"johac" <jhachmann@remove.sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:jhachmann-A4E110.23070006082007@news.giganews.com...

Dawkins takes on the quacks. Hopefully the series will also be shown in
the US.

---
New age therapies cause 'retreat from reason'

By David Harrison, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 2:15am BST 07/08/2007

Known as "Darwin's rottweiler", Prof Richard Dawkins caused a furore
with a stinging attack on religion. Now the evolutionary biologist has
turned his wrath on "new age" alternative therapies, describing them as
based on "irrational superstition".

Prof Dawkins says that alternative remedies constitute little more than
a "money-spinning, multi-million pound industry that impoverishes our
culture and throws up new age gurus who exhort us to run away from
reality".

The 66-year-old scientist has investigated a range of gurus and
therapists, including faith healers, psychic mediums, angel therapists,
"aura photographers", astrologers, Tarot card readers and water
diviners, and concluded that Britain is gripped by "an epidemic of
superstitious thinking".

Britons spend more than £1.6 billion a year on alternative remedies
which Prof Dawkins describes as "therapeutic stabs in the dark". Health
has become a battleground between reason and superstition, he says.

"There are two ways of looking at the world - through faith and
superstition, or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence,
through reason. Yet today reason has a battle on its hands.

Reason and a respect for evidence are the source of our progress, our
safeguard against fundamentalists and those who profit from obscuring
the truth. We live in dangerous times when superstition is gaining
ground and rational science is under attack."

He laments the fact that half the population claims to believe in
paranormal phenomena and more than eight million have consulted psychic
mediums, while the number of students sitting physics A-level has fallen
50 per cent and chemistry by more than a third in the past 25 years.

Prof Dawkins launches his attack in The Enemies of Reason, to be shown
on Channel 4 this month. The professor, the author of many books from
The Selfish Gene (1976) to the international best-seller The God
Delusion (2006), holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the public
understanding of science at Oxford.

In the two-part television series he challenges practitioners. He asks
an "angel therapist" how many angels he (Dawkins) has. The therapist
asks him: "Have you asked any angels to come close to you?" Prof Dawkins
says he hasn't. "Well you haven't got any then," says the therapist.

He also meets a therapist who says she can teach him how to use his
"psychic energy", a kinesiologist who "clears energy blockages in the
meridian system" and a "psychic sister" who talks about Mr Dawkins
senior as though he were dead, until Prof Dawkins points out that his
father is very much alive.

Satish Kumar, a spiritualist and the editor of the ecological magazine
Resurgence, whose fans include the Prince of Wales and the Dalai Lama,
tells Prof Dawkins: "I represent the entire history of evolution, I was
present in the beginning, the first big bang, and I'll be here for
billions of years to come."

Prof Dawkins visits Elisis Livingstone, a £140-a-day faith healer who
treats patients - including some with terminal cancer - with meditation,
spiritual healing and recorded chants at her Shambala Retreat in
Glastonbury, Somerset.
advertisement

He appears bemused as she intones: "Smile your very best smile, swallow
the smile with some saliva into the heart and let the heart smile back
at youŠ and the golden glow that comes from the heart, comes from a
golden flower and use the gold light from the centre of the flower like
a sunbeam and beam it on to those petals and wake them upŠ"

But yesterday, Miss Livingstone hit back. "I have a 100 per cent success
record with people at some level," she told The Sunday Telegraph.
"Richard seemed to enjoy it while he was here. He was smiling and he
didn't want it to stop.

"I deal with people including the bereaved and the abused, and I deal
with their hearts. A rational mind cannot understand the heart."

Another guru whose work was challenged was Deepak Chopra, described by
Prof Dawkins as a "one-man alternative health industry", who is paid up
to $75,000 (£37,000) per lecture and claims Michael Jackson and Madonna
as followers.

The professor reserves some of his most scathing criticism for
homeopathy, used by 500 million people worldwide, and which, in the UK,
benefits from taxpayers' money even though it requires no
qualifications. The refurbishment of the Royal London Homeopathic
hospital was part-funded with £10 million of NHS money.

