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Category: Parapsychology

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Judeo-reductionism Parapsychology Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 29

Sometimes, even if his soul is less complex, that is to say, in this case, less divided against itself, the agent who senses, or even knows, what the inevitable course of events will be, will decide—and this, without any need for him to ‘deliberate’—in favour of the most useless action from the practical point of view. Teia, the last king of the Ostrogoths in Italy, knew that it was now impossible for his people to remain masters of the peninsula. This did not prevent him from launching himself without the slightest hesitation into the fight against Byzantium and finding a death worthy of him at the famous ‘Battle of Vesuvius’ in 563. He is credited with the historical words which, even if he didn’t say them, capture his attitude: ‘It is not a question of leaving or not leaving Italy; it is a question of leaving it with or without honour’. Words of a lord… words of a man ‘against time’, i.e. defeated in advance on the material plane.

One can say that to the extent that what the Sanskrit Scriptures call the Dark Ages unfold, and as a cycle of time draws to a close, more and more lords—both in the biological and psychological sense of the word—are men ‘against Time’, defeated in advance on the material plane. They don’t feel any less ‘free’ in their spontaneous choice of the practically useless act.

The impression of freedom is thus not at all related to hesitation and ‘deliberation’ before a decision. It has to do with the agent’s ability to imagine a future different from the one that will result from his act—the one that he would like to see result from it, if possible—and with the illusion that he is the source and principle of this act—whereas he is only the instrument of realisation of possibilities destined, in our world of time, to pass from the virtual to the actual, because they already exist, in the state of actualities, in the ‘eternal present’.

In other words, this impression of freedom is linked both to the agent’s thinking and his ignorance. For the man who acts in time, true freedom consists of the absence of external or internal constraint (i.e. from the deep contradictions of his ‘I’), and the total authorship of the ‘I’ concerning the decision and the act. Ignorance of this future—which sometimes partly follows from the act, but which cannot follow fully in the case of a practically useless act—may help some men to act. Was it not said that the foreknowledge of the fate that awaited their civilisation had broken the spirit of the leaders of 16th-century America, both Aztec and Inca, that they were unable to resist the Spaniards as quickly and as vigorously as they might have done, had they never known of the prophecies of destruction? It can give the illusion of an absence of constraint—a knowledge of the absence of the constraint of Destiny— and thus allow the blossoming of hope, which is a force of action.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s Note: Once again, Savitri is assuming that precognition exists. Since I am more familiar with the 16th texts about the Conquest than her, and since for some years I read sceptical literature about the paranormal, I see things differently.

I don’t remember the source and I’m not going to dig for the moment into the literature I read when writing the section on pre-Columbian Amerindians for Day of Wrath, but I seem to remember that what the Amerinds began to say after the Conquest is that everything was prophesied. That is to say: it was not a real prophecy but vaticinium ex eventu: a psychological trick to better cope, based on the Mesoamerican worldview, with the trauma of the Conquest.

I mention this because it seems vital to me to question the existence of the extrasensory powers that came into vogue right after Savitri wrote her book. For the Westerner to regain his sanity, he cannot afford the slightest cognitive distortion of reality. This is why on this site we have been insisting so much on debunking the claims of the conspiracy theorists. Saving the Aryan race from extinction involves declaring war on all cognitive distortion, which includes blaming the Jews for everything. (Kevin MacDonald does generally a good job but there are quite a few racialists who, in their comment threads, blame Jewry for things they didn’t orchestrate. These guys would do well to read MacDonald’s trilogy, especially his first book, before keep seeing kikes under every stone.)

The same can be said of the American racialists who want to save their race but at the same time believe in the Hereafter, the existence of the god of the Jews and other paranoias. Savitri continues:

______ 卐 ______

 
But, as I said earlier, the Strong don’t need this help to do what the sense of honour dictates, which is always the consciousness of loyalty to a Leader, or an idea, or both, and the duty that this implies. Even in the full knowledge that the future escapes them, that their beloved truth will henceforth remain under a bushel and that, indefinitely, they will decide for action, useless certainly but honourable; for beautiful action, daughter of all that is most permanent, more fundamental in their lordly selves: an action for which they will be rigorously responsible and that they will never regret, because it is ‘them’.

They can, of course, imagine a future different from the one they only envisage with horror or disgust, and to which their whole attitude opposes them. But they cannot imagine themselves acting differently. In them, there is neither idle ‘deliberation’ nor choice, but a reaction of their whole being in the face of the elementary alternative: to be oneself, or to deny oneself; internal necessity—exactly like the sage ‘above Time’ when he acts.

The only difference is that, for those who do not yet ‘see’ the future from the point of view of the eternal, this internal need doesn’t necessarily merge with that which governs the visible and invisible cosmos, and the Being itself, beyond its manifestations. It can, by accident, merge with it. But it also can represent only the fidelity of action to the ‘ego’ of the agent, sages being rare, and a great character not always—alas!—being put in service of a true idea, an eternal cause.

This is enough to make the agent absolutely responsible. For one is responsible for everything with which one feels solidarity: initially for his action, insofar as it expresses his true ‘self’, and then for the actions of all those with whom one is bound by a common faith. So much the worse for the man who gives his energy to a doctrine that moves him away from the eternal instead of bringing him closer! No value of the individual as such, no nobility of character can make a false idea true and a cause centred on false ideas or half-truths objectively justifiable.

Categories
Parapsychology Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 28

‘But if’, I am told, ‘in the view of the man above Time, the future is ‘given’ in the same way as the past, what becomes of the notions of freedom and responsibility? If a wise man can see, centuries in advance, how long a civilising doctrine is destined to retain its credit with one or more peoples, what is the use of militating ‘for’ or ‘against’ anything?

I believe that there are, in response to this, a few remarks to be made. Firstly, it should be pointed out that all action—in the sense that we understand it when we speak of ‘struggle’ and ‘activists’, or when we have in mind the gestures of everyday life—is intimately linked to the notion of time (of time at the very least, if not moreover of space). We should then note that the philosophical concepts of freedom and responsibility only make sense in connection with an action, direct or indirect—actual or possible, or even materially impossible to direct or modify on behalf of whoever conceives it, as is for example the case of any action thought of in retrospect—but always with an action, which could or should have been thought of. Finally, it must be understood that, as a consequence of this, these notions no longer have any meaning when, from the temporal state, one rises to that of consciousness outside time.

