Psychics and Police Work

It's not just religious people who are closed-minded. As I alluded to in my recent article on the importance of critical thinking, skeptics can exhibit a mindset remarkably similar to that of a Christian who fails to understand the difference between paranormal powers and stage magick. A prime example is this article from Slate, which purports to debunk the claim that psychics help police solve crimes in response to a report that California psychic Pam Ragland was able to locate the body of a murder victim when police had failed to do so.

The issue of psychics aiding police investigation is contentious and complex. Researchers who have studied actual criminal case data agree that most people who claim to be psychics are unable to offer helpful information. At the same time, there are a few individuals who seem to produce results that are better than chance. The possibility may exist that Ragland could be one of those people, but one lucky guess does not make a pattern. I would expect a real skeptic to make this same argument - most psychic tips aren't helpful to police, and you can't infer much from a single incident, even a high-profile one. Instead, the Slate article offers this:

Yet another example of the mystical properties of the universe? No, but it’s certainly another example of the gullibility (or willful ignorance) of the news media. I’m willing to accept that Pam Ragland helped find Terry Smith’s body. I’m even willing to accept that Riverside County authorities believe she used psychic powers to direct her search. But I am beyond certain that, despite what Ragland says and the authorities might believe, psychic intuition had absolutely nothing to do with the discovery of Smith’s body.

How do I know this? Because psychics don’t exist. Psychic powers are not a real thing. A psychic cannot help a detective solve a crime, because there is no such thing as a legitimate psychic. And it’s dangerous and wrong to report otherwise. Pretending that mystics and "intuitives" have something real to offer criminal investigations gives false hope to desperate people, and it’ll just end up wasting time and resources that would’ve been better spent on actual investigative techniques.

Bathroom Witchcraft

Tanzania's Daily News reports that experts have recently been consulted regarding the role of witchcraft in bathroom and toilet accidents. Thankfully for those living in fear of their restroom facilities, they concluded that such deaths are in fact the result of normal accidents rather than evil spells. This suggests that Tanzanian resources could be better applied towards enforcing modern building codes than in trying to obtain magical protection for the nation's bathrooms.

Giving living examples, some of the Dar es Salaam residents interviewed by this paper said that according to their experience, in rare cases does one escape serious injuries after falling in the bathroom or toilet, while others brushed it off as mere accidents which can occur anywhere.

"Three years ago, a neighbor of mine dies on the spot after falling the bathroom while taking a shower, and a year later my brother-on-law also died after suffering a similar fate," said Filipo Siraju, a resident of Tegeta on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam.

He said that with the death of the neighbor, he ruled it as a normal accident, but after his brother-in-law died under similar circumstances, he started having serious worries. He told our reported that after the two deaths, he got to lear of similar deaths which occurred in the same fashion, and a relative later informed him that in most cases, these deaths are related to dark forces.

However, retired medical doctor Amos Mwakilasa disagreed, noting that falls in the bathroom can in fact be deadly and when they are health problems such as high blood pressure, which can increase the risk of a concussion or internal blood clot, are often to blame. And as in most other countries around the world, the falls themselves are usually caused by wet tile floors, which can be extremely slippery. Funny how that works.

Critical Thinking Fail

If you ever find yourself wondering how fundamentalists could possibly see the world that way that they do, look no further than this article. Author Dan Delzell is a Christian concerned about magicians being misled and corrupted by evil spirits. And by magician he means both occultists and stage performers, because as far as I can tell he thinks they are one in the same. That is, he apparently believes that stage illusionists are actually working with paranormal forces. I expect James Randi would find that pretty bizarre - as do I. As an example, Delzell pulls up stage magician Dynamo's recent double decker bus levitation illusion (warning: linked article contains spoilers) as the sort of supernatural occurrence he's trying to warn readers against.

I had never heard of the magician, Dynamo, until I read about how he floated alongside a double-decker bus in London recently. I watched the video. Personally, I think it was legit. I believe this was a paranormal event and an authentic example of levitation. But it's not like this sort of thing is completely unheard of today.

Whether the levitation is experienced by young girls playing a dangerous occult "game" at a slumber party, ("Light as a feather, Stiff as a board") or by street magicians as shown on YouTube videos, paranormal things happen when people engage in practices that are rooted in sorcery, magic and witchcraft. Many magicians and other occultists have experienced levitation and various forms of supernatural power. These sorcerers typically cast spells or perform other rituals in an attempt to conjure the power to accomplish these feats. It is becoming more and more commonplace to see such expressions of magical performance.

