I know he edited the book. Did he also write the piece on Roberts and “Seth”?
In some ways I’m sorry I lost track of this thread, but since it’s devolved into the expected “I believe and nothing you say can stop me” rant of the deluded I’m OK with my scant loss.
I do need to spend a moment on this phenomenally weird post. I’ll need to compress a long and convoluted history into a paragraph, and in doing so I’m sure I’ll offend purists and believers but what the heck.
The Victorian Age in England was consumed with its realization that forces of nature could be rationally examined, understood, explained, and even manipulated. This led to major advances in science and technology and also some major dead ends. One of the latter was the Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882. The SPR had a number of famous names as members, many of whom were serious researchers and many of whom were staunch believers. They investigated mediums, psychics, channelers, and the various other types of mystics of their day and had sufficient success in debunking them that Conan Doyle and other believers stormed off. Even so, the society had the unfortunate habit of inviting magicians into positions of authority with, shall we say, mixed results. The SPR still exists but people stopped taking it seriously a century ago.
In the same vein, very few people take Theosophyseriously these days although in its heyday it was as big as Scientology now is. The SPR paid special attention to Madame Blavatsky’s little racket and worked very hard and successfully at debunking its supposed miracles. Let’s put it this way. If the SPR debunked you, you wouldn’t fool Penn & Teller. Why mention this? Well, if you look at Steken’s list you’ll see not just Blavastsky but some actual Presidents of the Theophysical Society. Shrinking violets all, no doubt.
Magicians as entertainers go way back in time, but as the modern profession we know in entertainment today it’s also a product of the Victorian Age. They were very busy people. Magicians quickly understood that psychics were their enemy, magicians who denied magic but used it to cater to a smaller audience of believers, many of them desperate in grief or in need of affirmation of the afterlife. That trick always works. But tricks are all it can ever be and “real” magicians - stage magicians - have made it their duty to debunk and expose these frauds. Most do it as a sideline - they have to make money, too - but legions of them from Harry Houdini to James Randi have pulled out the rug from legions of nonsense peddlers.
They’ve been very successful. Psychics are now thrown in the same leaky boat as Creationists by all thinking adults, even though many who put belief over thought continue to worship at that shrine.
Firstly, you don’t evidence any understanding that “showing” something is not merely a matter of asserting it by vague reference to books you say you’ve read.
Secondly, your analogy to Einstein is inapt: he did things so outstanding he couldn’t have escaped fame if he’d hid in a box his whole life. Doing some old carney tricks is not something that gets written up unless you start doing it publicly and claiming it means something. Your other points are similarly flawed because you are drawing an equivalence between doing things so worthwhile they can be and are researched, and doing old carney tricks that will only bring you fame and a place in history if you take steps to publicise yourself.
HenryH, this is from your OP:
And this is what you said later:
Notice anything?
Yes.
For fuck’s sake, have any of you actually read this thread you’ve been participating in? THERE’S NO DISAGREEMENT HERE! The OP has explicitly said that he believes the allegedly channelled “information” could be coming from the channellers’ subconscious in something like the idiomotor effect. And yet people keep claiming that he insists on a supernatural explanation. Meanwhile, everyone else is at great pains to explain that no, not every medium is a conscious fraud, some may be sincerely deluded. And yet the OP is bizarrely insistent that everyone here thinks all mediums are frauds.
If you think that you are channelling an alien being, but in fact are spouting bullshit from your own mind, you are deluded. If you don’t know that you’re coming up with the bullshit yourself because you’re deluded about it coming from an alien, then you’re coming up with it unconsciously. Whether you call it “channelling the subconscious” or “suffering from a delusion” or “being batshit crazy,” you’re describing the same phenomenon, just with different degrees of disdain. Either way, EVERYONE IN THIS THREAD, as far as I can tell, thinks it’s a plausible explanation for whatever non-fraudulent mediums may exist.
The OP does seem to think that the supernatural explanations are as prima facie plausible as the subconscious explanation, but he hasn’t yet insisted on that point. In fact, he said that a subconscious origin for the channelled “information” better explains the failures of the mediums, and is more comforting that supposing that the aliens/spirits/chickens are fucking with us. So let’s take our victory where we can. We have an answer that satisfies everyone: some mediums (presumably) are frauds, but at least some are sincere; like the fraudulent ones, the sincere ones are making up the material they channel, but they aren’t aware of it. In the extremely unlikely event that we come up with an example of channelling that can’t be explained by one of these explanations, then we can begin speculating about ghosts or magical aliens or whatever.
No, he hasn’t insisted on that, but he has repeatedly mentioned it as an included possibility. Do we have to wait for him to insist before we talk about ruling it out?
I propose ruling it out by recognizing that there is a more parsimonious explanation he has already acknowledged, which accounts for everything he claims to be interested in. Or you could keep shouting past each other. That’s worked so far!
So you didn’t see me doing that actual thing?
QFI
You’re not talking about me, are you? I do not “believe,” and have never claimed to.
Anyway, I agree with much of the rest of your post. And I think people from Houdini to Randi have indeed done a very fine job at debunking falsifiable claims of “materialisations” and the like.
Shrinking violets? No, I wouldn’t say that. I’d say they were, as were the others I mentioned, true believers, primarily motivated by factors other than the craving for money and notoriety.
You will note that this was the point I was making in the post you’re replying to. Not that they were genuinely in touch with some divine agent. Not that their miracles were genuine. But that they were true believers, for whom any eventual craving for riches and notoriety was, at the very best, secondary.