For those who are placed in the ‘eternal present’, i.e. outside of time, there is no question of freedom or responsibility, but only of being and non-being; of possibility and absurdity. The world that we see and feel, that others have seen and felt or will see and feel—a set of indefinite possibilities that have taken or will take shape—is simply what it is and, given that the intimate nature of each limited (individual) existence cannot be anything else. The consciousness above Time ‘sees’ it, but does not take part of it, even though it sometimes descends into it as a clairvoyant instrument of necessary action.

The beings that cannot think, because they are deprived of the word, thus of the general idea, nevertheless act and are not responsible. They behave according to their nature, and could not behave differently. And ‘to be free’, for them, consists simply in not being thwarted in the manifestation of their spontaneity in the exercise of their functions by some external force: not to be locked up between four walls or the bars of a cage; not to wear a harness or muzzle; not to be tied up, or deprived of water or food, or access to individuals of the same species and the opposite sex, and in the case of plants not to be deprived of water, soil and light, and not to be diverted in their growth by any obstacle.

It may be added that most humans are, although they can speak, neither freer nor more responsible than the humblest of beasts, or even of plants. Exactly like the rest of living, they do what their instincts, their appetites, and the demands of the moment urge them to do, and this, insofar as external obstacles and constraints allow. At most, many of them believe themselves to be responsible, having heard it repeated that this is ‘the nature of man’, and they feel, among the fridge, the washing machine and the television set—well as in the factories and offices where they spend eight hours a day under the blinding neon light—that they are less captive than the unfortunate tigers in the Zoological Garden. This only tends to show that the tigers are healthier in body and mind than they are, since they are aware of their captivity, and suffer from it.

Freedom[1] and responsibility are to be sought in different degrees between these extreme planes which are either active in time without thought, or consciousness outside of time without action, or accompanied by a completely detached, impersonal action, accomplished per an objective need. In other words, in an absolute sense, no one is ‘free’, if ‘freedom’ means the power to direct the future as one pleases.

The future is all oriented, since few wise men know it in advance, or rather who apprehend it as a ‘present’. But it is undeniable that the man of goodwill who lives and thinks in time has the impression of choosing between two or more possibilities; that he has the impression that the future, at least in its immediate course (and also in its distant course if it is a question of a decision of obvious historical significance) depends partly and sometimes entirely on him. This is, no doubt, only an impression. But it is an impression of such tenacity that it is impossible to ignore it, psychologically speaking. It forms so much a part of the experience of every man who must act in time, that it persists, even if that man is informed in advance (either by an invincible intuition, or by the evidence of one fact after another, or by some prophecy to which he gives credence) of what the future will be despite his action.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s Note:

When Savitri wrote her book the criticisms of purported precognitions had not been popularised.

As I already said a couple of years ago, when I lived in Marin County, in 1985 I had the opportunity to realise that the foundations of the ‘science’ I was studying were shaky. In a bookstore I saw that they sold the recently published A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology. Decades have passed since that night and I still remember the image of James Randi on the dustcover.

But as an immigrant who still had to get a job in the US for elemental survival, I thought I couldn’t afford it. If I had obtained a copy, years of my life would have been spared from my quixotic project of trying to develop psi and become a Bran before Martin wrote his novel!

(Left, the signature of the book’s editor on the first page when he visited Mexico City and I was, finally, able to purchase it at a reasonable price for my modest income.) The difference between the priest and the priestess, is that the priest already had the opportunity to read books like this one because he was born half a century after the priestess…
 

______ 卐 ______

 
[1] We are talking here, of course, about freedom in the sense that this word is generally understood, not about ‘freedom’ in the metaphysical sense in which René Guénon understands it, for example.

Categories
3-eyed crow Parapsychology Savitri Devi Souvenirs et réflexions d'une aryenne (book)

Reflections of an Aryan woman, 27

The future, whether personal or historical, is as impenetrable—as impossible to experience—as the past. We can at most, by reasoning by analogy, or by letting ourselves be carried along by the rhythm of habit, deduce or imagine what it will the immediate future be like. We can say, for example, that the road will be covered with ice tomorrow because it has just rained this evening and then the thermometer has suddenly dropped below zero centigrade; or that the price of food will rise because the strikers in the transport services have obtained satisfaction; or that such and such a shop, ‘open every day except Monday’, will be open next Thursday. On the other hand, it is totally impossible for any human being to predict what Europe will look like in three thousand years’ time, just as nobody in the Bronze Age could imagine what the same continent will look like today, with industrial cities in place of its ancient forests.

This does not mean that the future does not already ‘exist’ in a certain way, as the only set of virtualities destined to be realised, and that this ‘existence’ is not as irrevocable as that of the past. For a consciousness freed from the bondage of the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ everything would exist on the same basis, the future as well as the past, in what the sages call the ‘eternal present’, the timeless.

To predict a future state or event is not to deduce it from known data, at the risk of making a mistake (by omitting to take into account certain hidden, even unknowable, data); it is to see it, in the way that an observer, seated in an aeroplane, grasps a detail of the earth’s landscape, amid many others that he apprehends together, whereas the traveller on the ground can only distinguish it in the course of a succession of which he himself is a part, ‘before’ one detail, ‘after’ another. In other words, it is only when seen from the Eternal Present that what we, the prisoners of Time, conceive something as a debatable possibility that it becomes a real fact: a ‘given’, as irrevocable as the past. It is a matter of perspective—and of clairvoyance. Even when viewed from above, a landscape is clearer for the observer gifted with good eyesight. But it is enough that he stands above to have a global vision, that the man on the ground lacks.

History relates that on 18 March 1314 Jacques de Molay, before going to the stake, summoned ‘to the tribunal of God’ the two men responsible for the suppression of his Order: Pope Clement V, ‘in a month’, and King Philip the Fair, ‘within a year’. Both men died within the time allotted, or rather seen from the perspective of the eternal present by the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar. And more than eighteen hundred years earlier, Confucius, when asked by his disciples about the influence his teaching would have, answered that it would ‘dominate China for twenty-five centuries’. With a margin of fifty years, he spoke the truth. He also had, in the same perspective of the sage who rose ‘above time’, seen from beginning to end an evolution that no calculation could predict.

