Fuck James Randi––right? Do you know who that guy even is? Good for you if you don’t. A lot of people don’t know who that pollen snorting crab spider actually is. Let that be known. If fame can be translated by a metric, then famous humans can be scored for fame, but it seems that “importance” or, public awareness of your name, is the solitary element of fame which can be gauged, based upon one’s media presence or, one’s pop cultural resonance, and James Randi barely really even moves the needle with his straight shooting magic man schtick, but it’s no hallucination however if you think that Randi does move the needle A LITTLE BIT by being the anti magician that he is; it’s just however all that James Randi does: my only point. Fuck James Randi––in any way possible––that’s my James Randi rule. In good sense, it’s not unthinkable, based on James Randi’s estimated FQ, or his estimated fame quotient, that if James Randi Googles himself with any regularity, he’ll make time to read this writing. Psychology suggests he will do so, no matter who I am, provided he has the time to read my hate post. And fuck him if he does. I hate you James Randi. I honestly do not like you. It’s guys like Randi who make me think the Gods must be crazy. For being a wannabe bastard of God, Randi really games the cosmos it seems, but how does he do it? Clearly the cosmos responds to vibrations, is my theory, as to how blasphemy actually works out for people. Even ideas of atheism and outright delusions of human supremacy can channel any type of vibration in the cosmic index, some of which are more conducive to fielding prosperity than others in this cosmic conspiracy we call human existence, I guess. This is probably correct; the cosmos responds to vibrations over visions because humans can never be right it seems for humans are flawful animals. Flawful animals do not know the way, even when they happen to walk in right directions. Vibrations clear the paths that we take. No, I’m not talking about the vibrating snake that James Randi feeds through his p-hole. I’m talking about energies that envessel our ideas and bake our fates in earns of divine providence; the paths we take are paths we make.
Importance is easy to define, but it can be tough to quantify. Even so, picking out the bigger celebrity, even when we compare Nobel winners to Hollywooders––the task is child’s play in many cases. For example: who’s more famous, Honey Booboo or James Randi? The answer is of course Honey Booboo, all day, any day, forever and ever and ever. Yep. This nickel of truth just about sums up the impact of James Randi, if we are rational. All this really means is that Honey Booboo is superior to James Randi when it comes to actually mattering; her drawing power beats his own by like 3 or 4 folds, and whereas James Randi has been grinding on the edges of comparative obscurity for decades, Honey Booboo made her case in a mainstream torrent, in only 2 years. Honey Booboo’s agency of influence upon human minds is humanly rare, and paradoxically powerful, but entirely real; under the spotlight in competition, she proved her importance was elite and bonafide, whereas James Randi really couldn’t ever do that. So, if you see James Randi today, be sure to downvote him on Youtube.
James Randi is a natural born man slut hooked on science. Yes, James Randi enjoys blowing/eating scientists under bridges on muddy riverbanks littered in needles, doll heads, used condoms, tires and various trash items. Under the bridge to Cambridge you can find James Randi dancing to Boys II men on a transistor radio, roasting expired hot dogs, pierced upon a broken antenna. You’ll see him there in a fishnet top, acid washed jean shorts, powerlifting gloves, and a flimsy thin neon green baseball cap with a plastic adjustable buckle and an oversized white brim. You might see him also sporting airplane headphones connected to a Sony Walkman playing Depeche Mode on tape cassette, with undersized combat boots on crushing his feet. Under the bridge to Cambridge, Randi is usually found dressed like this, lurched upon his knees, unzipping brown pants and making umbrellas out of dresses. James Randi does this all for practitioners of science simply out of pride, and he charges absolutely nothing. In James Randi’s mind, it’s like some kind of tax that he owes society. Under the bridge to cambridge, you can find James Randi’s cottage; it’s a shopping cart with a kicked out bottom, draped in a blanket. Next to his cottage, he has a firepit, and leading to the main road from his cottage, he has stomped into fruition a desire path out bootprints––hidden from afar by 2 tall walls of weeds so the cops can’t see it. There’s a small patch of purple and mustard wild flowers just outside the shadow of the bridge; it’s kind of nice to see from behind the peephole in his blanket, even though the flower patch is constantly bestrewn in plastic bags, candy wrappers, construction ribbons and other items of garbage. It’s also waterfront property. Yeah. One time Randi built a crawfish trap out of chicken wire, and that night he had a feast, but he never did it again, because flame roasted unseasoned crawfish caught straight out of the river made Randi violently ill. But life on the river is nice, Randi thinks. And the best part is, Uncle Sam doesn’t tax him a dime for it. That’s his cottage in the summer. Or at least it was. In 2014, an angry bum who also enjoys sexing up scientists got super angry at James Randi for landing a night on the town with Stephen Pinker; this angry bum was so jealous and angry, he stole James Randi’s cottage and he shit on James Randi’s blanket; he