Topic: Atheism BS (Read 5929 times)

On a side note here some real research getting impressive results on the global consciousness

I wonder how much acid someone has to take to get any "physic ability's".

Historically, Mohammed flew up to heaven for a visit on a mythical animal. That is what some say anyway. Any demonstration must be done under controlled conditions. That is what makes it a scientific experiment vs. a TV show. The million dollar challenge states that "Only an actual performance of the stated nature and
scope, within the agreed upon limits, will be accepted. Anecdotal accounts or records of previous events are not acceptable."

The benchmark will also be a lot higher than "highly significant results". Mr. Randi can produce those results by trickery alone. When I saw him debunking horoscopes, the audience (by show of hands) scored him at 90+% when they read their personalized star chart. That is until he asked them to look at the star chart of the person next to them. They were all identical charts of course.  

There are lots of TV shows that feature such stuff. Scientist do not watch TV to make discoveries. The person will have to state what they think they can do, then do it under controlled conditions. That means no audience, no one else in the room. They will not even be allowed in the room before the demonstration. These are important factors. James Randi knows all the tricks about having a mole in the audience, for example.
You can find an application on his website. It is straightforward. But again, no one has ever passed the test or any controlled test. Ever.

Application: http://web.randi.org/the-million-dollar-challenge.html

Oh, and here is a show about him and what he does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MFAvH8m8aI

People will do anything for money. especially scam idiots.

Well, Randi's bonds may be worthless (nobody knows who is the underwriter)... But if you will promise to pay one bitcoin, I will surely provide a reference to confirm that this demonstration historically took place to your satisfaction; first let's confirm we are on the same page and that the evidence will be acceptable:

Can you agree that carrying out experiments with psychics on television with a very precisely determined pre-agreed protocol, followed exactly, and getting highly significant results, would be one such example/demonstration?

At that point, would skeptics have any cause for refusing to accept the results as valid?

What Dank is going to do it LOL.

That is the most convincing argument for me. NEVER EVEN ONE TIME IN HISTORY did anyone ever demonstrate any kind of psychic ability. Not one damn time! What does that tell me? I'll even thrown in a bitcoin with James Randi's offer of a million dollars. For those not familiar with him, he is the worlds greatest psychic and the first to tell you that it is all bull shit. He has a hilarious act that shows how easy it is to convince people that he can read minds or predict the future. It is a skill and an art that involves understanding how people think rather than anything supernatural.
It's weird to me that people can believe something that has never even been done once. If you think he's wrong, simply show it and your a millionaire! Plus one BTC from me!

Why do skeptics agree to a protocol, only to dismiss it so casually when it is precisely fulfilled? See linked reference below...

I notice the usual Humean claims about witness unreliability, that people get confused, or forget things, or exaggerate. This doesn't begin to account for the detailed visual descriptions recorded by a variety of researchers.


If you do understand the context, such explanations are utterly lame - the desperate gambit of a clever defense lawyer with a patently guilty client and nothing to lose.

It's very hard to understand how a serious minded, objective person could take these sorts of 'explanations' at all seriously. One is left with the feeling that they are permissible because the alternative is just so flat out impossible that virtually any alternative scenario will do, no matter how implausible.

A good link to get an idea of the context.
Unengaged, implausible, illogical

Those reforms were going to happen whether or not.

P.S the reason we have 2 day weekends is because of Sunday for Christians and Saturday the Sabbath for Jews not because of some commie but because of religion so your welcome.

Theocracies doesn't cultivate IQ. But you are linking it backwards, the status of a country is a reflect of its people. If its people is dumb it will remain in the shit.
Patronize them and blame US, as if it got to what is by magic, improves nothing, it's just the typical loser excuse.

Search for that claim that they are making and you will find there the data to back it up. A maxim of law is "No one can rightly understand any part until he has read the whole again and again". So you have to go to the source and review the data, because that is where the data is located. I reference its entirety.

I do not understand how a perception itself can be "baseless", since there was a valid methodology employed which did lead to obscure statements later confirmed as valid. As far as valid methodologies go, case studies have their own validity. Quantitative methods also exist.\

For example, Dr. Hodgson was so far from being credulous that he detected and exposed many spurious phenomena, so his psychological conditioning was sound. It is not clear how perceptions can be baseless in someone of sound mind.

