Woo can be defined as anything supernatural, irrational or lacking in evidence. So it would include religion and any kind of pseudoscience.

On a side note, is there anything that could be defined as woo that you still believe in? If so, why?

For me, I’ve somehow whittled down my friend list from all woo-lovers to all skeptical atheists. I didn’t do this deliberately, but I guess with my skeptical talk and constant questioning (not aggressively, but I really did question all the woo I previously embraced), my woo-loving friends all went their separate ways and avoided me within months of when my quest for knowledge began.

I didn’t have many friends for awhile but then found the Morgantown Atheists where I found several people that have become good friends. Also, having HDC has let me meet new people who were rather like-minded as well.

With extended family, I still have to deal with woo, both religious and supernatural. They know Butch (my awesome husband) and I are die-hard atheists so we have come to an unspoken agreement that we don’t talk about religion. Or politics just to be safe and have nice dinners together.

I think I’m lucky in most respects. My skeptical atheist friends keep things lively by being smart and reason-based (most of the time, we’re not perfect, of course). And my extended family gives me an occasional glimpse into woo-land so I get to see what the majority of people are dealing with and believing. It’s enough.

I don’t avoid anyone based on their woo. But I tend to gently state my skepticism when I can so that I am not being dishonest about myself. Then people who are wrapped in woo tend to avoid me, not the other way around. I can’t emphasize enough that I am very nice about it, not aggressive or “militant” at all. I’m probably way too nice about it. The other evening, I let my sister-in-law go on about her visit to a psychic and only said two things about how cold readings work. When the other sister-in-law said the psychic (a 95 year old woman) insisted she give her her hand (she didn’t want a reading) and told her to never drive, to dump her boyfriend (who she just moved in with and is very happy with) and other negative things, I said a few things then. Mainly that it’s all made up and it’s nonsense and don’t let that upset her. But even though she said it was no big deal, she talked about it all night. I got the impression it really bothered her.

As you may know, I’m happily married to Butch (we’ve been together for 15 years). So I’m not looking to date anyone, of course. But if I did have to date, I think I would be pretty strict about how much woo my partner could be into and still be in a relationship with me. I think it would be such a clash of belief and skepticism that it would cause problems. I think I’d have issues with it.

Let us know what you think in the comments!

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Cursus Walker said, “I make a distinction between Pure and Skeptical Atheism. The former refers only to lacking belief in gods, while the latter extends the attitude to all supernaturalism.”

I couldn’t agree more! I like the terms and thought I’d share them with you.

Pure Atheism: A lack of belief in gods.

Skeptical Atheism: A lack of belief in all things supernatural.

As a skeptical atheist, I have trouble understanding how people can believe in ghosts, ESP, life after death, or anything along those lines, while not believing in any gods. So the concepts aren’t mutually exclusive. But it still amazes me to run into atheists who use no skepticism or logical reasoning when it comes to supernatural woo. Can’t you just feel the cognitive dissonance?

And why do you think that is? Is it a need for comfort? Is it fear of the unknown and death? Is it ignorance in science and the laws of nature? All of the above? Probably.

Of course, as synchronicity would have it, I stumbled upon a QualiaSoup video (thanks to my awesome husband) shortly after and it was so good I have to share it with you here. It’s kind of relevant, but excellent in its own right. About 10 minutes long.

Putting Faith in its Place

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Notice how in the demo clips it’s always about some materialistic thing like a bike or a necklace? How shallow and self-serving! Why don’t all believers in this stupid lie wish for world peace or clean drinking water for everyone? Or everyone to be disease free? Instead they have to have a new Shiny. Pathetic!

Oh, and see the waves of rays coming out of the peoples’ heads? That doesn’t happen. That’s a special effect. So when you wish for something your thoughts don’t actually leave your head. Just in case you were wondering. Don’t believe me? Ask a neuroscientist. They have proof your thoughts don’t leave your head by magic (they only leave your head when you speak, write something down or perform an action based on those thoughts)

Oh OH! And when you ask for something, then believe it’s already yours, there’s no invisible man in the sky that says to you, “Your wish is my command.” You know that, right? The Universe doesn’t have a log of every time you wish for that new Ferrari. It doesn’t wait for the wish requests to reach 1,000 before it has it shipped to you. (Don’t move your house because it will get delivered to your old address! LOL!)

Other posts about The Secret:

• The Law Of Attraction – And The Secret – Are Bullshit
• The Secret Divides
• The Secret Divides Part 2

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I think I understand what it’s like to be lost in a world of woo thinking. Maybe even an inkling of what it’s like to believe in Jesus as your personal hero.

Butch, my awesome husband, came home Friday night and told me he felt awful. He and I both got a cold about 3 weeks ago and he shook if off in about 4 days while I suffered with a nasty chest cold, congestion and laryngitis until just the other day. I didn’t want to hear that he was sick again. It was my birthday weekend, we were supposed to go out to dinner on Sunday (last night), and I was hoping we’d both be feeling well for a change.

