Philosophical Vegan Forum

I am generally confused on how Christians prove hell real. If you can prove it real, do it.

There are many channeled messages that "prove" the existence of hell.. Not of an eternal hell that christians claim, but certainly of a painful existence in another dimension. It seems only natural to me that emotions such as hate, anger, apathy and fear should cause pain in the person that holds on to such emotions, and that those emotions will be reflected in your environment.


This is a channeling of a woman in hell. It is really quite an emotional channeling, even the channel has to cry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quZ68Ws7q-s

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: This is a channeling of a woman in hell. It is really quite an emotional channeling, even the channel has to cry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quZ68Ws7q-s

He keeps rubbing his toes, it's distracting. Why?
Note to self: If ever on camera, be sure to wear shoes to avoid idle toe massage.


That said: every well examined case of channeling has been demonstrated to be false, or fraud. That is, the person either did research on the historical data they talk about, or when any details (if given) are looked up they turn out to be wrong, or like prophecies, so vague that anything can be interpreted to fit.
Without details, it's unfalsifiable, and any time there are details which can be confirmed from spirits, they have the success ratio of dumb luck.

I'm not saying these people are deliberately lying (most cases are not of people who are cheating and have looked up information), I think most sincerely believe they're channeling and don't realise they're making things up as they go. They're fooling themselves, though.

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/fakers_an ... ho_try_for

James Randi wrote:You must know that most of the people, the vast majority of people who come to be tested for the million-dollar prize, are innocent. They’re self-deluded. They’re not the fakers. Oh, I’ve had a few of those, but I get rid of them. I point where the trick is, good-bye, and they’re gone. But very few. Most of them are very innocent, so innocent that when you ask them, “How successful will this test be?” They always say, “One-hundred percent. I never miss.” That’s an easy test to do. As soon as they miss one . . . arrivederci. Goodbye. Out of here.

It would be so easy to provide conclusive evidence of this stuff if even an iota of it were true -- I would love to have evidence of this, it would expand my world immensely -- but it just doesn't exist.
Does absence of evidence mean evidence of absence? Sometimes: yes. It depends on how hard we look, and professional science already went down this road many decades ago in the days of Houdini when spiritualism was experiencing a revival. It was a dead end, nothing but hoaxes and nutcases; it wasted a lot of time and a lot of money.
At a certain point you have to respect parsimony, and give up looking for these things because the money we're spending is better used on other causes (curing cancer, maybe?).

If you believe these things are true, though, I would be glad to help you design a test. And if you can prove it, then you'll have started a whole new field of science.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:There are many channeled messages that "prove" the existence of hell.. Not of an eternal hell that christians claim, but certainly of a painful existence in another dimension. It seems only natural to me that emotions such as hate, anger, apathy and fear should cause pain in the person that holds on to such emotions, and that those emotions will be reflected in your environment.


This is a channeling of a woman in hell. It is really quite an emotional channeling, even the channel has to cry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quZ68Ws7q-s

I call bullshit. There is absolutely nothing that changes my religious beliefs in that video. Nde's are bullshit, and so is the Bible.

Considering that the only way described in the xtian "holy" book that one could ever go there is after death (and some sort of judgement by an "all loving father figure" and his rejection of you) one could "find out" by dying, and only by dying. Rather convenient...
So, no, as per the game rules that the Christians follow in their PHB, there would be no way to prove hell's existence during life. Not even a natural 20 roll will sway the "ultimate DM" of the universe.

I would just like to make a few minor points on your post and then look at what are the problems with constructing experiments. I would love to be able to construct a good experiment, but we do have a weak signal and strong noise. Here is an interview by Richard Dawkins with a self professed medium, Craig Hamilton Parker, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppQtA90c5wk which puts forth a number of interesting anecdotes as well as general comments on testing, etc. Just for fun you can see a discussion I had 2 years ago in the comments.

brimstoneSalad wrote:

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: This is a channeling of a woman in hell. It is really quite an emotional channeling, even the channel has to cry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quZ68Ws7q-s

He keeps rubbing his toes, it's distracting. Why?
Note to self: If ever on camera, be sure to wear shoes to avoid idle toe massage.