What most of these magicians do not realize, however, is that the power to do such things only appears to be under their control. These magical performers are actually being duped by beings with superior intelligence to their own. Just as some magicians engage in illusion, so do the spirits which seduce magicians to go deeper and deeper into their craft. It is incredibly enticing, especially when the performers start to get high on the attention it brings them. While the spellbinding feats such as levitation are very often real, these "abilities" are not under the ultimate control and power of the magician.

Politicians Who Meditate

Meditation has been found to both reduce stress and expand awareness, and there are few who could benefits from those effects more than members of the United States Congress. Congressional approval ratings have been low for many years, and over the last two decades harsh polarization between the two major parties has been the norm. Republican gains in 2010 gave their party control of the House of Representatives while Democrats retained control of the Senate, creating a divided congress that has passed little major legislation since that time. Salon has an article up about the so-called "mindfulness caucus," a group of legislators who have taken up meditation.

This year saw gains for bona fide Buddhists, with Mazie Hirono becoming the first to enter the Senate in history, and with fellow Buddhist Hawaiian Colleen Hanabusa in the House. And from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, to health-conscious Bill Clinton, to redeemed Southern Republican lawmaker Mark Sanford, a growing number of politicians and the people they employ are getting turned on to the benefits of meditation, in general.

“If more people meditiated, we probably would have less arguing, less animus, physically, mentally, and legislatively, and we’d probably have a lot more effective legislation because people would be coming from a much more balanced place when they’re doing their jobs as legislators,” said Los Angeles Democratic Rep. Tony Cardenas, who has been meditating twice a day for a little over a year (at least when his schedule allows).

Many of those involved are Christian rather than Buddhist, but there's nothing wrong with that. Contemplative Christianity has a long history of meditators inspired by Western rather than Eastern esotericism, and studies have shown that the benefits of meditation accrue regardless of the practitioner's religious foundation. Contemplative practitioners have the advantage that they actually are doing spiritual practice, unlike those who do little more than attend church services.

The mindfulness caucus is small, and unless it grows substantially I doubt it will do much to change the tone in Washington. On the other hand, I'm certainly open to be proven wrong. Lawmakers with more enlightened perspectives certainly can't hurt.

School Yoga Lawsuit Fails

So the Poor Oppressed Christians believe that stretching is inherently religious. That is, it does not explicitly support Christian privilege, which makes it fundamentally pagan or at the very least irredeemably evil. On those apparent grounds, two San Diego parents sought to ban secular yoga classes taught at local schools for violating the separation of church and state. Fortunately, Superior Court Judge John S. Meyer rejected this logic - or, I suppose, the complete lack thereof.

Meyer sided instead in the Monday ruling with administrators from the Encinitas Union School District who argued the practice while often religious is taught in a secular way to promote strength, flexibility and balance. The judge said parents who objected relied on personal opinions, some culled from Internet searches. "It's almost like a trial by Wikipedia, which isn't what this court does," said Meyer, who took nearly two hours to explain a decision that explored yoga's Indian roots and philosophy.

The judge emphasized that the school district stripped classes of all cultural references, including the Sanskrit language. The lotus position was renamed the "crisscross applesauce" pose. Dean Broyles, an attorney for Encinitas parents Stephen and Jennifer Sedlock, said he would likely appeal.

Refering to lotus as the "crisscross applesauce" pose is so stripped of its original context that it just sounds stupid. To my way of thinking this shows that the district made every effort to ensure that nothing religious or even reflective of Indian culture was mentioned in the classes - which, by the way, families could opt out of. Still, for the Poor Oppressed Christians that's never enough. Hindus do these stretching exercises, so even if they are presented in a neutral context their kids are going to get heathen cooties or something by osmosis.

As usual, it's the hypocrisy that drives me nuts the most about these folks. When atheists file lawsuits to prevent authority figures in schools from leading sectarian prayers, the "separation of church and state" is a myth created by liberal activist judges that must be challenged at every turn. But the moment the Poor Oppressed Christians see anything that doesn't support their privilege, they go running to the courts offering up the exact same arguments as their atheist opponents.