Intelligent interaction with an aware personality included direct response to questions, comments about local activity and reference to prior activity. If these are baseless perceptions, then it strains the mind to imagine how they were concocted without deception on the part of the skeptical researcher.

"While it is tempting to contrive exotic alternative explanations, at some level of complexity, it becomes simpler to include this example amongst the collection of experiences indicating survival."

This is from a public debate with Rupert Sheldrake on telepathy - where we note the skeptic's refusal even to watch a relevant clip that Sheldrake was showing to support his case. Some of the links are broken but available on archive.org
Unengaged, implausible, illogical

I must admit, the study linking religiosity and IQ, if that's what we're talking about here, was severely flawed because it was more of a link between poverty, access to education, nutrition, and IQ

Again, you cannot demand that someone else present the data, you have to as you are the one asserting something to be true. Rambling subjective tales peppered with pseudo-scientific fallacious statements do not qualify as data.


No, that is not quantitative data, it is misrepresentative and dishonest.
Let me give you an example:


The first half of the first sentence consists of a reference to 'anomalous' voices and images. Well 'anomalous' suggests that which is being experienced by a person is not to be expected, namely, aural and visual halucinations or dreams, which is exactly what is to be expected given that our brains provide us with aural and visual sensory experiences when we are asleep, so unconscious and/or dying brains are just as likely to induce similar.

The second half of the first sentence relies on the dishonest use of the described 'fact' to run on into an assertion that is stated as accepted fact, when it is not. The 'mundane' explanations, that which explains without needing to resort to the 'paranormal', have indeed explained the existence of the aural and visual experiences of the unconscious and/or dying.

The second sentence references images of a 'discarnate' person, well that describes a person without a physical form, otherwise known as, an imagined one.

The third and final sentence is just so epically dishonest that it unintentionally discredits its own argument. There is no evidence for the existence of paranormal 'EVP', none. This means that, considering the sentence ends by stating that this 'EVP' "provides most of the supporting evidence for survival", we can readily disregard any claims towards there being anything like sufficient reasoning or evidence for 'survival'.


Now, as I already said, in that I am not sure if you are genuinely unaware of the intellectually dishonest methods you employ to assert your side of the argument, I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Firstly, you are appealing to authority, because you want the assertions made by this 'respected' researcher to be accepted because he is 'respected', not because you are citing a valid methodology employed by him in his research.

Let me give you an example:
Christians and Muslims and Hindus and many other believers in the ooky and the spooky, like to cite the instances of 'respected' scientists, who work in various fields but who possess personal belief systems similar to their own, yet may have achieved great successes in their work, leading to the false argument that, because they are scientists, then their belief systems must, therefore, have some degree of validity.

Wrong.

Personal beliefs are, exactly that, opinions without sufficient data for them to qualify as fact and are often wildly speculative and baseless perceptions arising from psychological conditioning that prevents them from recognising the important difference between the reality they are capable of applying critical thinking to in their work and the 'special pleading' that they require of their beliefs, meaning they demand their personal beliefs not be held to the same standard of analysis as, well, everything we know about reality.

For you to then dishonestly claim that I said he was a 'serial fraudster' and to quickly tack on that I must provide for extraordinary evidence to support this 'elaborate claim', leads me to suspect you are being intentionally deflective and merely resorting to the same tactic you have employed from the beginning, asserting something to be accepted fact and then demanding that your opponent in this debate have to then go off and hunt through a haystack of dubious 'data' and fallacious reasoning in order to debunk each and every piece of it.


I'm not implying there could be unknown methodological flaws in the experiments, I'm saying that I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the methodology employed is entirely flawed. I can confidently state this because, if these experiments could actually withstand critical analysis from the actual scientific community, it would be GLOBAL news of staggering proportion.


No, again you ask for me to go through the information in these cases when it is you who needs to be able to prove sufficient controls and methodology for the experiment concerned to be considered of sufficient high standard for the results to be considered objective and reasonable.


Firstly, it's not 'science', it's pseudoscience, relying on erroneous and dishonest presentation of experimental data that is grossly flawed from the start.

