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 was bored out of my mind after about 12 minutes of sitting in the car, and started to find ways to occupy myself. I got out and wandered around to look at all the different lichens on the trees, but I didn’t have enough light to get any decent pictures. I paced , looking at ants, then sat in the car and read my book for awhile, tried not to think about how much Monster energy drink I had consumed on the way there, and let my mind generally wander around. It was excruciating.

At one point I noticed that there was a decorative wall that had the top knocked off, around a little flower garden near the front doors (which were locked so I couldn’t go in and get rid of the huge amount of Monster now making me miserable). Next to it were lots of bits of broken concrete, but among them, like a shining miracle, was a smooth brown river stone. I picked it up and thought how lucky I was to find something so wonderful in all that chaos.

Miracle: An event that appears inexplicable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of god.

Neece holding the Miracle Rock

Of course, I was just being silly. It was just a misplaced stone from another flower bed, but I was thinking how easily it is to see something that stands out as somehow special or miraculous. I slipped it in my pocket with a smirk. My sacred touch with the divine (NOT!). It reminded me of the way people see patterns in randomness and claim it to be divine, such as the magical stump and the magical bird shit. It’s really nothing more than pareidolia.

Back in the car, waiting patiently, I glanced up at the rear view mirror and saw a sticker that I had put there probably 10 years ago. Now, in the 10 years that we’ve had this car, this is the only sticker I’ve ever put on it that was not practical. We have the registration stickers, and the oil change one, but no bumper stickers except this one, which I had placed there because it meant so much to me back then. I wanted to see it every time I got in the car. I wanted to be reminded of this message, which was:

The Universe arranges itself to accommodate your picture of reality!

Now, if you read HDC regularly, I’m sure you are aware that this is utter pseudoscience bullshit. It is completely and totally wrong and anyone who holds this as truth is crazy. I was crazy back then. I believed that thoughts were powerful and could help shape the universe. I was wrapped up in a lot of “spiritual” thinking that was completely bogus.

It was easy to selectively enforce those beliefs back then though. To me, this statement was accurate. It never occurred to me how ridiculous and nonsensical it was. I was a believer in “energy” and a conscious universe (even though I was an agnostic).

So as I sat there, I was amazed at how far I’ve come over the years. I now embrace science, reason, skepticism and logic, which to me, is much more rewarding, and certainly more consistent and satisfying than the desperate beliefs that were based on nothing more substantial than wishful thinking.

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Remember Craig the christian from last month? He emailed me yesterday about the recent post I wrote: Cherry-Picking and a bible Lesson for Atheists. I’ll quote his email and then post my replies.

Craig said: I do not have a problem with your use of the Skeptic’s Bible per se. The issue I have with the Skeptic’s Bible is the use of the King James Bible, which relies on later documents for its translation (8th and 9th century if I remember correctly) as opposed to the 1st and 2nd century documents other translations use (NRSV & NET to name a few).

Neece’s reply:
If you know of a more accurate interpretation of the bible that I can link to online and read online, can you link me? Otherwise I’ll stick to the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible. Because it’s the one people know best, and it’s the one I was indoctrinated with, and it honestly shouldn’t matter that much for the following reasons below.

Craig said: Unchecked, the Bible can be made to mean a number of things. The Bible has been used to support slavery and patriarchy. It has also been used to try to define marriage and condemn homosexuality. I’m sure we will get into these matters at a different time. My point is, that the Bible does none of these.
There are three different courses of action on can take when interpreting tricky passages from the Bible
1. Cherry-pick from the texts
2. Ignore difficult texts
3. Admit that we don’t know what the text means and hope that future research will shed light on the meaning.

(Neece’s note: Craig thoughtfully included commentary regarding the quotes I chose in the bible lesson for atheists from April 7th, but I am omitting them here. If you’d like me to include them, comment below and I’ll add them to the bottom of this post.) Instead of getting tangled in the apologetic thinking of the commentary, I said this:

Neece’s reply:
Regarding the bible verses and their interpretation, I think that the word of god should be infallible and shouldn’t be ruined and easily misinterpreted by man. It should be the same in every language, and should be offered to every culture in their own tongue, by god himself, if it should even be necessary at all. Why can’t god make it so that we’re born with an inherent understanding of our creator? Why did this local god play a prominent role in the lives of the Israelites, who ordered the killing and maiming, the torture and deaths of women and children, as well as people who made the slightest error in their worship of that god says a lot to me. The sheer barbarity of the bible is telling. It certainly doesn’t read as a divinely inspired text of love and understanding. It is conflicting at almost every turn, it’s barbaric and cruel and unjust, just like the people of that time.
Why only preach to the men of the Middle East and make those few men tell the rest of the world? It is so easily warped and interpreted to suit anyone and everyone, whether for good or ill. It was written by men from many different walks of life, and many different political eras, over a huge range of time. The stories are all stolen from more ancient religions, and not much of it is original, which is quite telling as well. It all leads to a text that, in its original form, is relevant historically, but certainly doesn’t appear to be divinely inspired.
If god existed, and cared about humans, the bible wouldn’t be easily misinterpreted and would not contradict itself in any way. The message would be simple and clear and probably quite concise.