Peter Fisher, the hospital's clinical director and a rheumatologist,
tells him: "I don't claim that it's much more than a hypothesis. What I
do say is that I have considerable evidence that homeopathy does work."

However, the medical establishment remains deeply sceptical about its
success. A House of Lords committee found little evidence in 2001 that
alternative health remedies work and raised doubts about a range of
treatments, saying much of the evidence on homeopathy was anecdotal.

---
http://tinyurl.com/you2rz
--
John #1782

I admire Dawkins so much. I hope he lives at least as long as
his father and in good health.

"johac" <jhachmann@remove.sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:jhachmann-A4E110.23070006082007@news.giganews.com...

Dawkins takes on the quacks. Hopefully the series will also be shown in
the US.

---
New age therapies cause 'retreat from reason'

By David Harrison, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 2:15am BST 07/08/2007

Known as "Darwin's rottweiler", Prof Richard Dawkins caused a furore
with a stinging attack on religion. Now the evolutionary biologist has
turned his wrath on "new age" alternative therapies, describing them as
based on "irrational superstition".

Prof Dawkins says that alternative remedies constitute little more than
a "money-spinning, multi-million pound industry that impoverishes our
culture and throws up new age gurus who exhort us to run away from
reality".

The 66-year-old scientist has investigated a range of gurus and
therapists, including faith healers, psychic mediums, angel therapists,
"aura photographers", astrologers, Tarot card readers and water
diviners, and concluded that Britain is gripped by "an epidemic of
superstitious thinking".

Britons spend more than £1.6 billion a year on alternative remedies
which Prof Dawkins describes as "therapeutic stabs in the dark". Health
has become a battleground between reason and superstition, he says.

"There are two ways of looking at the world - through faith and
superstition, or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence,
through reason. Yet today reason has a battle on its hands.

Reason and a respect for evidence are the source of our progress, our
safeguard against fundamentalists and those who profit from obscuring
the truth. We live in dangerous times when superstition is gaining
ground and rational science is under attack."

He laments the fact that half the population claims to believe in
paranormal phenomena and more than eight million have consulted psychic
mediums, while the number of students sitting physics A-level has fallen
50 per cent and chemistry by more than a third in the past 25 years.

Prof Dawkins launches his attack in The Enemies of Reason, to be shown
on Channel 4 this month. The professor, the author of many books from
The Selfish Gene (1976) to the international best-seller The God
Delusion (2006), holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the public
understanding of science at Oxford.

In the two-part television series he challenges practitioners. He asks
an "angel therapist" how many angels he (Dawkins) has. The therapist
asks him: "Have you asked any angels to come close to you?" Prof Dawkins
says he hasn't. "Well you haven't got any then," says the therapist.

He also meets a therapist who says she can teach him how to use his
"psychic energy", a kinesiologist who "clears energy blockages in the
meridian system" and a "psychic sister" who talks about Mr Dawkins
senior as though he were dead, until Prof Dawkins points out that his
father is very much alive.

Satish Kumar, a spiritualist and the editor of the ecological magazine
Resurgence, whose fans include the Prince of Wales and the Dalai Lama,
tells Prof Dawkins: "I represent the entire history of evolution, I was
present in the beginning, the first big bang, and I'll be here for
billions of years to come."

Prof Dawkins visits Elisis Livingstone, a £140-a-day faith healer who
treats patients - including some with terminal cancer - with meditation,
spiritual healing and recorded chants at her Shambala Retreat in
Glastonbury, Somerset.
advertisement

He appears bemused as she intones: "Smile your very best smile, swallow
the smile with some saliva into the heart and let the heart smile back
at you… and the golden glow that comes from the heart, comes from a
golden flower and use the gold light from the centre of the flower like
a sunbeam and beam it on to those petals and wake them up…"

But yesterday, Miss Livingstone hit back. "I have a 100 per cent success
record with people at some level," she told The Sunday Telegraph.
"Richard seemed to enjoy it while he was here. He was smiling and he
didn't want it to stop.

