Televised/Commercial Psychics

[LibGeek]

Do you trust the popular, more famous psychics and mediums?

The big one for the past couple decades has been Sylvia Brown. Do you think she's authentic? Personally, I think her descriptions are pretty vague.

I've also bought oracle cards by Doreen Virtue. More for the art than the oracle, though I do use them regularly.

If someone is psychic or a medium, should they use it for personal gain or just to help others?

[ambelamba]

I did a research and I found that millions of reasonable and well-educated people have a strong conviction that Sylvia Browne should just...DIE.

[White Crane Feather]

Do you trust the popular, more famous psychics and mediums?

The big one for the past couple decades has been Sylvia Brown. Do you think she's authentic? Personally, I think her descriptions are pretty vague.

I've also bought oracle cards by Doreen Virtue. More for the art than the oracle, though I do use them regularly.

If someone is psychic or a medium, should they use it for personal gain or just to help others?

Real mediums do not market themselves or pick out letters in large crowds of people

Edited August 11, 2013 by White Crane Feather

[ambelamba]

I am not sure if there are real mediums or psychics out there. But if there are, I guess they would be tormented by endless extra-sensory assault. And I guess all of them could be really reclusive.

If psychic perception was commonplace, law enforcement would have embraced it. But in reality, they don't. And ignoring psychic phenomenons doesn't have much disadvantage. I guess yearning for those kind of powers is like yearning for a console cheat code in some video games. And usually the cheaters are banned from servers.

[Odin11]

Do you trust the popular, more famous psychics and mediums?

The big one for the past couple decades has been Sylvia Brown. Do you think she's authentic? Personally, I think her descriptions are pretty vague.

I've also bought oracle cards by Doreen Virtue. More for the art than the oracle, though I do use them regularly.

If someone is psychic or a medium, should they use it for personal gain or just to help others?

Sylvia Brown is a fake. I saw a video were a widow told Sylvia Brown that they could not find her husband’s body. Brown told her that he died in water; you could tell by the widow’s face that Brown was way wrong. The widow then told Brown that her husband was a fireman who died when the 2^nd World Trade Center collapsed. Sylvia Brown didn’t back down or go a different way she callously kept insisting that he died by water, at one point she even tried to say that the husband had a fire hose with him with is asinine. That’s when the host of the show stopped Sylvia Brown from talking and went to commercial. Sylvia Brown (and all people who claim to talk to the dead) is a fake and a con-artist, and she, like many for her fellow con-artist, has no regard for the people she is conning

Edited August 11, 2013 by Odin11

[LibGeek]

So what about independent tarot reading shop owners? Do they also fall into this fraud category?

Are they diviners or psychics who use external tools?

[Odin11]

So what about independent tarot reading shop owners? Do they also fall into this fraud category?

Are they diviners or psychics who use external tools?

If you don’t know in the 1920’s Houdini spent his time debunking self-proclaimed psychics and mediums. He would go to them asking if they could contact his mother, everyone he tested failed. A lot of them would acted as if they were channeling his mother and they would call him Harry as if it was his mother talking. The problem is Harry was a stage name and his mother refused to call him that instead she called him by his real name Erik.

During and after my High school years Houdini was (and still is) a hero of mine. My friends and I would go to psychics or tarot readers all the time. We had fake IDs and funny enough we never used our cards for beer but for tricking psychics (you would think they would know lol). Our IDs had fake names that we used to call ourselves. Mine was Blake O’Conner and I use to talk with an Irish accent. We would go in and I would ask if they could contact my mother. Sure enough they almost all did contact her without fail only problem is my mother is not dead. Most would even try to do it in an Irish accent which was funny because a lot of them could not do it. It was fun to tell them after they tried that my mother was British just to see them try and work around their mistake.

Now at this point you might want to say something a long the lines of “but you used a fake name maybe it was somebody else’s mother?” and to that I say; I use to go in and use my own name as well and again they would contact my mother on the other side, only is isn’t dead. Every single psychic we went to, we expose them as frauds. Whether they were out right liars or just delusional I don’t know.

As for the tarot readers they were always so vague that the reading could have been for anyone. Some might actually believe what they say, but I would place the larger number in the out right fraud category.

[Beany]

I do readings for people, and sometimes someone or something seems to come through from the other side. I pass along what ever information I get, but always tell the person that it is up to them to decide how accurate or useful the information may or may not be. I really don't know how or why the psychic part works, and because of that I don't feel comfortable putting a value judgement on it. And since the thrust of my work has more to do with people's belief systems, both personal & religious, and how those can harm or help, and identifying errors in thinking, it's not really pertinent to my work anyway.

No doubt most of those people are frauds; I don't see how anyone could charge the kind of money they do and be serving anyone but themselves. I think some of them may have initially had a gift, but it has long since been corrupted by greed.

[Rafterman]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8uTSStgX0Q

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading

All you need to know.

[Emma_Acid]

There is nothing that "psychics" do that a talented mentalist can't.

[Crabby Kitten]

I don't trust or believe Sally Morgan. There was some controversy about her 2 years ago and she won her case.

[brlesq1]

Never heard of Sylvia Brown, but I've always thought that mediums who advertise are fake, preying on the gullible and the desperate.

[Purplos]

I would say most commercial psychics and such are fake, although some of them may not realize they are fake. They could actually believe they have some gifts.

As for people saying no psychic or medium should ever make money from their gift, I disagree. People charge all the time for their gifts, from baseball players to writers to corporate accountants. I have no problem with people making money for something they're good at.

But... there should be some way to weed out the fraudulent. In the end, even people like Sylvia Brown are providing some service for the people who CHOOSE to pay her money or buy her books... even if that is just a small sense of comfort.

[Rlyeh]

But... there should be some way to weed out the fraudulent.

Isn't that the only kind?

[scowl]

Some places like Philadelphia have simply outlawed psychic businesses, even for "entertainment purposes". Since they rely on fraud and deception and give people unreliable information, why should they be considered legitimate?

[Leonardo]

Do you trust the popular, more famous psychics and mediums?

I am skeptical, but not cynical, regarding 'psychic abilities' - although I do draw the line at claims of being able to affect physical objects with the mind. Saying that, I am cynical with respect "commercial psychics", purely on the basis that money (and fame, etc) corrupts. The accuracy of these entertainers is only proclaimed in their own promotional material, and not through any research into the predictions they have made. Likewise, it is largely the entertainers retinue of 'hangers-on' (who often are material beneficiaries) who promote that entertainers 'abilities' via anecdote - rather than evidence or serious study.

For me, true evidence of anyone's psychic ability would lie not in a broad or generalised personality analysis, or even in non-specific, vague, or overly broad predictions (a la Nostradamus) which may be subject to post-event validation only via 'interpretation'. The only true validation of a person's psychic ability would be sepcific, clear predictions with an accuracy significantly above that of chance success, or being able to relate to me knowledge that only I possess and could not possibly (by it's specific, clear and accurate nature) be guessed.

[spacecowboy342]

I have never seen any evidence that any psychic phenomena are real. As far as those who advertise for me to call in for a reading I always wondered, if they were psychic why didn't they call me?