Open Your Eyes, For Me?

I need to learn to stay away from discussions on the internet.

I know that as a blogger that might seem like a stupid thing to say but going into the comments section on anything from Youtube to Memebase brings about a mood so infuriating that I can’t stop myself; the fact that it’s likely to give me a headache apparently doesn’t deter me, and so I stare into a black abyss of ignorance and wonder what the fuck is wrong with the world.

I shouldn’t, there are billions of people running around with different opinions, different attitudes to living their lives and apparently different earplugs wedged in to… well, their ears, so that they can block out as much evidence and reasonable argument as possible so that they can still hold onto points that are at their best ignorant and at their worst stupid. I don’t want to go into a downer but bloody hell, if there’s any proof that Western education still needs a lot of work, it’s the diversity of ridiculous notions that the internet lets stew in its various melting pots.

Perhaps this is partly to do with the popularity of largely USA-based websites, a country where denying evolution and climate change both is not only commonplace but the majority (at least according to some surveys, I know that they’re not always trustworthy so I won’t pretend that this is a proven fact, but it’s worryingly close to one nevertheless), and in the face of more hurricanes, terrifying data on temperature and CO2 levels in the last few decades and flooding, people still close their eyes and pretend it’s not happening. It’s gone past the point of ridiculousness now, in my opinion. People find it very easy to ignore and cherry pick data, I get that, it’s unfortunately common, but when it’s right in front of you? Ugh.

Natural Wars On Science

This is an interesting article.

I think we briefly referred to it on Teen Skepchick’s latest podcast recently (which will be coming out sometime between now and February) and I do find it depressing that some of the movements supporting politics that make sense to me come out with anti-GMO speeches and other instances of using the naturalistic fallacy as proof that something is good (and therefore anything not deemed natural is bad). I’ve talked about this before, I’m certain, yet this belief persists, bolstered by the connotations of the word ‘natural’ that you might have noticed in ‘natural products’ such as certain toiletries.

By the way, if toiletries can be natural, surely anything can be, there’s nothing natural about shoving pleasant-smelling gel into your hair, as pleasant as it might be and how distasteful most of us find it when others don’t do this.

The fact remains that there are people in every subset of the population that do not listen to reason and choose to ignore evidence that does not align with their preconceived beliefs (on an important note, when I say every subset of the population, this includes people who self-identify as skeptics and other variations of the rationalistic approach to knowledge, ironically) and generally they will believe that they are approaching these beliefs from a rational standpoint.

You can’t remove superstition entirely from humanity it would seem, and in an age rife with conspiracy theories with the internet to spread them around like wildfire it shouldn’t be a surprise that extreme views are becoming increasingly prevalent, but it should be a disappointment.

Blaming Yourself?

So I got this comment over at Teen Skepchick, in regards to April’s post about Spirit Science (a web series based on new age philosophies that makes me a sad panda). While I admit that my ego does sometimes float above the average line, I spend most of my time under it, so unless the writer is referring to the fact that I blog as proof for arrogance I don’t really see how I fit into that category. Either way, I thought it was interesting to hear someone deny that they their childhood abuse caused misery, instead putting the blame on a chakra. I know I shouldn’t be but I was seriously surprised that someone could come to this conclusion, although I am glad that they’ve managed to turn their life around. I have a big problem with victim blaming, for obvious reasons, but what do you even tell someone for whom it has worked? You’ve got me stumped.

