Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Are you kidding me???

Someone who has more time than I do oughta start a new blog: Debunking Deepak Chopra. My husband passed along this article titled "The Perils of Skepticism." As he described it, "The whole tone is like a twelve-year-old who's mad because someone insulted him."

Here's a gem: "Over the years I've found that ill-tempered guardians of scientific truth can't abide speculative thinking." Do you know anything about science, Deepak? It's all about speculative thinking and asking "what if," but you test that speculation against measurable evidence, as opposed to your method of saying, "Hmm, wouldn't it be fun if this were true?"

Here's another: "No skeptic, to my knowledge, has ever made a major scientific discovery or advanced the welfare of others." Uh, Marie Curie, Warren Buffet, Angelina Jolie, Carl Sagan, Steve Wozniak. Do you live in a self-manifested knowledge bubble or something?

And finally: "Today, no right-thinking physician (or very few) would trace physical illness to sickness of the soul, or accept that the body is a creation of consciousness, or tell a patient to change the expression of his genes." And for good reason! He goes on, "But soon these forms of wrong thinking will lose their stigma, despite the best efforts of those professional stigmatizers, the skeptics."

Whenever I hear someone going on about how physical illness can be traced back to the soul, I feel like pulling a Joe Wilson, pointing my finger and saying, "You lie!" Yes, mental and emotional stress can take its toll on the body, but that doesn't mean every little defect in your body indicates a defect in your soul. This is the height of "blame the victim" mentality. What about babies that are born with birth defects? What the hell did they do? Genes don't always fire right. We don't control that.

A positive mental attitude is a good thing, but so are reason and realism. This whole idea that if you just believe enough, you'll get whatever you want (Harmonic Wealth, salvation, eternal youth, presents from Santa or the Tooth Fairy) is nonsense. The universe owes us nothing and we do not control it. 

So go manifest somewhere else, Deepak.


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4 comments:

  1. As Stephen Colbert says: "Reality has a well known liberal bias."

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sweet burn:)

    My mother, in an desperate attempt to get me away from my non-belief, sent me this DVD by Deepak entitled, "Knowing God is Knowing Yourself", based on his best-selling book. (My ethnicity is Indian, btw. my family is very Catholic.) On the phone, she said, "Watch it, it has some space and science information in it you'd like." I almost didn't watch it, but then got curious as to what kind of "conversion" crap she'd sent me. And, I have to say, it was definitley crap of the highest order. Ijust sat there watching it with this "Whatt??" thought in my head the whole time. I almost burned the thing afterwords. I can't believe people buy this stuff. It's such BS. But I do find it hysterical (and sad) that my mother is still trying to "bring me back into the fold" as I hurtle towards 40. But with Deepak? That was such a hit and miss!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sweet burn:)

    My mother, in an desperate attempt to get me away from my non-belief, sent me this DVD by Deepak entitled, "Knowing God is Knowing Yourself", based on his best-selling book. (My ethnicity is Indian, btw. my family is very Catholic.) On the phone, she said, "Watch it, it has some space and science information in it you'd like." I almost didn't watch it, but then got curious as to what kind of "conversion" crap she'd sent me. And, I have to say, it was definitley crap of the highest order. Ijust sat there watching it with this "Whatt??" thought in my head the whole time. I almost burned the thing afterwords. I can't believe people buy this stuff. It's such BS. But I do find it hysterical (and sad) that my mother is still trying to "bring me back into the fold" as I hurtle towards 40. But with Deepak? That was such a hit and miss!

    ReplyDelete

Religion, skepticism, and carving out a spiritual life post-Mormonism