 the
Skeptic's Dictionary
Newsletter 53
March 11, 2005
"Men would never be superstitious,
if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were
always favored by fortune...."
Spinoza
In this issue: some
feedback; second-hand smoke again;
Wisconsin DMV supports psychics; near-death experiences and
suicide; Uri Geller; Osama Bin Ladin;
Spanish translation of the SD; and a list of
updates and new stuff in the Skeptic's Dictionary and Refuge.
Feedback
I open my Skeptic's Dictionary entry on
the mineral doctor thusly: "Joel
D. Wallach is a veterinarian...." A reader wrote to correct me:
"A day without a hamburger is like a day without
sunshine." Dr Joel Wallach is a meat eater!
Please correct your book and site as a skeptic, why
would you have this information incorrect? He is not a vegetarian!
____
James Taylor from Calgary, Canada, writes
In Canada we have a chain of bookstores called
Chapters (we also have Indigo, but it is the same company). I went into
Chapters the other day to find some James Randi material and found that they
had none in stock. They did happen to have plenty of books (whole sections
in fact) on alternative therapies, alternative medicines. They have no
section pertaining to skeptical material or critical thinking. This was the
first thing that irked me.
Things aren't much different here, James.
But can we blame the bookstores for carrying the books that sell?
Skepticism will never sell as well as true believer stuff.
What was worse I went to go look in the science and
astronomy section and I found a book called "Dowsing: A Journey Beyond Our
Five Senses" by Hamish Miller in the Science section! At first I thought
maybe it was a book that helped to debunk dowsing but I was quickly
disappointed when I picked it up to see that on the inside flap it talked
about the "science and art of dowsing" and how you yourself could use this
"scientific technique" to find hidden water in your own home. I quickly put
down the book in disgust.
I had just the opposite experience. I found a copy
of L. Sprague de Camp's classic,
The Ancient Engineers, in the New
Age section of Tower Books in Sacramento. Who knows what was waiting for
me in the "science" section.
It is also unfortunate that I can only obtain skeptical material (at least in Canada) from online bookstores.
I hope James complained to the bookstore manager and
explained why it's important to give people a choice. It's really the only
decent thing to do in a free society.
______
A reader was very upset with the claim in my entry on
repressed memory therapy
that there is little scientific evidence supporting the notion that
childhood sexual abuse almost always causes psychological problems in
adults. I referred the reader to an
article by Esther
Giller, President and Director of the Sidran Foundation, which, according to
its website, is "a nationally-focused nonprofit organization devoted to
helping people who have experienced traumatic life events."
According to Giller, the research indicates that
"about 1/3 of sexually abused children have no symptoms, and a large
proportion that do become symptomatic, are able to recover. Fewer than 1/5
of adults who were abused in childhood show serious psychological
disturbance."
I also referred the reader to an article in
Psychological Bulletin (1993) by Kathleen A.Kendall-Tackett, Linda Meyer Williams, and
David Finkelhor:
Impact
of sexual abuse on children: a review and synthesis. 113:164-180.
These facts, of course, in no way diminish the
horrible damage done to children every day by sexual and physical abuse. Nor
do they diminish the long-term damage, physical and psychological, done to
victims of severe sexual abuse in childhood.
_____
Another upset reader admonished me for not having an
entry on "love" in the Dictionary. He says he's from the Bronx, New York.
That might explain his "accent."
I have enjoyed reading your website.
However I have found what I think is a flaw in your rather
'totalitarian' system of skepticism.
I notice that among your list of subjective beliefs and practices
(some more dubious than others) you do not have an entry for 'love'. Love
is, like the benefits of aromatherapy, or faith, entirely subjective; it
cannot be objectively proven or tested: its occurrence is based entirely
on the experience of the lover or lovers.
Love may be subjective but I'm not aware of any cranks
or quacks claiming it can cure cancer or arthritis. Headaches are
subjective, too, but I don't plan an entry on that topic any time soon,
unless I get more letters like this one.
Now, I cannot imagine that you have never felt or been in love, and
hence, must conclude that you are either a hypocrite or a fool, or both.
If indeed, I imagine wrong, and you can truly say that you have never felt
love (of any kind), or having felt it, dismissed it as untrue because
unproveable, then I shall think you a monster.
Hypocrite, fool, or monster? That is the question.
I'll only respond by noting that the writer's notion about dismissing
love as untrue because unproveable is gibberish and has no meaning.
Now, one may very logically say (as I think it) that a lover's love
is sufficiently proven by the beloved's love in return. But, to a true
skeptic as yourself, I'm afraid that this does not pass muster.
The writer dismisses me a "true skeptic" but is that
proveable? Even so, should he ask, I would pass him the mustard though he
reek of pretentiousness and babbledygook.
The collective subjective experience of two people does not
objectivity make, as you will certainly agree. OK, what if the lovers are
married and their two families are united in friendship, and society
accepts them as husband and wife, and they have beautiful and intelligent
children? Well, entire civilizations have believed in false gods, so that
is not acceptable either is it?
