Harry. Forgive me for saying so, but I think that Bob Leggitt is pretty clear. Seems to me he is roundly taking the michael, and doing so in a satirical way designed to highlight some of the absurdities of the ultimately wholly absurd 'pscychic' industry.Originally Posted by Harryprice
Whether Bob may have considered himself 'psychic' before, seems to me he must have learned his lesson good and proper if he was. I for one am looking forward to the next episode.
You cannae kid a kidder kiddo!
Good luck with that but I think he'll find satire entirely lost on his intended audience!* In my experience, the way to influence believers is to present them with an explanation that better fits their personal experiences than their own theories.
*possible exception - if he were to satirise 'skeptics' (ie. the psychic communities idea of what skeptics are rather than the real thing) he would definitely get through to them - in fact, this could be a good idea!
THE TRUTH ABOUT REINCARNATION & THE AFTERLIFE
It is of course the case that after death, we all live in perpetuity with our deceased relatives, who are sufficiently alive to jovially and vibrantly discuss family matters with Derek Acorah, yet sufficiently dead not to have wondered why they were in a coffin. A good medium can contact anyone who’s officially dead, at any time. So once in the spirit world, the dead-yet-alive evidently remain on 24/7 call, forever. Death, then, potentially means meeting up with even one’s very earliest tangible forebears, who lived hundreds of millions of years ago. This creates some apprehension. Finding out you’re related to a primitive lump of very simple matter, who spent every waking second trying to mate in a small pool and has the brains of a plant, can be a severe shock. (No need for apprehension Bob. I'm sure your dead ancestors will come to accept your pool-based proclivities and plant-like brain once they meet you. I did - Tori).
So, with the above duly absorbed, you must next attempt to absorb the following... Whilst all your ancestors (including Richard the Third and Hereward the Wake, if applicable) are everlastingly available for your reunion (and for the Acorah stage show, naturally), they have also been reincarnated. So not only are they both dead and alive, they are also both themselves and someone else. Indeed, they may have been reincarnated many times, which means they could simultaneously be Hereward the Wake, Richard the Third, and fifty or so other table-banging loudmouths from the annals of time. This, I know, is not an easy concept to visualise. So here’s a more worldly analogy for the way reincarnation avoids conflicting with the medium’s interminable supply of spirit world contacts...
A shopping channel sells a superior quality timepiece, for three quid, and sends it to the customer.
Whilst the timepiece is in the post, Uri Geller thinks about it and it falls to bits.
The customer sends the timepiece back.
The shopping channel has the clock crushed, melted, and made into a superior quality necklace.
But somehow, they still have the clock. The clock has been reincarnated as a necklace, and yet it still exists.
So now they have the clock, and the necklace... And the three quid, and the P&P profit, obviously.
The shopping channel then sells the superior quality necklace to a customer, for eight quid.
The customer wears the necklace in a brisk breeze of almost 9 mph, and it falls to bits.
More return post, crushing, melting, and reincarnation - this time as a box of scrails.
But the necklace somehow still exists, as does the clock.
So now the channel (which, I should stress, is fictional) has the clock, the necklace, the three quid, the eight quid, both sets of P&P, and the scrails - which some poor sod is at his wit's end trying to sell as I write...
It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to surmise that if things go on like this for 600 million years, the shopping channel will need a warehouse about a billion times the size of the universe. Indeed, they’ll need a hard drive the size of the solar system just to house the inventory.
So how is the spirit world able to contain all this relentless expansion? Well, it does help that some beings are reincarnated as something much, much smaller. Gulay Harris’s parents, for example, were reincarnated as seafood, and after a message from the spirit world he fished them out of the Atlantic. There were many advantages to having parents in the form of seafood as opposed to humanity. Gulay was able to spend his days blissfully happy, living rent and mortgage-free in his parents’ house. He could have his bottom smacked by a purpose-hired operative in the bedroom, whilst his mom and dad were safely confined to the closet, in a fish tank. Christmas was a breeze. No driving halfway across the country to visit the family, and blowing fortunes on gifts. He’d just pop into the spare room, drop a bauble and a couple of lumps of turkey into the tank, and it was all over. An affront perhaps, but it didn’t matter a jot. Small creatures of the sea have a memory span of just a few seconds so by Boxing Day they’d have no concept of what a gross bloody insult of a Christmas they’d had. Best of all, if ever Gulay came home drunk with the professional bottom-smacker and forgot to move the fish tank out of view, his parents would only remain disgusted for a maximum of six seconds. Sadly, however, it was a session of vertical drinking which would eventually end Gulay’s relationship with his parents. As the great man himself put it...
“One minute your family are balanced precariously on the side of the bath, as you left them, awaiting a water change. The next, you’ve been carried home from a nightclub, and you’ve crawled into the bathroom, and the contents of the fish tank are being irretrievably sucked down the lavatory in a tragic whirlpool of vomit, Harpic and government juice. You awake the next morning, and suddenly it hits you... “Oh God!... I didn’t, did I?... Please tell me I haven’t flushed my parents down the toilet!!!...”
Would it be any wonder, in the light of all the foregoing, if rather than try to negotiate the scientific impossibility and potential personal trauma of reincarnation and the afterlife, mediums were just to say “stuff it”, and make it all up? Afterall, it's so much easier, and who’s to know?
