Ever Watch James Van Praagh, or John Edward ??

Scam artists who make a living exploiting the gulliblity of those who have lost a loved one. Such people should be shot in a healthy society.

They are an obvious fraud.

Do you think it's just a coincidence that John Edward can hear things from "the other side" but apparently the connection is just a little fuzzy. Just fuzzy enough that all he can sense is things like "Oh someone is coming through... They are trying to reach someone... someone whose name starts with an M or an N... a woman... maybe a mother or a daughter, or maybe an aunt... [no response]... no, no, maybe a sister or a friend then?"

Christians and Muslims pull the same shit. They say there is a heaven and a god, and that it is certain, you just have to have "faith" and be in the right frame of mind.

If there was an "other side" occupied by a supreme being, you would think He would be more fucking clear with His communication. As a matter of fact you would think He would be crystal fucking clear - after all it's God, He controls the fucking transmission.

The gullibility of man is an amazing thing.

i am not religious at all but i gave both shows a chance.When one of them started talking to animals that ruined it for me

and your arguments defending your point are amazingly funny

You don't think animals communicate with each other without speaking?

Go do some research and you'll find otherwise.

You put it perfectly. There's a great episode of South Park about John Edwards...

I love when people criticize religions as being "big business" and only a money generating tool, and then go on to discuss the merits of psychics. Haha.

They all use a standard cold reading technique that is easily learned, and clever editing makes it look just that more convincing.

http://www.randi.org likes to bust these asshole's chops

Not dead animals.

Dude as someone who's worked around these people lemme let you answer your own questions:

1.) How many accurately predicted the 911 disasters?
2.) How many accurately predicted the Shuttle Columbia disaster?
3.) How many accurately predicted the hurricanes that devestated the U.S. over the past 10 years?
4.) How many accurately predicted the massive death tolls in C. and S. America due to volcanoes and floods over the past 20 years?
5.) If they could really talk to the dead, how come none of them asked President Kennedy who shot his ass?
6.) Here's an exercise of a medium:

Hello audience, I'm getting a psychic message from the beyond. One of you in the audience let me know if I'm correct.

Hmmmm I'm picking up the name...Bob, or Robert. Is anyone thinking of someone with that name?

( 50 out of 100 people in the audience raise their hands )

Okay ummm okay, Bob, is telling me something about a 'Mary'...Anybody thinking of a Bob and Mary?

( 25 out of the 50 raise their hands )

Okay, ummm Bob and Mary, married? Or dating? Or brother and sister? I'm getting some sort of relationship.

( 10 out of the 25 raise their hands )

Okay, Bob and Mary...relationship...uh, near the water?

( 5 out of the 10 raise their hands )

Ummm, wait , ahhh. Fishing, I'm getting fishing

( 2 out of the 5 raise their hands )

ummm, I'm getting one of them sick.. um..cancer?

( Lady jumps up and says her step brother's 3rd cousin twice removed was named Bob and he used to date a woman who's next door neighbor's sister introduced Bob to a woman named Mary who had cancer last year she heard but she died )

Okay, unnn Mary says hello!

Lesson: What are the odds that a group of 100 people are going to know a Bob and a Mary who got sick, died, married, dating?

When they find a famous person who can give all the details of the afterlife ( which is an oxymoron ) then that'll settle the issue.

" There's a sucker born every minute PT Barnum is credited with saying, but I submit that if he's right, then there's a damned fool born every second. "

I can agree with the cold reading data. That's an old trick, but the Amazing Randi is about as credible as the 'Lucky Charms Leprechaun'.

He's just an antagonistic charlatan making a buck off anal retentiveness.

When he's been put up to the challenge himself on two occasions I know of he ran like a beootch.

I have read Sylvia Browne's books, watch her on Larry King and Montel Williams... I would love to believe her theories, but it all sounds too good to be true.

But if I believe in any superior being and life after death, I would believe what she says, as opposed to other religions and theories.

As far as what Greg B mentioned about psychics predicting those events, Nostradamus did predict those things hundreds of years ago... http://www.nostradamus.org/

It's all entertaining to say the least

personally i believe there are some kind of psychic people

since a person only use like 2% of their brain power, that extra % can make them enlightened.

I even think everyone has some kind of psychic intuitions. When you have shit like Deja VU, or that crazy gut feeling.

This is another reason that i know happens to everyone

1. have you ever thought about a person and then all of a sudden they call you on the phone?

2. have you ever got that creepy feeling that someone is starring or talking at you? then you turn around and its true

2% of their brain???

How about NO BRAIN AT ALL!




Is A Brain Really Necessary?
By Richard Milton
Alternative Science.com
9-22-3



Do you really have to have a brain? The reason for my apparently absurd question is the remarkable research conducted at the University of Sheffield by neurology professor John Lorber.

When Sheffield's campus doctor was treating one of the mathematics students for a minor ailment, he noticed that the student's head was a little larger than normal. The doctor referred the student to professor Lorber for further examination.

The student in question was academically bright, had a reported IQ of 126 and was expected to graduate. When he was examined by CAT-scan, however, Lorber discovered that he had virtually no brain at all.

Instead of two hemispheres filling the cranial cavity, some 4.5 centimetres deep, the student had less than 1 millimetre of cerebral tissue covering the top of his spinal column. The student was suffering from hydrocephalus, the condition in which the cerebrospinal fluid, instead of circulating around the brain and entering the bloodstream, becomes dammed up inside the brain.

Normally, the condition is fatal in the first months of childhood. Even where an individual survives he or she is usually seriously handicapped. Somehow, though, the Sheffield student had lived a perfectly normal life and went on to gain an honours degree in mathematics.