What you said is the exact opposite of what I think about the bible. What do you mean by the statement that the bible does not support slavery and patriarchy, that it doesn’t define marriage and condemn homosexuality? That is exactly what it does. Sometimes by different authors in different books, sometimes with a different message, but often the same statement of hatefulness as the others.

It says those things plainly in some cases, and in other contexts it’s more a part of a story. But usually it’s pretty plain and blatant what it means. So what do you mean that the bible doesn’t do that? What does the bible do, then? What is its purpose and what is its message? What does the bible do? What is its moral stance? I ask because I was assuming a more direct interpretation of the text, and now I am not sure where you’re coming from.

Next, Craig quoted me from the Cherry-Picking article. I said: “Hey, if I am smart enough to realize that, don’t you think an all powerful god would figure it out too? Maybe it’s because he was just all made up and not really there. That would be the simplest and most logical explanation. Especially since there is zero evidence of yahweh or any other god ever having existed in any fashion.”

Craig said: I debated how I was going to respond to this because I don’t want to come off harsh or sound like an arrogant ass. In fact, I was very hesitant to respond in this way, but I really can’t see any way around it. It’s taken me about four days to get it to this point. So please keep that in mind as you read on.

Zero evidence does not equate non-existence. Saying that something does not exist because there is no evidence is a logical fallacy, the fallacy of negative evidence, or more specifically the argument from ignorance. I pulled this from Wikipedia:

“The two most common forms of the argument from ignorance, both fallacious, can be reduced to the following form:
* Something is currently unexplained or insufficiently understood or explained, so it is not (or must not be) true.
* Because there appears to be a lack of evidence for one hypothesis, another chosen hypothesis is therefore considered proven.”

I will concede that this same fallacy can be applied to Christians because it can be said that we make claims that there is a God when there is a lack of evidence.

First, I don’t think Craig sounded like an arrogant ass. I forgot to tell him that in my reply.

Neece’s reply:
Zero evidence does not equate to non-existence. That’s true.

Claiming that a supernatural being in the sky is the creator of the universe and only started talking to men in the middle east about 6,000 years ago, and simply ignored all other humans before and since is pretty extraordinary. Not to mention virgin births, talking snakes, rising from the dead, etc. It’s all pretty magical.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If evidence came along that was convincing and extraordinary, after it was verified and retested, I’d reconsider my position on the existence of god. But since I’ve yet to come across any evidence, then the burden of proof is on you to show and verify the existence of god.

If I say I am the best bread baker in the world, I’d better be prepared to back that claim up. You come along and say you don’t believe me. That’s your prerogative because there’s been no evidence for my claim. So why should you believe me for no reason? That’s faith, which is based on belief without proof.

If I say the Invisible Pink Unicorn (IPU) visits me every other Tuesday if it’s raining, then I had better be able to show the IPU in all her glory off to a bank of scientists who want to verify her existence. There’s no difference. I’m sure you don’t believe in the IPU. Would you say that is an argument from ignorance, too?

Neither one of us believes in Santa Claus anymore (I hope) and that isn’t an argument from ignorance. There’s no evidence of Santa and no proof of his existence, not to mention his very existence would break the laws of physics. So we can say we don’t believe in him without argument. That isn’t a fallacy.

Now, if Santa walked into the room and offered to prove his existence to us and show that he can fly in his sleigh and deliver tons of presents to good christian boys and girls all over the world, I’d be skeptical, but I wouldn’t stop him from doing the tests.

Skepticism is about holding off judgment, being doubtful and thinking critically. We want proof of wild claims, instead of ignorantly believing everything that is told to us.
Skepticism doesn’t mean we flat out deny everything and don’t believe anything. There’s a huge difference.

There IS ZERO evidence for yahweh or any other god in history having existed in any fashion. And since yahweh makes some huge claims, just like I’d require extraordinary evidence for cold fusion, I’d want it for yahweh. No evidence? Well, I see your point, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t exist, but the burden of proof lies on the claimant. You claim there is a god, so you have to prove it. I can’t prove a negative. So I am left with lack of belief in a god.