Didn't bother me :p it's nice to be relaxed, and later the cameras zoom in to just show his head and shoulders. Could you tell me whether you watched the whole thing or just the beginning?

That said: every well examined case of channeling has been demonstrated to be false, or fraud. That is, the person either did research on the historical data they talk about, or when any details (if given) are looked up they turn out to be wrong, or like prophecies, so vague that anything can be interpreted to fit.
Without details, it's unfalsifiable, and any time there are details which can be confirmed from spirits, they have the success ratio of dumb luck.

How would we go about quantifying the success ratio of dumb luck? Obviously with a finite amount of options, such as playing cards or whatever, we can easily get a chance distribution... But how would we "partition" reality, when a channel receives an image of a household item, which turns out was an agreed upon token to signify continued existence when the spirit was still on earth (as in the Richard Dawkins video). Just 1 over the average # of different household items in a household? How did the medium know it was a household item? Just 1 over all different "items" in the world then? :p

Or in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g74znWzyRTU
What are the chances to guess a nickname right and all the other things?

This is another channeling with Anto Klobucar and Allan John Miller:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUPZVKnENx0?t=1m00s
Here the spirit claims to have died in a bus accident in the Andes and drowned, 5 years ago from the channeling (2014), being 16 when she died and being English, and she calls herself Jess.

I investigated this some time ago...
After using this site: http://www.mapreport.com/citysubtopics/ ... a-d-c.html with bus accidents & vehicles plunged...
I found this article: http://www.scotsman.com/news/gap-year-t ... -1-1163766

There is no one called Jess amongst them, also they were killed directly on impact, not by drowning - the girls were around 19, not 16... There are some other bus crashes on that site, but none mention British casualties. Here are other crashes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ... 2%80%9309)
It could be he just makes a number of mistakes in the details, because as the Richard Dawkins medium points out too, that the communication is largely based on feelings, thoughts and emotions, rather than expressive language.

An often proposed explanation for mediums of good faith getting things correct is that they subconsciously use information they have subconsciously retained from other sources. It is of course possible that Anto saw a newspaper article of the event in case. It could be an explanation for getting some things right, and others wrong: him having like a partial memory of a newspaper article - or it could be that it was another bus crash. Or that he was connecting to the people from this article, but rather makes some mistakes. If the way it works is that he has to feel how old the person is rather than get a definitive answer, that could be an explanation. And perhaps the girl has adopted another name... Which kind of sucks as an explanation... Also, drowning is a rather clear sensation that in my opinion would be well communicated through mediumship. So possibly we would have to look for another crash than the one I found.

A hypothesis that all accurate information from a medium somehow was accessed through subconscious memory seems rather untestable to me too, and ad hoc. How do we test whether someone remembers something subconsiously? If we can't test it, the latent-memory-hypothesis remains as an easy out-clause for a skeptic at any time - no matter how accurate the information is.

I'm not saying these people are deliberately lying (most cases are not of people who are cheating and have looked up information), I think most sincerely believe they're channeling and don't realise they're making things up as they go. They're fooling themselves, though.

It's good that you trust that most people are sincere. Many people will do their channeling for free, or by donation.

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/fakers_an ... ho_try_for

James Randi wrote:You must know that most of the people, the vast majority of people who come to be tested for the million-dollar prize, are innocent. They’re self-deluded. They’re not the fakers. Oh, I’ve had a few of those, but I get rid of them. I point where the trick is, good-bye, and they’re gone. But very few. Most of them are very innocent, so innocent that when you ask them, “How successful will this test be?” They always say, “One-hundred percent. I never miss.” That’s an easy test to do. As soon as they miss one . . . arrivederci. Goodbye. Out of here.

I read the article. A lot of totally goofy claims are made... I don't think many sincere mediums would claim to be a 100% right though.

It would be so easy to provide conclusive evidence of this stuff if even an iota of it were true -- I would love to have evidence of this, it would expand my world immensely -- but it just doesn't exist.
Does absence of evidence mean evidence of absence? Sometimes: yes. It depends on how hard we look, and professional science already went down this road many decades ago in the days of Houdini when spiritualism was experiencing a revival. It was a dead end, nothing but hoaxes and nutcases; it wasted a lot of time and a lot of money.
At a certain point you have to respect parsimony, and give up looking for these things because the money we're spending is better used on other causes (curing cancer, maybe?).