But I repeat: the wise man capable of transcending time is already more than a man. The future, already ‘present’ for him that he reads, remains, in the consciousness subjected to the ‘before’ and the ‘after’, something that is built at every moment in prolongation of the lived present; that becomes at each moment present, or rather past—the ‘present’ being only a moving limit. It is unalterable, no doubt, just like the past, since there are rare consciousnesses that can live both in the manner of a present. Nevertheless, as long as it has not become the past, it is felt, by the man who lives on the level of Time, as more or less dependent on a choice of all moments. Only with the past does a consciousness related to Time have the certainty that it is given, irrevocably: the result of an old choice perhaps (if such is believed), but that it is too late to want to modify, however we go about it.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s Note: A time in my life I was involved in parapsychology, which includes the purported study of retrocognition and precognition (before George Martin wrote his novels, I really wanted to become a sort of Bran). I entered the field as a believer and came out sceptical. Now it seems clear to me that parapsychologists have not demonstrated the reality of retrocognitive or precognitive phenomena, or even that there are psychics or gifted people who have had these powers.

But I still love to play with the idea even if it is pure fantasy. The ultimate truth about Time is unclear, and while parapsychologists have failed to scientifically prove their claims, that doesn’t automatically mean that extrasensory cognition doesn’t exist. It just means that there is no reliable evidence yet.

Anyone who wants to get acquainted with the subject could start with sceptical books like Nicholas Humphrey’s Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation.

Categories
Autobiography Parapsychology Turin Shroud

‘Introjection’

I have used the word ‘introject ’ (see e.g., here) and would like to explain it using a little isolated piece of my biography, as when writing a profound autobiography I had to come across this word.

In common dictionaries introjection is ‘the unconscious adaptation of the ideas or attitudes of others’. But I emphasise the adoption of the ideas that our parents instilled in us, as it was they who had the greatest influence on our tender egos.

Several commenters, both here and outside this site, have scoffed at my past ideological deviations: completely ignorant of what I intended to tell them about. I confessed that to illustrate how we are slaves to parental introjects, for example, why some anti-Semites continue to kneel before the Jewish god.

Although decontextualised, the following passage from The Grail illustrates how it was that I introjected some religious things that my father told me. It was like a tremendous malware that I couldn’t erase until after a long time. The following passage is just a loose piece of the puzzle that my eleven books put together, but it helps to understand the word introjection when it leaves my lips. On pages 231-235 of The Grail I wrote the following (my Spanish-English translation, with some explanatory brackets):
 

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The Shroud of Turin

Imagine my surprise when, flipping through a book on the so-called Shroud during a subsequent stay in the neighbouring northern country (this time in Houston, Texas), I found some pages where the authors spoke of a writing of mine whose theories I had already abandoned:

Some see the origin of the image on the Shroud as paranormal, rather than miraculous. They suggest that supernatural, rather than Divine, forces may be at work. Mexican parapsychologist Cesar Tort has raised the possibility that the image is a ‘thoughtograph’ . There is evidence – controversial, but not easily dismissed – that some psychics can create recognizable images on film by the power of thought alone. The most famous case is that of Ted Serios, an alcoholic Chicago bellhop, whose abilities were studied intensively in the mid-196os by the eminent researcher Jule Eisenbud. If it exists, the ability of the mind to affect the highly sensitive chemicals of photographic film would seem to be a natural variant of psychokinesis (PK)—the alteration of the state of a physical object by mental influence alone—as exhibited most famously by Uri Geller.

Tort [1] points to a similar phenomenon, that of images appearing spontaneously on the walls and floors of buildings. He cites a well­ documented case from the 1920s, when the image of the late Dean John Liddell appeared on a wall of Oxford Cathedral. Such pictures are usually of people of special sanctity, but not always. In one case in Belmez de la Moraleda in Spain, which was investigated by the veteran parapsychologist Professor Hans Bender one-time mentor of Elmar Gruber, co-author of The Jesus Conspiracy, leering, demonic faces have appeared regularly on the walls and floors of a house for more than twenty years. [2]

Cesar Tort’s starting point was the paradox between the historical and scientific evidence that we had already noted: the image on the Shroud is more consistent with actual crucifixion (and so, to most people, with the first century), than with a medieval artistic forgery, but the carbon dating and the documented history show it to be medieval. How, asked Tort, could a fourteenth-century cloth show a first-century image? So he speculated that it was a thoughtograph, projected onto the cloth by the collective minds of the pilgrims who came to meditate on a (then plain) cloth that they believed had wrapped their risen Lord. Tort admitted the main objection to this scenario: even suspending disbelief about the reality of thoughtography, we would expect the image to conform to the beliefs and expectations of those who unconsciously created it. To a medieval mind, there should be nails in the palms (not the wrists), Jesus should look younger, and he would certainly not be naked as here. To explain this, Tort has to invoke another paranormal phenomenon—retrocognition—where the past can be psychically perceived.

The pros and cons of these phenomena are outside the scope of this book, but in the case of Tort’s hypothesis it is enough to say that neither effect has ever been reported as working on the scale needed to make the Shroud image, and that the use of two such unknowns—thoughtograph y and retrocognition—is simply stretching credulity far too far. Neither does it explain why a negative image was projected, or why the bloodstains should be so different from the rest of the image. It is a bold and open-minded attempt to reconcile the contradictory elements of the Shroud, but in the end it creates more questions than answers.

The passage appears on pages 45-46 of Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince. The authors mention my name again on pages 48 and 57-58. Despite having cited an enormous number of bibliographic references, I never imagined that what I had written in the JSPR could appear in a hardcover book whose first edition was sold in the United States.

In an Octavio Paz book I read that what is written for money has no artistic value. If I had become a commercial writer, I would have written, in addition to My Agony in California, books such as In Search of the Soulmate and My Quixotic Misadventures in a Cult. Eventually my editor, avid for bestsellers out of the pens of tortured souls, would have asked me to write My Misadventures with the Shroud. But those books would no longer be the cream of the cream. However, although I could fill a book on my misadventures with the Shroud, which I will not write, I also cannot completely overlook that stage of my life.

It all started in 1986, on a gloomy night in the Loch Lomond harbour for private boats in San Rafael, California, times when I wrote desperate letters to Octavio [my cousin]. In wanting to save me [from the introjected fear of hell], I had to demonstrate that the mysterious image of the shroud had been a mere paranormal phenomenon (did others also leave imprints on mortuary sheets?), not the resurrection as Christians understand it. In my Whispering Leaves I mentioned that that year John Heaney answered a letter that I had mailed to him. But I omitted that the theologian referred to a Scott Rogo book on miracles, stressing that this parapsychologist had speculated analogously to what I had asked Heaney. I had also commented to the theologian, in a sentence that I wrote to him that verbatim still reaches me today: ‘Because of the fear of eternal damnation, I have been in spiritual agony’.

Opening Scott Rogo’s book in the blackness of Loch Lomond [I had a night shift] I was greatly surprised by a hypothesis that had not crossed my mind. That book, Miracles, was the starting point that resulted in an obsession in which I gradually acquired several books and scientific documents on the shroud.

