STi-Frenchie

Anyone been watching this 3 part Everyman series? Have to admit I find it fascinating viewing. The only one of the mediums who seems to be worth his salt is the Scots lad, Gordon Smith (with a name like that I would have expected him to predict the future of pie-makers and the butterfly effect on the UK economy, but I digress).

The blind girl from Belfast seems not to have much of a "gift" from what I've seen so far, and seems to be using the old fairground hocus-pocus trickery to lure the sitters in and convince them she's talking to the other side.

Donatella Versace's cousin and her husband and their "do a reading by email" seems like one big scam although, give the woman her dues, she did get a few things right last night. As for the trainee-mediums, what's that all about? I doubt if any of them are picking up much of anything - "Yes, I feel warmth in this room, definitely warmth", "That's cos the heating is on". Class.

However, this Gordon Smith chap - the only one who doesn't charge for his services - seems to be the real deal. I really felt for that poor woman who'd lost her son in a car accident and has been "in contact" with him. If we're to believe what we saw, Smith knew nothing of the parents but was able to give an astonishingly accurate reading. I hope the woman received much comfort from him and can now move on as she looks to be suffering immensely.

So, what do you think fellow SNetters ? Who's been talking to the dead and how good was your "channel to the other side"?

Geezer

IMO, it's all ****. They are very good at reading peoples body language and guage their reactions to particular questions. Once you are dead, that's it, you can't contact anyone.

They prey on the emotional needs of the bereaved to be re-united with their loved ones, it's all very underhanded.

I went with an old girlfriend once to a medium who everyone raved about, and how accurate her readings were. I gave nothing away at all, an not unsurprisingly, she did not get a single thing right about me, nor did any of her 'predictions' come to be.

To give them their due, these people do have a talent, but it's not for contacting the dead!

Geezer

boxst

Hello

This person http://www.ianrowland.com/Start/Home.html is a friend of mine and he likes nothing more than to go around and show so-called psychics that he can do a better job using trickery.

Steve.

jjones

lmao @ derek acorah

has me rolling on the floor hysterically when the mrs watches that "Most Haunted" rubbish

STi-Frenchie

Totally agree. Can't take the man seriously at all.

TonyFlow

Whats that Sam?

Leslie

It can be a dangerous game if you take it too seriously.

Les

ozzy

So, spirits are purely dead people or do they include animals too?

Wonder why no ones reported being haunted by a 60 million year old dinosaur

STi-Frenchie

Strangley enough, I was lying in bed the other morning and could hear this loud, wild thumping sound which I could have swore was a dead stegosaurus roaming around in my house. Woke up and found I had a hangover. Another myth de-bunked

Geezer

I predict this thread will become very silly.

Does that count?

Geezer

Sith

FWIW I believe in life after death. We only use 10% of our brains, most people it seems use alot less. We don't know what people could do if we used 30% of our brains, some say contact the dead, some say kinetics. Who knows.

What I know is people mock what they don't understand. Our mathmatics and science is built on other peoples beliefs and calculations. What is there to say they were right.

At one point in history everyone knew the earth was flat. Those who suggested otherwise were mocked. Untill they were proved to be right.

Who knows if these mediums on TV are fake or not. They know, we don't. Hitler had the Occult division. The Americans and the Russions also had their own paranormal divisions.

People spend too much time taking the **** out of what they don't understand rather than trying to understand it or prove one way or the other.

Why is there a Universe, why are there planets, why are we here? Why is there anything at all? Nothing need exist at all, but it does.

I'm not expecting sensible answers but I welcome a sensible debate as I believe it would be interesting.

Geezer

I agree that just because we don't understand something it cannot be true. But this is slightly different. The human mind (and indeed other primates and intelligent mammals like dolphins) is just a load of electrical impulses. We are nearly on the point where we can create learingin computers to emulate us. Are they living? No. When you switch them off, they are gone, just like us.

People who say they can see the future, or what is going on in other places, whilst unlikely, is within the realms of possibility, and indeed allowed to a certain extent in modern physics.

Geezer

Sith

That's just it, they were never alive. We are. The biological is very different from the mechanical.

There is something more to the biological. Emotion, life a sense from within which gives you choice, desire etc.

Geezer

Please define life. I suspect you cannot, no one else has been able to successfully do it yet.

Sensient computers may well be considered alive. It's just easier to kill them!

A sperm is considered living, so is an egg, but neither are capable of thought. At what point does it become so? Where is the 'soul' before that point? Same place as after it dies I suspect, nowhere.

Geezer

Sith

Life for me is an organic term. If computers were organic then they would be alive.

For me, alive does not have to mean sensient. When you bring a soul in to the equation, that's when it starts to get awkward. I don't really believe in a soul as such. More of an inner sense that all living items have.

Someone once said to me about life, there are no right or wrong answers to life, some are just more feasable and easier to understand.

mattstant

is that the Scouse **** he really needs a good smack for being such a crap performer for starters and the appalling generalised twaddle he comes out with beggars belief.

Bubba po

It's because the last dinosaur became extinct 65 million years ago, naturally!



(apart from the dickie-birds, of course)

Bubba po

And stegosauri were closer to 150 million years ago.

Geezer

That is quite interesting, but all it proves is that whilst we are alive, the impulses that give us thought can exist in another place (not unusual in quantum physics). And, you mention near death experiences, not dead people. Once they brain activity stops, that's it.

Geezer

OllyK

I'd like proof, but I'd settle for your theory on how / what survives death as a starter.

You may only use 10% of your brain, science actually suggests the rest of us, use it all. http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percnt.htm

Speak for yourself, we know perfectly well how paranormalists do what they do, you just haven't removed the romantic spectacles and seen through the ruse yet.

Please, go and take a basic science class, go to the local primary school and ask them to explain the scientific process to you. Science is not a belief system. It is based on observation and repeatable verifiable evidence.

When in history? Do some research and you'll be surprised how far back we knew the earth wasn't flat, and you need to go back way earlier than the middle ages!

Turn it on it's head. Science is self correcting and showed the earth was not flat. Paranormalists have not been able to show any effect or ability under controlled conditions that remove the possibility of cheating. We just occasionally "mock those who still claim the earth is flat", we know it's not.

Oh they are fake. No question. Not yet seen a convincing one, and not one has been prepared to "perform" under controlled conditions that would preclude cheating, wonder why?

We do, we really do!

And....it did what exactly? Help him win the war? Ooops - nope!

Which showed??? Yup you got it, after millions of tax dollars spent, it showed remote viewing and other paranormal goings on weren't worth dick. They didn't work, not even slightly. Oops!

It's been researched, it's been understood and debunked every time it is presented. Some people want to romanticise it and still believe, that's fine, but don't try and tell the rest of us it is or may be real unless you can prove it. In the last few millenia there hasn't been a single scientifically proven repeatable paranormal event. What does that tell you? It tells me that there is a infinitessimally small chance that the paranormal is real, so small that to all intents and purposes we can consider that it does not exist. If somebody can come along and show an effect under controlled conditions then I'll happily change my mind.

And your point is? Or are you trying to suggest, because YOU don't understand something that's proof for the existence of a god or the paranormal?

Happy to debate, but do some reading on your own, look up some of the commonly held beliefs (the 10% myth for a start), you'd be surprised how many things people accept as fact when they aren't so. Once you have questioned some of the common myths, start looking at some of the paranormal claims and use the same critical thinking to analyse them rather than approaching them with awe and wonder because you don't understand it.