Acts of god

On Friday, September 11, an enormous crane collapsed in the Grand Mosque in the city of Mecca, killing 107 people and injuring 87.

The Grand Mosque of Mecca [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The more prosaic amongst us attribute the collapse to the wind from a violent thunderstorm.  Others, however, have called this an "Act of God" in retribution for the destruction of the Twin Towers in 2001.

A writer who goes by the handle Dom the Conservative, and bills herself as "a Christian conservative, mother, and wife" whose purpose for writing "is to inform, anger, and unite 'We the People'" had the following to say:

(A) devastating attack of a seemingly supernatural kind has taken place in the Grand Mosque of Mecca, the largest mosque in the world and the same location to which Muslims make their hajj pilgrimage each year...  Whether you believe in God, Allah, or any supernatural force, the symbolism is eerily sinister, especially on the day that true Islam, the Islam of the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad, reared its ugly head in West.

The people commenting on her post were not nearly so circumspect.  Unsurprisingly, "God works in mysterious ways" was said more than once.  When a commenter suggested that the victims were innocent people, he was immediately mauled by a string of vitriolic comments like "What do you think the people killed in the WTC were guilty of, asshole?" and "No Muslim is innocent.  They all want to kill us" and "If they hadn't been in their mosque worshiping Satan, they wouldn't have died."

None of which is very surprising, honestly.  The attacks of 9/11 are still raw for most Americans.  I know more than one friend who took a few days' vacation from social media so they wouldn't have to be bombarded by reminders of the horrific events of that day and the days following.

But still.  It appalls me that there are people who honestly think that a divine being would work that way.  Do people really believe that the deity that at other times they call "all-loving" and "the prince of peace" would look down at a group of people, none of whom had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, and say, "Ha!  If I smash a bunch of them, that will teach the rest of 'em a lesson!"

Apparently, the answer is "yes."  But you have to wonder why anyone would think that such a god would be deserving of worship.  If there is justice in the world, it does not come in the form of killing random people to avenge the unjust deaths of a bunch of other random people.

But then I realized; that is exactly how the god of the bible operates.  I recall being vaguely unsettled by this even in my churchgoing days, and actively avoided reading the parts of the bible like the following:

• God killing 14,700 people in a plague, because there was too much complaining about how many people god had killed (Numbers 16:41-49)
• God killing 50,070 people for peeking into the Ark of the Covenant (1 Samuel 6:19)
• God sending two bears to maul 42 children to death for teasing the prophet Elisha about his bald head (2 Kings 2:23-24)
• God sending divine fire to kill 51 men for no particularly obvious reason (2 Kings 1:9-10)
• God killing a man and his wife for not donating enough money to the church (Acts 5:1-11)

And so forth and so on.  And that's not even counting the most famous instances -- the slaughter of the firstborn children in Exodus, and the horrific drowning of nearly every living thing on Earth in Genesis.

To me, a god like this doesn't sound like anything I'd be even slightly inclined to worship, even if I believed he existed, which I don't.  I'm more inclined to agree with Richard Dawkins:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

So it's not to be wondered at that people who take the bible seriously think that the collapse of the crane in Mecca, and resulting deaths of 107 innocent people, is the hand of god at work.  That's precisely how the god of the bible does work.

Funny, isn't it, how many of these same people question atheists' basis for morality, when their own moral code is based on the behavior of a deity who evidently considers such an action just?  But that, of course, is far from the only morally questionable stance you find in this belief system:

I'm not trying to be offensive, here, it just really strikes me as baffling.  I'll leave you with another quote, this one from the Greek philosopher Epicurus: "Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?  Then he is not omnipotent.  Is he able, but not willing?  Then he is malevolent.  Is he both able and willing? Then why does evil exist?  Is he neither able nor willing?  Then why call him God?"

Quantum frequency box

The latest in a long line of pseudoscience-based diagnostic and treatment devices is making the rounds, which is only notable because of how widely it's being circulated amongst the woo-woo alt-med crowd.  Called "Physiospect," this gadget claims to do just about everything but toast your bread for you.

