Intellectual Discrimination and Religion

[Voyager]

I think this demonstrates a fundamental disconnect in worldviews - which is way wandering from the original topic, but is very interesting.

@mswas

I don’t think you lack faith at all, I think you have a tremendous amount of faith in your own bias. I am not trying to convince you that crystal healing works, only that I believe it works. Crystals vibrate when soundwaves pass through them, it’s that simple. Matter is “frozen” energy but that doesn’t mean it is unmoving, only that it moves extremely slow based upon our perception of time.

You should try reading The First Three Minutes. After the Big Bang, right after, the temperature of the universe was so high that it was all energy. As the universe expanded, and cooled, matter could form. The details are way beyond my feeble understanding of physics, but matter is not slowly moving energy.

My problem with your point of view is that you are dismissing things outright, and I don’t think it has anything to do with critical thinking. Your mind is basically half-closed. You are open enough to be sociable about the subject but you have some things you seem opposed to on principle, which is not thinking critically.

What have I dismissed outright? I only said that I provisionally don’t believe in things absent evidence. I’m sure you don’t immediately believe in everything anyone tells you. I have a nice collection of books about UFOs and strange events and psychic phenomena. When I was a teenager I really wanted to believe in all this stuff. The evidence isn’t there.

Just because someone doesn’t know how to explain something fully doesn’t mean that they don’t understand what they are talking about. Just because someone isn’t as good at research as you are, doesn’t mean they don’t understand the subject better than you do. Just because someone can’t prove something is true, doesn’t make it not true. By your justification for your own dogma, Newton would have been a charlatan, but I’m sure you make exceptions for him because he’s been canonized, however back in the day he was trying to prove all sorts of wild metaphysical/alchemical/astrological assertions. Comparing Isaac Newton to the Snake Oil dealer is ridiculous, just as comparing someone who is in between the two to either is ridiculous. There are charlatans all over the place, and it’s just too easy to latch onto a catch phrase like “new age” in order to be haughty about your own no less dogmatic bias.

That is another misunderstanding. Science depends on what people do, not on who does it. That Newton believed in all sorts of weird things matters not at all - the proofs in Principia still work. (I haven’t read it - hanging my head in shame.) F=ma no matter who says it. You are not a creationist, but the creationist have this myth that Darwin recanted evolution on his death bed. They don’t seem to understand that, even if this were true, evolution still happens.

Plus, I assure you I know there is tons of stuff I don’t know. Having a Ph.D means you know more and more about less and less. I am a generalist in my field, but there is a lot of stuff I know nothing about, not to mention other fields in which I know even less. I wrote a column about this very subject, and got asked to expand on it.

Next, science does not work on proof. We can get evidence of something, and try to falsify it and fail, but that just gives us greater confidence. Nothing in physics was surer than Newton’s laws, but when they were demonstrated to be incomplete almost everyone accepted that, and in quite short order. And no one claims that not proving something true means it is false. If, however, all attempts to show it fail, then we can assume it false, provisionally, until some better evidence comes along.

if you or anyone else can repeatably show that crystals do neat magical stuff, we’ll all accept it.

Within pseudo-academic communities, you really only need to sound scientific enough to be accepted by the clique, if you can do that, the rest doesn’t really matter. It’s like that scene in “Good Will Hunting” where he makes fun of the guy at the bar. I don’t think you are an asshole like that guy was, but I think that sort of biased assertion is of the same ilk. If you were a true skeptic you should have no opinion on crystals either way, unless you have some research that shows me it in fact that crystals do not vibrate.

I assure you MIT doesn’t work the way shown in that movie. (Those guys were Harvies, so what do you expect. ). And crystals do vibrate. The vibration is where you get clock pulses from. There is no evidence that the vibrations do anything for our breathing or health. And you have another misconception. If you assert something, it is up to you to demonstrate it. You don’t get to make random assertions and tell other people that they are true until disproven.

Also if homeopathy is bullshit, that doesn’t mean crystals are and vice versa. I don’t use the example of people practicing pseudo-science as a reasoning why all science is bullshit. I’m not asking you to believe in anything other than skepticism. If you truly believe in skepticism then embrace it, don’t go about it half-assed like most people do.

