Psychics

[Yerushalmi]

My mother is a great believer in this stuff and took me to mystic rabbis once in a while. One told me I "shouldn't care so much what other people think of me", which is so vague and true about everyone that it's useless and yet at the same time probably applies less to me than it does to most; after the session I demonstrated the ridiculousness of this sort of thing by using a mathematical formula to tell my mother and each of her sisters which chapter of Psalms "best applies to them".

Years later I was taken to another mystic who blessed me with "health", which confused me because I wasn't sick. Well, I got sick the next day. So I facetiously told my mother I'm not going to psychics anymore.

Interestingly, my mother later consulted one about me during a dark period in my life, and he warned her about something ridiculous. But she didn't realize there was a second meaning to one of the words in the sentence, which perfectly applied to something I was doing at that exact moment on the other side of the world, about which she knew nothing. So, maybe there could be something to it? I'm a scientist at heart, so I'm inclined to disbelieve, but a truly honest scientist is open to being convinced should there be a preponderance of evidence. (One coincidence, though, is not a preponderance of evidence.)

Frankly, I won't believe in a psychic of any kind unless they can tell me the nature of my dark side without knowing about it first.

No. I don't like encouraging con artists.

What about magicians?

Does anyone actually believe, and do magicians by and large seriously encourage the belief, that they are doing actual magic with mystical powers? I will cheerfully call any that do in order to lure in credulous dupes to be con artists. But otherwise I see that as a pretty clear distinction between the two groups (in general, as of course there can be exceptions). John Edward is among the most despicable, but his claims aren't any wilder than many self-labeled psychics.

Uri Geller is famous for claiming that he actually has mystical powers rather than just using it as a conceit. But he's also a bit of a jerk.

This is kind of off topic, but I remember the time a friend of one of my exgirlfriends claimed to know all sorts of things about the afterlife/supernatural world. One of the points that she brought up was the "witching hour." She said this meant that there is a specific point in time where all spirits are more active across the world.

I then asked, "Do spirits know about timezones or daylight savings time? What about people that died before such concepts was introduced to society?"

She didn't like me much after that.

My mother-in-law believes in this ridiculous superstition (which several of my childhood friends also believed) that if you step over somebody they'll stop growing until you step over them again in the opposite direction. I once climbed over her to get out of a sofa and she started panicking, telling me I had to cross back over her. I asked her how much more growing she's intending on doing at the age of sixty. I then asked if it has to be the same person crossing over you in reverse or if anyone can do it; and what happens if you cross back over but offset the angle by one degree or five degrees or seventy degrees, and where the line is; and whether that means people who live around airports suffer from extreme dwarfism; and if there's a statistical correlation between being shorter and living on lower floors of an apartment building. She wasn't very happy with that