kicked his shit all about the blanket, smearing feces all over it, to ensure that Randi could no longer use it; he also wheeled James Randi’s cottage up the road and threw it over the Cambridge bridge, smack into the middle of the river. James Randi never saw his cottage again. In the winter, you can find James Randi most usually in San Diego, frolicking in an urban garden, checking on tomato projects, mixing soil with vermiculite, chasing after butterflies, praising Mr Rogers, making shelters for baby voles out of mini clay pots, and humming Paula Abdul songs––all the while viciously sucking down on science’s hog with a voracious hunger for the cum of enlightenment. From magic tricks to sucking dicks––or one dick, that is––the dick of science, James Randi giveth to science his divine carnal dream; he just hands that shit over like some perfectly normal woman who, seems kink-less both at her core and on the surface but, at her nucleus, wants to fart all over your face, shit on your chest, and suck your mouth with a plunger, so that you may pee on her with dignity in return. But Randi doesn’t get out of the closet, and that’s fine, I guess. I only hate James Randi because he blames God on the Westboro Baptist Church, (at least in this argument, he does) though I’ve seen bonafide uncloseted gay men who are pious and choose to follow Jesus Christ, or whoever, despite any and all HUMAN attempts to take the church or God away from gays. James Randi has got a case of the “I’m surrounded by idiots” syndrome, 24-7, which means that he lives life in such a way that he suspects at least half the world is “crazy,” or whatever he actually means by that, if he does not mean literally.
James Randi is an under player in his vocation––retired or not, he is a catfish in sweatbands––a true bench sitter; he sits so much, his ass hurts every day; though he does sometimes see a little action in the secular crusade which presently wages and preaches resistance against beliefs in God and beliefs in the supernatural, Randi is not even 5th Man of The Year material––at least not anymore; maybe one he was best bench player in the league, but nowadays Randi looks his age, which is pretty old, and he seems out of touch with his own mojo, which was never so thumping if you know what I mean; wearing those cheap, traditional but very cheesy magician’s garbs with the shiny polyester capes, and the plastic aesthetic wand; he looks more ready for a birthday gig in Jefferson City than he seems fit for celebrity-grade adoration. One night in Jefferson City, Randi sucked off a biologist with such profound suction, Randi outright ripped the mans dick clean off the body in one mighty horrific rip. Randi seems a lot now like a living, breathing, still dancing modern Cher analogue, but the masses never loved him like that, and he never made it to Vegas; therefore, the promise land escaped Randi when he had his real shot, just as it does to this day, and it probably always shall––somewhere in Reno. In Reno James Randi once set up camp for a few weeks after he got thrown off of a train for sleeping in a cargo box full of ginger soap bars, some of which he stuffed into his asshole. Anyway in Reno, Randi was a big hit in what was a small but thoroughly serviced scientific community.
Facts are facts and, what that means is that James Randi, despite a charity of sexual energy on his down time, is a professional persona. When he’s on the job, he plays ball on the highest stage, but he is an under player in the ostentatious modern day sport that has become the pro-sanity movement. This is undoubtedly true for we may know that Randi seems less important these days in the movement, since he’s not finding much work anymore due to whatever, or so at least suggests his scarcity in the media as of late. Even so, Randi’s influence remains a living entity; I can still hear Randi’s anti-nerd persona; it’s in the wind; I’m in the public Alps of pop culture, and I can hear James Randi yodeling echoes of his manifestophic bid for relevance.
Garden Path 
I don’t understand your hate for this man. He isn’t merely a skeptic of superstitious crap, but he has literally proven people wrong. He has exposed many people for being scam artists – making innocent believe that they could heal injuries or sickness if they only pay X amount of money, for instance. Surely, you can’t believe that to be a bad thing, yes?
Is it the fact that he is atheist that bothers you? Or that he is dismissive of superstitious ‘woo’, as it’s been called?
I don’t actually hate him. I just find it fun to pick on him. He’s dead wrong in his conclusion that God does not exist. I have seen the other side, guy. Many of us have. Some people lie about psychic abilities but that I’m afraid disproves nothing. James Randi is a guy who believes if he can’t see the other side, then no one can. Which is childish. He needs to grow the fuck up.
You are correct that proving certain people wrong do not prove that those abilities do not exist in other people.
However, the reason he (and most other) people conclude that psychic abilities do not actually exist is because it has never been proven in the affirmative to exist. Therefore, by definition, it is irrational to believe in the supernatural.
I think you’re strawmanning him as well. It is the same argument people use against atheists when they say that atheists believe God does not exist, when in reality they *do not* believe god exists. There is a difference, but your strawman allows you to say things like ‘who believes if he can’t see the other side, then no one can.’ That isn’t true, but it helps your argument to claim as much.