The sales pitch starts with a bang:

The Physiospect is an NLS biofeedback system, connected to a computer it can diagnose and treat almost every known pathological condition, disease and illnesses, even before there are any physical symptoms.  The Physiospect machine will determine the stress level of all organs and systems, it can select the most appropriate allopathic and/or homeopathic remedies, as well as suitable foods, herbal and nutritional remedies, and can identify emotional and physiological issues.

Which is vaguely amusing in a number of ways, not least because at the bottom of the webpage is the following bolded message:

Physiospect does not provide specific medical advice, and is not engaged in providing medical and professional services.

Now, I may be missing something here, but "determining the stress level of all organs" and selecting remedies for what ails you (even homeopathic ones, so presumably you can figure out which pills with no active ingredients whatsoever would be the most helpful) definitely sounds like "providing specific medical advice."

How does it work, you may  be asking?  Well, they tell you all about it:

It works by sending an infra-red triggering signal of extremely low intensity to the Bio-field around the brain via specially designed headphones.  The principle is based on the fact the every cell tissue and organ has its own unique frequency pattern that varies as it experiences a load or stress.  The healthier the area being investigated the more stable its frequency pattern is.  We can direct the Physiospect to investigate the unique frequency of say the tissue of the right lung, given that the Bio-fields of both brain and lung tissue, (as with all parts of the body) are in constant communication with each other.

Right!  Okay!  What?

One thing I noticed right away was those wonderful words "field" and "frequency," which have rigorously-definied, specific meanings in physics, but seem to be popular with woo-woos who evidently think that you can take scientific vocabulary, define it any damn way you please, and still make sense.

But let's see... there's another word that always seems to appear in these sorts of claims... where is it?... it's got to be here somewhere...

The principles of the Theory of quantum entropy logic give justification to claim that a biological organ with pathology have an unstable (meta stable) state and Physiospect functions according to the principle of amplification of the initiating signal with the disintegration of meta stable systems involved.

Ah, yes.  There it is.  "Quantum."  Nothing in woo-woo alt-med works unless it's "quantum."

This is then followed by what may be the single most incomprehensible bunch of pseudoscientific technobabble I've ever seen:

The Physiospect is a system of electronic oscillators resonating at the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, whose energy is equivalent to the energy breaking down the dominant bonds that maintain the structural organization of the organism under investigation.  The magnetic field of the molecular currents, affected by external fields, lose their initial orientation, which causes misalignment of the spin structures of de localized electrons of admixture center of cortex neurons; that, in turn, gives rise to their unstable meta stable state whose disintegration acts as an amplifier of the signal. Physiospect produce a preset bio electrical activity of brain neurons.  With this it becomes possible to selectively amplify signals hardly detectable in the back ground noise and to isolate and decode the information they contain.

Worse still, we find out that the way the machine fashions a remedy for you is that you place a "carrier" like some water or sugar pills into the "resonance cup" after the machine scans you for problems.  The correct "resonant frequencies" are then downloaded into the "carrier," and you swallow it to fix what ails you.

Oh, and if you don't put any "carrier" into the "resonance cup," no worries!  The machine downloads the treatment directly into your body.

Well, all I can say is, I'm perfectly happy with my quantum meta-stable neurons oscillating at their original delocalized spin orientation, but thanks anyhow.  Especially when you find out that the system costs €11,500 (with an optional upgrade to the "Physiospect 23" for another €2,500).

You might be asking yourself, "What kind of moron would fall for such an obviously bogus spiel?"  I know that's what I asked.  But apparently, these things are showing up all over the place, purchased both by individuals and by practitioners of alternative medicine for use on their clients.  So as mind-boggling as it is, Physiospect is making money hand-over-fist selling these contraptions.

Look, I believe in caveat emptor and "a fool and his money are soon parted," and one of the recurring themes in this blog is that if you staunchly refuse to learn any actual science, you deserve everything you get.  But really.  This is like shooting fish in a barrel.  Rooking poor gullible people of €11,500 --  which, for my fellow Americans, is just shy of $13,000 -- and then sending them a souped-up laser pointer attached to a box with an assemblage of apparently random electronic equipment is just mean.