If you believe these things are true, though, I would be glad to help you design a test. And if you can prove it, then you'll have started a whole new field of science.

I would like to devise tests as well. We have a number of problems, the largest I can see is the noise/signal ratio. The noise could be increased by many mediums simply not being any good. (I suspect that Mary Luck, partner to AJ Miller, is probably the best medium right now on earth)
The mode of communication could just not lend itself very well to communication of details, because it is more about the medium interpreting the feelings and personality of the spirit person... Which would mean a weak signal...

I have a number of experiences myself with spirit communication as well - I just don't know how to convince you that they're not just in my head, that they're a rather consistent set of experiences... They could be in my head, but that is rather painful to conclude...

P.S. I dreamed about you, we were talking about that I would post a reply to this today... :p

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I would love to be able to construct a good experiment, but we do have a weak signal and strong noise. Here is an interview by Richard Dawkins with a self professed medium, Craig Hamilton Parker, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppQtA90c5wk which puts forth a number of interesting anecdotes as well as general comments on testing, etc.

A weak signal to noise can still be detected. If it's too weak to be detected, then it's too weak to be useful to any human beings.

Parker advocates an insulting conspiracy theory about scientists in that video, which Dawkins debunks fairly well, that scientists don't want to be challenged or to question skeptical orthodoxy.

Aside from that, he claimed that a very good medium could report a random number from a generator in a proper test (just that he wasn't at that level).
He also said because the communication is intuition based in nature, he can't get information from the spirit world that he wouldn't understand: e.g. an equation from Einstein.

He can clearly understand and report basic mathematical functions like equals, multiplication, and letters standing for variables -- and understands all of these concepts.
E=mc^2 is not that complicated.

This suggests that he needs some kind of more "complete" understanding of how it works to gain that information, which defeats his entire profession, since nobody is going to completely understand anybody else's experience with anything -- down to green paint, which we all hold different opinions and connotations for.
What one person regards as "green paint", tied into feelings of love and bonding and moving in with his spouse, claiming territory, because they chose the color together and painted the house together, another person might regard as drapes. We see this in brain scans where the idea of a "cat" can be recognized in one person's brain, but has to be calibrated specifically to that brain, and won't tell us anything about what the idea of "cat" looks like to anybody else.
We rely on an index of symbols and language to communicate anything at all.

Do you understand? If he's not getting symbols and language through from the spirit world, he's just getting general feelings or stimulations in arbitrary brain regions, and those could mean anything at all or nothing to him: what they won't mean is the same thing that they do to anybody else, which makes anything down to names and places entirely subjective, and makes his whole practice nothing short of random.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:Could you tell me whether you watched the whole thing or just the beginning?

I skipped around, but saw the whole process (probably watched 20 minutes, and caught the most important points).

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:How would we go about quantifying the success ratio of dumb luck? Obviously with a finite amount of options, such as playing cards or whatever, we can easily get a chance distribution... But how would we "partition" reality, when a channel receives an image of a household item, which turns out was an agreed upon token to signify continued existence when the spirit was still on earth (as in the Richard Dawkins video). Just 1 over the average # of different household items in a household? How did the medium know it was a household item? Just 1 over all different "items" in the world then? :p

That's a good question, with an easy answer:

You have to define a set. E.g.
The item is one of these colors: red blue green yellow purple orange black white
The item is one of these shapes: boxy spherical cylindrical flat
The item may or may not have a handle.
The item may or may not have a lid.
The item may be made from glass, metal, wood, plastic, stone, ceramic, cloth

When you define sets and require an answer from each, you can find a clear statistical distribution. BUT you should look at how Randi's many experiments were set up. The terms were always agreed upon by the alleged psychic or channeler, both what would be done and the success rate.

This is not difficult.

If we follow the claims of Parker, then you need human interaction to determine these things, and that can be done too.

If we find ten actors and train them in cold reading, and ten "legit" mediums, somebody with experience should be able to watch them work and tell us which are legit and which are fakes. If they identify 5 of each group as real, then that would be what would be expected from guessing.