You get my point.
No, I don't get your point.
So, do you have an answer for me, dear skeptic? Please include love
in your list of 'debunked' phenomena, or admit that you are partial, and
hence, not a true student of objectivity.
I'll admit no such thing, sirrah! Follow my advice:
get thee to a nunnery!
_____
Jeff D. wants to know if I consider atheism a
religion. He tends to think it is because he thinks atheism takes "the
nonexistence of nonfalsifiable metaphysical beings/forces on faith." I
referred Jeff to my entry on
faith, where I argue that it is a mistake to assume that any statement
that is not a scientific statement, i.e., one supported by evidence
marshaled forth the way scientists do in support of their scientific claims,
is a matter of faith in the same sense as religious faith in such
things as the Virgin birth or the Trinity. On the other hand, I wouldn't
consider theism a religion. And I can imagine atheists creating some sort of
gathering place for rituals that they call a church and advocating some sort
of naturalistic ethical doctrine. Such atheists might be said to have a
church and belong to a religion (like the
Scientologists and
Raelians, for example).
Second-hand Smoke....Again
A reader asked me to comment on an article by somebody
named Dr. Mason who says that "The largest and longest study (Enstrom
& Kabat) followed more than 35,000 subjects for almost 40 years and
found no significant risk associated with second-hand smoke. Similarly, the
World Health Organization spent seven years at a dozen research centers in
seven countries and came to the same conclusion." Dr. Mason asks "Why
haven't we seen a decline in lung cancer deaths despite Draconian
anti-smoking legislation?" I suppose the comment is asked for because in the
last newsletter I claimed that Shermer is wrong to write "The fact is, there
is no evidence that secondhand smoke causes cancer."
First, here are the actual conclusions from the
Enstrom & Kabat study: "The results do not support a causal relation between
environmental tobacco smoke and tobacco related mortality, although they do
not rule out a small effect. The association between exposure to
environmental tobacco smoke and coronary heart disease and lung cancer may
be considerably weaker than generally believed." To interpret this study as
saying that no significant risk was found to be associated with second-hand
smoke is to come to a different conclusion than the authors of the study.
On the other hand, there is evidence that second-hand
smoke causes cancer. It may be disputed. It may be underwhelming. It may be
contradicted by other evidence. But there is evidence. More evidence was
recently
produced in California. No doubt it will be disputed and argued about,
but that doesn't make it "no evidence."
Headline of the Week Award
The headline of the week award goes to AZCentral.com
for their headline above a story on how the Wisconsin Department of Motor
Vehicles sent about 25,000 registration renewal notices to truckers that
advised them to call the number printed on the notice, which happened to be
the phone number of a "psychic service." (The printed number was one digit
off the DMV number.) The headline read:
Psychic service should have warned DMV
Near-Death Experiences and Suicide
On March 3rd I was interviewed by the Radical Reverend
(Rev. Dr. Cheri DiNovo), who hosts a radio show in Toronto that is broadcast
throughout Ontario as well as to the northern U.S. The topic was
near-death experiences (NDEs).
The main issue was what to make of NDEs. Of course, I maintained that while
the experiences are real and significant, I don't think they provide much
support for the afterlife hypothesis. It was mentioned that the fact that
scientists and others have duplicated NDEs with drugs and electrical
stimulation of the brain does not disproved the afterlife notion. I agreed
but noted that faux NDEs do prove that having an NDE isn't conclusive
evidence for life after death.
I mentioned the research that found that many people
who have NDEs find them life-transforming for the better. Someone else on
the program, however, claimed that something like 4% of those who have an
NDE commit suicide. I wasn't aware of that and have no idea how the
statistic was arrived at. While searching the WWW for some information about
this claim, I came upon an NDE
website that deals with
suicide, but it collects data on people who try to commit suicide and have
NDEs. Apparently, those who fail at suicide don't get the light at the end
of the tunnel, nor do they enjoy a blissful, peaceful trip as reported by
others who have had an NDE. The same WWW search led me to a page that claims
that Melvin Morse, M.D. writes in his book "Transformed by the Light
that "4% of normal adults and 2% of out-of-body experiencers claim they make
watches stop." Rather than try to get more information about that statistic,
I decided to stop my search and be satisfied with the knowledge that there
is still a lot left out there to learn on some future cloudy afternoon.
Uri Geller
Somehow this guy keeps getting media attention.
According to Click2Houston.com, the Amazing Kreskin, a mentalist with some
understanding of hypnosis, has advised Michael Jackson's attorney not to
call Geller to the stand to
testify about what Jackson told him when Geller hypnotized him a few years
ago. Kreskin advised Thomas Mesereau that Geller would hurt the case because
it can be easily shown that people under
hypnosis are able to
control what they say.