So, how are the reasons for the homeopaths beliefs any different from yours? They say the medicine leaves vibration patterns in the water. It is the process of belief that is at issue, not the actual belief. And pseudo-science is not science because it doesn’t follow the process of science. If you think they are similar because the word science is in both names, you don’t get it. This is not to say that all scientists are perfect. The process of publishing and peer review and reproducibility exist to correct the inevitable errors that creep in due to human fallibility.

Also the half-wits that make religion look bad, are the ones without any faith. An easy way to tell if someone actually has faith or not is to see if you can question their religion. Certainly if someone thinks something is true and finds out it’s not, they are gonna be thrown for a loop faithful or not, but if they maintain cognitive dissonance in the face of overwhelming evidence, then they have no faith. Questioning is the friend of the faithful, and the enemy of the unfaithful.

Erek

That’s bizarre. Can you give some examples? Maybe you mean like questioning at a politician’s press conference, where there is an evasive answer to all.

Here’s how science works, in a nutshell. After experimenting, reading, dreaming, taking a shower, or whatever, you have an idea. You try to formulate this idea into a hypothesis. Often, after reading some more stuff, or thinking more deeply, you abandon it. If it survives this far, you write it down and devise experiments which must be able to prove it wrong. You do the experiments. If they don’t pan out, then back to the drawing board. If they do pan out, you try to find flaws in them and analyze them for accidental positive results. (That is what statistics are all about.) You keep on running them until you are fairly confident you have something. Then you write it up and send it to a journal. The reviewers may find stuff you missed, or a better explanation for what you observed, and reject the paper. You can try to meet the comments, or agree that they’re right and drop it. If the paper gets published, and it is significant, others will try to reproduce your work. If they cannot, they might find why your results were erroneous. At this point it gets embarrassing. Even if it holds up, somewhere down the road someone will find a better explanation. But in that case they are building on your work.

At every step of the way are chances to show that you are wrong, and a good scientist gives up the ideas if the data is against it. I’ve had good ideas, that some people were excited about, falsified by experiments I’ve conducted - experiments that were designed to allow me to falsify the hypothesis. The most pitiful thing in science is someone holding on to an idea out of pride.

Religion doesn’t work that way (or most religion.) Mystics don’t work that way. Astrologers don’t work that way. That’s why we’re no closer to showing astrology to be true today than we were 300 years ago, but there are still plenty of astrologers.

So, what experiments could you do to give evidence that crystals either do or do not have the properties you claim for them? I already gave you the razor in the pyramid experiment for free.

[mswas]

@Voyager

So, what experiments could you do to give evidence that crystals either do or do not have the properties you claim for them? I already gave you the razor in the pyramid experiment for free.

I’d put them on a vibrating surface to see how they resonate and see if different crystals resonate in a different way. Then I would test them on human subjects putting them against different energy centers in the human body like the heart, stomach, under the adams apple, the forehead etc… and see if there is any resonance to that, if it resonates differently from the control group that was put on the calibrated platter that vibrated in the first experiment.

Getting deep into physics is a bit down the road for me as far as courses of study, I’d like to get into it, but I’m hardly a scientist, but I can feel energy and it’s effects upon my body, and I intuit it that way, I have very keen senses, I can see well close up or at a distance, I can hear conversations going on in other rooms, and I feel the slightest wisp of wind across my skin. My sense of smell ain’t too developed, and my sense of taste not so much either. I can hear the difference between music created using an analog synth and music using a digital synth, unless the sound design on the digital is impeccable.

I don’t believe in hard delineations. Everything flows into everything else. I’ve read some articles about electrons not actually being a point but a nexus, that they don’t have any actual size and shape. As all matter is made up of atoms, meaning they have protons, neutrons and electrons, there is still energy moving within it, I couldn’t tell you what makes it maintain it’s form, and I can feel my own ambient energy and the ambient energy of others as they get closer to me or further away. When I am centered and balanced it makes me pretty agile, and I can move pretty wildly in the middle of a crowd without touching people. That’s all energy being output by those people. Vibrations are energy, and crystals conduct those vibrations that people produce. I believe in crystals because I can feel them vibrate when I squeeze them in the palm of my hand.