Atheists Just Like Everyone Else

A study from a Tennessee university has reached the completely obvious conclusion that atheists exhibit the same distribution of personality types that believers do. In other words, people are people. Funny how that works. The study found that non-believers can be broken down into six basic groups spanning a range of personality types that are also found among religious adherents.

“Previous research and studies focusing on the diverse landscape of belief in America have continually placed those who profess no belief in a God or gods into one unified category infamously known as the ‘religious nones,’” reads the report’s overview. “This catch-all category presented anyone who identified as having “no religion” as a homogenous group in America today, lumping people who may believe in God with the many who don’t.”

The University of Tennessee researchers found that, on the contrary, religious non-believers actually break down into groups. The study identified six types of non-believers: Intellectual Atheist/Agnostics (IAA), Activist Atheist/Agnostics (AAA), Seeker Agnostics (SA), Antitheists, Non-theists and Ritual Atheist/Agnostics (RAA).

Among believers, the Intellectual type would seem to correspond to individuals who are is drawn to theology and philosophy, seeking to understand the divine through intellectual means, and the Activist type to those who are primarily motivated by social justice concerns. Likewise, the Seeker type corresponds to those who are drawn to contemplative religious practice, and the Ritual type to those who are attracted to complex and involved liturgies.

Eben Alexander Debunked

When Eben Alexander's book Proof of Heaven came out I initially found the story circulated by his publisher potentially compelling. Alexander claimed that much like the events fictionalized in the film Flatliners, he experienced a detailed vision of the afterlife while in a coma. During that time, doctors monitoring his condition detected no brain activity. At first the story sounds like solid evidence of out-of-body consciousness, but several caveats have emerged following the book's publication.

The first is that Alexander's vision does not exactly match up with the Christian concept of Heaven. He had a classic near-death experience consisting of a tunnel of white light leading to a bright and awe-inspiring place in which he felt the presence of the divine. Despite the book's title, Alexander's experience fits the general New Age description of the afterlife just as well as it does that of Christianity. Alexander just happens to be Christian. The thing is, so is most of America, and the title is just savvy marketing. It apparently worked; the book has sold over 15 million copies. My guess is that the same book titled Proof of an Afterlife would not have done nearly as well.

The second caveat came to my attention when it was revealed that Alexander wrote his book over a period of many months surrounding his emergence from the coma. Memory is not fixed or necessarily reliable, especially when recalling altered states of consciousness. When it became clear that the the account was not written right away, that threw up a red flag because it is entirely possible that events remembered long after the fact can be jumbled or even completely made up. So the time delay means that the account could have been fabricated, even if Alexander himself believed that what he was writing was true.

Now a new article published in Esquire raises a third and probably fatal caveat to Alexander's paranormal claims. Not only was his coma medically induced rather than spontaneous, but he was clearly at least somewhat conscious while his doctors were bringing him out of it. During that time he certainly exhibited brain activity, which easily could account for his experience. The article is behind a pay wall, but Yahoo News has an excerpt:

The Real Bigfoot?

Back in February I covered the story of the DeNovo Scientific Journal, a publication apparently created for the sole purpose of publishing a research paper by geneticist Melba Ketchum regarding the supposed sequencing of bigfoot DNA. As I noted at the time, the trouble with this is that publishing your own paper in your own scientific journal bypasses the process of peer review and as such cannot meaningfully be called scientific. The whole point of peer review is to allow other researchers to check your findings, to rule out any possibility of experimental error that might happen in any individual study.

Yesterday science blogger Eric Berger published his account of having Ketchum's "bigfoot DNA" analyzed by another geneticist - that is, performing the sort of peer review that would be necessary to validate that bigfoot indeed represents an unknown species.

I am first and foremost a journalist, and I figured if there was even a 1 percent chance that the Bigfoot evidence was real, it was worth my time to check the story out.

So I agreed to be an intermediary between Ketchum and a highly reputable geneticist in Texas, whom I trusted and knew personally. I also knew that this geneticist was first and foremost a scientist, and if there was even a 1 percent chance the Bigfoot evidence was real, he’d want check out the story. I asked, and he was willing to approach the evidence with an open mind.

(Why am I maintaining my source’s anonymity? Because some of his peers would question his engagement on such a topic, believing it unworthy of valuable research time. But make no mistake, he is a top-notch scientist at the top of his field.)