"I deal with people including the bereaved and the abused, and I deal
with their hearts. A rational mind cannot understand the heart."

Another guru whose work was challenged was Deepak Chopra, described by
Prof Dawkins as a "one-man alternative health industry", who is paid up
to $75,000 (£37,000) per lecture and claims Michael Jackson and Madonna
as followers.

The professor reserves some of his most scathing criticism for
homeopathy, used by 500 million people worldwide, and which, in the UK,
benefits from taxpayers' money even though it requires no
qualifications. The refurbishment of the Royal London Homeopathic
hospital was part-funded with £10 million of NHS money.

Peter Fisher, the hospital's clinical director and a rheumatologist,
tells him: "I don't claim that it's much more than a hypothesis. What I
do say is that I have considerable evidence that homeopathy does work."

However, the medical establishment remains deeply sceptical about its
success. A House of Lords committee found little evidence in 2001 that
alternative health remedies work and raised doubts about a range of
treatments, saying much of the evidence on homeopathy was anecdotal.

---
http://tinyurl.com/you2rz
--
John #1782

I admire Dawkins so much. I hope he lives at least as long as
his father and in good health.

On Aug 7, 1:07 am, johac <jhachm...@remove.sbcglobal.net> wrote:

Dawkins takes on the quacks. Hopefully the series will also be shown in
the US.

---
New age therapies cause 'retreat from reason'

By David Harrison, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 2:15am BST 07/08/2007

Known as "Darwin's rottweiler", Prof Richard Dawkins caused a furore
with a stinging attack on religion. Now the evolutionary biologist has
turned his wrath on "new age" alternative therapies, describing them as
based on "irrational superstition".

Prof Dawkins says that alternative remedies constitute little more than
a "money-spinning, multi-million pound industry that impoverishes our
culture and throws up new age gurus who exhort us to run away from
reality".

The 66-year-old scientist has investigated a range of gurus and
therapists, including faith healers, psychic mediums, angel therapists,
"aura photographers", astrologers, Tarot card readers and water
diviners, and concluded that Britain is gripped by "an epidemic of
superstitious thinking".

This is usually my evidence that neither end of the political
spectrum can lay claim to the intellectual high ground. I've
found that a lot of my liberal friends who ridicule conservatives
for their religious views will themselves swallow vast quantities
of New Age mumbo jumbo hook, line, sinker, and pole.

It's the same logic that has people criticizing the Patriot
Act in one breath and singing the praises of Castro in
the next.

Kudos to Dawkins for intellectual consistency.

-jc

Britons spend more than £1.6 billion a year on alternative remedies
which Prof Dawkins describes as "therapeutic stabs in the dark". Health
has become a battleground between reason and superstition, he says.

"There are two ways of looking at the world - through faith and
superstition, or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence,
through reason. Yet today reason has a battle on its hands.

Reason and a respect for evidence are the source of our progress, our
safeguard against fundamentalists and those who profit from obscuring
the truth. We live in dangerous times when superstition is gaining
ground and rational science is under attack."

He laments the fact that half the population claims to believe in
paranormal phenomena and more than eight million have consulted psychic
mediums, while the number of students sitting physics A-level has fallen
50 per cent and chemistry by more than a third in the past 25 years.

Prof Dawkins launches his attack in The Enemies of Reason, to be shown
on Channel 4 this month. The professor, the author of many books from
The Selfish Gene (1976) to the international best-seller The God
Delusion (2006), holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the public
understanding of science at Oxford.

In the two-part television series he challenges practitioners. He asks
an "angel therapist" how many angels he (Dawkins) has. The therapist
asks him: "Have you asked any angels to come close to you?" Prof Dawkins
says he hasn't. "Well you haven't got any then," says the therapist.

He also meets a therapist who says she can teach him how to use his
"psychic energy", a kinesiologist who "clears energy blockages in the
meridian system" and a "psychic sister" who talks about Mr Dawkins
senior as though he were dead, until Prof Dawkins points out that his
father is very much alive.