Back in Mexico, I spent two years, full-time work, on the subject; and I got to publish my theories in the journal that Picknett and Prince read in the quote above. In 1991 I would even visit John Beloff in Edinburgh, the editor of that journal for psychical researchers. By the way, the previous year I had rushed into publishing my article, which Picknett and Prince summarised so well above. It was plagued by typographer’s misprints for having asked Karen Deters, my syntax editor, to speak to Beloff for publication in January of 1990, rather than the editor’s wise advice to leave it for April. Deters tried to contact Beloff [there was no internet] but Beloff was not in his cubicle when she called Scotland on the phone. The director of the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh answered the call, who conveyed my hasty wish to Beloff. So I was responsible for the horrible misprints.

More than three decades have passed since my misadventures began with the most sacred relic of the Catholic Church. I currently have a web page on the shroud that reproduces a few texts (The medieval Turin Shroud). To write one of the entries on that site I had to find, from my archived files, an old half-blurred photocopy of Walter McCrone’s article in Scientific American. The brief article referred to the turning point of October 1988: the month in which the results of the radiocarbon tests dated the relic from 1260 to 1380 C.E. Capturing McCrone’s text for my shroud website came as a revelation.

But before I confess it, I must say that, at the time when I was writing for Beloff’s journal, I paid no much attention to what the Skeptical Inquirer had published in the spring issue of 1982, which contained an article by Marvin Mueller. I had requested that number and Joe Nickell’s sceptical book on the shroud, but still believed that the image was paranormal.

When I quoted McCrone’s words in 2018, the question came to me how it was that, with such good information, thirty years before I had not woken up. I concluded, in one of my diaries, that it had all been a tremendous introject from my father. Years before my internal struggles in Loch Lomond, it had been my father who had captivated me with his tales about the Shroud! He had taken that information out of books he bought, although they have been lost and are no longer in the family library. ‘And that was more important than everything posted on my new blog about the shroud’, says my diary. ‘You can imagine’, I said to myself, ‘the toll that the shroud of Turin would have caused in my mind if my father had been an agnostic regarding religion, like his brother Alejandro who still lives’. In the 1990s uncle Alejandro had told me, in front of dad and alluding to McCrone, that the image on the sheet was iron oxide—as if making fun of my JSPR article, which he had read.

On my shroud site I confess that I am indebted to the late nuclear physicist Marvin Mueller for having had the patience to answer my letters. Mueller’s long missives, which would gradually disillusion me about the claim that the image was mysterious, can be seen on my mentioned shroud website.

____________

[1] Tort, César J. (1990) ‘The Turin Shroud: A Case of Retrocognitive Thoughtography?’, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 56, Nº 818, pages 71-81.

[2] (The previous footnote appears in the book by the English authors.) I investigated this case on my visit to Bélmez in Andalusia, Spain, in 1992. After another credulous article of mine in the journal of the previous note, I became convinced of the fraud. See my short 1995 article, ‘Bélmez Faces turned out to be suspiciously picture-like images’ in Skeptical Inquirer, 19 (2) (Mar/Apr), page 4. I personally submitted the manuscript of this article to the editor of the magazine, Kendrick Frazier, during the CSICOP conference in Seattle in 1994, where I had the pleasure of shaking hands with Carl Sagan, who gave the keynote address.

Categories
Parapsychology Psychology

Slaves of parental introjects

Yesterday I wrote that many people who want to do something for the white race cannot do it because they continue to be slaves of their parental introjects. But not only yesterday. On this site I have used the term ‘parental introject’ many times. And on my stats page I’ve noticed that several visitors try to understand its meaning when I link the word to Wikipedia. But the best way to explain it is simply by anecdote.

Professor of psychology Nicholas Humphrey does not usually use the term introject. But by 1997, when I had already abandoned my belief in parapsychology, I was still reading on the sceptics of the paranormal. At Barnes & Noble in Houston I sat down to read some passages of Humphrey’s Leaps of Faith, and on page 147 I had a eureka moment. On that page we can read:

Imagine that in childhood, before you thought of questioning it, you were told as a fact that Jesus performed miracles and therefore was the son of God, and not till later in life did it occur to you that the miracles might not be genuine. By that time, you might well find that your critical faculties had already been hijacked. For how could you possibly entertain such doubts about the works of a man whose works had already proved he was never to be doubted! The importance of the first step taken in childhood was not lost on the Jesuits: ‘If I have the teaching of children up to seven years of age or thereabouts, I care not who has them afterwards, they are mine for life.’

Above, Humphrey as a boy. It was after that passage, on that same page, that the author added a phrase that caused my eureka moment. Keep in mind that his book is a critique of parapsychology. Humphrey said that even when an alleged psychic is shown to resort to fraud, because of the image implanted on us about Jesus, the damage had been done in the believer’s mind.

When I read those words my mind immediately flew to the introject that my father had put in me as a child about Jesus’ miracles, an introject secularised by parapsychologists with their beliefs in extrasensory perception and psychokinesis among humans. So to understand the word introject, we just have to think about Humphrey’s quote from the Jesuits above, ‘If I have the teaching of children up to seven years of age or thereabouts, I care not who has them afterwards, they are mine for life’.

That’s it! Once you have a specific malware programmed in your soul at a tender age it is incredibly difficult to remove it.

Leaps of Faith can be read online, but I suggest obtaining a copy because it is one of those books that should be in our bookshelves. It explains why so many people still cling, like children seeking reassurance, to belief in supernatural phenomena like an immortal soul and life after death. It is also a devastating critique of the existing evidence for paranormal phenomena, ranging from miracles to the laboratory experiments for extrasensory perception.

No matter what the evidence, those who have not fulfilled Delphi’s commandment will continue to believe that ‘there must be something there’. They’re slaves of parental introjects.

Categories
Autobiography Conspiracy theories Parapsychology Pseudoscience

Ron Unz and JFK

or

Leaving the courtroom

My comment in the previous post, about Ron Unz’s credulity about conspiracy theories (CTs) of the assassination of John F. Kennedy has made me think, once again, about what we might call the pathology of extraordinary beliefs. As the sceptics of CTs have said, which not only includes JFK but also 9/11, this is a topic that, like religion and politics, should not be touched in after-dinner conversations. People feel very hurt and it is impossible to argue on good terms.

