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New Dossier: Susan Blackmore

  • Posted on March 12, 2012 at 9:28 am

susan blackmore

Blackmore was an important influence for me a few years ago when I was giving up on practicing magick because she had been through the same thing studying ESP: she researched it for years and determined that there wasn’t evidence to support her hypothesis. But she remained interested in “extraordinary human experience,” and showed me that it was possible to research and examine these issues from an open minded and respectful yet skeptical way. Blackmore considers these experiences an important part of the human condition worthy of our study and consideration, regardless of whether the causes are paranormal, psychological or neurological.

Dr. Susan Blackmore is a researcher of consciousness and what she calls “extraordinary human experience,” which includes experiences often referred to as “paranormal,” including out of body experiences and alien abduction. She has a PhD in parapsychology from the University of Surrey, where she studied ESP and memory and eventually gave up belief in the paranormal and adopted a more skeptical worldview.

Dossier: Susan Blackmore

From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/0biE5OAxwho/

PZ Myers on Alan Moore and Magic

  • Posted on June 14, 2011 at 9:05 pm

A while back Cat Vincent asked why no atheists debated Alan Moore at the skeptics conference TAM London. I told Cat that I personally didn’t have much to debate with Moore.

Moore’s position, staked out in this essay on magic as well as the magic essay from Dodgem Logic 3 (which I think is a better version of the “Fossil Angels” essay, and extends the purpose of magic from art in particular to creativity in general), is that that magic is a process that takes place probably in one’s own mind and doesn’t confer the power to fulfill wishes. For example, in Dodgem Logic he wrote that using magic to try to get money handed to you was pointless. Instead, you were better off using magic to try to find some creative way to actually earn some money. He claims to have seen visions of gods, but admits they could very well be hallucinations. There’s not much room to debate a guy who says magic can’t fulfill all your wishes and that he could be tripping balls mad.

Biologist and noted atheist blogger PZ Myers seems to agree:

Moore has an affinity for a 2nd century oracular sock puppet, but he doesn’t worship it. He believes in magic, but he doesn’t believe in the supernatural. He also doesn’t like religion. I agreed with almost everything he said 100% (although he did speculate a bit about the absence of explanation for memory, which he thought was a mystery because there are no changes in the structure of the brain that last for more than a few weeks, which is total bullshit, and he wondered if the purpose of junk DNA was to store memories, which is bullshit on fire. But, OK, the rest of the talk was mostly fun.)

Moore is a writer, and his explanation was basically that the weirdness was to spark creativity; for instance, he talked about staring into a quartz crystal and seeing visions, but he was quite plain that it wasn’t supernatural, it wasn’t the crystal, it was his own mind generating and imposing ideas on what he saw. And that’s all right with me — it fits very well with how I see science functioning.

Pharyngula: Alan Moore at Cheltenham

Actually, I think if there’s anything to debate Alan Moore about it’s whether what he describes as magic is truly “magic” at all. But I’m not particularly interested in having that debate, and I doubt he really is either.

From http://technoccult.net/archives/2011/06/15/pz-myers-on-alan-moore-and-magic/

Does Religion Make People Happier – Or Conformity?

  • Posted on June 9, 2011 at 11:33 am

A couple months ago I linked to a story about the happiest guy in the world. One of the ways this was calculated was based on religion – religious people are typically assumed to be the happier than non-religious people. And apparently religious Jews are expected to be happiest of all.

But are religious people actually happier? According to Nigel Barber, an evolutionary psychologist, that might not be the case. Barber writes:

Much of the research linking religiosity and happiness was conducted in the U.S. where more religious people are slightly happier. Researchers saw this as evidence for the universal benefits of religion (a perspective that interests evolutionary psychologists like myself because it helps explain why religion is so common around the globe). Yet, there is no association between religiousness and happiness in either Denmark or the Netherlands (3).

Why the difference? Religious people are in the majority in the U.S., but in a minority in Denmark and the Netherlands. Feeling part of the mainstream may be comforting whereas being in the minority is potentially stressful. Ethnic minorities around the world tend to have higher blood pressure, for example – this being a reliable index of stress.

If religion contributes to happiness, then the most religious countries should be happiest. Yet, the opposite is true.

Psychology Today: Does religion make people happier?

Could it be then that the level of happiness enjoyed by religious people in the U.S. is a result of conformity, rather than religion itself? If that were the case, we should expect religious people in more secular countries, controlled for income, to be less happy than non-religious people in those countries. Is this the case?

Here’s a recent ranking of the top 10 happiest countries in the world.

From http://technoccult.net/archives/2011/06/09/does-religion-make-people-happier-or-conformity/

Chief of International Pedophilia Ring Blames Nazism on Atheism

  • Posted on September 17, 2010 at 7:52 am

The Pope

I know the whole world is abuzz about this, but I’m gonna have my say anyway. Pope Benedict XVI (formerly known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) said:

Even in our own lifetimes we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live.

“As we reflect on the sobering lessons of atheist extremism of the 20th century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus a reductive vision of a person and his destiny.

BBC: Row after Pope’s remarks on atheism and Nazis

(via David Forbes)

The Beeb piece mentions that Ratzinger was in the Nazi Youth when he was a teenage – a point I don’t think is terribly relevant. It fails to mention:

1. Adolf Hitler was a member of the Catholic Church until his death (and for the occultniks and conspiracy analysts out there: even what Nazi Mysticism there is evidence for had an expressly Christian element.

2. Ratzinger conspired to cover-up the activities of his global child rape gang.

3. The Catholic Church’s relative silence on the matter of the holocaust while it was occurring.

So what’s the bigger threat to the world? Atheism or Catholicism? (If the Pope really wanted to make a point about atheism, he could have invoked the suppression of religion in Soviet Russia).

This sort of thing drives me bonkers – as innocent people were being sent to prison as part of the Satanic Panic, priests and Boy Scouts masters were actually out raping children and covering it up. And this creep has the gall to blame one of the worst genocides in history – one that was carried out in the name of Christianity! – on atheism?

From http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Technoccult/~3/56_o0gGcR48/