As far as homeopathy goes, I think they are correct, water by definition does have memory. If you throw a stone into a lake, the ripples go back and forth forever, they just get smaller and smaller in amplitude and wavelength until it is negligible because you cannot see that movement in a placid pond, and eventually it gets to be smaller than the distance between electrons and is thus so miniscule it would be difficult to measure. Whether or not putting a tiny bit of arsenic into that water cures stomach ailments I couldn’t tell you, but the theory of how and why it works seems sound to me.

Everything in the universe is a cause and effect relationship, that energy doesn’t disappear it is transferred into some other energetic reaction. My particular theory about the crystals is that the crystal begins to vibrate at the resonance that helps you tune your “chakras” or energy centers. It makes perfect sense to me, and I have felt the effects. As far as psychic phenomena goes, I have had experiences where friends of mine were able to know what I was thinking. I think explaining the external factors that go into this process as debunking it is silly IMO. If psychic phenomena are a combination of body language, phermones, prior knowledge, empathy, or similar thought patterns, that doesn’t make it not what it is, that just defines more clearly what the word psychic means. My problem is the idea that ‘explaining how it works debunks it’, or in your case saying that it’s pseudo-science to try and explain it with whatever limited knowledge one has. Something I learned some time ago is that a lot of my problems with a lot of knowledge is lack of vocabulary, and I am not so willing to accept outright denials of what I am saying, not because I am opposed to thinking critically about it, but because I think the issue is really one of alternate definition. We might be using the same words, but we all define them slightly differently.

IMO everything can be explained logically and rationally, and critical thinking is not in opposition to spirituality. Religion which is a Political organization with spiritual ideals can be in opposition to critical thinking on a case by case basis. That’s why I dislike the use of the term supernatural, it’s a nonsense word, and in my opinion is used most often in a dishonest way, by any side of the argument.

No I don’t believe in everything everyone tells me. “The First Three Minutes” sounds interesting, and I don’t believe in the Big Bang the way most people do. The Big Bang is constant, it is always occuring, because the Big Bang is the point of origin for all space and time, and everthing in the universe is static and contiguous back to that point, while existing within that point, made up of that point. There is no beginning or end to time. I suppose the moment of my conception would be the beginning of time for me, and everything moves forward from there, forward into antiquity and forward into the future in nearly, but not quite parallel lines pointing back at the point of origin on the other end with infinite distance between the point of origin.

Erek

[Voyager]

All I can say is that I pity the physics teacher who has you. I’m just going to respond to one thing: just think about how the movement of large water molecules can become smaller than the space between electrons. That’s like saying a beach ball can bounce between grains of sand. That’s not even the type of memory they’re talking about, which is even wronger. There is also the small problem of noise from wind etc. overwhelming the ripples. I know people say that a voice can echo forever - but chaos says that’s wrong.

And do try to get a book, any good book, on the Big Bang and read why it is not a matter of belief. You will understand when you understand why my friend Arno got a Nobel Prize. (That’s irony - I’ve actually given a presentation to the guy and was not impressed. )

But I do believe you can move in crowds without touching anyone. I can too. It is something New Yorkers pick up.

And for your experiment, you might think how you can keep from fooling yourself about feeling the vibrations. Are there dead crystals? It would have to be something like a person marks a set as live and dead somewhere, gives them to a second person without telling which is which, who gives it to you. If you can guess which are live significantly better than chance, and if there is no way of distinguishing them without feeling the vibrations, then you might have something. Controls are everything. You might also want to repeat the experiment with someone who cannot feel vibrations and see if they do as well as you do.

[mswas]

@Voyager

All I can say is that I pity the physics teacher who has you. I’m just going to respond to one thing: just think about how the movement of large water molecules can become smaller than the space between electrons. That’s like saying a beach ball can bounce between grains of sand. That’s not even the type of memory they’re talking about, which is even wronger. There is also the small problem of noise from wind etc. overwhelming the ripples. I know people say that a voice can echo forever - but chaos says that’s wrong.

