I only heard of this case for the first time yesterday, and having found it interesting, decided I would like to know more. So today, I googled the book and came across a number of different articles.
The first outlined in great detail the numerous discrepancies in Bridie’s story, with a number of references. Fair enough, I thought. A genuine analysis of the story disproving it.
The second outlined briefly the story, and then went on to provide an analysis of the reviews that apparently de-bunked the whole thing. Again the analysis appearred to be carried out in a scientific manner, and the conclusion of the article was that neither the initial story itself, nor the debunking reviews could be said to prove or disprove re-incarnation.
And then I came across this site. The Straight Dope! This site briefly recounts the story, and then quotes a number of the debunking articles, some of which were subsequently proven to be factually incorrect.
I don’t know whether this case is genuine or not, but I firmly believe that you are wrong to dismiss it on the basis that it does not conform to your belief system.
Likewise, anyone who disagrees with you falls in to the “no reputable authority” category.
Science has achieved so much and contributed so much to the world in which we live, not by blindly accepting what our senses tell us but by questioning and openly wondering about that world. Thankfully we have had enquiring minds in the past, or we might all be still living on a flat earth, and burning witches at the stake.
Can you quote anyone saying “I dismiss past life regression because it does not conform to my belief system”?
Or did you just make that up? :eek:
Please feel free to give evidence for anything to support your position - which is what us scientists want.
(Belief systems are for religious types.)
As an example of what is not evidence, a taxi driver told me last week that he knew we were all reincarnated.
He said he had taken someone to church for a funeral service and immediately afterwards taken another person to hospital where she had twins.
This proved reincarnation.
Let’s see. Heard of Bridey Murphy for the first time yesterday, and was intrigued and immediately went out and read everything that was cited in Cecil’s column, the book, the debunking books, and the voluminous literature that has appeared since 1985.
Oh, sorry. I thought you were being serious.
Apparently what really happened was that you found two articles on Google.
Well, that’s certainly enough for me. There has never been an authenticated case of a human living a past life, but if two articles on Google said so…
Wait, both of those articles apparently debunked the story.
So your entire case supporting the story is from Cecil’s debunking of the story.
It’s logic like that which allows beliefs like past life reincarnation to start in the first place.
OK. I can see I’m in a minority, (of one???) here. I’ll answer those posts.
Firstly Glee, thanks for the welcome. No, I can’t quote anyone saying those words. Neither would I say I just made them up. The phrase I used was based on the fact that the original article appearred to have picked and chosen a couple of random facts that supported it’s viewpoint, while ignoring a plethora of facts that didn’t. (Having said that I also have to acknowledge that the article was written a long time ago so maybe much of the information available now wasn’t readily available then, like the mistaken assumption that metal beds were not present in Ireland at that time.
My position is not about the validity or otherwise of the Bridie Murphy case. It is that science should ask questions and examine with an open rather than a closed mind. And yes, I agree. Your taxi-driver story doesn’t constitute evidence.
Expano, I did not claim to be an expert on this case. I did not claim to have read everything about it. I did not even support the story. What I said was, if you are going to attempt to debunk the story, then do it with facts.
I knew Bridie Murphy and she was a notorious liar even when we were little kids in medieval France, and I won’t even go into the whoppers she told when we were temple prostitutes together in Sumeria. Comes as no surprise to me at all she’s been debunked.
Um, the poster didn’t state that the story was true. The poster was making the point that other critiques were doing a better job of debunking it than Cecil did. :rolleyes:
The answer to that criticism is that the original article in question was printed originally in 1985, back when Cecil’s answers were pithy, brief, and not so much into detailed analysis of the situation. The follow up answer was much more detailed, and even then, Cecil wasn’t totally dimsissing the concept out of hand, please note. He was just saying he wasn’t seeing very much support for the idea.
Fine, that’s a serious answer. The serious response is to ask, what do you mean by facts? What facts could or should be used? How do you discount the obvious point that a well-made up story will be true in as many places as possible? How much of the rest has to prove not to be true before it can be dismissed? Cecil rebuts the Barker chapter addition to the original book with several points. Which are those are not facts?
Your wider point is a philosophical issue that has been debated here and in thousands of other places for many years, so I see no need to return to yet another discussion. The briefest answer - and the one you will see given on this Board if you stick around - is that the onus is on those who make the claim to provide the evidence for it.
