A Useful Life and Science Advocate Dies:

Discussion in 'Science & Society' started by paddoboy, Oct 22, 2020.

  1. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    James Randi, a MacArthur award-winning magician who turned his formidable savvy to investigating claims of spoon bending, mind reading, fortunetelling, ghost whispering, water dowsing, faith healing, U.F.O. spotting and sundry varieties of bamboozlement, bunco, chicanery, flimflam, flummery, humbuggery, mountebankery, pettifoggery and out-and-out quacksalvery, as he quite often saw fit to call them, died on Tuesday at his home in Plantation, Fla. He was 92.

    His death was announced by the James Randi Educational Foundation.

    At once elfin and Mephistophelian, with a bushy white beard and piercing eyes, Mr. Randi — known professionally as the Amazing Randi — was a father of the modern skeptical movement. Much as the biologist and author Thomas Henry Huxley had done in the late 19th century (though with markedly more pizazz), he made it his mission to bring the world of scientific rationalism to laypeople.

    What roiled his blood, and was the driving impetus of his existence, Mr. Randi often said, was pseudoscience, in all its immoral irrationality.

    “People who are stealing money from the public, cheating them and misinforming them — that’s the kind of thing that I’ve been fighting all my life,” he said in the 2014 documentary “An Honest Liar,” directed by Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein. “Magicians are the most honest people in the world: They tell you they’re going to fool you, and then they do it.”
    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/obituaries/james-randi-dead.html
     
    Ethernos D Grace likes this.
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  3. James R Just this guy, you know? Staff Member

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    Randi was one of the people who helped me to learn how to think skeptically. His influence and contributions in the skeptical community can't be overstated. Yet he was always humble about it.

    Vale Randi.
     
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  5. POVphysics2 Registered Member

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    Bet he's a ghost now.
     
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  7. paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    I remember reading about the great Houdini, telling his Mrs on his death bed, that he would vow to return if there was any afterlife at all.
    We're still waiting as far as I know.

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  8. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Seems like he forgot when he arrived at afterlife paradise

    Now his Mrs has arrived in the afterlife she can berate him f o r e v e r

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  9. POVphysics2 Registered Member

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    That's like an incredibly accurate way to know that the afterlife doesn't exist!
     
  10. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    The only credible way to know that the afterlife does not exist is general anesthesia, which renders your conscious mind completely unconscious.

    When you go under there is NOTHING. When they revive you, you could have been under 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 weeks, 5 years, 50 years. There is NOTHING during that time. For you time and reality ceases altogether.

    There is no AFTER. When you are conscious there is only NOW, when you are unconscious (dead) there is NOTHING.
     
  11. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Paul Simon wrote a song about that.

    Paul Simon - Afterlife
     
  12. Sarkus Hippomonstrosesquippedalo phobe Valued Senior Member

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    Maybe he just can't pick the lock to escape from there?

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  13. Michael 345 New year. PRESENT is 72 years oldl Valued Senior Member

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    Those who get to heaven are on permanent locked IN???

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