In other news, Geller has offered to remove a "cursed
stone" from the English town of Carlisle on the Scottish border and put the
stone in his back yard where he will perform an
exorcism on it with his
pendulum. In case you haven't been following this story, here's a brief
synopsis. In 2001, a "Cursing Stone" was installed in a city museum. The
stone is inscribed with some sort of 16th century curse against highway
robbers or some such bad people. Some folks in Carlisle have noticed that
some bad things have happened to the town since the stone was installed and
are convinced that the stone has something to do with the town's "bad luck."
(Apparently, nothing bad ever happened in the town before 2001. One wonders
what possessed them to install the cursing stone, given their long history
of serene, celestial bliss.) According to
CNN.com, one of the bad things that has happened is that the local
soccer team "dropped a league," whatever that means. CNN reports that Geller
claims that the "Domesday
book records an ancient healing centre in my village and all the
ley lines (alignments of
ancient sites) converge on my garden."
Yes, this is the 21st century and England is
supposedly an advanced industrial society. Of course, this cursed cursing
stone could all be a publicity stunt to try to interest tourists in visiting
Carlisle. Stay tuned and I'll let you know if the good people of Carlisle
give the stone to Geller, who says it's a work of art and he'd like to keep
it in his garden.
Osama Bin Laden
In case you're wondering why
remote viewers haven't
located Osama Bin Laden, wonder no more. Osama has a cadre of psychics who
have created a protective shield around him. How do I know this? I read it
in an article on EMediaWire.com about Ed Kovacs, a remote viewer and
"practicing clairvoyant." Kovacs has written a novel (Unseen Forces)
based partly on Stargate, the U.S. government's 20-year program to
investigate the value of using psychics for spying. (One reviewer describes
the book as "Indiana Jones on steroids.") The government claims it found
that even if remote viewing isn't completely bogus, it is of little or no
use for spying. So, the government disbanded the program - or so we're told.
Some (like
George
Hansen) think the disbanding of the program was a hoax, which would mean
that our government is still wasting money on psychics who are not powerful
enough to break through the psychic barrier created by Osama's psychics.
The Spanish Translation of The
Skeptic's Dictionary
For the past few years I have posted a link to The
Wayback Machine's web archive of the Spanish translation of the Dictionary.
The translation was done voluntarily by several university students. I lost
contact with them and feared maybe something sinister had happened. Not to
worry. They were just caught up in their studies. Now they're back. I heard
from Gerardo Fernández,
one of the original translators, who tells me that the group has its own
website and I can remove the link to the archived version. The address is
http://dicc.ciberesceptico.org/.
What's New in The Skeptic's
Dictionary & Skeptic's Refuge
Updates
- The
inedia entry, to include mention of another inediate, Hira Ratan Manek,
who claims to live on sunlight and water...just like a flower; and
- The
repressed memory therapy entry to include some references to the claim
that it is not true that childhood sexual abuse almost always leads to
psychological problems in adulthood.
New stuff
- A
review of a
review of the independent movie about the
Indigo children by P.M.H.
Atwater, L.H.D., Ph.D. (Hon.) that is really a promo for Atwater's latest
book The New Children and Near-Death Experiences;
- A
note on a
scientific study published by the British Medical Journal that
compared St. John's wort to Paxil for treating moderate to severe
depression;
- A
lovely rant
on a RedNova.com
article on the Global
Consciousness Project;
- A
link to a
worthy interview with playwright Arthur Miller;
- A
note on a
chupacabra that wasn't - it turned out to be a mummified
ocean skate;
- A note on the second meeting of the
Skeptic's Circle, which will lead you to, among other things,
a pile driving contest on Michael Behe's op ed piece in The New York
Times; for more info about the Skeptic's Circle click
here;
- A
roaring rant
on ABC's fulsome panegyric to the quack faith healer João Teixeira de
Faria, who goes by the name João de Deus (John of God);
- A
benign rant
about the Bush administration's continued abuse of science that concluded
with a facetious remark that "we shouldn't forget that it is President
Bush who plans to send men to the moon and Mars to investigate the man in
the moon and the face on Mars." I had three readers who demanded I reveal
my source for this claim! One claimed he couldn't find any evidence that
Bush "has ever said anything about the 'man in the moon' or the 'face on
mars'." Another wrote: "Do you honestly believe that those are the reasons
he wants to explore Mars and the moon? These claims are silly, baseless
(since you post no evidence), and irrelevant to your posting. Just the
facts, please." Some people have no sense of humor.
- A
note on
Richard Wiseman's latest work on how suggestion affects belief in the
perception of psychokinetic
metal bending;
- A new entry on
the Archaeoraptor hoax;
- A new entry on
Reiner Protsch and what
some are calling the German Piltdown;
- A new entry on the
Ten Commandments;
- A
note on
another scientific study that found no evidence of a connection between
the MMR vaccine and autism; and
-
Comments
on a tawdry piece on psychics from Australia's Sunday Telegraph.
That's all for this month!
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