That’s not to say that I can’t change my mind if there was proof and evidence and it all followed testing and the scientific method, which is the best way to verify claims that we have. Until then, you don’t believe in leprechauns any more than I do, and that’s not an argument from ignorance any more than my lack of belief in gods.

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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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Woo: (n or adj) when you uncritically believe unsubstantiated or unfounded ideas. Short for woo woo, according to the Urban Dictionary, definition 4.

I was into reiki, divination, numerology, you name it. While I was an agnostic back then, I still clung to the idea of a kind of Universal Energy. Not really an intelligence, but kind of “magical” principles to energy that science just hadn’t quantified or qualified yet. I held to the beliefs that ancient societies knew secrets that had been lost. Like the Chinese were better at medicine than modern science, or the Mayans had some secret knowledge about the Universe that we were missing out on, as seen in their calendar stopping in 2012.

My main thing was reiki. If you don’t know anything about it, basically you channel energy from the universe through you into your subject. You get an “attunement” where “sacred symbols” open you as a channel. A reiki master has to administer this attunement which is basically a short ritual.

I’ve never been one for ritual. But I really wanted to cure myself of all that was wrong with me and help people, so even though I didn’t like that part of it, I accepted it. And reiki worked for me. My hands would get really hot when I “channeled” this “sacred healing energy” for people. People would feel better when I did my “healings” for them. They would get better. The anecdotal evidence was positive.

I became a reiki master, actually. I then “attuned” other people so that they could go on and be a practitioner, or better yet, go on and attune others. I really enjoyed it and thought it was doing good for people.

I did a lot of reiki for awhile. I held “reiki circles” where we’d all do reiki on each other to “clear our channels” and heal ourselves. I even had a reiki “healing” center with some friends of mine. We offered “healings” and “attunements” in a clinic. We did talks at different places. One talk was at the hospital for cancer patients who wanted alternative healing methods.

I totally believed in reiki. I developed a set of “reiki runes” which had Japanese writing on them. I then gave divination readings with them. I was pretty good at it too. People came back to me again and again for readings and advice.

I can’t believe I’m telling you this. Personally I’m very embarrassed by how much woo I believed back then. But I’m telling you for a reason. I was really wrapped up in this kind of belief in “magical energy”. It made sense to me. It worked for me. I was good at it. I was helping people.

After awhile, I started noticing several things. At first, since they went against what I was practicing, I tried to ignore them or write them off with different woo thinking. What happened was that one of the women I had the clinic with got really sick with pneumonia for quite some time. At first she still tried to do healings with us, before she knew it was pneumonia. But she would cough and hack and we finally all agreed that she needed to get herself better before she could heal others.

This disturbed me. If we’re healing people by channeling this amazing, loving energy from the universe, how could she get so sick? But this was explained that she wasn’t doing reiki correctly. She was supposedly taking on the illnesses of the clients, instead of simply channeling the energy into them. Basically she was doing it wrong and that is what made her sick. She did it to herself.

She ended up in the hospital. She almost died because she was trying to treat it herself with woo magic at home, instead of the medicine she really needed. Of course, we dutifully went to the hospital to give her more reiki healings.

The other thing that I noticed was that it really didn’t matter much what I did. If the person I was working on “believed” I was healing them, they got better and felt a difference. If they didn’t believe, or were resistant to change, they stayed the same.

It was all about psychology. I did some testing of this theory, more so in the readings I did for people and found it to be blatantly accurate once I was aware of it. If the person believed I was channeling awesome energy, the reading was successful. Even if I didn’t feel connected.

After noticing that it was all about psychology, I finally realized there’s no evidence that this stuff does anything at all beyond the power of the human mind and the placebo effect. And that’s when I started letting go of woo. It has taken some time and education, but now I think I’m actually getting somewhere with skeptical thinking.

Of course, now there’s a skeptical community that I can tap into and get new information from. Which is very nice.

Anyway, back to Jane. She’s still very much into all kinds of woo. Talking to her makes me ashamed of who I was. I think back on how I used to think 10 years ago and I feel embarrassed. I can’t believe I embraced all that nonsense.

Of course, the way that woo is packaged and delivered to people is very slick and shiny and palatable. It’s easy and simple and will cure all your ills if you believe the lies.

I’ve rambled enough for one day. But tomorrow I will have a list of some of The Main Features Of Pseudo-Science. This list is quite helpful for figuring out what is nonsense and what is based on real scientific fact and research.

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