The whole thing makes me pine for the days when con artists tried to rip you off by claiming to be exiled Nigerian princes.

Moral assault

There is a speech by a public figure that I wonder if you've heard.

I won't present it here in full; but I will give a link to the complete text later, for those of you interested in reading the entire thing.  But here is a bit of it:

There is an effort today to disturb the established order.  Wait a minute.  Listen, I am talking straight to you....  Let me repeat, the Bible says as clearly as language can put it...   

Individually, Christian people... through the years have been able to work together and to understand each other.  But now a world of outside agitation has been started, and people are coming in the name of piety, but it is a false piety, and are endeavoring to disturb God’s established order; and we are having turmoil all over America.  This disturbing movement is not of God.  It is not in line with the Bible.  It is Satanic.  Now, listen and understand this.  Do not let people lead you astray.

These religious liberals are the worst infidels in many ways in the country; and some of them are filling pulpits...  They do not believe the Bible any longer; so it does not do any good to quote it to them.  They have gone over to modernism, and they are leading... people astray at the same time... But every good, substantial, Bible-believing, intelligent, orthodox Christian can read the Word of God and know that what is happening now is not of God...

Whenever you get a situation that rubs out the line that God has drawn... whenever that happens, you are going to have trouble.  That is what is happening today in this country.  All this agitation is... to overthrow the established order of God in this world...  Certain people are disturbing this situation.  They talk about the fact that we are going to have one world.  We will never really have one world until this world heads up in God.  We are not going to have one world by man’s rubbing out the line that God has established.  He is marking the lines, and you cannot rub them out and get away with it.

The established order cannot be overthrown without having trouble.  That is what wrecked Paradise.  God set up the order of Paradise.  He told Adam and Eve how to live and what food to eat and what not to eat.  He drew the lines around that Garden; and when Adam and Eve crossed over the lines of God, thorns grew on roses.  The first baby that was born was a murderer and killed his own brother.  So it has gone down through the ages.  It is man’s rebellion (due to the fall) against a Holy God to overthrow the established order of God in this world.

Sound like familiar rhetoric?  Contains a few more words, but basically the same sentiment as Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis's statement on being released from jail the day before yesterday: "I just want to give God the glory.  We serve a living God who knows exactly where each and everyone stands.  Keep pressing, don’t let down because he is here.  He is worthy."

And no one was more voluble about the jailing of Davis being an assault on the established order of god in the world than Mike Huckabee.  In an op-ed piece he wrote for Fox News, Huckabee said:

When I warned that the Supreme Court’s decision on marriage would lead to the criminalization of Christianity in America I was dismissed by many as an alarmist and my comments were mocked by the chattering class.  Now, just two months after the court's lawless ruling, an elected county clerk has been put in jail by an unelected judge for refusing to issue a “marriage" license to a same-sex couple, removing all doubts about criminalization of Christianity in this country. 

Kim's stand for religious liberty is a pivotal moment in our nation's history.  Will we continue to pretend as though the Supreme Court is the "Supreme Branch" with the authority and ability to make laws?  It most certainly is not.  The Supreme Court is one of three co-equal branches of government under our Constitution.  It is no more the "Supreme Branch" than it is the "Supreme Being" with the authority to redefine the laws of nature or of nature's God!

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the parallels between Huckabee's words and the opinions voiced in the speech from which I quoted in the beginning of this post.  God has delineated proper guidelines for behavior; the courts are attempting to force the abandonment of those guidelines; and right-thinking Christian folk are commanded to stand up against the tyranny of a judicial system determined to erase the divine order in the United States of America.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The only problem is, the first speech is one given by evangelical preacher Bob Jones in 1960 after the Supreme Court forced the segregation of public schools in the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.  He argued that the separation of races was a moral imperative, straight from the mouth of god via the bible.  The Supreme Court of the day was nicknamed "the nine dictators" and public employees were encouraged to flout the ruling -- resulting in the "Massive Resistance" movement that shut down schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia for nearly two years rather than see them integrated.

