Short and sweet:
(German, via Jazz mein Deutsch). Before we get down to business, a quick poll about “brutal TV” – the “Die hard” series, “King Kong” etc. on private TV stations – at easter, about which politicians and bishops feel like having to medde with again, because “the private media are not considerate of the religious feelings of the majority of our citizens” (translated quote from Günther Oettinger (CDU), minister-president) – it’s new to me that there’s an obligation to tune in to these channels, as it’s new that someone like Oettinger knows so well about the citizens’ feelings…:
Action movies at Easter
Votes total: 16
Loading ...And here’s the movie, found at Scary Alice:
Crabwise via baton/fun with numbers via Pegasus’ Traum I encountered something terrific which I modified to make it easier to operate, yet give it a much deeper meaning and analysis and changed it in my very special way:
Learn everything about yourself with numerology !!!
Simply with your name !!!!!
More than you ever imagined possible !!!!1
More than you ever wanted to know !!!oneeleven
Enter your name to have it kabbalistic-numerolie^H^Hogically analyzed with the infallible knowledge of the pre-ancient geniuses, combined with super-ultra-modern computer technology – but you can also leave the input field empty, then state-of-the-art new-scientific mathematicianmuddrag methods of space energy research will be used to determine your meaningfull number fully automatically! You just have to sit still and concentrate!
Name (optional):
In one of the weekly local ad papersm there was a somewhat odd ad this week [update: and again some time later] by some “spiritual healer” named Karin Fritsch – an ad consisting of lots of text, presumably to imitate an article. Following a few quotations (emphasis mine) with (not just) my comments; all translated by me. The headline:
Spinal Straightening with Spiritual Healing
Others, by the way, include “divine energies” in their claims – on Spreeblick, Johnny wrote a report about 3 years ago about such a questionable “spine straightening” that he participated in himself (performed by a certain Christian Stippekohl): “Glaube kann Ferse versetzen” = “Faith can move heels”.
From the ad:
Spiritual healing bases its successes in the fact that man consists of body, mind and soul, healer Karin Fritsch explains. Since everything is connected with everything, it’s possible to invoke the infinite wisdom inside of us through the soul using the high vibration of powerful healing energy.
Infinite wisdom? Now who can claim to possess that? Not even myself. 
No, seriously, those words may sound great, but the more grandious and exuberant the words and superlatives become (and there are more to follow), the more eyewashing and dubious the whole stuff becomes, I think. Not that I’d see anything not dubious in such a topic anyway…
For spiritual healing, an open, maybe curious attitude that you bring along should be sufficient.
Or put otherwise: A placebo works only if the patient doesn’t know or guess that it is a placebo.
To make [the deformation of the spine] visible, she draws a marker line on the heels of the person seeking help that clearly shows the leg length difference in sitting or lying position.
Yeah, you have to see how the legs are moved to and fro… From Johnny’s report:
Spreeblick:
[…] holds his hands above me conjuringly. After a few seconds I can sit up again to look at the result. Christian [Stippekohl] grabs my feet again, and behold: My legs now appear to have the same length! Polaroid!Enough. I dare to protest. I change my sitting position a little and show him that my feet don’t have the same length anymore like this. Yeah-ha-ha!!!! the master says slightly sour, but I manipulated! Erm, I think, before Christian continues. He wouldn’t have to prove anything to me. He wants to give me presents!
For 120 Euro, I’m giving him something, too, I think, but again don’t say it. I’m confused. Where did I end up here? At the club of the happy self-deceptionists?
Do I have to add anything to that? 
By the way, the “healer” who placed this ad also offers “misaligned pelvis correction” and “straightening of the shoulder-blades”, the “analysis” of which by just holding rulers agains them (and that with thick shirt and denims) also Johnny reports.
Advert:
I just a few moments she loosens blockades in body, mind, and soul, without touch, with the bundled power of a strong energy flow from the top level, […]
“Highest level”, aha. Sure. Of course. Whatever that may be. Loosening of “blockaden” is also easily done by relaxing, as also Johnny mentions, no matter if done by a massage or a reiki treatment (whose effects aren’t scientifically proven either, of course, except for placebo effects and relaxing, that is).
The healer explains that this succeeds because we are predominantly spiritual beings and the straightening takes place of all levels of human existencet.
Well, I could try to float through the air, then, maybe with my body, maybe leaving it temporarily – should work, being a spiritual being, shouldn’t it? Or can you only learn this with long, expensive lessons? 
But such lessons were another matter, and the ad is not about those…
Persons seeking help immediately feel noticable relief, connected with deep inner harmony and peace.
Let’s quote (and translate) Johnny again:
Spreeblick:
I also don’t doubt that there are people who feel better after the “divine straightening” than before. Maybe because they were able to really relax for the first time since long ago, maybe because they simply wanted to feel better and needed a little push. I think that “miracle healer” utilize the fact that many people can “heal themselves” at specific points. Also visiting a therapist can, for example, already after the first time, even without actions on behalf of the therapist, work “miracles” since for once someone simply listened to them. Maybe the little things are enough.
