on YouTube: James Randi's fiery takedown of psychic fraud

[Art Blade]

If you are a sane person with a skeptic yet open mind, or in other words, if you are a realist, then you're going to have fun watching this. Even if you're a different type of person, I still recommend you watch it, anyway. Enjoy.

[fragger]

While I believe that Randi is spot-on about commercial "psychic" charlatans, I feel that the man himself is a tad too dismissive of things that may be simply not well understood. I'm talking about Randi's debunking activities outside of exposing fraudulent commercial psychics (I think anyone with half a brain can see through the fakers he mentions here).

Randi has been around for a long time now, and I remember seeing him on TV many years ago where he was going around the world debunking things. He came to Fiji and attended a fire-walking ceremony (I've seen this myself when I lived there). The Fijians have one and the Indians have one - Randi attended the Fijian one. The Fijian one consists of the participants walking barefoot over a bed of red-hot stones, the Indian one uses a bed of red-hot ash and coals. I've seen both, and I can tell you that you can feel the heat emanating from those beds from over thirty feet away. Those rocks and ashes are bloody hot, yet those participating will casually walk right through it, enduring no pain and no injury. I don't know how the Fijians do it, but I know the Indians spend several days in advance meditating and putting themselves into trances (to them, it's a deeply spiritual event). They manage to transcend physical pain and even injury through sheer power of will, it seems.

At the Fijian one I attended, spectators were invited to inspect the glowing stones. The heat coming from them was so intense that I couldn't get any nearer than about a meter from them. Five minutes later, the participants were calmly walking barefoot over them.

Randi was not only unable to find a way to debunk it, he was at a complete loss to explain it at all. His final remark was, "I don't know what the trick is". In other words, to him, there had to be a physical cheat of some sort that he couldn't discern. He still stubbornly refused to admit that maybe there were things possible beyond what we usually consider to be a "normal" state of mind. I don't think Randi is open-minded at all. What won't sit properly within his own frame of reference, what he can't measure or quantify to his own satisfaction, he essentially dismisses. He will never admit that he has witnessed something which is beyond his understanding, and possibly beyond the bounds of "normality". The most he will say is "I don't know what the trick is". That is a closed-minded attitude.

I've always been a bit disdainful of Randi. He takes his skepticism too far for my liking. Such as at 15:12 in that clip where he says "...the business of believing in the paranormal and the occult and the supernatural, all of this total nonsense..." No, that is NOT being open-minded. That is being subjective and dismissive. Where is Randi's evidence that it IS total nonsense? Maybe nobody has proven to his satisfaction that psychic ability is real, but Randi has never proven that it isn't. All he has is his opinion - and his he@lthy ego. "I'm James Randi, and I'm waiting". Indeed.

I've always said that there is no such thing as the supernatural - there is only what we understand and what we don't, what we can perceive with our limited physical senses and what we can't. We can't see Infrared, X-rays or Gamma rays, but we know they exist and we can even utilize them. Could the same principal not apply in some way to what we consider "consciousness"? I believe it's not "magic" that enables people to walk on red-hot stones, but some form of mind over matter, which is essentially one definition of "psychic phenomena". When you see things like those fire-walking ceremonies yourself, you become more amenable to the idea that there are phenomena that transcend (what seems to us to be) the merely physical, but we just don't understand them. Being an "open-minded skeptic" means that you don't dismiss things out of hand, and if strong evidence appears that challenges your beliefs or suggests that you're wrong about something, then you admit it and you adapt your outlook to accommodate. Unfortunately, Randi doesn't. He is set in his ways. In fact he has made more of a career from being a debunker than he has from being a conjurer, and from what I've seen and heard, he's not terribly outstanding at either.

[Art Blade]

interesting point of view, and I can follow your train of thoughts.

Randi wasn't a name/person I was familiar with. The vid above to me is still entertaining and the examples given are comprehensive to me. I agree that "all of this total nonsense" isn't fair with respect to what he cannot explain but with regards to his examples, (for instance talking to the dead, homoeopathic medicine based on the idea of "the higher the grade of dilution, the higher its potency") those are total nonsense. Essentially I took his vid as a reminder, telling you, "don't believe those people who will only sell their 'abilities' in order to take your money."

I know first hand that there are things one cannot explain with any scientific approach. I know what I've seen and learned around martial arts, that there are forces or powers that do w0#k but even I cannot explain what exactly was happening when I performed, uhm, "such a trick." I am not at liberty to disclose how it's done but I can say it has got to do with what you're thinking so indeed it is "mind over matter." And I can say that it is possible to withstand physical power without flexing a muscle. I didn't care what the reason behind it was, but it made me laugh because it was so unbelievable. I didn't say, "hey, alright, so what's the trick behind it?" because I knew it wasn't an illusion. I won't go into any more details. However, I'm generally a realist and don't believe in just any bullshit. My own open-mindedness allows me to simply accept something if I have reason to believe that it isn't a fraud.

Which is why I too accept the fact that there are fire-walkers. I've seen those myself. We may not know how exactly it works, but yes, obviously it works if you know how to do it. From what I know, given my own experience, I think there is a difference between simply believing in something and having learned, uhm, what to call it.. let's call it a procedure. For instance, I don't think that the Pope himself, who is likely one of the firmest believers within in the Christian community, will be able to say, "I believe in god and he will now protect my feet," and then simply walk over those hot stones/coals without ending up screaming with burnt feet. So it's not simply believing in something. There is more to it. It is something that can be controlled. Only few know and teach how.