This case is by no means as rare as it seems. In 1970, a New Yorker died at the age of 35. He had left school with no academic achievements, but had worked at manual jobs such as building janitor, and was a popular figure in his neighbourhood. Tenants of the building where he worked described him as passing the days performing his routine chores, such as tending the boiler, and reading the tabloid newspapers. When an autopsy was performed to determine the cause of his premature death he, too, was found to have practically no brain at all.

Professor Lorber has identified several hundred people who have very small cerebral hemispheres but who appear to be normal intelligent individuals. Some of them he describes as having 'no detectable brain', yet they have scored up to 120 on IQ tests.

No-one knows how people with 'no detectable brain' are able to function at all, let alone to graduate in mathematics, but there are a couple theories. One idea is that there is such a high level of redundancy of function in the normal brain that what little remains is able to learn to deputise for the missing hemispheres. Another, similar, suggestion is the old idea that we only use a small percentage of our brains anyway -- perhaps as little a 10 per cent.

The trouble with these ideas is that more recent research seems to contradict them. The functions of the brain have been mapped comprehensively and although there is some redundancy there is also a high degree of specialisation -- the motor area and the visual cortex being highly specific for instance. Similarly, the idea that we 'only use 10 per cent of our brain' is a misunderstanding dating from research in the 1930s in which the functions of large areas of the cortex could not be determined and were dubbed 'silent', when in fact they are linked with important functions like speech and abstract thinking. The other interesting thing about Lorber's findings is that they remind us of the mystery of memory. At first it was thought that memory would have some physical substrate in the brain, like the memory chips in a PC. But extensive investigation of the brain has turned up the surprising fact that memory is not located in any one area or in a specific substrate. As one eminent neurologist put it, 'memory is everywhere in the brain and nowhere.'

But if the brain is not a mechanism for classifying and storing experiences and analysing them to enable us to live our lives then what on earth is the brain for? And where is the seat of human intelligence? Where is the mind?

The only biologist to propose a radically novel approach to these questions is Dr Rupert Sheldrake. In his book A New Science of Life Sheldrake rejected the idea that the brain is a warehouse for memories and suggested it is more like a radio receiver for tuning into the past. Memory is not a recording process in which a medium is altered to store records, but a journey that the mind makes into the past via the process of morphic resonance.

But, of course, such a crazy idea couldn't possibly be true, could it?

Alternative Science Website http://www.AlternativeScience.Com Copyright Richard Milton ? 1992-2002 Winner of more than 70 AWARDS for site excellence http://www.alternativescience.com/no_brainer.htm

yup

lol.

Oh well,

I still beleive some of it...

And if it is all guess work, James Van Praagh is much better at it than John Edward.

Edward takes like 5mins just to get a name out.

James seems to hit them with 5 or 6 different things right away....

i would have to say from my viewing of the show it looks as if he is using some sort of mental wedgie board.

On the back of John Edwards book says to a woman "Do you believe in God as this requires faith to work"

Either way i am not into this form of entertainment.

Anybody wanna healing see sig

It's apparent while watching these shows, that the "cold reading" technique is often used. Like most people, I want very much to believe.

I have read several articles in which claim John Edward is a fraud. He is said to have used numerous ploys including the planting of microphones in the auditorium in order to pick up conversation among audience members and having aides who gather data by having guests fill out cards with their name, address and other personal information.

http://www.csicop.org/si/2001-11/i-files.html

http://www.skeptic.com/newsworthy13.html

http://www.salon.com/people/feature/...3/probability/


I still, however, feel that Sylvia Browne may be legitimate, as her method differs from most of the other psychics I've seen on TV. She just spits out lots of info - first and last names, places, events - and seemingly without the back and forth guessing games of cold reading.

My friend, bodies die, souls do not.

Trust me on this one. As you get older and people and pets connected to die you'll start to form a different opinion on life and death.

Like I've said on other posts, I don't know exactly how it works, but there is something going on after death, cause I've had too many weird things happen that indicate life in some form continues on.

I'm a very black and white type person. I have to see it to believe it and I believe it.

If I can make a suggestion to all the disbelievers.

First I'm not saying there are not a lot of fake psychics around. No doubt the majority are bogus.

But there are some people who have incredibly powerful abilities in this area.

I like both James and John and they seem to have some talent. Unless I see someone personally though I don't buy it til I get the confirmation in my own reading.

I did have a reading from one women years back who I firmly believe had special powers. The things she said there was no way she could have known or faked. The only other possibility is that these folks are just talented at picking up the energy generated by yout thoughts as you sit there and maybe that's what they are connecting to.

Also, the CIA and the KGB, as well as most law enforcement agencies in the US, have been using Psychics for years. So you have to ask yourself, if there is nothing to it why do they continue to use these people?

I couldn't agree more.

That's how i feel about James Van Praagh.

He can have people on tears within moments. Mentioning stuff that they do at home, and such like.

John seems to take ages to get just the right name.

Yep, I agree. Two years ago my 7 month old son was killed in a car crash and there has been some strange things that have happened since. Mainly two different clocks in my house stopping on two different occasions at the EXACT same time (9:41AM) and the same day of the week the accident happened. Coincidence? Maybe. Personally I don't think so.

Dayyuumm, we had that happen once a while ago in here...

Okay, okay, okay!!!

Listen. I've got a great real estate deal for you..

There's this bridge, and it's in Brooklyn...

And the world is flat; and gravity, air and electricity doesnt exist because you cannot see it.

I'm sorry to hear that.

KRL....me too ! I'm glad you, a respectable guy says what I feel to be true. Thanks