This Should Be Interesting

In an attempt to resolve a property dispute in India, an Indian judge has summoned two Hindu gods to appear in his court:

Sunil Kumar Singh has placed notices in newspapers in the coal mining town of Dhanbad, in the eastern state of Jharkhand, asking gods Ram and Hanuman to appear in his court next week to present their arguments.

"You failed to appear in court despite notices sent by a messenger and later through registered post. You are hereby directed to appear before the court personally," Judge Singh's notice stated.

The newspaper notices were published, in keeping with accepted Indian legal practice, after two summons dispatched to the plaintiff deities were returned because their addresses were "incomplete".

While in the US, a contender to be leader of the free world says, in all seriousness, that his recent poll successes are due to Jesus’ help (quote time: “that’s honestly why it’s happened”), it’s good to know that a supposedly less developed country is going to require their gods to actually show up! Memo to God – put up or shut up. And no men in monkey costumes, please.  You’re going to have to prove you’re the real deal.

Here’s some additional outsourcing we could benefit from – let’s get this judge working in the US right now.

Comments

[Skemono]

Here's some additional outsourcing we could benefit from – let's get this judge working in the US right now.

Yeah. And let's get him assigned to Ernie Chambers' case.

[Swiftsure]

I hope this is on the TV news. Looking forward to seeing those gods being ushered into court with blankets over their heads.

[anonymous]

He may honestly believe that they will show up :(

[Mytho]

While amusing, I cannot fail to look forward to the moment that the deities show up, then Indy Jones rushes to steal the rocks with diamonds and make a run for it xD

[Crispin]

Hey this is totally off topic, but I ended up finding your site after watching the Bleep film. I did a Physics undergraduate at University and was told by some colleagues not to watch the film because it would just make me angry. So after many years I finally thought I would keep an open mind, and make up my own mind on the subject... So I watched it.

And the funny thing was they were totally right. It did make me angry. The absurd misrepresentations of Quantum theory. The cutting off of the experimental descriptions at an advantageous position (for them). As if when they placed the observing apparatus in the double slit experiment and changed the outcome, they stopped all future experimentation and went "Why does detecting the photon change the outcome? Well no one will ever know! It must be my mind!" In reality scientists like to continue investigations and this one is no exception.

So in some online areas I posted some rebuttals of the claims, and oh my! What a shit-storm! The vitriol and abuse that came back. My arrogance for "solving" something that has baffled physicists for over 50 years. Funny. I could've sworn that the outcome was solved 50 years ago by some Physicists much smarter than I.

So after being abused online I came looking for some other healthy rebuttals and found your lucid piece. And saw you got subjected to the same treatment in your comment section. Why do some people feel they have to be so aggressive in defending the film? Maybe the cult has a lot to loose from the films dismantling.

Anyway, I'd just like to say keep up the good work. It's nice to know there are still people like yourself in this world with properly functioning thought processes. I shall keep reading your pieces.

[Tom Foss]

And the funny thing was they were totally right. It did make me angry. The absurd misrepresentations of Quantum theory.

Oh, a kindred spirit. Believe me, I feel your anger and frustration--you should see what I called a Quantum-mangling Secretoid in one of Skeptico's early threads on that dreck.

I've never been entirely sure what it is about Quantum Mechanics that causes people to be such idiots about it. I see a lot of woos spout off some variation of the Feynman "no one understands it" quotation, then profess some deep, thorough, and philosophical (and wrong) understanding of QM and its implications for the mind and the macroscopic world.

Why do some people feel they have to be so aggressive in defending the film? Maybe the cult has a lot to loose from the films dismantling.

I wish I could tell you. I've never understood how people can get so angry when you point out where they've made some major factual error. I've never understood how people can profess such certainty in a subject that they don't understand at all. And while I'm sure the Ramtha cult has a lot to lose from people exposing the terrible idiocy of their propaganda, I can't imagine that Ramtha cultists make up the majority of the angry "What the Bleep" fanbase.

But, you know, feel free to stick around and find out, Crispin. The more, the merrier!

[obscurifer]

When I spoke to Ram last week, he told me that he was going to be in court, but Hanuman wouldn't answer my calls, either. Jerk.

[David D.G.]

Why do some people feel they have to be so aggressive in defending the film? Maybe the cult has a lot to loose from the films dismantling.

I wish I could tell you. I've never understood how people can get so angry when you point out where they've made some major factual error.

The problem is that these people have invested a lot of their own enthusiasm and personal credibility into these ideas, and when you tell them these ideas are BS, they take that as criticism of them personally.

I have found that it helps (a little) to take some of the onus for this off of them as explicitly as possible. Instead of saying, "These people are lying, and you're an idiot to believe them," or even, "You're wrong" (which still sounds like a personal criticism), I say something like, "You were given incorrect information by somebody (or an even more neutral "this information is incorrect"), and if you read more thoroughly on the subject you'll see that there's more to this than you've heard so far" -- and then follow that up with as much correct (and linked or cited) information as possible, presented as neutrally as possible. That way you avoid accusing them of lying or stupidity, and you even avoid accusing their heroes of lying or stupidity. Doing this makes it sound much less like a personal attack, so it takes a lot of the sting out of it for them. If you make the information less threatening, they are more likely to be open to it.

Of course, that doesn't mean that lying and stupidity are NOT to blame here, but calling people liars and idiots is counterproductive if your goal is just to educate someone -- emotionally satisfying, perhaps, but counterproductive.

Even so, these people are not likely to just blow off in moments what they've invested a lot of emotional energy and self-identification into for months or years. But over time, once they start getting actual science information, they might come around to reality on their own, and then later look back and cringe at how naive they once had been.

~David D.G.

[debbyo]

I think you're right David - even though I completely understand and even cheer when bloggers - after displaying the patience of Ghandi through long arguments so tortuous you feel like overthrowing the British Empire - suddenly turn into Judge Judies (but much hipper and funnier). What I try to remember when dealing with woos is that mostly they are just victims. Many of them are trying to question the world - they probably see themselves as progressive, left wing even (although I would argue that their individualism and their militant apathy [the karma thing] precludes this). They are trying to question capitalism (evil pharmaceutical companies) but don't recognise that the alternative health industry is just as profitable and even more evil. I'm curious, how have previous arguments about the profitability of the alternative therapy industry gone down?