Yes, I got it already thanks.

I'm grunching a little, but

Speaking as a theist with a penchant for religious experiences, I would go further and say that some religious experiences are almost certainly all in our minds

Derren Brown is good but he's no Tommy Cooper

Spoon Jar, Jar Spoon!

Yep, another semantic fail by me. 'Imaginary' would have been a better word to use maybe. How about 'Artificially induced'?

I put £50 on a horse at 10-1. It came in at half past two.

I will also agree with artificially induced. Even in traditional Christianity there exist plenty of admonitions that experiences can be false.

I think this point is similar to the point about the value as evidence that the map of religious belief has. That is, I think you can absolutely demonstrate that certain kinds of experiences can be artificially induced. There are examples of that from near-death-experience, or from this kind of demonstration, or even just from psychoactive drug use. I don't think there's any doubt that they constitute evidence that IF god or gods exist, the possibilities for the nature of that existence and what attributes you can plausibly give to such entities are constrained. For example you said (I think it was you, someone said :P) that you thought if there was a God the map would be all the same color. I would rephrase it such that the fact that the map appears as it does is evidence that any hypothetical Deity clearly doesn't behave in that way.

I guess this is somewhat of a pedantic point, from your perspective, because the arguments in both cases are ones about plausibility, and what you're getting at is the idea that the arguments and observations point to a greater level of plausibility for atheist conclusions than theistic ones.

Which I think is true from that perspective, but from the perspective of someone who believes they have a direct experience of God, even knowing the difficulties involved with disproving alternate explanations for the experiences, arguments about plausibility aren't very persuasive. For me, it's sort of like (and this analogy is probably bad in various ways) the difference between arguing against buying a lottery ticket on the basis how implausible it is that you will win, except the person you are trying to convince has already won.

I thought this question was going to go a different way, rather than an argument about Darren Brown.

One question which people who are convinced by 'religious experience' may want (or not) to ask themselves is 'Why is my experience so much more right than people of all other religions who also claim to have the same amazing revelatory religious experience'.
Its similar to the question of why is my religion right? but it looks at the evidence people normally give for their religion being right.
They can then either decide that they are the one true genius on earth (perhaps they are the new Messiah!!!) or that it is likely they are just as fallible as everyone else, including the people who are 'tricked' into spiritual experiences, or who feel ghosts on spooky houses (Something to do with a residual frequency common in houses of that age I believe).

The frequency comment wasn't complete random nonsense. Spent 1 min trying to find my source and I failed, but there is various history of the spiritualiy of sound. I was referring to an experiment where an imperceptible noise was played in the back ground of one performance of some show (cant remember the details) and not in the other and people who were being played the noise reported much greater spiritual experience and spookiness.
That same frequency was found to be common among buildings that are famously haunted.

i lived in a haunted house and i think it was something to do with the old stonework and heavy residual damp, but i do think there was more to it as well.

i was going to post something vaguely worthwhile til i realised it's gone 10 and i haven't had dinner yet. been playing online poker and posting on here all day and brain is a bit zogged.

As usual, I agree with you on the details, even if not the big picture.

Spirituality is a real phenomenon - us coming up with an explanation for some facet of it is no more of a proof than the discovery of evolution was a "proof" of god's nonexistence. This would be the case, in my view, even if this result were generated by a neuroscientist rather than a conjuror.

It may undermine the plausibility of a theistic explanation for some people, but such things are a subjective determination anyhow. I think its in a similar way that Pascal's wager is compelling to many theists but not to many atheists.

Okay just skipped over some of the replies and apart from the Tommy Cooper references I was kinda bored by it. To get away from the 'What is DB' conversation and get back on topic can I just ask one question? To those who watch and have read about DB, do you think what he has shown was faked? By that I mean, it was a set up with an actor or whatever?

It was a standard magic trick, dressed up as hypnosis.

EDIT: I mean the BMX present trick, I didn't watch the other links and have intermittent internet currently, so cant, im afraid.

In general though, laypeople tend to credit magicians with being cleverer than they are. There's usually an easy way and once you know it, it's obvious. Using a stooge is one way, but again laypeople tend to be overly quick to jump to this conclusion.

2nd EDIT: I was a juggler/acrobat for about ten years, but lived with a magician and did some close up card magic, read teaching books/videos and so forth. I'm not in hainsey or asdfasdf's league, by the sounds of it, but would echo their comments. This guy seems like a standard magician to me - albeit a good one, with a pretty convincing "schtick".

Where are the other ones? Just kidding.

Personally, I’m a perennialist when it comes to mystical experience. Meaning, I think there’s just one genuine mystical experience that people interpret differently once they’re out of it or reflecting upon it. While they’re in it, I think it’s the same for all:

When I stood in the Principle, the ground of Godhead, no one asked me where I was going or what I was doing: there was no one to ask me… When I go back into the Principle, the ground of Godhead, no one will ask me whence I came or whither I went. There no one misses me, there God-as-other passes away. –Meister Eckhart (13th century Christian theologian and mystic)

So whether that experience is engendered through Christianity, yoga, poetry, art, nature, hypnosis, drugs, etc., at the end of the day, it’s the veracity of the experience that counts; not our analysis of it.

And if the subject decides that it constitutes proof of a creator deity?

I'd like the experiment to be done differently. I'm curious about what would happen if you took a subject from one culture and put them in the religious setting of an another culture. Would it be as easy to induce a 'religious' experience in a setting that was outside of their normal frame of reference?