Secondly, actually you are wrong, in EVERY field of science, positive experimental results are absolutely criticised through peer-review if the data cannot be considered reliable indications of what is concluded.

One final thing, regarding all these Doctorates bandied about by the proponents of that site, Psychology is not a science any more than Philosophy is.

These aren't evidence of anything. Roll some dice a million times, and you will come out with a few very unlikely combinations. It's just a matter of statistics that you'll end up with a few coincidences, a few unbelievable stories. And of course such stories mostly get exaggerated and overplayed, if not outright invented, in sources like the ones you cite. None of the effects you presume to claim have ever been demonstrated in a controlled environment, through no lack of trying, and everything else is unreliable anecdote.

To be sure, I can totally defer to anything and you can choose to disengage at that point.

I will not pick quantitative data to present here. I will point you to some good researchers and websites, and the rest I will do at my pleasure. You mine the data; I am not your ASIC.

From what I can tell, quantitative data is found here and elsewhere on this site:
http://atransc.org/theory/survival_hypothesis.htm
This claim is mentioned--maybe it will interest you, and you will engage the data, or maybe not:

I am not appealing to authority; rather, I am demanding that you show that a respected researcher (e.g. Hyslop) is a serial fraudster, as you have claimed, since this is quite an extraordinary and elaborate claim.

If you don't rely on fraud then you still have to provide an explicit doubt; you cannot imply that there could be unknown methodological flaws in the experiments since it is impossible for any scientist to defend his work against that type of criticism. One of Hyslop's cases for your reference:
http://www.aeces.info/Top40/Cases_51-75/case56_soule-soul.pdf

If you think my use of "experiment" is too broad, then find quantitative studies on your own; this case study is seen to be powerful evidence once you purge yourself of elaborate presumptions such as deception on the part of the researcher. I will gladly discuss the controls and methods for this case, and attempt to refute any alleged flaws.

In no other field of science would a positive experimental result be criticized because there might be sources of errors that no one can think of. Consider this before posting or repeating any further criticism.

You ever heard of the 'Appeal to authority' fallacy?

It's when someone claims a position to be reasonable on the basis that a person supporting said position is highly qualified in some degree.

Just because someone has a PhD is does not render all they claim to be valid or reasonable.



Present actual data. Present a position. You cannot simply defer to a website consisting of unreliable data and questionable anecdotal tales.

Why is a professor's documented research classified as an anectdotal tale?

I had presumed that reputable professors' research gets the benefit of the doubt in intellectual circles. Was I wrong? If so, then why should we presume fraud instead of basic validity?

Yeah, I'm sure you'd be happy to claim that your assertions are on equal footing with objectively reasoned positions.

Let me make this real simple for you. When debating, you cannot simply point to a raft of stories claiming evidence of the ooky and the spooky and demand that we debunk them for you.

Your role in this debate is to present a well reasoned position that consists of objective data able to withstand critical analysis.

Links to shonky anecdotal tales does not qualify. That isn't 'presenting your case', that is putting the burden on us to disprove something that is not reliable data in the first place.

Post data that is not subjective or anecdotal and then it can be properly considered. We aren't the ones making a claim for something, you are, so you have to describe a reasonable hypothesis that is grounded in objectivity, not fantasy and wishful thinking from a website that is devoted to the desperate act of pretending it has evidence that we still exist as a sentient consciousness after total brain death.

Please see my edit:

To discuss two cases is not a really big deal, dude!  

You can feel free to present the extraordinary proof of your blanket statement (maybe I missed it in your post), but absent such proof I will need you to justify the consequences of your claim and blanket statement with some extraordinary evidence (of alleged widespread intellectual fraud that evades detection).

There is a valid, objective argument to be made for the survival hypothesis, and it is certainly true that many classes of phenomena unite in establishing the proof.

How do you know that what I post is intellectual fraud if you have not looked at the circumstances under which the evidence was obtained?

How will you know if I have proven something without looking at the evidence?

Do you understand how elaborate your fraud explanations would have to be to explain these cases? Any reasoned intellectual would demand extraordinary evidence of a very high caliber for intellectual fraud of such scale.

At this point, it is your choice to respond to me or not; we can go our separate ways and be perfectly happy with the "amount" of evidence we have examined at present. That would be great!