Cite of chaos saying it’s wrong please.

And do try to get a book, any good book, on the Big Bang and read why it is not a matter of belief. You will understand when you understand why my friend Arno got a Nobel Prize. (That’s irony - I’ve actually given a presentation to the guy and was not impressed. )

Well I don’t think the big bang is untrue, I just think that the event that created time would necessarily have to exist parallel to time. How do you measure something by that which it has created?

And for your experiment, you might think how you can keep from fooling yourself about feeling the vibrations. Are there dead crystals? It would have to be something like a person marks a set as live and dead somewhere, gives them to a second person without telling which is which, who gives it to you. If you can guess which are live significantly better than chance, and if there is no way of distinguishing them without feeling the vibrations, then you might have something. Controls are everything. You might also want to repeat the experiment with someone who cannot feel vibrations and see if they do as well as you do.

All matter/energy has a vibration. Definition is just a delineation point so that we can understand things as being seperate from one another, it doesn’t mean that they actually are. There is no delineation point where red becomes yellow becomes orange in the spectrum. I didn’t say water molecules become smaller than the space between electrons, only the wavelength by which they are vibrating, for instance, I can move side to side and still keep it within a range that one side of my arm does not pass the original location of the other side of my arm. I am still moving, but I am not passing my own size. Also, as electrons are orbiting the nucleus, the orbit of those electrons would more or less define the outer edge of that molecule, so the movement of the molecule is miniscule, but it is still moving.

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it gets transferred through it’s environment until it becomes so distributed that it is imperceptible to a human being. Protons, electrons and neutrons are more or less tiny or incredibly massive (depending upon your perspective) bubbles of energy centered around an energy nexus. The center is a point with no size whatsoever. All of our judgements of the world are based upon comparative measurements. Whenever we assign a property to something, it is in comparison to something else.

Have you ever seen glass that melted because of time rather than heat? Glass flows, it just flows at an incredibly slow rate, all matter flows, nothing is static.

As far as testing it on someone who can’t feel, that sounds like a silly proposition. Why would I stop listening to someone’s heart with my stethoscope and ask my hard of hearing assistant to listen to it instead?

As far as the experiment is concerned if I were going to test it (Which I’m not) I would use machines to do so, so that the variables aren’t so wildly changing throughout the process. I would be setting it on a vibrating platter and measuring the resonance with microphones and a computer. I cannot get accurate measurements by feeling the stones in the palm of my hand because variable such as what mood I am in would affect the proceedings and invalidate the test. I would vibrate differently if I were angry/hungry/happy/sad etc… let alone the color those moods would have on how I would perceive such a vibration.

I don’t think that “magic” is unexplainable scientifically. Magic is only a matter of your perception. If I took a computer to 12th century England, they’d be pretty damn terrified of it. They’d have NO frame of reference for it, and the stories of a magical picture box and the sorcerer who wielded it would be passed down through generations, and no one who wasn’t there would believe it. Then when computers were developed, someone would say “That sounds like a computer” and others would scoff at the explanation of it as a computer saying that’s ridiculous because “Time Travel” isn’t possible and they don’t believe in such “magic”. It’s all magic until we figure out how it works, then it becomes science, and people deny that the magic ever existed in the first place.

Erek

[Voyager]

Get a popular physics book, please.

Just a few items.

When electrons change orbits, they don’t move from one to another like a spaceship. “Quantum jump” is all about how they move without going through the intervening space based on a change of energy. So thinking about something (especially a water molecule) vibrating in that space is meaningless. The rules you know don’t apply at this level. It is far weirder and more interesting than crystal vibrations, and experimentally demonstrated.

Neutrons are made of a proton and an electron. These are made of quarks. Quarks might be made of strings, - that isn’t known yet. They’re not bubbles of energy.

Time began with the Big Bang. We can estimate how long ago it happened by measuring the expansion of the universe. I think the error bars are down below a billion years - we’re never going to get it to Friday at 3 PM. I don’t understand why this would be difficult.