Alas, it was not to be. He had a fever, the chills, and was completely miserable. And here’s where I realized I felt totally helpless. I can’t stand seeing someone I love sick. When Butch or my dogs or someone I care about has a problem or is in pain, I want to fix them. I want to make them at least feel better. But sometimes there’s nothing you can do.

Butch seemed to have the flu, which is a virus, and really all I could do was make him a hot toddy, be extra nice, and send him to bed to sleep it off.

Recently my older dog, Koku went through some weird emotional thing where whenever I gave the dogs treats, he would suddenly act like there was thunder and lightning and he would practically jump in my lap and shiver. Which is also new. He just developed a dislike of thunder last year. Poor little fella is anxious like me, I guess. But again, there really wasn’t anything I could do for him, except give him some affection and make sure that he was physically alright. (I can put him on doggy prozac, I guess, but that would make him sleep all day, so it’s a last resort.)

But it’s painful to watch the ones I love suffer. I hate it. In my previous life, I was into taking vitamins and airborne. And before that I (shamefully admit) I believed in energy healing. But back then, I had solutions. I could turn to a concoction or my hands with authority and say, “this will make you feel better.” Butch didn’t believe in the energy stuff, but sometimes he’d let me do my woo woo magic. Because when you’re sick, you just want to feel better, even if it’s a long shot.

Then I figured out that energy healing was totally bogus. Which meant I lost a huge security blanket. It was all a placebo,  nothing more. Recently the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, along with other podcasts and science news, helped me to become a full fledged Skeptic. (I have a badge and everything!) I learned that taking vitamins have been found to actually shorten your lifespan (a recent study), mega doses of vitamins can be very harmful, and taking airborne as suggested is dangerous, and that it was never properly tested. So, now I have no security blankets at all. It’s just me and bare naked facts and science.

Most times that is quite liberating, not to be weighed down with lies and nonsense. But when my loved ones are sick  and there’s nothing that can really be done except fluids and bed rest, (oh, and TLC, of course), I feel really naked and frustrated.

So I guess I understand why people turn to crackpot pseudo-science. I see why they buy ridiculous remedies, books for crazy diets, books for strange magical ways to improve their lives. I guess I even understand people who pray to Jesus for a cure. It might be a long shot, but at least they’re doing something.

Of course, prayer is actually doing nothing. You’re just wasting time and energy on a god that doesn’t exist.  But I guess it makes sense, in a way, if you really believe it’s going to work. Maybe it’s just the knowing, the confidence that Jesus wouldn’t let you down, that whoever wrote that stupid book you read really does have the answer and really wants to help you achieve perfect health and happiness. Whatever it is, it’s doing something, it’s keeping you from realizing that the world is often harsh and cold.

But turning to a god that isn’t there, or a pill that doesn’t do anything useful, or a book that is full of lies isn’t doing anything. It might seem like it’s helpful, but really it’s worse than nothing. Sure, you might feel like you have a bit of control over a bad situation, but you don’t. You’ve given what little control you might have had to the invisible god, the sugar pill, or the guru who wrote the book. See? You’re less in control than ever. With no hope of ever getting any of it back when you believe in lies and let them lead you and control your life.

It sucks. I know. But reality is a harsh mistress.

So, I kissed my husband on the forehead, reminded him that a mild fever is the body’s natural way of fighting infections, and told him I loved him. He was upset about my birthday dinner, but I told him it can wait. No big deal, just feel better. Sometimes all you can do for someone is love them. So that’s what I did. Love is good medicine, at least.

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Here is the premise of the Secret, as well as other systems that use the principle of the law of attraction. You can call it whatever you like, positive affirmations, the power of positive thinking, Bernie Siegal’s Love, Medicine and Miracles, Deepak Chopra, and on and on.

Put on your thigh high wader boots, and cover your ears, the bullshit meter is about to sound off loud and long:

Thoughts have an energy that attracts like energy (sometimes borrowed from Quantum Mechanics, minus any evidence). You must control this energy by practicing four things:

1. Know what you want.
2. Ask the universe for it.
3. Feel and behave as if the object of your desire is already with you, or is on its way to you.
4. Be open to receiving it.

Of course, if you think negative thoughts, the universe will manifest those negative thoughts in your life as well. So you must think positively at all times so that the universe will manifest all of your desires.

Before the Secret was around, there were plenty of other similar methods of thinking – positive affirmations and the like. As I’ve mentioned before, even though I was an agnostic in my late 20′s and early 30′s, I was very spiritual. I believed this bullshit 150%. I’d read books, learned from “gurus”, had a few college teachers, doctors and nurses suggest these techniques, and even had success with it. I taught others how to manifest their dreams, too. In a way it was the core belief of my spirituality.

