Jakinbandw

Just a minor update. This thread has grown to big for me to follow easily. I am ready every post in it, but real life is taking up a lot of my time right now so I will be very slow to reply. I found the limit of multiple conversations I can hold at one time before I get a headache, and it appears to be less than I suspected.

Once again, sorry, didn't mean to drop out, but I stayed up way to late and even now I am recovering from sleep deprivation and still have an annoying headache. My body seems to want to wake up 2 hours before... (read more)

You test a large number of these against placebo rituals, where elements of the rituals are changed in ways that ought to invalidate them according to the traditional beliefs, in ways that the patients won't notice, and you find that all of the rituals you test perform no better than placebo.

But but what if you get inconsistent result? Let's say you try the ritual 5 times and the placebo 5 times and it works 2 times for the the ritual and twice for the ritual. Furthermore consider that nothing changed in any of these tests that you could measure. You said the ritual was spiritual, and there for asking for divine intervention.... (read more)

Has your mother ever called anyone when she felt they were in trouble, only to find out that they weren't, in fact, in trouble ? Confirmation bias is pretty strong in most humans.

Not that I remember. My memory could be faulty, but thinking long and hard about it I don't remember it happening.

Wait... she predicted that she would call someone, and then went ahead and called someone ? This doesn't sound like much of a prediction; I don't think I'm parsing your sentence correctly.

She predicted they were in trouble. I think the phrase she used was "I think XXXX is in trouble and needs help." I could be misremembering though.

Why did

Even if that were true, and not a misremembrance or a post-hoc rationalization

I did state that she predicted one in advance to me. Also when my mother called me the first thing she asked was "are you alright?"

You should expect in advance to hear more anecdotes about the times that someone really was in trouble, than anecdotes about the times they were not, so having heard them is very little evidence.

As far as my mother goes I have never once seen her mistake a prediction. Now 2 predictions (and 2 more that she told me about) sounds small, but consider the amount of times that she didn't mistakenly call the probability that... (read more)

We can look at folk medicine, and see if there are examples of cures which have been passed down through cultures which perform no better than placebo in double blind tests.

Point.

though I would point out that not all of them are wrong either. Just the good majority. That's neither here nor there though.

Out of curiosity how does science explain people feeling knowing that people they care about are in trouble? My mother has made 4 phone calls, and I have witnessed 2 where she felt that someone was in trouble and called them. One of those calls was to me and it helped me greatly. While she has missed calling people that... (read more)

Many, possibly even all religions though, make claims of supernatural events being witnessed by large numbers of people, and religions make enough mutually exclusive claims that they cannot all be true, so we know that claims of large scale supernatural observations are something that must at least sometimes arise in religions that are false.

That may be the case, and I won't disagree that some claims are fabricated. However for the rest imagine the following: A parent has two children, and he gives a present (say a chocolate that they eat) to each child without the other child knowing. Each child takes this to mean that they are the parents favorite. After all they... (read more)

Is "god exists, has the properties I believe it to have, and wants to stay hidden" really the only reason you can think of for the observable universe being as we observe it to be?

My own belief is closer to: "Something very powerful and supernatural exists, doesn't seem to be hostile, and doesn't mind that I call it the Christian God." And while I would answer 'no' to that question, the amount of evidence that there is something supernatural if far greater than the amount of evidence that there are millions of people lying about their experiences.

For instance, every culture has a belief in the supernatural. Now I would expect that... (read more)