The reason you get someone who doesn’t feel to test if this guy does as well as you. If he does, then we can look for an effect that does not involve feeling crystal vibrations. Not that sonmeone wouldn’t say the guy feels them after all. Arthur Conan Doyle kept claiming that Houdini did his tricks with supernatural powers, even after Houdini clearly said he used non-supernatural magic.

The point of the protocol I sketched is to keep you from fooling yourself. That is far more common than fraud in science. If you knew which subjects were crystals and which weren’t, it is likely that you would feel the vibrations without any intentional deceit. Only if you don’t know, and if no one in the room knows to give you unintentional clues, will the experiment be valid.

Measuring with instruments is good. Like I said, the vibration of crystals when electrical energy is applied is not in question. If the vibrations change with mood, or yours do, and this can be measured, that is a good experiment also.

Every ask yourself why no one has done a successful experiment showing this? (If there is one, please give a cite.) Perhaps people did, and found no results. Perhaps people didn’t knowing that they wouldn’t find anything. Some people are scared when what they think is true gets knocked away by evidence - scientists love it.

[Sample_the_Dog]

@mswas

No ‘aren’t’ was not a typo. I was talking about people measuring intelligence based upon their own bias. Thus I meant “aren’t” not are.

Ok, then I’m very confused. I don’t understand why you would claim that it’s racist for academics to say “The minorities aren’t too stupid to be academic like us.”

If that’s what you really meant, then would it therefore not be racist to say the opposite, that minorities are too stupid to be academics?

Also, if “aren’t” isn’t a typo, you contradict what you say later in the paragraph – that academics define intelligence too narrowly, that they don’t appreciate types of intelligence different from theirs, and so underestimate the intelligence of people different from them.

It just makes no sense, mswas.

[mswas]

Voyager: Here is my basic conundrum. Simply put, I don’t have ‘faith’ in the idea that anyone is ever unbiased. We come to the understanding within the level of understanding that we have. Some understandings last through the ages, and others get tossed aside when someone else figures something out.

I get your point about electrons, that makes a lot of sense. I don’t think it really refutes the idea of crystals. People vibrate, and they vibrate based upon mood. Crystals vibrate, and they vibrate based upon external forces applied to them.

The only assumption you have challenged is one that related to homeopathy, which was your example anyway. What you point out about the way electrons move doesn’t say whether or not water continues to remember things or not.

As far as the “Big Bang” you can tell me “This is absolutely the way it happens” and it’s not going to make a bit of difference. We are created OF the Big Bang, the space and time we believe in was created BY the Big Bang, and therefore is a product of it, and the fact that it is constantly occuring. The Big Bang was instant, because there was no prior measurement for time, since the Big Bang never stopped happening, you cannot say when it happened, it is still happening. Trying to point to the beginning IMO is like telling me you found the center of the universe. The Universe’s center is everywhere and it’s circumfrence is nowhere. My problem that I’ve found with a lot of people is they want a finite system that is very large so that things make sense. They’ll accept infinity as a concept but not a fact, and everyone has a different reason why different ideas of infinity don’t exist, but their definition of infinity is correct. I’m not disputing the Big Bang’s existence, I am merely saying it is constantly occuring. The Universe is Eternal as well as infinite. We can break everything down deeper and deeper, that’s why you’ll never find ‘the beginning’ in any accurate sense, because all of your measurements were created by that beginning. The big bang created the concepts of time and space, as well as their physical representations. It is all too relative to give it some static property like a fixed point in time. The only thing that YOU will find out is where your ability to fathom the Big Bang stops, not where the Beginning is. Because as you get closer the idea of “A billion years” becomes silly in comparison to the origin of all things.

We can measure finite systems, we can say that the Earth is “This big” and then we can say the Solar System is “This many, this bigs” but we are measuring the solar system based upon the size of the Earth. The Earth is neither big nor small. Compared to us, the Earth is big, compared to the Sun it is small. Compared to the Galaxy the Sun is small. Compared to an Atom it is enormous. The universe is just many different types of particles, and their measurements are based upon the comparative sizes of other particles, which aren’t really even solid themselves, but actually nexuses of energy. No matter which way you look you are peering at infinity, and to expect other people’s views to stop at some arbitrary limit you set for yourself is rather silly IMO. When you can speak to someone and get them to understand where your limit is, and you try to understand where their limit is, that’s where communication is possible, and each party’s limit is adjusted.