When I fully embraced the fact that there is no god about 9 years ago, and acknowledged that there is no evidence of a benevelent creator or universal force that watches out for me, I still didn’t quite give up the positive affirmations. They had seemed to work in big ways in my life. But they started really messing with my head, too. And this is where I realized that they can be quite dangerous.

If you believe you have control over events and objects in your life based solely on your thoughts, you feel you are much more in control than what reality supports. While I believe we all must be responsible for our actions, thinking like this goes grievously too far.

Examples:

I developed this fear that my thoughts controlled my husband’s success or failure at driving to and from work. If I had a worry based on the weather conditions that he might have an accident, I would panic and had to tell him to drive carefully, and I had to think only positive thoughts while he was on the road. This became an obsession in which I had to tell him to drive carefully before leaving or he would crash. It didn’t have anything to do with his driving skill, the safety of our well-maintained car, or anything else. It was all down to my thoughts. The problem is, the more I tried to avoid thinking about accidents the more they filled my mind. If he did have an accident it would have been my fault entirely. It wouldn’t have anything to do with the stupid deer that stand in the road, the patch of black ice, or the idiot that stopped dead at a green light because he was texting his girlfriend.

This then led to other obsessive thoughts that seemed to be incredibly important for our happiness and safety. Innocent random thoughts became terribly important. Mild concerns harbored doom if they weren’t countered with positive thoughts. A mild and common worry about leaving the coffee pot on would lead to thinking of the house burning down, a brief worry that would turn into a horrid panic. I had just sealed my fate by having that flash in my mind. It doesn’t help that my mind is graphic and vivid in technicolored detail for such things. That only led me to believe I actually had power over such events.

Sure, I do have some power. I can remind my husband to check the brakes or replace the tires on the car. I can make sure I don’t leave appliances on that could overheat if left alone for a long time. But I do those things anyway, just like the rest of us. And sure, mistakes happen, which can lead to accidents and misfortunes.

But the idea that your thoughts alone are so powerful as to change physics, to affect physical objects and the will of other people is crazy. You use your thoughts to make decisions on what to say or what action to take. Nothing more. I’m happily surprised I didn’t start wearing a tinfoil hat to keep those pesky negative thoughts inside my skull.

A lot of people use this belief system to try to gain wealth and money. Of course I did it too. This is where it seemed that I had the most success. But like everyone else, I would cherry pick the results of all the thousands of times I controlled my thoughts and forced myself to repeat positive affirmations over and over to just those few that were amazingly, positively successful. That’s anecdotal evidence, my friends. It isn’t scientific. It isn’t reality.

Of course I felt I had full power over our finances, just by my thoughts. When I write that and read it, I see how insane it is. Our financial successes and setbacks had nothing to do with the economy, the job market, my husband working 2 jobs at one point, the housing market or anything else? No, it was all due to my thoughts. Yes, that’s crazy, I know.

Once I realized how far I’d gone with crazy thinking, I forced myself to do a test. For a week, I didn’t tell my husband to drive carefully when he left for work. If I had worries and negative thoughts, I tried to rationally remind myself that they were simply that: irrational worries. I didn’t force myself to repeat positive affirmations. And you know what? He didn’t get in an accident. I tried different mind experiments after that, every one unscientifically confirming that my thoughts were staying in my head and simply causing stress and worry. Nothing more.

Here’s another angle. If you get cancer, it’s your fault for being afraid of cancer and worrying about it. If you are a woman and you get mugged and raped, you were afraid of being attacked and you attracted it to you. Again, your fault. That’s the way that screwed up belief system works. Blame the victim because it strengthens the flawed and unproven system as “effective”.

But it’s completely unscientific and downright cruel to tell a cancer victim, a child with leukemia, or a rape victim that they did this to themselves just through negative thinking when there is absolutely no evidence to such bogus claims.

I used my personal examples to explain this insidious system of false belief, hoping you could learn from my errors. Even an intelligent nonbeliever can fall into the trap of the law of attraction. In fact, the reason I am writing this is because I hear people say “what you think about is what you attract to yourself” or some variation thereof, even within the atheist community.

It leads me to understand that not all atheists are critical thinkers or skeptics. But in this case, it’s a good idea to examine the evidence (NONE) for our thoughts controlling objects both near and far, physics, and the actions of others. Seems silly when you think about it. Your thoughts are in your head. So don’t fall into the same trap that I got stuck in. Think for yourself. You’ll be glad you did.

~

I have written some follow-up posts to this one:

• The Secret Divides
• The Secret Divides Part 2

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This is what the christians would use for a science textbook. Oh, how they long for the dark ages!

Every person should have to take this test to see if they qualify for reproducing.

godless America! if only!

Well said cartoon about how rationality loses in the political mainstream.

Great logic! Keep up the good work!

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