See the problem here?  When someone claims to know what god wants, almost always (what a coincidence!) god's will agrees perfectly with the person's own biases and beliefs.  Cherry-picking scripture to back up those biases and beliefs is easy enough; as we've seen over and over, you can find support for damn near anything you want in the bible if you pick and choose, up to and including stoning disobedient children to death.

And each time some bigoted cultural practice is presented as divine utterance, dire predictions are made of what will happen to our society if it's legislated into well-deserved oblivion.  Just yesterday, Glenn Beck said that the Supreme Court's decision on gay marriage was going to lead to our abandonment by god:

This is it.  I'm telling you this is the last call.  Within a year, America will be so divided that we literally will not even be able to understand one another.  I am telling you, please, Dear God, listen to me, please.  Please!  We are here.  This is the moment that historians will look back and say, 'They would have survived, but they chose death instead.'  He can no longer be our God.  He has to withdraw...  We're going to feel the full ramifications of what it feels like to choose death.

How is this any different from Bob Jones's claiming that ending segregation was "rebellion... against a Holy God to overthrow the established order of God in this world?"  Both are motivated by the narrow-minded, self-righteous bigotry of men and women who believe that the law of god demands the denial of basic human rights -- and both are justified using scripture and the language of hellfire and damnation.

And both, fortunately, are destined to the scrap-heap of history, along with countless other evils that have been put into the mouth of god by pious hypocrites -- slavery, the subjugation of women, anti-semitism, the torture of heretics, the burning of witches.

The target changes each time.

The basic inhumanity of moral assault, however, always remains the same, regardless of how it's justified.

Creative neurosis

A few days ago, a friend of mine posted this gem:

To say I relate to this sentiment is a monstrous understatement.  I have for as long as I can remember been capable of keeping myself awake at night worrying about various possibilities of how the near future could go terribly, terribly wrong.  Many of these possibilities are mutually exclusive.  Some are so wildly unlikely that I would accomplish just as much by fretting over whether Cornell University was secretly creating genetically engineered flying dinosaur super-predators, and they were gonna get loose and eat my home town for brunch.

Doesn't matter.  My brain apparently prefers tossing such hypotheses around than it does getting a good night's sleep.  And every single time, when nothing bad happens, when no airborne T-rexes descend from the sky, my brain doesn't do the logical thing, which is to say, "Wow, what a goober I am.  Next time I won't worry so much."

No, my brain says, "All this does is make it more likely that next time, I'll be correct.  So I should worry even more."

Yes, I know this may sound odd coming from a guy who plays the trumpet of rationalism on a daily basis.  It's entirely possible that I developed my skeptical outlook in order to have a weapon with which to beat my limbic system, which seems determined to make me miserable.

But there's another upside to being a neurotic mess, apparently.  A team of researchers led by Adam Perkins, of the Department of Psychological Medicine in King's College of London, has found that there is a connection between being neurotic and being highly creative.

In the paper "Thinking Too Much: Self-generated Thought as the Engine of Neuroticism," Perkins and his collaborators, Danilo Amone, Jonathan Smallwood, and Dean Mobbs, found that the driver for neurotic modes of thought was the tendency toward self-generated thought regarding threats.  And while this increase in threat sensitivity can be pretty unpleasant, it is also the source of the creative urge.

"Why should having a magnified view of threat make you good at coming up with solutions to difficult problems?" Perkins said, in an interview in TIME magazine.  "It doesn’t add up.  On one hand, it’s a clever theory—it shows the difficulty of holding down a dangerous job, for example—but on the other hand, it doesn’t explain why [neurotic people] tend to feel unhappy or why they’re more creative."

Perkins says he had his epiphany about the nature of the connection when he was attending a presentation by his collaborator, Jonathan Smallwood.  Smallwood studies the neuroscience of daydreaming -- and had just done an experiment where he placed subjects in an fMRI tube with no distractions or instructions.  Naturally, the subjects began daydreaming.  Afterwards, Smallwood asked the volunteers about the nature of their thoughts while they were in the tube.  The ones that had experienced more negative thoughts showed higher levels of activity in the medial prefrontal cortex -- a part of the brain related to imagination, memory, and creative thought.