Important Addendum From Victoria... Pet fish and/or seafood should not be fed on turkey at Christmas, or at any other time of year. I disagree with the synopsis that sea creatures will only remain disgusted for a maximum of six seconds. If I was a fish, and I saw something which disgusted me, I would still be disgusted in six seconds’ time. One second later, seven seconds after the event, I may have forgotten the incident which disgusted me, but because I was still disgusted about it only one second ago, I will remember my disgust. Hence, I will continue to be disgusted, on the basis that I am never disgusted without damn good reason, and simply the fact that someone has clearly done something disgusting enough to disgust me is disgusting in itself.
In our next main piece, Tori will reveal how YOU can convince people you’re psychic. It’s so simple, and I'm not joking!
Love & Light,
Bob.
Oh please keep it coming, I lurk on the forum most of the time but had to sign in to saybrilliant ........best laugh I've had in ages - alsa think some people have no sense of humour!
@alisondubois
Are you this Alison Dubois by any chance?
Last edited by polomint38; 10th November 2010 at 07:17 PM. Reason: There seems to be a fault with my keyboard
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her cheese slid off her cracker many moons ago
floppit
Bob. V.good again. Looking forward to the female perspective. Of course, notable exceptions such as beloved Derek (light and love be upon him) aside, the ladies do seem to be so much more receptive to the spirits. Like you say though, so many of them, making so many noises, it must be like force 10 tinnitus, poor things.
You cannae kid a kidder kiddo!
Sorry, I'm completely confused now. I thought the idea was to get through to believers, whereas this piece reads as if it is designed to amuse skeptics. So who is it aimed at, please?
Harry,
While I can understand you seeing it that way I must disagree. Bob appears to me to have very wittily highlighted some of the absurdities of the 'psychic' theories.
Evidence is the fact that our very welcome Spiritlove visitors, or one at least, has praised Bob and agreed with me. A bleedin' miracle in itself.
The fact that they keep coming to visit shows we are respected to some extent, and that Bobs daft but ever so accurate dissections just add another dimension to our work.
Put another way, I do not suppose there is any single answer bomb that will get believers to reconsider. Just as there are so many variations on religious and spiritual beliefs, there must be many ways to address the problems, and Bob is, imho, offering a perfectly valid approach as part of a multi-front effort to push back the boundaries of ignorance and gullibility.
There must be room for the incisive, academic thorough demolitions, as well as the funny but serious highlighting of the inconsistencies, and lack of probability let alone possibility of the pantheon of psychic poop.
Long live Bob and Tori! May you have many happy reincarnations, but preferably not as seafood/shellfish.
You cannae kid a kidder kiddo!
There are many variations of 'psychic theories', often mutually contradictory and inconsistent. Pointing such obvious points out is likely to quickly identify the writer as a skeptic who will subsequently be ignored by believers. I'd be interested to know if this approach has ever made anyone change their mind about anything.
I thought the idea was to gain the confidence of believers and influence their thinking. Instead, this material looks typical of the sort of stuff you get in many skeptic blogs. Does anyone read them, apart from other skeptics?
Harry, first I repeat that if Spiritlovers can come here and enjoy then it must be o.k. at some level.
Evidence of changing minds? Hum? Well, this sort of deabte has rumbled on here on other threads. Not sure if anyone has produced serious evidence of the effects of trying to convert believers (whatever variation on the theme)?
It certainly would be interesting to see any studies of say fundamental believers getting a 'revelation' of rationality to see what inputs had an effect.
Even if a little of the humour sticks and spreads it is part of our great 'mission'. Another thought is that believers rarely if ever see the absurdities and contradictions in their beliefs, even when they stick out like a sore skyscraper. Maybe a little humour, and expressed in a slightly different way, has value as far as I can see.
Even if not, it is highly amusing. Perhaps we can have a vote as to whether it should be in humour threads. Though Bob did acknowledge this point earlier, and I think handled it o.k.
Of course, if there is counter-evidence i.e. that this is positively damaging the cause, then o.k. However, I somehow doubt it because we have enough trouble trying to get them to listen anyway. All that gish gashing or whatever it is Bindeweede mentioned in another thread, where they just snow (perhaps blizzard!) any debate.
You cannae kid a kidder kiddo!
That could be taken two ways - there's arguably a fine line between getting someone's confidence openly and by deception.
Possibly the worst thing would be to do something that could be taken as being dishonestly stealthy, and someone who has things they really want to believe but isn't entirely sure about could choose to place their dividing line very differently to where I'd place one.
Bob, have you thought about posting all this on the Spiritlove forum?
I wasn't suggesting deception - that would be the worst approach possible - but rather constructive engagement. In other words, not preaching to people but listening to their ideas and beliefs seriously and finding out how they arrive at them. Then, and only then, you might want to gently point out any obvious logical or evidential flaws.
Ridiculing ideas has never worked with religion, over a long period of time, so I see no reason why it should suddenly start working now on other weird beliefs. If amusing skeptics is the aim then it's fine but if there is some other point then I'm not convinced it's the right approach.
But is he ridiculing ideas? seems to me Bob is just working through the implications of the premises held by woo-mongers. If the consequences happen to be funny that's not the fault of the skeptics.
"What gets us into trouble isn't what we don't know, but what we know for sure that just ain't so!" - Mark Twain
Does any individual hold all those implied beliefs at the same time? In my experience, many individuals I've talked to hold beliefs that are, more or less, self-consistent but simply lack supporting evidence. And other people hold contradictory beliefs which are also pretty much self-consistent but,again, lack support from evidence. It is the lack of evidence in the field of, say, the paranormal that allows so many contradictory theories to survive. There is no way to rule any of the competing theories. The same thing happens with conspiracy theories - look at all the supposed 'alternative' theories there are for 9/11. But individual CTers don't hold contradictory theories at the same time.
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