Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Mediums... yet again...
I've written quite a bit about my feelings on mediums, here and here (oddly, the starting point being The Da Vinci Code), and was therefore delighted with the post that popped up on Bloglines from John Walker, about all sorts of rubbish, the two that caught my eye being about Mediums and Cold reading
She can tell people things about them that she couldn’t possibly know! “I know how to do that too,” I replied. She was excited. “No,” I said, “I mean, I know how to cold read. I can do that trick. I know how you’re tricking people, and how you make it appear that you’re revealing that information.” At last she didn’t nod in agreement. After a couple of beats she went back to the magic of the universe, and the nature of energy, and how the cards can channel this. “No,” I repeated, “It’s cold reading.”
She then did a little bit of cold reading, not very subtly, as I brought up the next subject. Mediums.
It was fairly obvious I wasn’t about to be very tolerant of this one. She began slowly. “I do… I don’t… I have some. I have quite a few friends who are mediums, but I… I… I don’t believe in it.” I felt like this was permission for me to say, “Good, because it’s the most wretched, inhuman foulness I’ve encountered, preying on the recently bereaved to make money out of their grief. It disgusts me.” This was in no small part a reference to something she’d said earlier about how her clients are often, “Willing to try anything when they’re bereaved so will consider alternative therapies”. She said this as if it were a wonderful thing. I was then told about how she believes that once we “move on” we are completely moved on, and that you can’t speak to the dead. “I mean, I don’t need a medium to do it. I can speak to my dad. Not have a conversation!! But I can talk to him at any time, and he’ll reply. You know, a sign, a really clear sign.”
