Rant on pseudoscience in exosci.com forums:

I asked these people to substantiate their claims about the existence of souls
and mediums actually speaking to the dead, they gave me this list, and
no other response... here is my response.

"http://www.ghostweb.com/soul.html
http://www.tim.nu/noframes/links.html
http://www.google.com/search?q=evid...-8&start=0&sa=N
http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/392/spy/psychic.htm
http://www.google.com/search?q=decl...-8&start=0&sa=N
http://www.astrologix.de/metalinx/U...ined_Phenomena/
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...enomena&spell=1"

I would resort to using links instead of rational responses, but I have been
yelled at in the past for doing that, haha.

Your lists of websites prove nothing. None of them offer physical proof of a
soul or anything of that sort. None of them even offer a large probability
that a soul exists. These hypotheses are not proven, in any way. Most of
them are just philosophy. Philosophy is not based on evidence, just
observation and conjecture.

I am not sure if I have asked this yet... Why isn't the knowledge that a soul
exists, or that people really do speak to spirits, widely known? Why do
people still doubt when there is this supposed evidence? The reason why is
that the evidence exhibited is not evidence at all!

first website: The substance of a soul? shit, that is almost offensive to
anyone's intellect. First, he even says, lost to respiration and
evaporation, and then he explains his experiment, which has hundreds of
errors in the thinking behind it... Balancing? WTF? This is ridiculous.

second website: shit, again. the writer makes this vague generalization about a
bunch of studies done at universities, then continues on his little ditty
about "empirical evidence". Citing of the studies... "Did it turn out that
mind could influence matter? Yes, it did, and though the results were only
slight, they were nevertheless statistically significant. " ONLY SLIGHT. Go
do some probability things, such as ESP tests and you will see that most of
the time, you will either be slightly above or slightly below probability.
It is merely statistics nothing else. And there are errors like that
throughout the website. Then he uses this false premise to continue
this "evidence" of souls, especially with faith-healing, goddamn... Faith-
healing, it works at a cellular level... that is horrible... hundreds of
people die a year because fundamentalist families do not take their
children or relatives to the doctor, but instead to a minister, and they
die.

Psychic warfare? yeah, see how the gov't shut down those programs... DIDN'T
WORK. Remote viewing... bullshit... Penn and Teller show a really good
experiment with Remote viewing... it was great.

Unexplained phenomena? Yes, exactly, unexplained... Unexplained does not mean
paranormal.

This is just ridiculous, I shouldn't even be giving these websites merit by
responding to them... And the biggest problem is... even with this plethora
of evidence, so many people still disagree. Millions of scientists know
that none of this crap is real, it seems that the only scientists that
think it real are the ones doing the experiment... because... in science,
an experiment must be able to be repeated and verified for it to be
established as fact. Have you noticed that none of these "studies" have
been published? They have not been because of two things, 1. Publishers
won't go near them, because they don't want to lose credibility, and 2. all
journals are peer reviewed, and the experiments do not exhibit what
the "scientists" claim.

If all you people are going to rely on in your life, to understand things you
wish to know about, is on pithy little unknown websites that will never
have their content published, you have a very unrealistic worldview, and
this is one of the reasons our society is so backwards. The dark ages, we
were ruled by christianity. Now, we are ruled by superstition and idiocy.
Most of the time it is ignorance, but when people are presented with
logical, re-proven, factual evidence, and they disregard it for some fairy
tale... that is just stupidity.

I love sci-fi, BUT I DON'T CONFUSE IT WITH REALITY.

---