The term “open-mindedness” is a talking point that is used virtually without exception to accuse scientists of not believing events that have no evidence to back them up. Nobody accuses scientists of being insufficiently open-minded when they work up string theories with esoteric math. The only time they are not open-minded is when occultists, conspiracy theorists, new agers, medical quacks, and similar detritus find scientists and other experts interfering with their ability to con people out of money. Therefore an accusation of lack of open-mindedness is so historically fraught and suspicious that it alone is sufficient to discredit the user.
All we have to go by in these posts are your words on the screen. You may think that talking about open-mindedness shows a positive attribute on your part, but if so that is pure naivety. It is a flashing red light of anti-science, used here only by those who want to believe in mystical nonsense. Scientists have the most open minds in the positive sense of any group. It is those on the other side whose minds are in actuality closed. You need to understand that for any further comments you make and responses you get here.
I apologise for my naivety, and I’m most certainly not anti-science. I do believe though that there is a tendancy to begin at the end, (on both sides of the science/anti-science debate), and only see/accept the facts that suit your argument or perspective.
That’s the same attitude that in the past would have said man cannot fly because he never has. I understand that the ‘open mind’ argument may be open to abuse as you say, but surely that cannot be used as a defence for discounting something because it falls outside of our present understanding. If you could sit down with the greatest minds of the mid-19th century and tell them about some of the things we take for granted today, how would they accept them I wonder.
If this is a subject that has been done to death here, then again I apologise.
But the Wright Brothers proved people could fly by going out and building an airplane. They proved their case. Had they simply sat around and accused nay-sayers of failing to keep an open mind, they would have and should have been ignored.
If believers in past lives want to prove their case, they’ll have to actually do so. Cecil was merely pointing out that the Bridey Murphy case didn’t do this.
They wouldn’t accept them. They didn’t accept them at the time when they were first presented.
However, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the case you’re trying to make. Those who challenged the orthodoxy did so either with actual working inventions or with solid math that explained previous problems and presented ideas that could be experimentally tested. Even so, they needed decades of experimental proof before their ideas were finally accepted. (And let’s kill in its tracks the notion that everybody said that man could never fly. Huge numbers of people believed in flight long before the Wrights. What knowledgeable people knew - quite correctly - was that no engine existed that was light yet powerful enough to carry a human being plus the weight of a plane. The Wrights came along at the first moment in history when that was no longer true, which happened to be a few years before others independently discovered the same truth.)
It is just as true today that there are dozens of scientists attacking every notion in every field of science with alternative theories. Some will be taken seriously; some not; most will not pass the extremely stringent tests required of them. When one does, and the experimental evidence over decades backs it up, it will become commonly accepted. This is the exact opposite of closed-mindedness.
It is only the people who want to believe in past lives and other crackpot notions that offer no evidence, no theories, no explanations of how scientific understanding of reality is completely undermined or negated, and no experimental evidence, who say that their beliefs should just be accepted without opposition. Again, this is the exact opposite of science and exactly why “no reputable authority” will countenance them for a second.
If you have facts to present, fine, let’s hear them. But accusations of closed-mindedness? That’s not the way science works. Nor is any of the rest of your post good history. “They all laughed at Einstein” is the mark of a crackpot. It is not a serious philosophy. You can’t convince somebody who knows the history of science that because some new thoughts were not taken up on the shoulders of scientists and instantly given a parade that nonsense should be treated equally. Skepticism of new ideas is the hallmark of good science. Overcoming that skepticism is the sign of even better science. Decrying it from the outside as being closed-minded is mysticism.
As other posters have said, please give the impressive collection of facts that refute the viewpoint.
And don’t make quotes up!
You’re at it again! :eek:
Who says science shouldn’t ask questions and examine with an open rather than a closed mind?
So far you are the only person stating this. :smack:
You need to do precisely this with your debunking of Cecil.
And let’s disabuse ourselves of the notion that, because the Wrights were “mere bicycle mechanics,” people thought they were incapable of working on cutting-edge science, like airplanes. At the turn of the 20th century, bicycles were high tech, and designing and building them, like the Wrights did, required a strong knowledge of engineering and materials. They were among the people most likely to succeed and, once they had performed their research but even before their first flight, they were without peers.
As for the “they all laughed at Edison” canard, when he announced he had perfected the incandescant light bulb (true to form, a year before his team actually did and decades after the first one had been invented–the man was a god of self-promotion and vaporware) he was already a very famous inventor and, rather than laugh, it is said* the owners of stock in gaslight companies dumped theirs while the gittin’ was good.