"If you have a high level of activity in this particular brain area, then your mind wandering tends to be threat-related," Perkins said.  "[Smallwood] started describing how people whose minds wander are better at things like creativity, delaying gratification and planning.  He also talked about the way that daydreamers’ minds wander when they’re feeling kind of blue.  And my ears perked up."

So the capacity of the neurotic brain to dream up various scenarios that could result in tragedy is also apparently correlated with its ability to dream up ideas for art, writing, music, and other creative endeavors.  Makes sense, doesn't it?

All of which gives me some solace.  I just wish I could convince my brain that it's perfectly okay to come up with horrid ideas, but that (1) it'd be preferable if we could confine said horrid ideas to plot points for my next novel, and (2) there are better times to engage in such behavior than 2 AM.

The dolphin midwife

Okay, I'm willing to admit that I take a fairly prosaic, practical view of the world at times.

That's not to say that I can't be awestruck by nature.  I've been many places that are breathtakingly gorgeous, most recently coastal Cornwall and Devon.  And the stunning beauty of many plants and animals is what led me to study biology, and ultimately, to share that joy with 29 years' worth of high school students (and counting).

But fer cryin' in the sink, let's keep in mind that however beautiful nature can be, it's not called "wild" for nothing.  When I was in Yellowstone in summer of 2014, my enjoyment of watching elk, bison, and bears was tempered by the knowledge that if I were to approach any of them too closely, those lovely and majestic animals would have without hesitation turned me into Hamburger Helper.

This is an awareness that many people apparently lack.  Not only is there the bizarre attitude that we saw all too often in Yellowstone -- that nature is some kind of Global Petting Zoo created for the entertainment of humanity -- there is a weird quasi-pagan belief system that is experiencing a resurgence lately, and which is leading people to do things that are, in a word, idiotic.

This all comes up because of a link sent to me by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia in which we find out that an Atlanta, Georgia woman is planning on having a "dolphin-assisted birth," an idea that stupidity-wise, ranks right up there with the guy who put his two-year-old on the back of an elk in Yellowstone two weeks before we arrived for a cute photo-op.  The elk bucked and kicked the man, killing him instantly.  (The child, fortunately, was unharmed.)

But such pragmatic reasons for treating wild animals as what they are seem to have no impact on "spiritual healer" Donna Rosin and her partner, Maika Suneagle.  "Dolphins are kind and healing creatures," Rosin said.  "In 2011 and 2014 I had the privilege to learn from and with wild and free dolphins and humpback whales in Hawaii who transformed and healed me in a very profound way.  I felt deeply called to spend two times three months in nature – mostly by myself – and to deeply connect to this magical place of beauty and transformation inside and outside which called me home."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Which is all lovely and spiritual, but ignores the reality that dolphins, like many large mammals, can kill.  They have not only been recorded as killing other animals -- not, apparently, for food or defense, but because of an innate drive to attack -- but there is good evidence that they sometimes kill infants of their own species.  Such behavior appalls many humans, especially those of us who like to anthropomorphize animals and give them something like human motives, but it is by no means limited to dolphins.  Male lions will unhesitatingly kill cubs fathered by their competitors, the probable evolutionary driver being that such actions trigger the females to go into estrus again, increasing the likelihood of the killer male passing along his own genes to the next generation.

So Rosin's idea of having a dolphin "help her give birth" is one of those ideas that could go severely wrong in any number of ways.

Oh, and did I mention that Rosin and Suneagle believe that if their baby is born this way, it will know how to "speak dolphin?"

Fortunately, I'm not the only one who thinks this is ridiculous.  "This has to be, hands down, one of the worst natural birthing ideas anyone has ever had," wrote science journalist Christie Wilcox in a 2013 article on the practice in Discover.  "Dolphins have been known to toss, beat, and kill other mammals for no apparent reason despite enjoyment.  Is this an animal you want to have at your side when you’re completely vulnerable?"