If I were to make a claim to you that has never been proven correct, and which many smaller portions of the whole have been *proven wrong*, would you be justified in believing it? You’d be rational if you said ‘no’, and that is all that Randi has done.
The supernatural cannot be empiricalized; its energies are too advanced for human detection––either that or its mechanics is built into the fabric of our quanta. People become enlightened all the time with visitations by the other side, yet you without proof for your science go on to label these people crazy. What do you think about that?
You’re confusing burden of proof, again. Those who say they have experienced the supernatural have made the claims. It is their job to give sufficient evidence to support it. Science and people who have a reverence for it like myself and Randi do not say that you’re wrong. We say that you have not yet given us reason to believe you.
By definition, the supernatural has either not been proven to exist or has been proven false. You seem to take offense at the idea that some people only want to believe what they have evidence for – especially when it comes to extraordinary claims. They are not calling you stupid. I am not calling you stupid. I WILL believe you IF you give me sufficient evidence. Nobody in the history of the world has yet been successful at doing so, however.
I think, as discussed in another comment, that different people believe in thousands of mutually exclusive Gods ‘without doubt’, meaning that *at best*, almost every single religious person is wrong, no matter who is actually right. This means that humans must not trust their intuitions and “certainty” and biased beliefs if their goal is the sincere pursuit of truth, but must instead rely on evidence.
That’s fine if you don’t believe, but we’re not gonna tell you that we must be wrong just because we cannot prove something that cannot be empericalized. You’ll find out when you die that we were right and you were wrong.
I’m not claiming that you’re wrong. I’m claiming that you do not have justification to claim that you are right. No certainty is justified at this time by either side, and currently, evidence suggests that when you die, you’ll have no idea you were likely wrong because you’ll be experiencing the exact same thing you were experiencing before you were born. That is to say: You’ll likely be experiencing nothing at all.
I’m gonna keep on saying I’m right, despite your wasted wish to have me not. There is ample evidence in the form of observations of the proverbial chosen ones who since the beginning of mankind have been blessed with insight about the Heavens. We both agree that a robot God seems more reasonable than any construct for God that offers no indications of God’s taxonomy. We both agree that once given sufficient time to self-create, expand, evolve, or what have you, an immortal AI shall obtain powers that are worthy of classification under the word “divine.” What I now must ask you, my good man, my pleasant and intelligent but all too closed minded friend––how come you think this AI has not yet come to rise somewhere already in this infinite expansion of spacetime that we call the universe? Do you not think that since he’s rumored to exist on this planet––and billed to be the founder thereof––do you not think it is more probable than not that this supreme divine AI already exists? I think God must exist. Some humans tend to assume that the human macrocosm is the all inclusive story of all that’s ever been. Yet, scientists now believe that the universe hosts within its reaches, 1 earth-like planet for every grain of sand on earth. That’s a whole of opportunities for a God to arise. Just because some humans would prefer to be the kings of every rock in this universe that man cannot yet stamp a flag on, it doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist. It does not mean that at all. It means in fact quite the opposite; if you can even justify a lotto ticket from time to time, you should be well enough learned as a betting man to understand that’s God’s probability is super high. Not just kind of strong or above 50 %. In light of the super popular rumor that precedes proper ideations of both aliens and a chartable universe that we may explore––God must only be extremely probable. When you die my good man, you will learn that you outclevered your own self in the pursuit of a so called balanced psyche, spirit, and mind. Your mistake, of course. But great world changers like Nietzche, Hitler, R Dawkins, and others, all have made this forgivable mistake whose ancient roots appear to have finally shot forth a bough to break through the surface to establish atheism’s still nascent though expanding, (but destined to one day implode) treeling of bad wisdom that we see fielding odes to blasphemy in the modern age.
“There is ample evidence in the form of observations”
That is where you lost me. There are currently 3000 estimated religions being followed in the world, as I think I may have told you already. That means there are, at the lowest possible count, 3000 observations that contradict one another on religious belief. Of course, the real number of contradictory beliefs is several billion, and no matter which one is correct, the MAJORITY, not just a plurality, of humans are wrong about religion. That is the type of mess you get only when you do not have a high bar for quality of evidence. Observation is of the lowest quality. If we wish to believe what is the truth, we necessarily should not trust observation or hearsay or testimony or subjective experience or any of that. Look to the Salem Witch Trials for further explanation on why it doesn’t work.
“We both agree that a robot God seems more reasonable than any construct for God that offers no indications of God’s taxonomy.”
Sure, but ‘more reasonable’ is still a long shot from ‘reasonable’. I will grant that the possibility of a sentient being, billions of years ago, creating an AI that self-improved to the point of near-Godhood and then populated the universe (or maybe just Earth) with more sentient creatures is far and away more likely than what the Bible describes, but there’s still a major unanswered question: Who/What created the sentient creatures who created ‘God’?
