[Acting Like Godot]

I'm a great believer in the value of positive thinking, I just don't think it will move objects across tables.

Rather common, actually.

YouTube - Nina Kulagina Telekinesis Feats (This is one of the two women which led to the US and the Soviet militaries frenziedly pumping money into psychic research during the Cold War).

YouTube - Qi,move things without touch!believe it? (Excerpt from the Chinese news media - what's shown here is actually pretty common in China).

(Btw, there are some commercial tour packages to China, where you get to be the object! That is, the qigong master will manipulate you and make YOU move, without touching you).

to debunk all the nonsense I hear about psychic readings and channeling spooks and stuff,

Rather common too. Here's a special twist, how about you channel a spook and then stick a metal skewer through your cheeks? No blood will come out. I've seen hundreds of people do this annually, it's a festival called Thaipusam. The tourists love this too!



Thaipusam - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Science, bless it, doesn't even demand that if someone says they can do such a thing they must be able to do it every time (and you might argue that if someone has a genuine gift, what's to stop them getting it right every time?), but uses one of the least demanding measures - you have to get it right enough of the time to be considered statistically or experimentally significant, i.e. a reasonable amount more than chance would predict if you were absolutely totally un-psychic and just guessed. Surely that's reasonable enough?

Sure thing, John! One of these gifted individuals was Adam Linzmayer, you can read about him here.

Joseph Banks Rhine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

you can believe in messages in events (passive) which we can try to interpret without necessarily believing we can levitate

Oh, come on, levitation is as old as Jesus. Here are a few more-modern examples:

"Yogi Pullavar, also known as Subbayah Pullavar, was an Indian man who on 6th of June 1936 was reported to have levitated into the air for four minutes in front of a crowd of 150 witnesses.

Yogi's feat was publicly observed and photographed in an exhibition that occurred in South India. The feat was executed around noon on a sunny, cloudless day and in an area where visibility was not obscured. The Illustrated London News printed the story and photos which were taken from various angles by P. Y. Plunkett who was a witness present that day and scrutinized the entire event."

Link.



Also try googling this name - Daniel Dunglas Home. He levitated a few hundred times in front of all sorts of people in all sorts of places.

(Funnily enough, Daniel was a skeptic like you. Whenever anyone claimed to have a psychic ability that Daniel himself did not have, Daniel would say, "Oh, that's just not possible. I can't do it, so it can't be true.")

you can always appeal to multiple universes

If you are unscientific, you may refuse to acknowledge such an idea. However, the Many World Interpretation by Hugh Everett remains one of the major theories concerning the collapse of the wavefunction.

Bear this clearly in mind, Mr Freestone. If you refuse to even acknowledge the possibility of multiple universes, you are simply being unscientific and illogical.

Many-worlds interpretation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

there is no such thing as magick.

You're exhibiting circularity here, John. Your personal definition of magick is "things which are not possible". Then you say, "Oh, magick is not possible."

If we think it's going to stop the volcano errupting, we are superstitious idiots who deserve to be petrified in superheated pummice.

You could be right. And if you say that the Great Flood for which Noah built his Ark was simply not possible, well, you could be right too. After all, how could a single flood affect the whole world?

Then again .... who knows?

Catastrophic ancient flood cooled the Earth | COSMOS magazine <---- This just in from our scientists, four months ago.