by TD 20 Replies latest jw friends
How can you be so sure such a daring vaginal surgery was actually performed?
Good question. Obviously I can't and with every passing year, the whole story regresses farther into the past and becomes even harder to evaluate.
Like I said, I'm a skeptic, but I'd prefer to be a fair skeptic. I'd prefer to poke holes in the story and have experts expose the pictures, film and testimony as all part of a hoax as opposed to simply refusing to believe.
Like I said, I'm a skeptic, but I'd prefer to be a fair skeptic. I'd prefer to poke holes in the story and have experts expose the pictures, film and testimony as all part of a hoax as opposed to simply refusing to believe.
Think of the implications presented with a supernatrual explanation! You end up smack-dab in a Fantasy or Science Fiction story every time!
-Sab
I am not familiar with this particular "psychic surgeon". I think a detailed explanation of how he performs this feat would be quite interesting. I don't believe, however, that simply because it hasn't been explained means that a supernatural explanation is likely. He is performing a common illusion that has been repeated by numerous faith healers and magicians all over the world, the most famous of them these days being Oprah's new darling "John of God".
It's like the trick where a woman is cut in half and then put back together unharmed. It is a very convincing trick if done by a skilled magician. Any magician can tell you multiple ways that the illusion is performed. But if a magician comes along and performs it in a way other than the usual methods, and no one can figure out how he does it, I doubt many would come to the conclusion that he is the one human alive that can actually cut a person in half and than put them back together using supernatural forces.
I don't think I'm fully conveying the spectacular nature of what the author claims he saw, so I'll quote a brief exerpt from the book:
"Suddenly and without ceremony, he roughly took the first man in line -- an elderly, well-dressed gentleman in an impeccable gray sharkskin suit, firmly grasped his shoulders and held him against the wall, directly under the sign THINK OF JESUS. Puharich, standing next to the man was startled by the action, and wondered what to expect next.
Then, withoug a word, Arigo picked up a four-inch stainless steel paring knife with a cocobolo-wood handle, and literally plunged it into the man's left eye, under the lid and deep up into the eye socket.
In spite of his years of medical practice and experience, Puharich was shocked and stunned. He was even more so when Arigo began violently scraping the knife between the ocular globe and inside of the lid, pressing up into the sinus area with uninhibited force. The man was wide awake, fully conscious, and showed no fear whatever. He did not move or flinch. Then Arigo levered the eye so that it extruded from the socket. The patient, still utterly calm seemed bothered by only one thing: a fly that landed on his cheek.
Within a few moments, Arigo withdrew the paring knife from the eye, bringing out with it a smear of pus on the point, He noted it with satisfaction, then unceremoniously wiped the knife on his sport shirt and dismissed the patient. "You will be well, my friend," he said. Then he called the next patient. The entire "examination" had taken less than a minute.
The scene began moving so swiftly that neither Puharich nor Belk had time to collect his thoughts. Puharich was at least able to think fast enough to stop the first patient and make a quick examination of the eye. There was no laceration, no redness, no sign of irritation. The patient explained through the interpreter that he felt altogether normal, that he had had no anesthesia beforehand, and that he had complete faith in Arigo."
TD:
what the author claims he saw
IMHO, this is precisely the type of extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary evidence. Simply making a claim that he saw this is not sufficient.
Another way to prove this is BS is to track the patients. If they later die of the thing he supposedly cured them of, then he didn't cure them.
I consider myself a moderate skeptic. I believe a lot of stuff happens that we cannot explain yet but that that doesn't make it supernatural; it just makes it unexplained by today's science. There may be a power of the mind (or something) that can do things but we don't really know how it works yet. But as mentioned, the burden of proof is on the one asserting truth, not the one in doubt.
Another famous "healer" is John Of God. My wife is brazilian. She has a client that visited him. Guess what? She still has cancer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyyyQ8noCQo
Providing evidence was the purpose of Fuller's trip to Brazil. He took along two physicians and some cameramen to photograph and film Arigo. One test was for Arigo, to remove a lipoma from the arm of one of the physicians. They claim to have filmed and photographed it and photographs do appear in the book.
The "Catch-22" though, is that nothing short of actually seeing something like this would really convince most people, including myself. And even then, I would probably still think that it was a trick. So the harder somebody else tries, the more they exclude any middle ground. In other words, you have to conclude that either something inexplicable really was happening or that the photographs are fake and the testimony is fictitious. (i.e. Lies)
But if the latter alternative is true, (As I suspect it is) then there should be a better rebuttal out there somewhere than just the righteous indignation of people like Gardner. As a skeptic, it's an irritating loose end, like a nail that's only been hammered in about 3/4 of the way.
There are forms of healing that Western medicine hasn't yet accepted or understands, but I don't automatically dismiss them as fake, because Western medicine has some real problems of it's own. A good percentage of the research we base medicine on is flawed or incomplete, according to a well know writer David H. Freedman.
It's not flawless, and it's good to be open to alternatives if the work. 30 years ago, acupuncture was voodoo but it's accepted medicine now. So was hypotherapy.
We can't be static in our learning, stay open, keep questioning. That's what a real skeptic does.
Do you have access to and can your read/ understand German?
I've been wondering aboutthese things as well. German Television Corporation ZDF has for decades financed the series Terra X in which teams of scientists have tried to cautch sathya baba and rifa'i masters red handed with high speed camera's etc, etc. Nothing so far I know off. To me it is clearly something out of the ordinary, but to apportion that to the supernatural .... I'd like to think we not yet know the natural explanation due to absence of a framework. At least that is what history tells me.
Cheers
Borgia