The roles can also be reversed. A medium can be given people to read. Half are sincere, and half are actors instructed to lie to the medium and lead him or her on. If the medium can determine which are lying and which are honest, that would also mean something.

There are limitations in human acting ability which would be to the medium's benefit, so it wouldn't be proof, but it would be compelling evidence that there's something going on there and that there may be a unique ability that deserves more exploration.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: What are the chances to guess a nickname right and all the other things?

You'll have to give me a transcript so we can itemize the guesses, I could only watch a couple seconds. You need to understand how cold reading works, and how dishonest people have a promotion bias.

He's just fishing, he makes a number of guesses, many of which are wrong. If he had a one in a hundred chance of guessing something right, and had ten guesses to do it, then all he needs to do is line up ten people for readings, record them all then keep the best one (this is what these people do: long sessions with an audience are carefully edited to keep all of the "hits" where they guessed right, and cut out most of the misses. Individual sessions can be discarded entirely when they didn't go well).

I can have a 100% success rate of guessing a random number between one and a hundred in a single video... and discard the 99 where I was wrong.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: Here the spirit claims to have died in a bus accident in the Andes and drowned, 5 years ago from the channeling (2014), being 16 when she died and being English, and she calls herself Jess.
[...]
There is no one called Jess amongst them, also they were killed directly on impact, not by drowning - the girls were around 19, not 16... There are some other bus crashes on that site, but none mention British casualties.

So you already understand he was factually wrong. Guess any random cause of death somewhere in the world with a random name and age, and you'll probably be about as correct.
Stop making excuses for him just because you want to believe: it is not intellectually honest.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: It could be he just makes a number of mistakes in the details, because as the Richard Dawkins medium points out too, that the communication is largely based on feelings, thoughts and emotions, rather than expressive language.

Which would make it totally useless. Can you find a use for something that's only as accurate as guessing and gives us no credible information about reality?

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: It is of course possible that Anto saw a newspaper article of the event in case.

You wouldn't even need to. That was a terrible failure.

A 21 year old chinese student named Chen died three years ago in Italy in a car crash, he died of blood loss.

How'd I do? Probably about the same.

Age, name, nationality, location, accident, specific cause of death, year.

These are particular bits of information. AND I only had one try. Imagine editing these things and just not publishing the ones that aren't accidental hits.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: A hypothesis that all accurate information from a medium somehow was accessed through subconscious memory seems rather untestable to me too, and ad hoc.

Not at all. Just sequester them, and then ask about new information.

You have to determine a reasonable margin of success in conveying correct details, though. Otherwise, this is just incredibly vague. You also have to capture ALL attempts, and not allow them to be cherry picked for the best guesses to present.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: It's good that you trust that most people are sincere. Many people will do their channeling for free, or by donation.

That's less despicable than the people who charge for it, but they are being intellectually dishonest by both succumbing to personal confirmation bias and by only publishing their "best" work so we can't actually get a feel for their real hit to miss ratios.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: I read the article. A lot of totally goofy claims are made... I don't think many sincere mediums would claim to be a 100% right though.

They often convince themselves, incorrectly, that it is right more than wrong, but that it can not be tested by science (two mutually incompatible claims). If it's right more than wrong, it can be tested. And if it can't be tested at all, then it's useless and unreliable for anything.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: I would like to devise tests as well. We have a number of problems, the largest I can see is the noise/signal ratio. The noise could be increased by many mediums simply not being any good. (I suspect that Mary Luck, partner to AJ Miller, is probably the best medium right now on earth)

The noise is not due to many mediums, because NO single medium has ever done better than chance on anything. Just use your best medium if you think this is a problem.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: The mode of communication could just not lend itself very well to communication of details, because it is more about the medium interpreting the feelings and personality of the spirit person... Which would mean a weak signal...

Then choose a test where the feeling would be unambiguous.

Binary logic in computing does this. Select from spirits that either died horribly and violently (a very strong negative signal), or died in peace with loved ones after a good life (a strong positive signal).

Have them connect with the spirits in a certain sequence as defined by items, or the spirit's name, a loved one (maybe all together), or some other very strong way of reliably contacting that spirit specifically.

Bad, Good, Good, Bad, Good, Bad, Bad, Good, Bad, Good.