Let’s use the analogy of the lawyer and the prosecutor who bring the experts to court to try to convince the jury; say, the mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald staged by British television between Gerry Spence and Vincent Bugliosi. A good litmus test to know who has a closed mind is simply to point out who, when watching the TV show at home, leaves the room when the speaker is either Spence or Bugliosi.

The fact is that it is those who believe in the CT who usually leave the room, so to speak, in the sense that they never read sceptical books. Their attitude is as surreal as Alice’s Queen of Hearts in Wonderland: first comes to the sentence and then the trial. First we ‘know’ that 9/11 was an inside job, or, in the case of JFK, we ‘know’ that Oswald didn’t act alone. The long trial process that culminates in the sentence is of no importance or consequence for those who ‘know’ the truth.

Ron Unz is reputed to be a voracious devourer of books and articles. But when the issue of the trial between Spence and Bugliosi arrives, he leaves the courtroom every time the prosecutor speaks. Last year, in this discussion thread of his webzine, Unz said he had not read the thick Bugliosi treatise. When a supporter of Bugliosi pointed out that there was a much shorter book of another ‘prosecutor’ (pic above)—a book that with his amazing reading capabilities he could read it in a couple of days—Unz didn’t respond.

That is the all too common attitude among those who believe in CTs. True Believers can read a dozen books promoting the conspiracy but not a single article from the other side (listen how Bugliosi explains this bizarre behaviour: here)! That is why they ignore the most basic arguments of the prosecutor. For example, in the most recent discussion thread about the 9/11 attacks, some visitors got mad at me but none advanced an argument about a video I linked about Building 7 (for the believers in the 9/11 CTs, Building 7 is considered one of their strongest arguments of what they call ‘controlled demolition’).

It is relatively easy to find out who’s the one who leaves the courthouse every time the opposing lawyer speaks. They are those who believe not only in the CT about JFK or 9/11, but in the so-called Fake Moon Landing, Satanic Ritual Abuse, or the existence of UFOs in Hangar 14 of the US government.

Let’s illustrate this with my case. I used to believe in the pseudoscience of parapsychology. I spent many years of my life wanting to prove the existence of ‘psi’ (extrasensory perception and psychokinesis). I didn’t read the sceptics of the paranormal because they were ‘the bad guys in the movie’.

When I finally spoke with them, at a November 1989 conference they invited me to, I was surprised that those I considered closed were, in fact, quite open people. They even subscribed to the main journals of parapsychology. That happened also with UFO sceptics. They were avid readers of their opponents’ literature: those who promote the hypothesis that UFOs are manned extraterrestrial ships. It is the believers of the extraterrestrial hypothesis who never read the literature of the sceptics.

Before, I only read literature from parapsychologists. But after meeting the ‘prosecutors’ in the early 1990s I became familiar, little by little, with their literature. A few years after subscribing to the Skeptical Inquirer there came a time when I felt agnostic (just as there are people who are no longer a hundred percent sure that God exists). Concurrently I realised that my parapsychological colleagues did not read sceptical literature, nor did they respond to the main arguments of the sceptics (Occam’s razor, the falsifiability principle, etc.).

Only until May 1995, thinking outside a subway station, there was a time when I seriously doubted, for the first time in life, the existence of psi (something similar to a priest doubting for the first time in his life of the existence of God). However, it would take me a few more years to understand why had I got caught in such a self-sealing belief system in the first place: an issue I address in my autobiographical books (see sidebar at the bottom of this page).

I mention this just so that it is understood that there are times that we are so absolutely convinced that pseudoscience is real science that we do not realise that it is a cathedral built on clay bases.

When I lived in Marin County I once had the opportunity to realise that the foundations of the ‘science’ I was studying were shaky. In a bookstore I saw that they sold A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology. Thirty-four years have passed since that night and I still remember the image of James Randi on the dustcover. But I thought I couldn’t afford it. If I had listened to the prosecutor, a dozen (lost) years of my life would have been spared! But I didn’t listen to him and embarked on a quixotic project of wanting to develop psi.

You can’t learn from another’s mistakes. I know that what I say here won’t make any dent whatsoever in the True Believers’ worldview who, like Unz, flee from the courtroom every time Bugliosi speaks. They do this to avoid the most elemental cognitive dissonance, as I did when I was trapped in my self-sealing system. But if I could travel to the past and see Cesar in that California bookstore in 1985, I would tell him, I would beg him, to buy the book he had in his young hands…

Categories
Christendom Jesus Neanderthalism New Testament Parapsychology Richard Carrier

On Richard Carrier

A depiction of Ecce Homo, as Pontius Pilate
delivers Jesus to the crowd (Antonio Ciseri, 1862).

Before reading Carrier, I imagined that there was a historical Jesus crucified by Pilate if we only eliminated all the legendary tales, miracles and resurrection stories that appear in the Gospels. As I have already said, it was not until the end of last year that I changed my mind.

Discovering the mythicists reminded me strongly of what happened to me in the 1990s with CSI literature, and especially when I read a book by Robert Sheafferthat made me doubt, for the first time, of the existence of ‘psi’. The fact is that the exegetes of the New Testament, starting with Albert Schweitzer, have been in bondage of the introjects of their parents. They could never encapsulate the viruses and malwares as I have done in my mentality.

All the liberal and even secular exegetes of the New Testament that I read since the 1980s were in bondage of parental introjects. The simplest hypothesis should have been, from the beginning, the theory of a mythical Christ because no single contemporary witness outside the Bible ever bothered to write about Jesus.

None. Zilch. Zero. Plenty of people, long after Jesus supposedly died, claimed he was real but outside the Bible, sorry: it is a tall tale. It is the same as happens with parapsychologists: they cannot conceive the inexistence of psi. By force of deep parental introjects the historicist exegetes (those who believe in a historical Jesus) cannot conceive the nonexistence of Jesus (which includes those who believe in the historicity of an ordinary, non-miraculous Jesus).

The implications of my finding of the last days of last year are tremendous. Now I see the tragedy of the West (and the demographic bubble that Christianity caused) in another way as I saw it before my December discovery. The nonexistence of Jesus crushes all Christianity and neo-Christianity in a most forceful way. Or rather, I can use Carrier et al for the thesis I’ve been advancing in this blog.

The Christian bug is incredibly stupider—stupid indeed was believing in the Gospels in the first place—than I previously thought. If what Carrier et al say is true, the result would be that the white race is even more ‘Neanderthal’ than I imagined before my December 28 discovery.

Richard Carrier may be a blue-pilled liberal as foolish as those at Columbia University where he studied. But just as we cannot dispatch the findings in physics or medicine of those who graduated there, neither can we reject what Carrier says in his book that, perhaps, I’ll start to review on Mondays.