‘Ya know some things are true whether YOU believe them or not lol
Even though you have decided chakras dont exist they in fact do. I sustained every single kind of abuse you can imagine in childhood. Systematic as well. I managed to become a productive member of society & be self sufficient but I did not understand “love” I learned survival but I had one mentally ill parent, wasnt given ANY tools.
It is through life experience & illness that I was determined to heal without drugs & that in turn led me to the esoteric.
I had to spend YEARS working to get my heart chakra opened! It was severely blocked & caused untold pain in my life. And I went along thinking it was abuse? ? Go figure.
The feeling was insane! Absolutely insane! Literally felt it inside me like I got shot by a gun! I also had to work incredibly hard for a year & a half to leave my body.
Self-esteem can only exist when you take the time to clear yourself of those things that no longer work, take pride in yourself & make a realistic plan to better your life/yourself. It is not a feeling of power over others, it is an acceptance of others, a feeling of power over your own life.
Unlike the others here I kinda like your attitude, your arrogance, your skepticism because WE NEED DIVERSITY!! While I do not agree w/you I LOVE that the world is made up of individual souls! Each one is SUPPOSED to be different. So I just hope you open your mind a tiny bit more w/each year you reside in the physical vehicle you occupy now. Because some things are true whether YOU believe it or not ) And the more bodies on this planet that ARE in touch w/each chakra in & around their body & ARE in touch w/the balance of energy or lack thereof inside themselves the better off ALL OF US will be!
P.S. If you start to understand that you are a spiritual being having a physical experience & NOT the other way around you start to understand HOW your hardships are a result of your souls past actions. So while I know it sounds crazy to believe you are responsible for your own pain (tell someone who’s miserable their sadness is their own fault-harmful?) the moment I started learning, understanding, experiencing & opening those “ports” I started owning ALL of my pain. I own my fathers abandonment, I own the family I was given, I started to take responsibility & miserable-ness went away!
Im living breathing proof it is NOT harmful to take responsibility for your own energy be it miserable or happy. Ever! And its NEVER to late to start :O)
Im grateful for the SpiritScience folks & all the others out there like them helping to spread the news. Happy Holidays’

5 Signs You Might Be In A Cult

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what makes a group a cult. Some of the most dangerous sects out there claim to be as far away from a cult as possible (*cough*theta healing*cough*) but clearly fit into that category, other people claim that the major religions of the world are cults. Let me clear things up for everyone; here are five surefire ways to find out if you’re in a cult; you probably won’t have all of these, but an extreme form of even one should be enough to make you want to get out of there.

1. Are you encouraged to isolate yourself from family members and friends that are not part of your group, having been encouraged that the group is your true family? This can follow attempts to convert those close to you, and can be followed by the threat of being kicked out of the group if you don’t set yourself free from those you love. This can also take the form of institutional hate of a group or groups, such as a race, a subset of society or an industry.

2. Is your wallet empty? Pouring your money into promises that have yet to be fulfilled should not precede pouring more of it away because it still hasn’t. If you’re paying to get something that promises results beyond what you yourself are capable of, and requires multiple, large payments, run away. If you’re paying to learn the central dogma of your group, then you’re in a cult; religious groups are at least upfront with their beliefs. If you’re a member of a church but are not permitted to know what you’re supposed to be believing in until you’ve donated by the thousands, you’ve made a mistake; they’ve been hiding their beliefs from you, that should be a pretty big sign.

3. Are you/is your partner encouraged to have sex with the cult leader? No, I’m being serious. This is much more common in smaller cults where people can more easily get away with this, but in certain messiah cults the messiah can call upon followers from whom God has demanded they have sex with. Do I even have to point out that this should be an alarm call? Amazingly enough, some stay in cults where this has happened multiple times to their wives. If this happens to you, get the hell out of there.

4. Have you been told that your group can solve all your problems? Nobody can solve all your problems, even Jay-Z had 99 problems when his life was at his peak. Be wary of anyone who offers a cure-all solution to anything. Look around you and see if anyone in the group still has those problems, it’s more than likely that they do, not matter how much they believe they are freed of them.

5. Do your group know something that nobody else does or could possibly know? No, you don’t, that’s just really unlikely. There are seven billion people in the world, someone’s going to have figured it out. If this is a doomsday thing then think seriously about the possibilities, consult experts in the fields your apocalypse is supposedly of, and you’ll probably find that it’s not coming. If this is some sort of power or gift, then, even if you dismiss the science that prevents something like curing disease with a thought, then look to the other members of the group. They will still suffer from physical ailments, and no one’s knocking on your door to get help with the millions of victims of disease in your country alone. If this gift is explained by quantum physics, its 100% wrong, quantum physics is not what you think it is.

Don’t Blasphem Me

A few days ago I made a little nod to the rationalist movement growing in India, hoping that they will put up some kind of front against Vianna Stibal’s visit next year. Well, probably the most well-known Indian rationalist, Sanal Edamaruku (some of you may remember him as the guy who bet a tantrik that he could not kill him, and then proceeded to stand there and smirk while his opponent attempted to use dark magic to kill him, for hours, on live TV. Needless to say, Sanal is still alive, or I wouldn’t be talking about this next thing) has fallen afoul of blasphemy laws in India, and may have to go to jail.