The chances of guessing that sequence are less than one in a thousand.

Make it the strongest, simplest signal you could possibly ask for. This really should not be difficult.

Of course, they will make up excuses when they get them wrong, like that the good ones had some secret strife they suffered from, or the bad ones found peace with god right before dying unknown to anybody.
Which is what makes all of this ad-hoc bullshit, because these people will never accept they are wrong, and no amount of proof will ever convince them.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: I have a number of experiences myself with spirit communication as well - I just don't know how to convince you that they're not just in my head, that they're a rather consistent set of experiences... They could be in my head, but that is rather painful to conclude...

You should focus more on not being so convinced yourself that they're not all in your head.

If they're real, then convincing me should be very easy.

Your idea for an experiment to differentiate between accidental death or old age death seems problematic, precisely because of the objections/excuses you already raised. Is a short sickbed, an acute disease an accident or a natural death? You could of course select a number of deaths to be either car crash or heart-attack in their sleep... Then it would be a good test. I've already seen a Randi video where a woman claimed she could know whether a person was alive or dead by looking at a photograph (and something with a pendulum)... She failed...

Another factor that should possibly be taken into consideration is that the "connection" could be dependent on unknown factors. Until the time such connections become more reliable, people that think they are always reliable will be deluded, and evidence will be sporadic. Even so sporadic to seemingly correspond to what chance would dictate. Still I would maintain that many things that come through are so specific, such as many things in the video you could only watch a few seconds of, like "donkey-dick", that the chances of just randomly getting this right, are much lower than chance.


How is the following for an experiment:
Have 100 alive (married for more than 20 years, say, to reduce chance of divorce and ensure a stronger emotional bond) couples choose an object. When one of the partners dies, the one that is alive visits the medium that is being tested and they attempt to communicate the object.

This would take a number of decades of course. Would a statistical anomaly convince many skeptics? No university would conduct this experiment, thereby confining it to fringe-institutes or amateurs, which can be easily ignored... We shouldn't conflate biases with conspiracies, they are different things.


With regards to the partitioning of objects into its accidental properties - color, shape, etc. That is of course only relevant if the medium speaks in vagaries, such as "a round object in a primary color". If the medium is very specific, i.e. names the brand and a specific object- the partitioning effectively becomes as fine as the number of different things in the world. E.g. Parker transmitting a tin of Brasso as a token.

With regards to editing out misses - quite possibly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g74znWzyRTU did edit some things out. As far as I could tell only 2 misses were in the video, one thing about a baby girl and one thing about a burgundy color. Just because the "sitter" couldn't place either of them doesn't mean they are true misses. The sitter might not think of taking a morning after pill as an abortion and so not realize what the baby girl reference could be about.
As far as I know the Divine Truth channel doesn't edit out much. The bus-accident in the Andes girl, Jess - looks somewhat like a miss, yet they didn't edit the video. It could of course still be precisely true but not findable on the internet. I am going to post on the divine truth forum (forum.divinetruthhub.com) about this. About how the closest match I could find a newspaper article on, still is wrong on a lot of the detail. I do agree with your Chinese student Chen example that you could probably be roughly as accurate as the DT video.

I did watch some James Randi videos yesterday and there are a lot of goofball claims out there and it is good to provide basic education about probability and statistics to the general public. I do believe the million dollar challenge is legally phrased in such a way that the institute always has an out-clause.

brimstoneSalad wrote: You should focus more on not being so convinced yourself that they're not all in your head.

I'm not sure I'm very convinced that they are true... Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not. When I feel well, I usually feel that they are real. Also the feeling of love that is available to me from guiding spirits tends to convince me. This type of communication also provides feedback on my ethical choices.
I do know that once I was very convinced that they weren't true. During that period of my life, I had much less control over my mind and behavior. I would get a psychotic episode around every 2 years. Since I treat my experiences as if they are real (since about 3,5 years or so), that has given me a much more pleasant and safe life - I have been psychosis free for more than 5,5 years now. I can more easily not act on negative impulses, since I feel like they are coming from people that try to influence me negatively. Some time ago I met one of these people (i.e. had a more specific spiritual/telepathic interaction with one of them), who was just so extremely mean. He exhibited the intention one has when pinching someone as hard as you can: very mean and intent on causing pain as much as possible. He presented himself looking like an evil gnome. I also had contact with a pseudo-religious group in another dimension which had given me feelings of mysterious interactions with the spirit world, when I was around 16, such as deja-vu, feelings of mystery and predictive dreams, out of a desire to create mystification and confusion on earth. They came to speak to me, alongside AJ and Mary, some time after there were some channelings on the DT channel of pseudo-religious groups in the afterlife/spirit world, such as one that was attempting to "help" people "reincarnate", and one that provided new age and meditation groups with spiritual buzzes allowing the spirit group to have more control of people on earth. With the other group that came to speak to me, I told them like: What's the point of just creating confusion/mystery?