It’s not that I have little faith in Science, I have little faith in it’s practitioners. I’ve seen too many Doctors trained to think that feeling is “bad” prescribing patients Prozac for years so that they can avoid looking more deeply into what is causing them pain, while at the same time our government tells us that certain types of drugs that make people feel good are not acceptable, even when their medicinal value keeps being shown over and over. I see people who proclaim some sort of rationality as though it is some kind of badge of honor that they possess that the average person doesn’t, and that they are beyond the confines of those religious idiots, but ask that same person to take off their clothes in the middle of the street on a warm day and they won’t. Even though the idea of whether or not we are naked is meaningless without those religious mores telling us not to.

So each little fact you feed me gives me a greater clue as to what to look at next time I’m studying any of the myriad subjects we have discussed, but you have not shown me anything about the basic assertions being made. You’ve shown me that electrons make quantum leaps, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t continually affected by what happened to them. Any cause is remembered forever because everything that comes after it has to take into account what happened before it. So by definition the memory is permanent even if not concious. That electron’s movement has been determined by the energies that confronted it earlier in time.

I know that Crystals vibrate if you put them next to vibration. You’ve as of yet said nothing that refutes this. When the crystal vibrates it vibrates with it’s own resonant character in mind. Every crystal will vibrate in it’s own way. If you put this next to a human being the human being will have a communication with that vibration, as it feels it’s own vibration reflected back at it with that crystal’s color. That’s my theory. I haven’t tested it, and I think getting an insensitive person to hold the crystal does absolutely nothing for the experiment.

As skeptical as you are about the crystals I am skeptical about the medical industry as a whole. I am not saying I will automatically accept that a certain crystal is what I need, only that it seems plausible to me that crystals CAN do that. However, I am more skeptical about someone cuttign into me with a razor blade and removing part of my body in order to ‘heal’ me. Yet that sort of barbarism is the accepted norm.

If you were building a model, and you used the wrong glue and it fell apart you wouldn’t say. “Oh glue doesn’t work”, you’d say “I used the wrong glue.”, so if you are trying to empirically test whether or not a crystal will heal a “heart condition” you can’t, there are too many external factors to such a slow process. But if it DOESN’T heal the heart condition you can’t say “Crystal Healing doesn’t work” because what if you should have used an emerald instead of a ruby?

So while science is a set of critical thinking skills, I am skeptical about the people who want me to believe that THEY are scientific, because there are so many assumptions that every person makes on a daily basis.

Erek

[Voyager]

@mswas

Voyager: Here is my basic conundrum. Simply put, I don’t have ‘faith’ in the idea that anyone is ever unbiased. We come to the understanding within the level of understanding that we have. Some understandings last through the ages, and others get tossed aside when someone else figures something out.

Well, yes, but all people are biased about some people some of the time, and some people are biased about all people all of the time, but all people aren’t biased about all people all of the time. I think Abraham Lincoln said that. We can be biased and not act on it. I said that.

I get your point about electrons, that makes a lot of sense. I don’t think it really refutes the idea of crystals. People vibrate, and they vibrate based upon mood. Crystals vibrate, and they vibrate based upon external forces applied to them.

What does people vibrating mean?

A We are created OF the Big Bang, the space and time we believe in was created BY the Big Bang, and therefore is a product of it, and the fact that it is constantly occuring. The Big Bang was instant, because there was no prior measurement for time, since the Big Bang never stopped happening, you cannot say when it happened, it is still happening. Trying to point to the beginning IMO is like telling me you found the center of the universe.

Unlike the center of the universe, there was a beginning. The Big Bang is the name for the singularity that created the universe. It is not still happening - the expansion as a result of it is.

[quote]

The Universe is Eternal as well as infinite.
Well, if you call the situation after heat death and proton decay a universe, true. It does not appear that there will be a big crunch, but we might get surprised.