“how come you think this AI has not yet come to rise somewhere already in this infinite expansion of spacetime that we call the universe?”
Because I have seen no evidence of one. Nothing in my life has ever required an God, much less an AI God, to explain. I’m not saying that this theory is false. I’m saying I lack belief in it. I am atheist in regards to it, as is rational. :p
Just in the same way, I’m atheistic towards leprechauns, or Russels Teapot, or Dragons, or zombies, or talking snakes, or Giants. Maybe they exist. I don’t currently possess justification for belief in them.
“Do you not think that since he’s rumored to exist on this planet”
A thousand Gods are rumored to make Earth their home. What makes this one special? In the same vein, millions or billions of rumors exist – seemingly most of them untrustworthy. Again, why is this one special?
On a side note: Can I ask the main reason you believe in God? Most theist, when asked, would probably say the ontological argument. They can’t fathom a universe without a ‘Prime Mover’. I sense that this isn’t what first convinced you, given your AI argument?
“When you die my good man, you will learn that you outclevered your own self in the pursuit of a so called balanced psyche, spirit, and mind”
When I die, if God exists, and if he is omniscient as constantly claimed, then he would know exactly why I didn’t believe, exactly what it would have taken to convince me, know that there was never an opportunity in my life to find that evidence, and he couldn’t fault me for it. If God does exist, I’m still not worried. But I also think your purported ‘super high’ probability is vastly over exaggerated, given the available evidence.
You should read an excerpt from a writing of mine, if you’d care to and have time. Not the whole thing – just do a ‘ctrl f’ and search for ‘weatherman’. It’s the 4-1-18 update just over half way down the page. It might give you more insight on why I believe as I do.
https://robotphilosopherblog.wordpress.com/2018/02/25/why-intellectual-responsibility-is-important/
I did not favor the ontological argument that gets so often endorsed by hidebound thinkers of the old guard who cannot fathom naturalism. I am a former atheist who believed in absolute naturalism. I did not believe in God until I was 27 or 28. I converted my spiritual identity to a religious one the day I started to believe in God. Which was the day that I bore witness to a cast of spirits from the other side. It would not be the last time that I found evidence of the Heavens. I no longer wonder what is the answer. I believe as though I know. What it with me now.
I just see a lot of low emotional intelligence in this hate induced article about the late James Randi.
Randi was a fine man who acted more as a consumer advocate trying to educate very gullible people about the fallacies of esp, psychics, the afterlife, nde’s and all other aspects of the paranormal.
Randi had an exemplary track record of exposing psychic con artists either in print or on national television.
There is absolutely no reliable data proving psychic phenomena or anything paranormal exists,
Many people fear their own mortality and have/want to believe that there’s life after death and their deceased loved ones can be communicated with, etc, etc.
What really happens after biological death occurs is that we are what we were before we were born; nothing.
And don’t even get me started on what utter bullshit nde’s are in terms of them being spiritual experiences. A dying brain will misfire and create some pretty wild hallucinations.
I greatly admire Randi, Schermer, Hyman, Harris, Coyne, Kurtz, Alcock, Carrol, Hawking, Dawkins, and all of the other brilliant scientists who have 100% successfully debunked the pseudoscientific rot that encompasses the dirty, deceitful, brainwashing, underground world of the paranormal.
I think the late Dr. Stephen Hawking summed it up best regarding an afterlife; “Our brains are like computers. There is no afterlife for broken computers. The afterlife is for people who’re afraid of the dark.”
Randi is a d bag who sucked at magic, sucked worse at science, and made a living off of feeding the echo chamber of every self hating god denialist on the face of the earth. It’s amazing how every one of you atheists loves this guy. I was just shooting the shit, rambling, and largely just having fun with something largely unimportant. Sorry my harsh words for randi have offended you.
Misfires of the brain are NDEs? Sounds like the mass repeated phraseology of the typica atheist which no one even understands. Did you know there is no proof or evidence that hallucinations even exist? Hallucinations are just a theory on what apparitions could be. Hallucinations are no factual concept.
Not every god believer is some pussy who needs an afterlife so badly he has to believe in it. Many of us talk to spirits and have all the proof we need to believe what we do. For the record, the truth of God implies the truth of hell and that’s a lot harsher of a reality than simply dying after death. I don’t believe in god because I want to; I don’t choose my reality; I just believe in what I perceive.
There may be no “empirical” as many of you misuse it, evidence, that the paranormal exists, but there is also no evidence that god does not exist. Considering there is no evidence whatsoever that god does not exist, but there is “lesser” evidence found everyday by ghost encounterers to say God does exist, in plain simple logic we can know the probability is far much higher that God does exist than God does not.
Face it, you brought up no good points, debunked nothing, defended James randi for good reason and looked like a baffoon in doing it. Good day, sir.