Apparently, the answer is yes, if you believe in the whole Spirit Animal thing and have zero actual understanding of biology.  After all, even Tennyson, who often waxed rhapsodic about the beauty of the natural world, penned the line, "Nature is red in tooth and claw."

So, there you have it.  The latest in the Truly Awful Ideas department.  But I guess it could be worse.  At least Rosin doesn't want to have a grizzly-bear-assisted birth.  Here, at least there's the chance that the dolphins will go, "Oh, man, another stupid human.  Let's blow this popsicle stand and go find some fish to eat, okay?" and take off.  Because Spirit Animal or no, deliberately approaching a grizzly bear is just asking to have your name put in for a Darwin Award.

Fast forward

Can I plead with you on bended knee about something?

Will you all promise that if you forward something, or post it on Facebook or Twitter, you'll do three minutes of research and figure out if what you're sending along is correct?

Because I'm sick unto death of seeing stuff like this over and over:

Look, we get it, okay?  You hate President Obama.  If President Obama simultaneously figured out how to erase the national debt, end all war, and cure cancer, you'd complain that he had only done it to distract you from the fact that he failed to stop the Benghazi attack in 2012 that killed four Americans.

But you are not helping your case any by lying.  Let's start with the fact that there is no "Kenyan language"; there are 68 languages spoken in Kenya, of which Swahili, Kikuyu, Kalenjin, and Kamba are the most common.  "Denali" comes from the Koyukon Athabaskan language of (Guess where?  You'll never guess) Alaska, from a word that means "high" or "tall."  The Swahili words for "black" and "power" are "nyeusi" and "nguvu;" in Kikuyu it's "iru" and "thitma;" in Kalenjin, "oosek" and "lugumek;" and so on.

Do you see anything that looks the least bit like "Denali" in there?

No, me neither.

Then there's this thing, that has been circulated so much that it makes me want to scream:

I started out responding every time I saw this with, "Oh, you mean like we still do in damn near every school in America?", but I've seen it so many times that I've kind of given up.  It would take you less than the aforementioned three minutes -- something like fifteen seconds, even with a slow connection -- to verify that the Pledge is still recited in every public school in the United States, and a great many private ones, every single morning.  But the people who this one appeals to seem to be unhappy if they're not embattled, so it's much easier to thump their chests and say, "Let me pass along something that conforms to my preconceived notions of how the world is!  That's how staunchly 'Murikan I am!" than it is to find out if what they're angry about is actually true.

But it's not only the conservatives that do this.  How about this one?

This one circulated around the channels of "Everything the US Does Sucks" for ages.  You'd think that it'd be easy enough to check -- after all, whoever created this image kindly listed all of the countries we allegedly invaded -- but again, it's easier just to get outraged and say, "hell yes!" and post it to your Facebook than it is to see if it's true.

Turns out, some political scientists fact-checked the list, and by the generally accepted definition of "invasion," only three qualify (Grenada, Panama, and Iraq).  Another seven are possibilities, if you stretch the definition to include sending troops to help fighters already battling with the government (Libya, Kuwait, Kosovo, Haiti, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Bosnia).  But this list includes Liberia -- where US troops acted as peacekeepers to stop the citizens from slaughtering each other -- and Congo, where they were sent in for humanitarian aid after refugees from the Rwandan genocide started pouring across the border!

Outrage is easy.  The trouble is, making sure you're not passing along a falsehood is easy, too, in these days where information is available at the touch of a keyboard.  There is no excuse for the fast-forward-finger.

The bottom line is: truth matters.  As Daniel Patrick Moynihan so eloquently put it, you are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.  If you want to argue your position, that's fine and dandy, whether or not I agree with you.  But supporting your cause with lies helps nothing and no one.

All it does is make it look like you don't know how to do a Google search.

Come as you were

There's a Reincarnation Conference at the end of this month in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I can't go.