I don't agree with the idea that if experiences don't produce testable claims, they are useless. In my life they aren't useless, even if no testable data arrive from my experience...

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:Your idea for an experiment to differentiate between accidental death or old age death seems problematic, precisely because of the objections/excuses you already raised. Is a short sickbed, an acute disease an accident or a natural death? You could of course select a number of deaths to be either car crash or heart-attack in their sleep... Then it would be a good test.

Whatever the medium claims he or she can reliably determine is fine.

I was talking about horrible deaths, like being crushed and dying slowly in pain, burning alive, drowning. Compared with peaceful deaths, like in hospice with family and comfortable pain medication, dying during sleep.

But again, whatever metrics the medium claim he or she can determine.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I've already seen a Randi video where a woman claimed she could know whether a person was alive or dead by looking at a photograph (and something with a pendulum)... She failed...

She failed because it wasn't real. As in the case with spirit channeling.

You'll find out yourself if you start asking mediums to commit to a test: they'll be so squirrely about it, and so vague, and basically you'll realize that they have a double standards: claims they'll make that aren't subject to testing, and those that are (when their powers suddenly become incapable of providing reliable information).

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:Another factor that should possibly be taken into consideration is that the "connection" could be dependent on unknown factors. Until the time such connections become more reliable, people that think they are always reliable will be deluded, and evidence will be sporadic. Even so sporadic to seemingly correspond to what chance would dictate.

If that's the case, then you should admit that it is intellectually dishonest to hold a positive belief in it. Nothing that provides only the reliability of guessing should be trusted as a source of information about reality.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:Still I would maintain that many things that come through are so specific, such as many things in the video you could only watch a few seconds of, like "donkey-dick", that the chances of just randomly getting this right, are much lower than chance.

Then it should be testable, if that's true.

However, if there's a 1% chance of guessing something, and it takes 100 tries to do it, you have to admit that's not evidence for it.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:How is the following for an experiment:
Have 100 alive (married for more than 20 years, say, to reduce chance of divorce and ensure a stronger emotional bond) couples choose an object. When one of the partners dies, the one that is alive visits the medium that is being tested and they attempt to communicate the object.

No good, as I said before. They'll make vague claims that could fit any object, which they will regard as hits. You'd have to have them choose objects from a set of hard criterion that the medium agrees can be discerned.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:This would take a number of decades of course.

No it wouldn't. At a large hospital, it could be done in a couple days. Anybody there with his or her dying spouse probably has a strong bond.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:Would a statistical anomaly convince many skeptics?

Yes, if it has low odds of happening by chance, and in particular it would mean more rigorous studies would be done which would convince even more.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:No university would conduct this experiment, thereby confining it to fringe-institutes or amateurs, which can be easily ignored...

Not if it were done properly. Any number of credible skeptics would be glad to assist in making sure there was no monkey business. There's no reason to think no academics would participate in a well designed study. The problem is few prior studies (outside of the JREF) have been well designed.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:We shouldn't conflate biases with conspiracies, they are different things.

Bullshit. Saying that many people will ignore credible evidence IS a conspiracy theory: there are many people in the sciences who are open to these things and would be happy to win a nobel prize, as Dawkins said. You're calling people liars when they admit their interest and explain that they just don't have any credible evidence to believe it.

And pretty much half of scientists ultimately believe in something supernatural, and would be pleased to have their faith explored by science.
http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scie ... nd-belief/

Do you believe the same about Randi, that he actually just wants to stay ignorant of the supernatural and has foiled people's attempts and ignored evidence?