No matter which way you look you are peering at infinity, and to expect other people’s views to stop at some arbitrary limit you set for yourself is rather silly IMO. When you can speak to someone and get them to understand where your limit is, and you try to understand where their limit is, that’s where communication is possible, and each party’s limit is adjusted.

There actually is a smallests size, the Planck length. The quantum world is not like ours.

It’s not that I have little faith in Science, I have little faith in it’s practitioners. I’ve seen too many Doctors trained to think that feeling is “bad” prescribing patients Prozac for years so that they can avoid looking more deeply into what is causing them pain, while at the same time our government tells us that certain types of drugs that make people feel good are not acceptable, even when their medicinal value keeps being shown over and over. I see people who proclaim some sort of rationality as though it is some kind of badge of honor that they possess that the average person doesn’t, and that they are beyond the confines of those religious idiots, but ask that same person to take off their clothes in the middle of the street on a warm day and they won’t. Even though the idea of whether or not we are naked is meaningless without those religious mores telling us not to.

Very few doctors are scientists. Politicians whi want to keeps drugs that ease people’s pain from them for religious reasons are even less so. Everyone is at the mercy of their upbringing. They may not want to undress themselves (not even mentioning that it’s illegal in most places) but I doubt that they’d think anyone who did is going to hell.

Science does not assume all scientists are perfect - quite the opposite. Science is designed to handle mistakes, biases, and even fraud. That’s what you’re not getting. All of your vibration claims are poorly defined and not testable or falsifiable. How can we tell that you’re not, at best, deluding yourself?

Any cause is remembered forever because everything that comes after it has to take into account what happened before it. So by definition the memory is permanent even if not concious. That electron’s movement has been determined by the energies that confronted it earlier in time.

No, an electron’s movement is not determined. That’s what Heisenberg said. That’s why electron orbits are not little masses whirling around, but probability clouds. The impact of something may last (or may not) but not the memory of it. My great granfather’s decision to leave Russia had a big impact, but the words he used to state his decision are forgotten.

I know that Crystals vibrate if you put them next to vibration. You’ve as of yet said nothing that refutes this. When the crystal vibrates it vibrates with it’s own resonant character in mind. Every crystal will vibrate in it’s own way. If you put this next to a human being the human being will have a communication with that vibration, as it feels it’s own vibration reflected back at it with that crystal’s color. That’s my theory. I haven’t tested it, and I think getting an insensitive person to hold the crystal does absolutely nothing for the experiment.

I don’t know if crystals pick up vibrations, but it seems plausible. There are millions of example of things resonating to sound waves. Communication is something else. But you still don’t get the notion of a control. If you say there is a difference between sensitive people and insensitive people, and sensitive people can somehow sense crystals, the only way of showing this is to demonstrate that an insensitive person doesn’t do just as well on the test. Is that so hard to get?

However, I am more skeptical about someone cuttign into me with a razor blade and removing part of my body in order to ‘heal’ me. Yet that sort of barbarism is the accepted norm.

Why do we let people do this to us? It might have something to do with the demonstration that the procedure does in fact heal people, and the increase in life expectancy thanks to this. My wife no longer has excruciating back pain, my father, who was near death from a clogged artery, is now fine. And what has a crystal done for me lately?

If you were building a model, and you used the wrong glue and it fell apart you wouldn’t say. “Oh glue doesn’t work”, you’d say “I used the wrong glue.”, so if you are trying to empirically test whether or not a crystal will heal a “heart condition” you can’t, there are too many external factors to such a slow process. But if it DOESN’T heal the heart condition you can’t say “Crystal Healing doesn’t work” because what if you should have used an emerald instead of a ruby?

If you have never seen glue work, and only ever seen it not work, then I might have that conclusion. If the glue fan refuses to show me glue working, and comes back with the model done after a secret ceremony I might have doubts. Show me one controlled experiment where crystals did anything.

So while science is a set of critical thinking skills, I am skeptical about the people who want me to believe that THEY are scientific, because there are so many assumptions that every person makes on a daily basis.

Erek

I hate to say it, but you don’t seem to understand what science involves enough to make any judgments. Everyone makes assumptions, scientists test them when doing science. Not that everyone does science all the time, though.