Would the religion specific reinforcement that has inevitably taken place in the subjects own culture (religion being all pervasive) prevent them experiencing the same effect? If so, what is it that causes the emotions experienced?

Not sure if I'm out of anyone's league, but thanks for the bigup. Probably the hardest thing I managed to get down pat was landing a card face-up on the back of my hand from a hot-shot cut (an idea not original to me, i must say, but more attractive and harder to do than just catching it). got my mate to video it while i was practicing one day, and yeah, don't ask me to do it now...

To return to the thread from my crap brag...

The subject often will decide it constitutes "proof" of a creator deity, but obviously not evidence, or proof that can be presented or tested for, only personal proof, for them.

These experiences do not necessarily involve any religion-specific iconography, but are usually universal in their delivering of the subject to a state of consciousness where they "know" and "feel" certain truths, insights and experiences that go beyond the realm of the everyday intellect, senses and mind.

The point is, a hindu is probably not experiencing anything any different than a christian or whatever, it is only their contextualisation and understanding after the event that may differ somewhat.

If the experience is one of intense emotion, love, peacefulness, security, would that happen if the subject isn't in a setting that they've literally been programmed to associate with those things. Even as an Atheist I'm not immune to the feeling of awe and humility that being in a church or a cathedral can cause. Firstly those buildings are designed to inculcate a state of mind receptive to worship, secondly I've grown up in a society continually exposed to the idea that feeling like that is normal and even expected. I'm supposed to feel awed and humble in a house of god.

Remove me from that though, place me in a Hindu temple, surrounded by strange imagery, carvings and statues of gods I'm not familiar with and that have no strong associations, and my question is would it still be easy, or even possible, to cause me to have a 'religious' experience?

Nice card trick btw, I'm a big fan of sleight of hand.

I think we may be talking about different things

Yeah, sorry I came in late. I watched a later clip, not the one you initially posted, my bad. fwiw, I wouldn't pay any attention to what a magician says when he tells you how he does stuff. If he says its hypnosis and nlp, it's almost certainly something else.

Stooges is an easy way to perform miracles but there's usually a cheaper way (especially on television, where you can't use the same plant episode after episode).

Thanks :-)

I think we are talking about different things. The emotions of awe and reverence as you rightly say are natural when surrounded by the aesthetics of a cathedral, for example, but these are not to be confused with the "religious experience", which goes beyond basic emotions, senses, intellectual constructs etc. Although I'll admit it is both hard (or impossible) to describe, and also hard to define, as one religious experience may differ greatly from the next and both may be genuine. I imagine somebody at some point has constructed a list of criteria for determining what constitutes a religious experience, but off hand I cannot produce any for this thread. Certainly it must be somewhat out of the ordinary, and leave you thinking "whoa, wtf was that?!?", if it is to qualify as a full-blown religious experience, or at least in my book. Intensity and a feeling of being decidedly out of a normal state of being are hallmarks.

If you are interested I could link you to a blog I started writing a while back? I recorded some of my more memorable "religious experiences" on there, it might help show you more along the lines of what I'm talking about at least.

If the explanation has an effect or intent other than misleading the viewer to prevent the trick being figured out, for example if the illusionist were trying to show how easily people are led in order to debunk something else, then it might possibly be exactly what he says it is.

DB is a showman, but he's also thoroughly anti-theist and I do believe that when he shows how some of his tricks are achieved he's not misleading me to maintain the illusion but genuinely trying to demonstrate why religion is a placebo, or why Psychics and mediums are nothing but frauds who pray on the vulnerable. For one thing, he simply doesn't need to go to those lengths to disguise the trick itself, it's not necessary.

If the BMX trick isn't NLP, what else could explain how it worked? I accept that a lot of what he does could be faked, but in his live shows he throws a frisby into the audience and asks the catchers to throw it two more times to ensure that a subject is chosen as randomly as possible. I don't really see how the tricks where those subjects are then used, could be faked.

Nice. I appreciate the effort involved. I had a brief ambitious card routine, a pretty standard torn-and-restored and was working through erdnase's expert card technique with a view to putting together a Ricky jay type gambling cheat "expose". Juggling was my main thing though - magic was just for variety (and so my roommate would let me watch his teaching videos).

yes ambitious card was my favourite. i had a 4 or 5 step routine which involved probably my second hardest sleight, and ended with the final card-rise in the spec's hands (kind of my own creation) and it was killer!

the simple ones were always the best imo, dress them up right and they were a KO, and being simple they had so much less room to go wrong!!

ah, the good old days...

Man i'm itching to tell ya!! but i can't. as i said before though, i came up with a working method before the video had finished playing, and it didn't involve any NLP.

the frisby stuff is undoubtedly (probably) a genuine random selection, although you can never be certain of these things.

most magicians will never use a stooge, and will never need to. when you're as big as derren though with tours and TV shows you might sometimes need to, i know it's not unheard of amongst the elite, but i couldn't comment beyond that.

I'm not confusing them with religious experience, I'm saying that they're the context in which the experience may occur (or be induced) and they directly influence both the occurrence and nature of that experience.

So, in that light, can you revisit this question?


Thanks but as I've said before, I'm not really swayed or convinced by individual experiences, especially when I consider those experiences to have been directly caused by external influences. I'd rather examine the influences.