Why?

Well, what makes a miracle? One would think that to make such a bold claim about something, some sort of investigation is needed, and in the Catholic church, that’s usually the case, although the fact that they’ve made some events official miracles tells you a little something about the vetting process, mainly that its not thorough enough. Well, a weeping statue of Jesus Christ was investigated by Sanal and found to be caused by clogged plumbing, far from a miracle and more like a problem that needs fixing.

Perhaps you would think that Sanal might get a nod from the church for doing their work for them, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, instead, having refused to apologize for revealing the true nature of the ‘miracle’, he may be facing a jail sentence.

Is an apology in order? Well, probably not, seeing as people were drinking these Jesus tears to try and cure themselves of their afflictions, it’s probably a good thing that they know that this is clogged up sewage. Yet still the apology is still the only thing that will get the church to drop the charges, apparently.

Should blasphemy laws even exist?

Should the right to criticize be a human right?

Shouldn’t the public’s safety come first, even before possible hints of the divine?

Silence – Testing

Whatever you may have heard, theta healing is not, as thetahealingcentre.co.uk would have you think, ‘the practical application of quantum mechanics’, in fact anyone who tells you such a thing shows a profound misunderstanding of the most basic levels of this field, and physics in general.

According to the same website: ‘When you learn Theta Healing, you discover how to use the Theta Brainwave to reach a level of consciousness that allows you to change your emotional, mental, spiritual or physical reality instantaneously.’

It makes sense that you would be able to change your emotions, you can do that by watching a movie, seeing friends, going to a cemetery etc.

Spiritual, being a word that has different meanings for different people, is as vague as it has ever been in this sentence, but even if we ignore that there aren’t truly ‘levels of consciousness’ higher than being conscious, and what theta brainwaves actually are, being able to change your physical reality is something that we can actually test, and something that surprisingly, has never been demonstrated outside anecdotes.

If the people making money from theta healing wanted to prove that they are not the frauds that Lindsey Stock rightly claimed that they were, in my opinion, they should have jumped on this opportunity years ago. If they truly have nothing to hide, if they know that these techniques work, very public tests could be done to show whether they can truly alter physical reality, and the publicity of such an event would surely disprove claims of their fraudulence outright and on a large scale?

Rats, as well as humans and other mammals, experienced the oscillation patterns known as theta waves during REM sleep. And if we’re arguing about reaching a higher level of consciousness with these, should it not be perfectly clear that we are all less conscious when these are active during sleep, because, y’know, we’re sleeping? Those championing theta healing are living proof that you can throw a bunch of random scientific-sounding words together, devoid of their own meaning, and make a buck by leeching the wallets of those who need help the most.

And these are the people who would silence their critics?

Any reasonable court of law should be able to see which side of the argument should be facing charges here.

Silence – India

So, you can go onto the theta healing website and find out about the courses you can take to learn to become a ‘master of science’. Something tells me these are very different to the regular MSc format, or at least, the level of intellectual honesty is. I always find it hard to justify these sorts of ‘alternative treatments’ calling themselves a science, when the very background behind their ideas is that what science has come up with for the treatment of diseases does not work. Sure, science is a self-correcting process where new ideas can replace old ideas, but only when they provide a better explanation for phenomenon, and for a field as diverse and established as modern medicine, to dismiss it all with one, unproven idea proves right away that this is born from ideology, and not science.

But enough about that word, because I don’t want to continue the comparison.

Anyway, the ‘respected and loved’ Vianna Stibal, founder of this collection of strange ideas that have more money than evidence behind them, is soon to be travelling to India, where she will get the chance to sow the seeds of her ideas even further adrift.

Let’s back up a second.

Cancer, is a big thing, but people fall for that, because they’re in desperate situations. If you’re being told you can be cured when doctors say you can’t, it’s understandable that you will try anything. Theta healing offers that, and therefore takes advantage of the sick and the dying to make a buck.

But easier to dismiss claims have been made; it doesn’t take more than a google search to find a video where Vianna Stibal herself claims to have been able to make a leg grow back.

At that point, does it not become clear that there’s something fishy going on?

I know there is a growing rationalist movement in India, and I beg of them to make people aware that theta healing is a global lie before she gets to their country in 2013. Let her know that she will not be welcome to take from the sick and dying in their country. Although I doubt that will stop her doing it.

