My Facebook feed has become infested by adverts for psychics, tarot card readers, astrologers and all manner of fraudsters, trying to take my money in exchange for a “reading”. Worse still, it’s my own fault because when this nonsense appears on my timeline, I tend to respond. The way Facebook works is that it thinks because I reply to them, it thinks I am interested, so I get even more tosh from “Britain’s favourite tarot card reader”.
You have to watch your words carefully because even though none of these people have any kind of psychic powers – no one has – you can get in bother for calling them liars and fraudsters. So, I say things like, “If you claim to have these powers, why not put them to good use? Undergo tests under scientific conditions to see just how much psychic power you actually have.” Of course, they never do. Instead, they say things like, “You prove to me that I don’t have psychic powers.” No mate. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not for me to prove you haven’t got powers – I can’t – but it’s up to you to prove you have. And you can’t.
The reason I can’t prove people don’t have powers is very simple. It’s the same reason I can’t prove there isn’t a god. But by the same token, I cannot prove that there aren’t fairies at the bottom of the garden or that there’s a teapot orbiting Earth. Both are extremely unlikely but I can’t prove it. However, I just saw an excellent quote on the internet that sums it all up for me:
“You don’t see faith healers working in hospitals for the same reason you don’t see psychics winning the lottery.”
If faith-healing was a thing, faith healers would be curing everyone in our hospitals. There would be no need for surgeons. As George Michael so astutely put it: “Because I gotta have faith, faith, faith.
I got to have faith, faith, faith.” The lottery stuff would be even better.
If these people with psychic gifts were winning every single lottery draw, I’d take up mediumship or whatever you call it. The guy who’s trying to flog me a tarot card reading would surely be able to forecast the results of the main numbers. Euromillions would be even better. The good living he is grifting from credulous fools would turn him overnight into a billionaire. We’d be queuing up all day and all night to find the lucky numbers, although of course it would no longer be luck. The problem is that this doesn’t happen. Psychics don’t win the lottery any more often than sceptics like me. Because like me they have no special abilities to do so.
My partner, who is a far nicer person than me, suggests that some people who say they have great powers really believe they do. They’re not kidding us, just themselves. Perhaps they have learned the techniques of cold reading and hot reading to make them think they really can communicate with dead people when dead people can’t communicate at all because they’re, well, dead. Call me an old cynic but I don’t think so.
I’ll soon get bored and start blocking this hocus pocus nonsense but in the meantime I’ve started to offer them advice, particularly to my friendly tarot reader. Eventually, folk may finally work out that all you’re really good at is dealing cards and making stuff up with what you say they mean, which is nothing. Have you ever thought of working in a casino? It’s a steady job and you don’t have to pretend the cards mean anything.