What’s more: Scholars do indeed take Theosophy “seriously,” in the sense of “a worthy topic of serious scholarly studies.” For apart from the question “were their falsifiable claims, i.e. of ‘materialisations’ and the like, genuine?”, already answered by the Houdinis and Randis of their day, other questions remain, of interest to the scholars: Who were these people? What drove them? Who influenced them? Who did they, in turn, influence? Where did they stand on politics, and gender, and race, and music, and art? Did they believe the same things in 1875 as in 1900, or in 1925? How did the Society position itself vis-a-vis Christianity? What’s with the move to India? What’s with the break with Anthroposophy? Is true what they say about madame Blavatsky’s vagina? And so on and so forth.
OK, so if “vague references” don’t do it for you, would some precise references do the trick? Let me know if they would - if so, I’ll break out my books.
And the reason some did their “old carney tricks” publicly (not all did – Lévi, Davidson, etc.), was because they genuinely believed in the message.
Those I’ve mentioned didn’t go public in order to gain fame. They went public in order to spread what they genuinely believed to have been a message from on high - and along the way, some of them (not all of them – again, Davidson, etc.) gained fame.
Ah, but what is considered “worthwhile” changes from age to age, country to country, man to man. At the time, for example, women weren’t really seen as respectable authorities in religious matters - this was the matter for the all-male clergy. So when someone like, say, Lizzie Doten spoke up, in the middle of what both she and her audience believed to be a genuine “trance state,” channeling a heavenly voice, and, referencing 1 Corinthians 14:34, declared that “‘It is a shame for woman to speak in Church.’ It is indeed a shame for woman to speak in the Church; and woman ought to be ashamed… of the Church! Let woman come out from the Church; and when she comes out the minister and all the congregation will go out with her!”, small wonder this was considered “worthwhile”!
Now, I haven’t studied her life in detail, but I’d be surprised if Doten did what she did primarily for money, or notoriety. If I had to guess, I’d say she probably did what she did and said what she said, because she was an admirably brave (proto-)feminist, of sorts, as well as a genuine, honest-to-God, card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool Spiritualist.
Waitaminute WHAT did they say about Madame Blavatsky’s vagina?
I blush. That it was, shall we say… Physiologically inviolable?
I’ll let the woman speak for herself. In a letter to Olcott, dated 1885, she described herself as “a woman who had all her guts out, womb and all, by a fall from horseback,” and, more to the point, that “I could never have had a connection with any man, because I am lacking in something and the place is filled up with some crooked cucumber.”
She also had herself checked by a (legitimate) doctor, one Dr. Leon Oppenheim, who described her condition as anteflexio uteri. At the time, it was believed that this condition made pregnancy impossible; we now know better. What’s more, many concerned Victorian doctors then believed that a fucked-up uterus could lead to all manner of perturbations in the mysterious mind of the dreaded female, including an insatiable craving for notoriety and fame, which could in turn lead the woman thus afflicted into the mania of Spiritualism:
The Victorians, ladies and gentlemen! A weird and wonderful people! 
But anyway, yeah, ever since, scholars of Theosophy have speculated about madame Blavatsky’s “crooked cucumber,” and how it might - or might not - have influenced her thinking on sexuality (bad!), hermaphroditism (good!) and gender (it’s complicated!). Also, how her ideas on these matters were, in turn, received and reinterpreted by other Theosophists, from Leadbeater (women suck! men rule!) to Swiney (men suck! women rule!).
And that’s the longest post I think I’ve ever written about a long-dead Russian noblewoman’s vagina.
Then I’m afraid his background doesn’t impress me in the slightest if he said that about the person who wrote what I quoted in post #151. Did you read that quote? What do you think of what “Seth” said there?
More wisdom from Jane Roberts:
[QUOTE=Seth]
##An illness is a failure to solve a mental or psychological problem in the correct manner . . . The energy that would be used to solve the problem instead is spent maintaining the illness. It is therefore necessary that an attempt be made as soon as possible to solve the problem, which of course must first be discovered by the ego, which has avoided it.
[/quote]
And here’s one aimed specifically towards Wouter Hanegraaff, a little tossed-off bomb for which she gives no evidence whatsoever:
That’s why books are impossible to read, and the actors on all movies just make completely incomprehensible sounds at one another.
to be fair, yes. You’ve been perfectly reasonable and rejected QuickSilver’s claim that he’s only willing to accept a magical explanation. I shouldn’t have painted everyone in the thread with the same brush. I apologize.
i’m not sure what this means.
I believe that is Quoted For Irony.
The OP asserted the following was possible and worthy of consideration and debate:
#2 was acknowledged as possible since some fraction of mediums can certainly be delusional and believe that they are channeling something.
The rest falls well within the category of exra-ordinary claims and therefore required evidence. Without evidence, what is the purpose of a debate that requires me to first pretend something is true when the existence of it (never mind the cause) hasn’t been established?
HenryH, do you have anything at all to say about the quotes if provided from your best case for channeling, Jane Roberts/“Seth”?
I have no idea what Roberts / Seth is trying to say.
Question: What part of Prof. Hanegraaff’s argument is it that you do not agree with?
Is it that
a) “Detailed analysis of the literature of the New Age movement shows that its basic ideas are modeled after Seth’s worldview”?
or that
b) “Jane Roberts should be recognized as one of the major religious innovators in Western society after World War II”?
or that
c) “A major critical monograph is long overdue”?
Also: You claimed that “there is no woo this ‘dictionary’ doesn’t praise to the heavens.” Do you want to back that up, or would you like to admit that you actually haven’t read the dictionary in question, and so retract that statement?