Plz to Meet the Byzantine Emperor

Nice to see that world figures are up-to-speed with contemporary comment. I always like to quote 14th century figures at every opportunity. It keeps me in touch with what is happening in the real world. If you really want to examine those words that were quoted, you could always turn it round and see what Christians were doing at the time. The fact is that over history, it is not religion that has been responsible for all the nasty things that people have done to people; it is just used as an excuse. So take any religious group and compare it with any non-religious group and you find that the proportion of people in either prepared to do nasty things to others is probably about the same. Sometimes it does appear to me that the religious amongst us are MORE likely to be like this but that is probably because a tale of an atheist psychopath is always less news-worthy than something about a nut who uses religion as an excuse for something bad. I could mention the LRA, or worse still some of the religious establishment in the US who as far as I am concerned are using the power of a legitimate government as their weapon of choice.

It reminds me of a show I must have mentioned here, regarding experiment into the power of prayer. It involved groups of various faiths praying for named patients in hospital. Now I am not concerned with the outcome; there is something else on that later. The issue relevant here is that the only faith group who questioned whether the other groups’ prayers would have any affect were the Christians. Now this could have been editing but that would have been a bad mistake by the programme makers. Shall we say that all the groups doubted the ability of the others to be successful? That’s seems balanced. Which then of course raises the issue of who is right which is a whole other question and one for someone more into this than I am.

The Material World yesterday quoted a few responses to a previous live programme discussing whether the human mind extended beyond its corporeal boundaries. The final comment struck me quite forcibly. It referred to the idea that if some scientific postulation is true, then the increasing improvements in experimental procedures will tend to move towards proof. The fact is that all experiments into paranormal phenomena have produced results that increasingly tend to move away from the postulations being correct. I have a gut feeling on this whole area which is that if any of this was true, then we would have had absolute proof long ago. I don’t believe in drawn-out and carefully constructed parlour tricks like Uri Geller does; I want real proof – something that is as useful as modern technology. As Arthur C. Clarke says, any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from magic. We live in such a civilization, so when I can talk to someone on the other side of the world using a small box that I can fit in my pocket, why bother trying to see what someone is thinking.