without rereading the whole thread again, I always thought churches had priests/reverends/rabbis/etc. What do mediums do in churches?
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1st May 2014, 05:21 AM | #263 |
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"If you trust in yourself ... and believe in your dreams ... and follow your star ... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things" - Terry Pratchett |
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1st May 2014, 05:34 AM | #264 |
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Thank you - I suppose I could have Googled.
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1st May 2014, 05:36 AM | #265 |
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If you want to know the truth, I am not really sure of anything anymore.
Nor am I attached emotionally to the idea of the afterlife. I have not had so much fun that I want to live forever. The message from my brother was just one of many messages I received over the years, I refer to it because it was the most evidential, as it told me facts I did not know. As I said I gradually came to believe that some mediums are genuine, and there is a spirit world. Because if they were deceiving me they went to an awful lot of trouble for nothing. Because I only put a nominal sum in the collection plate. |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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1st May 2014, 05:38 AM | #266 |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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1st May 2014, 05:39 AM | #267 |
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There may have been some who were deliberately deceiving you but I suspect most were as honestly mistaken as you. Mediums have the same cognitive biases and fallible perceptions and memories as everybody else.
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1st May 2014, 05:47 AM | #268 |
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1st May 2014, 06:23 AM | #269 |
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"If I hadn't believed it with my own mind, I would never have seen it." - thanks sackett "If you stand on a piece of paper, you are indeed closer to the moon." - MRC_Hans "I was a believer. Until I saw it." - Magrat |
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1st May 2014, 06:24 AM | #270 |
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Oh! come on, give the man some poetic licence. Here is another verse.
You should always discriminate between the real and the unreal. God alone is real, the Eternal Substance; all else is unreal, that is , impermentant. By dicriminating thus one should shake off impermenant objects from the mind. Sri Ramakrishna |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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1st May 2014, 06:27 AM | #271 |
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Nice reply. You might fit in here after all. Being sure of anything is part of the problem we try to fight. Always have some doubt and gradually build-up a collection of things you are fairly sure about that are based-on evidence; all the while admitting those things you don't know at all.
Have a careful think about some of the posts in this thread. Pixel42's posts are usually worth reading over and over again. You might come to some other view of truth, at least a partial one. |
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"If I hadn't believed it with my own mind, I would never have seen it." - thanks sackett "If you stand on a piece of paper, you are indeed closer to the moon." - MRC_Hans "I was a believer. Until I saw it." - Magrat |
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1st May 2014, 06:44 AM | #272 |
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If I was a medium visiting a new church to drum up some interest, the first thing I'd do would be to see what I could find out about the regular attendees - names, addresses, jobs, family backgrounds, browse through local records, etc. All in a days work... then, perhaps, I'd be too busy to see the ones I couldn't dig out much about, and keen to see anyone who's details I'd uncovered.
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Simple probability tells us that we should expect coincidences, and simple psychology tells us that we'll remember the ones we notice... |
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1st May 2014, 06:49 AM | #273 |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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1st May 2014, 07:02 AM | #274 |
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1st May 2014, 07:37 AM | #275 |
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No. the point is that you are making it up. Or the person who told you this was making it up.
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1st May 2014, 07:42 AM | #276 |
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If we didn't want to know we wouldn't we here listening to, and carefully evaluating, the anecdotes of people like you and Scorpion.
Has it occurred to you that you might be the one who doesn't want to know - that the evidence on which you have based your beliefs is wholly inadequate to support them? We've made it very clear what would be needed to convince us that you are right - what would it take to convince you that you are wrong?
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1st May 2014, 08:36 AM | #277 |
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1st May 2014, 08:46 AM | #278 |
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Sincere and thoughtful people have been seeking and finding this god for 1000s of years. And delivering the message(s). It is a fact that these messages are cultural dependent, and not universal, which should be expected if there was one such overall being. There's 1000s of gods. All exactly suited to their culture, and can be significantly different from the neighbors on the other of the culture's boundary. .
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As above, but, there is "a truth". It's called the Golden Rule. That works for everybody... if only everybody would follow it. |
1st May 2014, 09:39 AM | #279 |
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There are former psychics here? I don't see how. There might be former fake psychics here, but if someone was really psychic they would know it is the truth, and they could not become a former psychic.
Well if this thread lasts long enough maybe one will turn up and contribute to it. |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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1st May 2014, 10:03 AM | #280 |
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"If you trust in yourself ... and believe in your dreams ... and follow your star ... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things" - Terry Pratchett |
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