Categories
Parapsychology Pseudoscience Psychiatry

A ‘disease’ whose lesion no one can see

To contextualise this series about psychiatry, see: here. I wrote most of the below text in the last century:
 

In his Occidental Dissent article about yesterday’s California bar shooting, the author wrote:

Take a young man, send him to fight in some God-forsaken Third-World pit inhabited by primitive Brown people, let him watch his buddies get their arms and legs blown off, dump him back in a homeland devoid of true healing religion, a unified culture, and basic healthcare, and you’ve essentially created a ticking time bomb.

Add in experimental drugs that certain (((doctors))) like to prescribe without knowing or caring about side effects, and the situation only grows worse.

So true.

With the Helfgott case I have outlined the model of trauma. Now, I will say something about the so-called medical model of mental disorders.

It is elemental that there can be no medical treatment without a biomedical disease. However, in contrast with true brain diseases such as tumors, multiple sclerosis, meningitis, epilepsy or neurosyphilis, after more than a century of bio-reductionist psychiatry no one has been able to demonstrate that the ‘diseases’ the psychiatrists diagnose are related to brain lesions. Thus by an act of faith and a diametrically opposed logic to jurisprudence, the psychiatrists supposed that the people under their charge were ill (‘guilty’) until proven healthy. Just as the pseudoscience of parapsychology that started about the same time as modern psychiatry, and which after more than a hundred years has not been able to demonstrate the paranormal, the psychiatrists believed it was simply a matter of time for the cellular pathology of the mysterious disease ‘schizophrenia’ to be discovered. (Likewise, the parapsychologists have been running after the mirage that sooner or later they will demonstrate the reality of ESP and psychokinesis.) [1] Thomas Szasz’s words are decisive on this point:

The gist of my argument is that men like Kraepelin, Bleuler and Freud [who defined modern psychiatry and psychotherapy] were not what they claimed or seem to be—namely, physicians or medical investigators; they were, in fact, religious-political leaders and conquerors. Instead of discovering new diseases, they extended, through psychiatry, the imagery, vocabulary, jurisdiction, and hence the territory of medicine to what they were not, and are not, diseases in the original Virchowian sense.

Actually, given the Virchowian criteria of disease [cell pathology], I do not believe that Kraepelin, Bleuler, or the other psychiatrists of that period could have assumed such a role, and gotten away with it. The reason is simple. They would have had to conclude that most of the ‘patients’ in their hospitals were not sick; at least, they could not have found anything demonstrably wrong with the anatomical structure or physiological functioning of their bodies. [2]

On these premises Szasz’s verdict is that:

No one is so blind as the person who does not want to see. Many people did not want to see in the past, and do not want to see now, the naked facts of psychiatry—namely, that psychiatrists diagnose diseases without lesions, and treat patients without rights.

This, then, was the fateful point of departure in the origin of modern psychiatry: the invention of the alleged disease ‘schizophrenia’—a disease whose lesion no one could see, and which ‘afflicted’ persons in such a way that often they wanted nothing more than not to be patients. [3]

Despite the misinforming publicity in the media promoted by the pharmaceutical companies, no one has seen anomalies in the brains of those labeled with that word, so much so that the psychiatric concept ‘schizophrenia’ has a bad reputation among some neurologists (the renowned journals of neurology do not publish bio-reductionist papers about ‘schizophrenia’). [4] Furthermore, it is fascinating to notice that, for many years, in the DSM the very American Psychiatric Association excluded the organic conditions as responsible for what they call schizophrenia. For instance, in the published revision of 1987, DSM-IIIR, the manual says that such diagnosis ‘is made only when it cannot be established that an organic factor initiated and maintained the disturbance’. [5] If they recognise that organic causes have not been found, how do these shrinks dare to tell their clients that the condition is due to chemical imbalances in the brain? What kind of schizophrenia do these professionals suffer from?

Perhaps the explanation of their divided mind can be found in the following fact. It was not until the DSM-IV edition of 1994 that the honest passage (‘it cannot be established that an organic factor…’) was censured from the former version. Psychiatrist Fuller Torrey recognises that the censorship could have been due to ‘the prevailing psychoanalytic and family interaction theories of schizophrenia’. [6] Another explanation is that if psychiatrists did not take bio-reductionism dogmatically and made common cause with the victims they listen in their offices, their drug prescribing enterprise in just a ten-minute consultation could go out of business—and that is something they cannot afford. As Laing said, economics controls politics.

It controls science too, or rather the political pseudoscience in the universities. If the medical model persists it is because it provides an unending field of pseudoscientific research for psychiatric drugs that generate billions of dollars. It is that simple. This ‘research’ has persisted since psychiatrists decided that the people under their charge were ill, and it will proceed because the biological causes of madness do not exist. It is exactly what is happening in parapsychology: both parapsychology and biological psychiatry unceasingly run after a mirage. (It is worth saying that Eugen Bleuler, who coined the word ‘schizophrenia’, was a staunch advocate of spiritualist phenomena in his time.) [7]

It seems incredible that the so-called professionals in mental disorders are capable of self-deception of this magnitude, but just to show that besides Szasz there is a new generation of psychiatrists that have realised how medical students are being deceived, I will quote Colin Ross again:

When I entered my psychiatry residency, I believed that research had demonstrated the genetic foundation of schizophrenia and had shown that schizophrenia is primarily a biomedical brain disease. This view was almost universally accepted at my medical school, and I never heard serious criticism of it while in training. It was by a gradual process that I began to become more and more aware of the cognitive errors pervading clinical psychiatry […]. I also saw how badly biological psychiatrists want to be regarded as doctors, and accepted by the rest of the medical profession. In their desire to be accepted as real clinical scientists, these psychiatrists were building far too dogmatic an edifice on a very meager scientific foundation […].

