Solea, do we know the same people?
:-)
kidding, this stuff is rampant.
The Chemtrails thing has reached almost mass hysteria.

I remember being a kid, under 10, and lying in the grass watching the contrails from planes. Even as a kid I could figure out they were water vapor from the hot-engines, and could trigger cloud formations, etc. Its like when you blow hot air out of your mouth on a cold day...a Chemtrail from your mouth! (I know they say all contrails, are not chemtrails...the conpiracy is all worked out in detail, even the coverups).

But people now get bad info from the internets, and they flip into the paranoid conspiracy channel.(If they had a Paranoid Conspiracy TV channel, it would probably get great ratings).

Then that gets combined with End Times, Illuminati, and the rest of it. There are zillions of people who believe the Illuminati thing, basically the DaVinci Code stuff. [skepdic.com]

It seems everyone believes a little bit of "crazy" stuff, and that is not too damaging.
Its when people get fed an entire bogus worldview from the new age cultish groups, and then get led down the garden path, then that is real trouble.

There is a good book, Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer.

But all I can say, is people don't seem to change these types of beliefs based on evidence, they try to make anything they can find fit the belief they want to have.

But sometimes people change, after many years, and maybe once they take it too far and hit bottom with it.
Maybe its like an alcoholic drinking booze...

Sorry, I did get kind of distracted within this thread. I can no longer edit or remove the last post I made.

Conspiracy theories are indeed not the focus of this thread. I don't endorse those theories in any way. I was just making a connection about the way they seem to intersect with New Age mumbo jumbo at a certain point.

AC - Well, we know the same kind of people I guess! I'm planning to send some of the skepdic links to my friend. I wonder if it will help him at all.

Skepdic has been a great resource for me. As someone with a very limited understanding of science (my brain just never seemed to work well in that area!) I was very susceptible to New Age pseudo-scientific thinking. It was easy for me to adopt such ideas quickly into my belief system. It is convenient and helpful to go to places like skepdic and snopes to fact-check.

The skepdic article on radionics can be helpful because many people involved in New Age mumbo jumbo do believe in energy healing including Rife Machines. They would trust their lives to these things rather than 'traditional' medicine, which they often see as impersonal, 'unspiritual' and over-aggressive.

They don't realize that many 'energy healing' ideas in this country were popularized (and such machines were created) by medical charlatans.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/24/2008 12:01AM by solea13.

solea 13, has your massage therapist friend talked about the Gentle Wind Project?

Check out this info right here at: [www.culteducation.com]

These crooks were selling "pucks" and pieces of laminated cardboard that was magical! Woo! Woo! They were caught, successfully sued and driven out of business in Maine only to move to another state and the true believers were lined up ready to part with their money once more.

Newage is hard to shake off...

Sparky - No my friend has never mentioned Gentle Wind. I have looked at the information on RR before, it does seem outlandish. He really seems to be more into Fundametalist/'End-time' preachers.

Maybe those guys have not reached our area of the country yet ...

it seems to me that New Age mumbo jumbo has a big cross-over with paranoid conspiracy theories (PCT).
Some New Age theories have a paranoid aspect to them, and a dark side.

I personally like SkepDic, and Snopes. SkepDic is not the gospel, of course, and it can just be a good place to get an alternate point of view.

There is also James Randi ...
An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural
[www.randi.org]

These are all good tools in recovering from New Age mumbo jumbo.

All these "energy healing" machines just have to be properly tested by universities around the world, in double-blind trials. They refuse to do that of course, as they don't work, and that does not make money. Charging sick people $10,000 for a treatment on some energy machine makes a lot of money.
Sadly some people will die giving their money to frauds, before getting real help. its very strange...

I've recovered from New Age mumbo jumbo, as if anyone makes a CLAIM, I say...PROVE IT.
Not stories, not anecdotes, but objective evidence from 3rd party sources.
PROVE IT.

But they don't want to prove it, they want to sell it.

The first thing to remember is that the new age is an industry.

[Moderator note: Please don't post contact information and/or use the board for book promotion.]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/24/2008 06:02AM by rrmoderator.

was not that familiar with Radionics.
[skepdic.com]

It started out as quackery, and turned into a huge profitable business.

Notice how all these new age treatments are so expensive?
Like some guy in New York sells "herbs" for aids, and he charges 10's of thousands of dollars per treatment...for ground-up plants from China picked for pennies a bushel.
They are crooks, exploiting desperate dying people, for huge profits and mark-ups. Its truly vile.

Why not sell the herbs at cost to dying people? Which is a few bucks a pound?
Not much money in that.

Why not get them tested? No money in that either.

Does Santa exist?
[www.skepdic.com]

I agree with corboy; even if there truly is some connection between some of these 'theories' and the subject matter at hand, it doesn't really add to the clarity of the discussion of 'Cults, Sects and New Religious Movements'...in fact, it just muddies the waters. Heck, it could just be that trolling has taken a new tack, eh?

qd

You know, I hate to see a thread like this one get derailed by things superfluous. The title is particularly important to me, since the whole newage lingo has wormed it's way into every aspect of my communication and even my thinking. I have found it helpful, if not necessary, to edit my speech and typing, to delete and replace all of the terminology that is now so second-nature. For some of us, this recovering from newage mumbo jumbo is a major undertaking.

I would love to see stories, thoughts and suggestions related to this dilemma, on this thread.

qd

{footnote: newage rhymes with sewage}