Silence – Some Background

Let me say a few words about ‘theta healing’ in brief, before I set out to do a longer, better-prepared post, because background is important, and not everyone who reads this blog was reading it when I posted my original criticisms of this ‘healing technique’ a couple of years ago, judging by the five-fold increase in my subscribership since that period, although my criticisms of people such as Vianna Stibal and Gregg Braden are probably my most googled pages (not that that says much comparing them to the googleability of the others, if that is indeed a word).

With a quick search for ‘jengajam theta’ you can find these links, but I’ll provide them anyway.

http://jengajam.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/oh-vianna/

http://jengajam.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/fuck-you-theta-healing/

Let it be known before you click on these however, that these posts are from my early days of ranting, where I don’t control my emotions as well, and I throw a few F-bombs around.

I don’t have the best internet here, so the newsnight video contained in this post on Derren Brown’s blog may not show up on here, but it’s worth linking to anyway.

http://derrenbrown.co.uk/bbc-newsnight-theta-healing-crackpot-faith-healing-movement/

Despite the unique branding, this is barely different from what Gregg Braden has been saying, and despite the ‘specifics’ that go into theta healing (a bunch of jargon mismatched to the actual science it’s pretending to reference and basically making excuses as to how it would possibly work), the quantum woo-spouting remains just as constant, and just as wrong.

It should be surprising to me, that with all of the effort that goes in to trying to help the public understanding the complicated world of quantum mechanics, that people can get away with bastardising its name in so many ways, and so many times, in so many different places. The Deepak Chopras of the world have created a monopoly with quantum as its name and increasing public ignorance as its face.

More tomorrow.

Silence

Some people like to silence their critics.

Some people have enough money to silence their critics.

Some people are cowardly enough to go through with lawsuits rather than back up their claims, and sometimes it works.

Lindsey Stock was bullied into submission by people touting dangerous claims unsupported by evidence but supported indefinitely by money and the greed that it brings.

Her blog will live on, under a different address than the one I’m linking to here, for reasons explained in the comments section, and I for one, will be speaking about Vianna Stibal and her theta healing cult again very soon.

I hope that one day, this whole mess will fade into the woodwork from whence it came, but until then, there are voices that need to be heard, and I’ll be damned if I don’t shout mine.

Understanding Gregg Braden

It seems that some people are still confused about a post I wrote about a year and a half ago, or perhaps a little earlier, about a certain guy who claims he has found the cure for cancer in the human mind. I can imagine being confused about the fact that someone would claim such a thing, but seeing as most of the confusion seems to be focused around the fact that this claim got me riled up enough to write a blog about it. I don’t believe I need to make excuses for thinking people should get proven treatments for cancer instead of wishing really hard, but for the record, if you think your friend died of cancer because they just didn’t want to live enough, I wonder if you even understand the concept of empathy.

The person making the claims in this case, is no other than Gregg Braden; author, public speaker, COD.

I doubt there’s a person reading this that doesn’t understand that cancer is a horrible thing to have to deal with, and many of you will no doubt understand that desperate times lead to desperate measures. Try to put yourselves in the shoes of some of these people; when you are given a deadline for your life, sometimes desperation ensues, people will look for answers wherever it seems that there might be some, and so the responsibility falls on the people claiming they have a cure to prove it; because if it can’t be proven, then they shouldn’t be dangling false hope in front of people who are suffering. Does it even need to be said that that’s immoral? Should that not go without saying?

Well, apparently not.

This man’s words are dangerous, and as a public speaker, he’s throwing them around a lot, using peoples’ misunderstandings of quantum mechanics and the way the universe works beyond the microscope to confuse people into thinking what he’s talking about makes sense. But I’ve said it once, and I’ll keep saying it until everyone understands, frequencies and vibrations are well understood things in physics, they do not mean you can do anything you want, there are limits on the laws of physics and we can see those in the very frequencies and vibrations you claim prove that The Secret is a legitimate guide to getting what you want.

Self-help books are a topic for another day, but the school of thought that’s scarily on the increase at the moment, that anything is possible if you want it hard enough, is an insult to everyone who has ever been bullied, who has ever been discriminated against, who has ever suffered at the hands of another, who has ever had to fight with a mental disorder, who has ever felt like they didn’t belong, and yes, who has ever been diagnosed with cancer.

Gregg Braden is not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.