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:With regards to the partitioning of objects into its accidental properties - color, shape, etc. That is of course only relevant if the medium speaks in vagaries, such as "a round object in a primary color".

Do you think a medium might not have access to that information? Can he or she not figure out the shape, color, etc.?

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:If the medium is very specific, i.e. names the brand and a specific object- the partitioning effectively becomes as fine as the number of different things in the world. E.g. Parker transmitting a tin of Brasso as a token.

Then the medium should check the shape and color of the object the medium names, and see if it matches. There's no need to record the exact brand of the object from the subject if we can't get a statistical distribution on that.
The object should be randomly selected based on those qualities, and then decoded in the same terms.

If the medium gets nothing, or nothing useful, then throw out that test and keep trying until you get metrics that can be analyzed as true or false, with the statistical chances being very clear.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: With regards to editing out misses - quite possibly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g74znWzyRTU did edit some things out. As far as I could tell only 2 misses were in the video, one thing about a baby girl and one thing about a burgundy color. Just because the "sitter" couldn't place either of them doesn't mean they are true misses. The sitter might not think of taking a morning after pill as an abortion and so not realize what the baby girl reference could be about.

That's a horrible and frankly insulting rationalization, I've heard that kind of ad hoc excuse from every dogma: you really should know better.
If you make excuses like that, your claims are unfalsifiable and have no scientific or rational value whatsoever. If you do not have any standards of evidence in your belief, then your belief has no value to understanding reality and is as irrational as any dogmatic religion.

I wasn't just talking about editing in a single video: they also present only the videos they think are the "best examples", that is the ones that looked like they worked. They don't necessarily see a problem with this, but it's a huge problem. As such, you can not trust the content of any of these videos because you never know how many "misses" are being hidden.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: The bus-accident in the Andes girl, Jess - looks somewhat like a miss, yet they didn't edit the video.

It was a miss. They left it in because they are delusional and make excuses for it and decided it was a hit based on the same rationalizations you made. "Oh, age isn't precise. Maybe it was a nickname. Drowning is a similar feeling." and all that bullshit.

They thought it was a hit, and presented it as such, because they have no standards of evidence.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: I do agree with your Chinese student Chen example that you could probably be roughly as accurate as the DT video.

And even more if you make rationalizations. Actually he wasn't in Italy, but he dreamed of going to Italy and he had a brochure about Italy. He was ethnic Chinese, not from China, and actually his name was Cheng but that's close enough. And his age was a couple years off, but he was mature for his age.

Can you see how profoundly ridiculous this gets when you throw out standards of accuracy and precision, and you just let anything be bent until it fits?

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: I do believe the million dollar challenge is legally phrased in such a way that the institute always has an out-clause.

That's a lie people have repeated to discredit it, all you're doing is buying into and feeding the dishonest propaganda and conspiracy theories.
The million was there, and all they had to do is perform in the test to do what they said they could do under the conditions they said they could do it.

The only reason it's not available anymore is because Randi retired.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote: I'm not sure I'm very convinced that they are true... Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not. When I feel well, I usually feel that they are real.

That's how all faith goes, from Islam to Catholicism. Intellectually, your feeling shouldn't influence your belief in what is real.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:Also the feeling of love that is available to me from guiding spirits tends to convince me.

We already talked about that. A feeling only tells you a feeling is there, it doesn't tell you anything about the source of that feeling. I can feel that feeling too: do you not remember my description of it?

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:This type of communication also provides feedback on my ethical choices.

That feedback isn't going anywhere if you stop believing in spirits: it's coming from you, from your conscience. It's all been coming from you all along, and you just need to learn how to tap into that without the delusion that it's coming from magical spirits.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I can more easily not act on negative impulses, since I feel like they are coming from people that try to influence me negatively.

You can have the same realization in a completely secular way. Better understand your psychology to be made of many parts of disparate interests and intentions that battle for your ego, and work on culturing the positive over the negative.

AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:I don't agree with the idea that if experiences don't produce testable claims, they are useless. In my life they aren't useless, even if no testable data arrive from my experience...

They are useless in determining reality. They may be personally useful to you as visualization: just do not consider them real. Also, you can achieve all of the same practical benefits using a secular model.