Satish Kumar, a spiritualist and the editor of the ecological magazine
Resurgence, whose fans include the Prince of Wales and the Dalai Lama,
tells Prof Dawkins: "I represent the entire history of evolution, I was
present in the beginning, the first big bang, and I'll be here for
billions of years to come."

Prof Dawkins visits Elisis Livingstone, a £140-a-day faith healer who
treats patients - including some with terminal cancer - with meditation,
spiritual healing and recorded chants at her Shambala Retreat in
Glastonbury, Somerset.
advertisement

He appears bemused as she intones: "Smile your very best smile, swallow
the smile with some saliva into the heart and let the heart smile back
at you· and the golden glow that comes from the heart, comes from a
golden flower and use the gold light from the centre of the flower like
a sunbeam and beam it on to those petals and wake them up·"

But yesterday, Miss Livingstone hit back. "I have a 100 per cent success
record with people at some level," she told The Sunday Telegraph.
"Richard seemed to enjoy it while he was here. He was smiling and he
didn't want it to stop.

"I deal with people including the bereaved and the abused, and I deal
with their hearts. A rational mind cannot understand the heart."

Another guru whose work was challenged was Deepak Chopra, described by
Prof Dawkins as a "one-man alternative health industry", who is paid up
to $75,000 (£37,000) per lecture and claims Michael Jackson and Madonna
as followers.

The professor reserves some of his most scathing criticism for
homeopathy, used by 500 million people worldwide, and which, in the UK,
benefits from taxpayers' money even though it requires no
qualifications. The refurbishment of the Royal London Homeopathic
hospital was part-funded with £10 million of NHS money.

Peter Fisher, the hospital's clinical director and a rheumatologist,
tells him: "I don't claim that it's much more than a hypothesis. What I
do say is that I have considerable evidence that homeopathy does work."

However, the medical establishment remains deeply sceptical about its
success. A House of Lords committee found little evidence in 2001 that
alternative health remedies work and raised doubts about a range of
treatments, saying much of the evidence on homeopathy was anecdotal.

---http://tinyurl.com/you2rz
--
John #1782

"We should always be disposed to believe that which appears to us to be
white is really black, if the hierarchy of the church so decides."

- Saint Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) Founder of the Jesuit Order.

On Aug 7, 1:07 am, johac <jhachm...@remove.sbcglobal.net> wrote:
[snip]

Prof Dawkins launches his attack in The Enemies of Reason,
to be shown on Channel 4 this month.

[snip]

I can't wait to see it! Thanks for the heads-up!

Budikka

On Aug 7, 2:07 am, johac <jhachm...@remove.sbcglobal.net> wrote:

Dawkins takes on the quacks. Hopefully the series will also be shown in
the US.

---
New age therapies cause 'retreat from reason'

By David Harrison, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 2:15am BST 07/08/2007

Known as "Darwin's rottweiler", Prof Richard Dawkins caused a furore
with a stinging attack on religion. Now the evolutionary biologist has
turned his wrath on "new age" alternative therapies, describing them as
based on "irrational superstition".

Good for him! Here in the Southern US, many of these people (including
most of my girlfriends, it seems <g>) think of me as an ally against
the xian hordes. They're invariably suprised (and sometimes hurt!)
when I tell `em I don't believe their crap either.

-Panama Floyd, Atlanta.
aa#2015/KoBAAWA!

On Mon, 06 Aug 2007 23:07:00 -0700, johac
<jhachmann@remove.sbcglobal.net> wrote:

Dawkins takes on the quacks. Hopefully the series will also be shown in
the US.

---
New age therapies cause 'retreat from reason'

By David Harrison, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 2:15am BST 07/08/2007

Known as "Darwin's rottweiler", Prof Richard Dawkins caused a furore
with a stinging attack on religion. Now the evolutionary biologist has
turned his wrath on "new age" alternative therapies, describing them as
based on "irrational superstition".