One of the most disturbing effects of the errors of logic in biological psychiatry I witnessed in ten years as a resident and academic psychiatrist, from 1981 to 1991, was their influence in medical students. Already intensively socialized into biomedical reductionism by the time they arrived on the psychiatry wards, many medical students accepted the folklore and logical errors of biological psychiatry as a scientific fact. I would hear them parroting the teaching that psychiatry has become more scientific recently, has many effective drugs, has demonstrated the genetic foundation of schizophrenia, and is moving ever forward into more specific psychopharmacology. The problem was not that all these propositions were completely false; rather, it was the uncritical acceptance of the dogma that alarmed me. [8]

This passage is from Pseudoscience in Biological Psychiatry. In another chapter of this book Ross criticises one by one several bio-reductionist articles of the AJP (American Journal of Psychiatry), the official organ of information of American psychiatry. It is unnecessary to quote the rebuttals to the theories of the medical model of ‘schizophrenia’: studies on monozygotic twins, the dopamine hypothesis, the subjects’ response to psychopharmacology, etc. Those interested in the rebuttals can review the writings of Ross and especially Peter Breggin’s journal. [9] Suffice it to quote Ross’ final words about the AJP:

This completes a detailed analysis of pseudoscience in the American Journal of Psychiatry from 1990 to 1993. The January 1994 issue of the Journal indicates that logical errors and bio-reductionist ideology will continue to dominate psychiatry for some time. A similar analysis could not be made of a leading journal in a truly scientific field. [10]

In the market world, the advertising that drug companies sell to the media is taken as real science. This advertising, which ignores the biographies of persons like those of the California shooter, is precisely the same of the medical students who parrot that psychiatry has demonstrated the biologic foundation of schizophrenia, depression and other mental disorders. The impression on the public of these supposed medical advances has been created by the incessant repetition of these psychiatric slogans in the media.

________

[1] A splendid book of how for more than a century parapsychologists have been chasing a mirage is Leaps of faith: science, miracles, and the search for supernatural consolation by Nicholas Humphrey (Basic Books, 1996).

[2] Thomas Szasz, Schizophrenia: the sacred symbol of psychiatry (Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 35 & 21.

[3] Ibid., pp. 42f.

[4] Neurology (the official journal of the American Academy of Neurology), Journal of Neurology (European Neurological Society), Journal of Neurological Sciences (International Federation of Neurology), Journal of Neuroradiology and Archives of Neurology.

[5] Quoted in Lawrence Stevens, Schizophrenia: a nonexistent disease (www.antipsychiatry.org). The page of the DSM-IIIR is 187.

[6] E. Fuller Torrey, Surviving schizophrenia: a family manual (Harper & Row, 1988), p. 149.

[7] George Windholz, ‘Bleuler’s view on the inheritance of acquired characteristics and on psi phenomena’ in Skeptical Inquirer (Spring, 1994), pp. 273-279.

[8] Colin Ross, ‘Errors of logic in biological psychiatry’ in Colin Ross and Alvin Pam (eds.), Pseudoscience in biological psychiatry: blaming the body (Wiley & Sons, 1995), pp. 85-87.

[9] Pam and Ross convincingly refute the biological theories of schizophrenia in chapters 1 and 2 of the book cited in the previous note; Peter Breggin in chapter 5 of Toxic psychiatry (op. cit.) and more academically in his scholarly journal. In addition to the mental institution with his name, Ross has been a contractor of psychopharmaceutical companies; he has been called to participate in neuroleptic trials, and continues to publish in the AJP: his credentials as a psychiatrist are impeccable. The books of veteran critic, Tom Szasz, who already has forty years fighting against psychiatric barbarities, are also useful to approach the subject of this inquisitorial pseudoscience.

[10] Colin Ross, ‘Pseudoscience in the American Journal of Psychiatry’ in Pseudoscience in biological psychiatry, p. 191.

______ 卐 ______

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Categories
Parapsychology Pseudoscience Science Turin Shroud

On the Turin Shroud, 4

One of the problems with pseudosciences is that, to refute them, almost a career in refutation is required. When in November of 1989 the group of sceptics known then as CSICOP visited Mexico City, I was completely lost in the paranormal. However, unlike people in general I always had a predisposition for honesty, in the sense of being able to change my worldview if coming across facts and solid arguments based on facts.
The visit of CSICOP to the city where I live changed me in many ways. The sceptic who had published a critical book on the Shroud, Joe Nickell, had been unable to come. But for the first time I spoke with the professional critics of parapsychology: two academic psychologists whose hobby was to read all the important journals of parapsychology, and publish their critique in specialized journals. It was because of their work that I learned the enormous amount of dedication that the refutation of a single pseudoscience, such as parapsychology, requires.
But the problems do not end with finding a couple of motivated sceptics. Their criticism may be true, but the popularization of the criticism was difficult to divulge, especially previous to the Internet. In 1989, for example, the Skeptical Inquirer was only sold by subscription, a smaller magazine and more pleasant in its reading than what is currently sold in newspaper stands. Very few knew the work of Nickell and other sceptics on the Shroud. What the market wants are the paranormal claims big time; not taking the sweets away from children. Consider this candy for example:

Jerusalem, Friday before Passover, c. AD 30. The body of a crucified man lay on a slab in a rock-hewn tomb just outside the city walls. It had been placed there by Joseph Arimathea, a secret disciple of the man Jesus, and Nicodemus, another member of the Sanhedrin who brought a large amount of spices to be placed in the folds of a new linen shroud. Joseph placed a great stone in front of the tomb and left in a hurry as the Sabbath was fast approaching.
Sometime during the following night and before the first glimmers of dawn of the first day of the new week, there was a quick flash of blinding light. The stone before the tomb was jarred away; the body vanished, but on the slab remained the Shroud with strange images of the man some called the Son of God.

The passage was not written by a believing sindonologist, but by a sceptic portraying what believers want to hear. With that paragraph David Sox opened the first chapter of his book The Shroud Unmasked, published immediately after the Carbon 14 tests revealed that the relic had been manufactured in the Middle Ages. However, this is where you see the huge advantage that believers have over sceptics in a market society.
Scepticism does not sell. What sells well are sweets for adults who are still children.
The copy I have of Sox’s book, which I read in 1989, is made of cheap paper. If we compare it with the elegant books of Ian Wilson, with whom Sox worked closely, Sox’s book seems, at first glance, extremely modest. Nonetheless, despite the quality of the paper and the covers, given that Sox does not violate Occam’s razor his books are more relevant to understanding the relic of Turin than those of his popular colleague.[1]
I am tempted to rephrase what Sox says in The Shroud Unmasked but here I would just like to quote, in addition to the passage above, the first paragraph of the introduction:

There were times when I thought I’d never live to see the day the Turin Shroud faced its obvious test. The road to carbon dating has been long, contentious and convoluted. There are those who will not appreciate mine and other’s efforts to have this test. That’s their problem.
When you open Pandora’s Box, you have to be prepared for whatever comes out. I have always wondered why many so fascinated with the Shroud mystery were afraid to see the end of the story.
This volume explores the road to the test, and recognises there is undoubtedly more yet to come in the Shroud story. At least now that the identification of the cloth with the historical Jesus has been removed, the new sleuths into the mystery can be more objective than most observers have been in the past.