Of course, tickets are $225 a pop, and I suspect Carol would have words with me if I blew that kind of money on such a thing.  But still.  It features talks, workshops, and opportunities for hypnosis sessions in which you are guided through "past life regression."  There's a presentation by a psychic lawyer and an "acclaimed materialization medium."  Workshops include:

• People Stuck Who Need to Be Rescued
• How Earthbound Spirits, Ghosts, Demons and ETs Can Affect You and Your Clients and the Six Steps to Take to Release Them
• Why We Know Our Pets Live on with Us in the Next Realm
• What Happens to Babies Lost Before Birth by Miscarriages and Other Events
• Why We Know Jesus Taught Reincarnation
• Your Soul's Plan: Why You Chose This Life
• Heaven and Hell As They Really Are: What "the Dead" Are Telling Us

So I think we can all agree that it's gonna be good times.  I wonder how many of the participants in past life regressions will find out that they were Babylonian princesses?  You always seem to have Babylonian princesses, somehow.

The Dazu Wheel of Reincarnation [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

A recent poll indicated that one in five Americans believes in reincarnation.  One in ten claims actually to recall a past life. This is grist to the mill of Dr. Brian Weiss, a prominent psychologist who specializes in past life regression.  "I define [reincarnation] as when we die physically, a part of us goes on," Weiss said, "and that we have lessons to learn here.  And that if you haven't learned all of these lessons, then that soul, that consciousness, that spirit comes back into a baby's body."

Well, that all sounds just nifty.  But the difficulty, of course, is the usual one; there's no evidence whatsoever that this actually happens.  The human mind, as I've mentioned before, is a remarkably plastic, and scarily unreliable, processing device.  Experiments have conclusively shown that given enough emotional charge, an imagined scene can actually become a memory, and thereafter be "remembered" as if it had actually happened.  In a context where a subject was being hypnotized by a professional-looking individual with "Dr." in front of his/her name, and perhaps was even being given subtle suggestions of what to "recall," that impression, and its retention as a memory afterwards, would become even more powerful.

So what gets told to someone, how (s)he remembers it, and how that memory is conflated with what else has happened make all of these stories of people who remember past lives questionable at best.  (Here's a well-publicized one about a little boy who supposedly recalls events that happened to him in a past life in which he was a woman named Pam.)  Add to that the possibility of hoaxes and outright lies, and you can see why few skeptics accept what anecdotal evidence we have as convincing.

And then, there's just the statistical argument, that because there are more people alive today than at any time in the past, not all of us can be reincarnated.  Some believers solve this problem by allowing reincarnation from "lower animals."  In that case, it's funny how no one seems to remember being, say, a bug.  "Boy, life sure was boring, as a bug," is something I'd bet you rarely hear anyone say in a past life regression.

Not only does no one remember being a bug, few of them, it seems, were even just ordinary humans.  "The skeptical part of me about the past life thing is that, just statistically, the odds are that in my past life, I was a Chinese peasant, right?" says Dr. Stephen Prothero, a professor of theology at Boston University.  "But hardly anybody ever is a Chinese peasant.  Everybody is Cleopatra or Mark Antony or Jesus, you know?"

Even Dr. Weiss has to admit this is a problem.   "We're not going to be able to extract a blood sample and get DNA and say, 'Oh, I see you were alive in the 11th century,' no," he stated.  "It's people remembering it, so it's clinical proof."

So, once again, we have someone whose definition of "proof" differs considerably from mine.  And I'd be willing to say, "Well, what harm if these people believe that they were once Eleanor of Aquitaine?" except that the past life regressors and the rest of them are bilking the gullible out of large quantities of money.   On one level, perhaps people who are that credulous deserve bilking, but the compassionate side of my personality feels like it's just wrong to take advantage.

In any case, I rather regret that I'll have to miss this month's "Come As You Were" party.  It would have been fun.  I would have loved to see what they'd have made out of trying to do a past-life regression with me.  I think I'd have said... "I'm...  I'm flying through the air.  Free.  Wild.  I'm... well, fuck.  I just got splatted on a windshield."

So it's kind of a pity I can't go.  Oh, well, as the reincarnated are wont to say, there's always next time.