Prof Dawkins says that alternative remedies constitute little more than
a "money-spinning, multi-million pound industry that impoverishes our
culture and throws up new age gurus who exhort us to run away from
reality".

The 66-year-old scientist has investigated a range of gurus and
therapists, including faith healers, psychic mediums, angel therapists,
"aura photographers", astrologers, Tarot card readers and water
diviners, and concluded that Britain is gripped by "an epidemic of
superstitious thinking".

Britons spend more than £1.6 billion a year on alternative remedies
which Prof Dawkins describes as "therapeutic stabs in the dark". Health
has become a battleground between reason and superstition, he says.

"There are two ways of looking at the world - through faith and
superstition, or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence,
through reason. Yet today reason has a battle on its hands.

Reason and a respect for evidence are the source of our progress, our
safeguard against fundamentalists and those who profit from obscuring
the truth. We live in dangerous times when superstition is gaining
ground and rational science is under attack."

He laments the fact that half the population claims to believe in
paranormal phenomena and more than eight million have consulted psychic
mediums, while the number of students sitting physics A-level has fallen
50 per cent and chemistry by more than a third in the past 25 years.

Prof Dawkins launches his attack in The Enemies of Reason, to be shown
on Channel 4 this month. The professor, the author of many books from
The Selfish Gene (1976) to the international best-seller The God
Delusion (2006), holds the Charles Simonyi Chair for the public
understanding of science at Oxford.

In the two-part television series he challenges practitioners. He asks
an "angel therapist" how many angels he (Dawkins) has. The therapist
asks him: "Have you asked any angels to come close to you?" Prof Dawkins
says he hasn't. "Well you haven't got any then," says the therapist.

He also meets a therapist who says she can teach him how to use his
"psychic energy", a kinesiologist who "clears energy blockages in the
meridian system" and a "psychic sister" who talks about Mr Dawkins
senior as though he were dead, until Prof Dawkins points out that his
father is very much alive.

Satish Kumar, a spiritualist and the editor of the ecological magazine
Resurgence, whose fans include the Prince of Wales and the Dalai Lama,
tells Prof Dawkins: "I represent the entire history of evolution, I was
present in the beginning, the first big bang, and I'll be here for
billions of years to come."

Prof Dawkins visits Elisis Livingstone, a £140-a-day faith healer who
treats patients - including some with terminal cancer - with meditation,
spiritual healing and recorded chants at her Shambala Retreat in
Glastonbury, Somerset.
advertisement

He appears bemused as she intones: "Smile your very best smile, swallow
the smile with some saliva into the heart and let the heart smile back
at youŠ and the golden glow that comes from the heart, comes from a
golden flower and use the gold light from the centre of the flower like
a sunbeam and beam it on to those petals and wake them upŠ"

But yesterday, Miss Livingstone hit back. "I have a 100 per cent success
record with people at some level," she told The Sunday Telegraph.
"Richard seemed to enjoy it while he was here. He was smiling and he
didn't want it to stop.

"I deal with people including the bereaved and the abused, and I deal
with their hearts. A rational mind cannot understand the heart."

Another guru whose work was challenged was Deepak Chopra, described by
Prof Dawkins as a "one-man alternative health industry", who is paid up
to $75,000 (£37,000) per lecture and claims Michael Jackson and Madonna
as followers.

The professor reserves some of his most scathing criticism for
homeopathy, used by 500 million people worldwide, and which, in the UK,
benefits from taxpayers' money even though it requires no
qualifications. The refurbishment of the Royal London Homeopathic
hospital was part-funded with £10 million of NHS money.

Peter Fisher, the hospital's clinical director and a rheumatologist,
tells him: "I don't claim that it's much more than a hypothesis. What I
do say is that I have considerable evidence that homeopathy does work."

However, the medical establishment remains deeply sceptical about its
success. A House of Lords committee found little evidence in 2001 that
alternative health remedies work and raised doubts about a range of
treatments, saying much of the evidence on homeopathy was anecdotal.

---
http://tinyurl.com/you2rz

Excellent news.
Spurred on by James Randi, no doubt.