Update of 21 May 2018: Further thoughts about the relic, and the correspondence that a real scientist addressed to me, will appear: here.
__________
[1] Wilson violates it by lucubrating a hidden history of the shroud from the 1st century until its actual appearance in the Middle Ages, as we shall see.

Categories
Conspiracy theories Parapsychology Pseudoscience Science Turin Shroud

On the Turin Shroud, 1

‘A love letter from God’

From personal experience I know that, when one is immersed in the dogma of a pseudoscience, the believer swears that it is real science.
A typical believer in a classical pseudoscience, such as the study of UFOs or parapsychology, ignores that there is a litmus test to distinguish between false and true science: the principle of the falsifiability of a hypothesis that Karl Popper devised in The Logic of Scientific Discovery. In short, for a hypothesis to be scientific it has to be refutable. Pseudoscientists follow the opposite methodology: they present their central hypotheses in such a way that they cannot be refuted. A typical case of pseudoscience from the Popperian point of view is sindonology, the study of the Shroud of Turin (Sindonology, from the Greek sindon: the word used in the gospel of Mark to describe the type of the burial cloth of Jesus).
Geoffroi de Charny, a French knight who died in 1356 at the Battle of Poitiers, was the first recorded owner of what later became known as ‘the Turin Shroud’. When in the late 1980s I was immersed in sindonology, I not only read a huge amount of literature on the subject where I learnt about the de Charny story, but contacted the ‘experts’ by mail, some personally. The late Dr. Enrique Rivero-Borrell, the foremost ‘expert’ on the shroud in Mexico, told me something I should mention.
I met him at a meeting of a group of Catholic sindonologists who believe that the image of the shroud is nothing more and nothing less than a late ‘love letter’ that God left behind in the 1st century as proof of the Resurrection for our scientific age!
The meeting with Rivero-Borrell, presided by Faustino Cervantes Ibarrola, a pleasant priest, was held in the aftermath of the carbon-14-dating tests results performed on the shroud in 1988. Rivero-Borrell, president of a sindonological organisation, was very confused. The tests, endorsed by the cardinal of Turin himself, revealed that the fabric dated from 1260 to 1380 CE. Keep in mind that the shroud is exactly about the size of an altar cloth; in no way resembles the several burial cloths used by Jewry. Since the shroud made its first appearance in a town in France, precisely in the times of de Charny, it could not be more significant that science corroborated that the cloth was manufactured in the 13th or 14th centuries.
However, I continued my investigation of the shroud because, at that time, I believed that the image remained mysterious. That was how I learned, a couple of years later that Rivero-Borrell left behind all his previous confusion of 1988. Very enthusiastically, he told me that the latest research had revealed that the carbon 14 tests had come out medieval because a fungus had covered the cloth, changing the molecular chemistry and the results turned out aberrant!
In other parts of the world, other sindonologists said that Jesus’ energy in the resurrection, which they call flash photolysis—the very moment when Jesus was resurrected!—not only left the miraculous imprint on the sheet, but changed its molecular chemistry. That’s why the results had come out medieval instead of the 1st century (a rather clumsy deity was this one who intended to leave behind ‘a love letter’ for us)!
The least absurd excuse among the sindonologists that I heard is that the piece of cloth to which they applied the carbon 14 tests was attached to the shroud; not a part of the original fabric.
All these excuses have something in common: they present us their central hypothesis—that the image of the Turin shroud is the result of a miraculous imprint at the very moment of Jesus’ resurrection—as an irrefutable hypothesis. And it is precisely the irrefutability of the central hypothesis of a field of study the most common feature in pseudosciences.
For example, those who study UFOs say that there is a conspiracy that involves all governments since 1947: government officials who have hidden evidence from the American people of extraterrestrial visitors. This is an irrefutable hypothesis insofar as, when a sceptic requests evidence that an alien ship exists in a top-secret hangar, the believer responds that everything is jealously guarded by sinister instances of the federal government. A massive conspiracy involving all presidencies from Truman to Trump, including the CIA and the FBI, and which continues today, cannot be refuted. Every time the sceptic complains that a massive conspiracy stresses the claim to the breaking point, the believer responds that the sceptic himself is a paid CIA agent! I’m not kidding: some ufologists used to say that about Philip J. Klass, the CSICOP specialist in UFOs, whom I met at a conference.
The same happens in the field of parapsychology. Parapsychologists say that extra-sensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis (PK) exist, but that they are such erratic phenomena that it is very difficult to demonstrate them methodically and repeatedly in the laboratory. That is, there is no way to adequately submit the paranormal hypothesis to the protocol of refutability devised by Popper. That does not mean that ESP and PK do not exist (personally I doubt they exist). It means that the parapsychologists, who claim that they have reliable, empirical evidence of the existence of the paranormal, violate the principle of falsifiability by calling their field of study strictly ‘scientific’.
Such a pseudoscientific methodology is what the sindonologists also follow. Take for example the least insane of the above-mentioned excuses about why, according to believers, the carbon 14 tests did not come out of the century they expected: that researchers could have cut a cloth attached to the shroud, not the fabric where the image is.
If the proponents of the authenticity of the shroud were true scientists they would not be lucubrating such things. They would simply ask the Cardinal of Turin to allow another carbon 14 test on the cloth, this time from the area they consider appropriate. Meanwhile, the wise thing would be to suspend judgement until the cardinal approves another series of tests. Instead, what sindonologists do—who after the radiometric 1988 tests continue to claim that image is proof of the Resurrection—is a battery of secondary tests. Most of such tests are unrelated to the dating of the cloth; tests that purportedly show that the image remains mysterious.
That the image is not so mysterious can be seen in the research that Joe Nickell, a sceptic I met in 1994, has made of the shroud. But there is more to Nickell’s research: as we will see in the following entries on the subject.
Before finishing this post I would like to say something else. A white nationalist visiting this site might think that my interest in unmasking the gospels and the shroud buffs is a secondary issue. It is not. A few minutes ago of my writing this paragraph the bell of my house rang. Some Jehovah’s Witnesses gave me propaganda. I wrinkled it in anger and was about to throw it away when I saw the image of these blacks. Then it occurred to me to use it because in the background these neo-Christians put whites in a bucolic world where the races converge.
Christian ethics, so well captured in the propaganda I was given today, is a bigger factor than Jewish subversion, as without such ethics there would be no Jews (or blacks) empowered in the West. Aryans embracing a moral grammar based on the belief of a resurrected Jew is unhealthy, to say the least.