I don’t know if or how much the “treatment” offered in the advert (weekend after next in a hotel) costs – only a phone number in Munich is given for registration –, but my personal assumption that later offers will become more expensive shouldn’t be that far-fetched. And even if not: Once the potential customers – and who participates in stuff like this will generally tend more towards such mysticism – acquired a taste for it, “spiritual healers” certainly won’t lose their jobs.
Surely such “treatments” are, at first, not dangerous to one’s health as such, and relaxing certainly isn’t bad. However, besides a possible psychic addiction in singular cases(?) – there apparently are people who visit such “healers” over and over again because any problems didn’t get better after all but they are so blind to believe it would still get better later on anyway – and besides the costs (if they reach a significant level), it might become dangerous in case of serious health problems if they refuse “real” medical treatments and rather rely on inadequate cures or even “miracle healing”. And the possibility that especially the more dubious among the “healers” intentionally tell their “patients” wrong diagnoses in order to be able to sell them more and more expensive “treatments” can’t be ruled out in ominous paramedical areas either. (Nota bene: Of course I don’t claim that the “spiritual healer” who placed this ad is one of such fraudsters, especially since I don’t know her and couldn’t find anything about her.)
Link tips: SkepDic: Healing touch, “alternative” medicine.
First, this post is about the Misanthrope’s blog carnival (German) about the original “Gretchen’s question”
Gretchen: “How do you feel about religion? Tell me, pray. You are a dear, good-hearted man, but I believe you’ve little good of it to say.”
(Faust, part I, verse 3415)
Of course that’s a topic that you can easily discuss and quarrel about and which has led to way too many religious wars. Let’s hope that e.g. the comments here at Konna’s coincidentally matching post (German) won’t get out of hand like this.
As mentioned here from time to time, I’m an atheist. Of course I don’t mind if others believe, as long as they don’t strive to actively evangelize me or others or seriously harm them or even, as in case of some fundamentalists, want to punish for non- or other-believing; and I’m not too happy about spreading too much antiscientific nonsense like creationism, either…
I need no god, no heaven and especially no church; not even to find a “meaning of life”… what’s the meaning of life for me? Short answer: Life! (And I don’t mean that in an egoistic way.)
Now some – like e.g. Wu-Lan-Tong – may mention:
“But don’t atheists believe, too?
They believe in nothing, they say.
That, too, is believing, I say.”
I don’t see it that way. Believers “must” believe, have faith in something – in the existence of a higher power, in miracles or other phenomena, for this consideration can be extended towards the paranormal and various pretended supernatural pgenomena –, which secludes itself from rational, scientific access. Atheists – and, with aformenetioned topical extension, skeptics – can do without the assumption of or the belief in such “supernatural” elements simply from the rational side, all pragmatically, since there are simpler, more coherent explanations.
If you want to call this trust in the scientific point of view as “faith” or “belief”, you have to take a very far stretched definition of these words which is lightyears away from the faith that’s the basis for religion; mixing them up must, in a sense, lead to misunderstandings.
For this, see also Phil Plait’s extensive explanation “Is science faith-based?” – you just need the simple assumption that the universe obeys a set of rules (and that you can deduce these by observation) – and the long discussions there…
About the (un-)provabilities of phenomena – and accompanying problems – (and a few other things) I had already written my article based on the Uri Geller interviews on ProSieben.de: “I believe we have been brought here from other planets”
Proof and faith issues and the strange thoughts of Uri Geller.
Finally (for the first part of this post) let me mention the small poll I had here on the sidebar last autumn; its 42 participants voted like this:
Let’s move on to the other part of the title – astrology, somewhat also as an example for superstition, which I personally don’t think much of, either, “of course”. The magazine Gehirn & Geist (brain and mind) had a poll (which I had mentioned in my links of the week last December) about “What do you think of the power of the star?“ – 464 people participated, and a total of 35% believe that zodiac signs reveal at least something about people. The entire result can be viewed/downloaded here (German).
The corresponding article “Die Kunst der Sterndeuter” (“the art of the astrologers”) can also be downloaded freely. I’d like to mention (and translate) two quotes from it:
“The Australian Geoffrey Dean, who gave up his astrological profession due to sobering findings, analyzed until today over 50 […] attribution studies. His conclusion: His former colleagues were not able to attribute a hososcope that has been created according to exact birth data to a personality profile or a case history any better than a random number generator.”
Also, the fact that so many people consider newspaper horoscopes – which aren’t even created according to exact birth data – appealing is of course based on how they are written:
The tricks of the pros
How do newspaper astrologers manage to have so many readers find themselves in their short texts? Germanist Katja Furthmann identified in 2006 in her doctorate seven linguistic artifices:
- exhaustive topic presentation, for instance by combining opposites
- use of abstract terms like chance, problem …
- relative and ambiguous formulation
- integration of timeless truths
- clearness through pictorial formulation
- astrologic technical terms
- staging proximity and emotional affection.
Furthmann, K.: Die Sterne lügen nicht. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2006
And let me also mention my post about a magazine article about fortune telling on TV.
