Establishing the truth of mediumship
Posted: Sun May 22, 2016 5:23 pm
I would like to talk about the channeling of a spirit who's called Jess.
A number of specific claims are made by Anto on behalf of the spirit. The spirit calls herself Jessica, but would like to be called Jess. She died in a bus accident in the Andes, by drowning, together with a group of girls from England, who were on a trip. Anto says she was about 16 years old when this happened, "about 5 years, coming on to 5 years" ago from the channeling, i.e. the latter part of 2009.
I wanted to find out some time ago if I could find anything on the net to confirm the truth of these claims.
On this site there is an overview of bus accidents in south america. On this wikipedia page there are a few others as well: 2000-2009. Googling the description of the crash plus the country where it happened will return newspaper articles.
Out of the many articles you can find, none mention (young) English victims, except for this one: Gap year adventure ends in tragedy as five killed in bus crash.
Teenage girls from Great-Brittain die in a crash, in Ecuador, South-America.
However, a lot of the details are not accurate. The bus did not drown but the people died on impact with a lorry. The girls are around 19, not 16. There is no-one among them called Jess(ica). The event happened over 6 years before the channeling, not coming on 5.
I don't know what to make of this. I would think that drowning would be a feeling that would be well transmitted through mediumship, even if things like numbers and names would be harder to transmit accurately. It has been suggested to me on another forum, philosophicalvegan.com, that coming up with a random scenario would have roughly the same accuracy. The person there provided the example of a Chinese student, 21 years called Chen, died in a car crash in Italy 3 years ago. If we allow for the same range of accuracy, i.e. name not accurate, age not accurate, cause of death not accurate, date not accurate - it is probably quite likely to find an example of such an accident.
Of course I'm not suggesting that Anto knowingly and willingly came up with a random scenario, but in light of the lacking accuracy it is hard to see this kind of channeling as establishing any kind of proof of life after death. Such proof would of course be huge in building faith and convincing skeptics. How can we establish more convincing proof - or should we conclude that there is no such proof at this point?
My intuition says that Jess is possibly Rebecca from the newspaper article, but what good is that really? Should we just conclude that at this point mediumship is not accurate enough to convince a skeptic? I know of course that there are skeptics that would still not believe in the face of any evidence, but if mediumship is real, it would show its truth scientifically and statistically, i.e. perform better than expected from chance.
A number of specific claims are made by Anto on behalf of the spirit. The spirit calls herself Jessica, but would like to be called Jess. She died in a bus accident in the Andes, by drowning, together with a group of girls from England, who were on a trip. Anto says she was about 16 years old when this happened, "about 5 years, coming on to 5 years" ago from the channeling, i.e. the latter part of 2009.
I wanted to find out some time ago if I could find anything on the net to confirm the truth of these claims.
On this site there is an overview of bus accidents in south america. On this wikipedia page there are a few others as well: 2000-2009. Googling the description of the crash plus the country where it happened will return newspaper articles.
Out of the many articles you can find, none mention (young) English victims, except for this one: Gap year adventure ends in tragedy as five killed in bus crash.
Teenage girls from Great-Brittain die in a crash, in Ecuador, South-America.
However, a lot of the details are not accurate. The bus did not drown but the people died on impact with a lorry. The girls are around 19, not 16. There is no-one among them called Jess(ica). The event happened over 6 years before the channeling, not coming on 5.
I don't know what to make of this. I would think that drowning would be a feeling that would be well transmitted through mediumship, even if things like numbers and names would be harder to transmit accurately. It has been suggested to me on another forum, philosophicalvegan.com, that coming up with a random scenario would have roughly the same accuracy. The person there provided the example of a Chinese student, 21 years called Chen, died in a car crash in Italy 3 years ago. If we allow for the same range of accuracy, i.e. name not accurate, age not accurate, cause of death not accurate, date not accurate - it is probably quite likely to find an example of such an accident.
Of course I'm not suggesting that Anto knowingly and willingly came up with a random scenario, but in light of the lacking accuracy it is hard to see this kind of channeling as establishing any kind of proof of life after death. Such proof would of course be huge in building faith and convincing skeptics. How can we establish more convincing proof - or should we conclude that there is no such proof at this point?
My intuition says that Jess is possibly Rebecca from the newspaper article, but what good is that really? Should we just conclude that at this point mediumship is not accurate enough to convince a skeptic? I know of course that there are skeptics that would still not believe in the face of any evidence, but if mediumship is real, it would show its truth scientifically and statistically, i.e. perform better than expected from chance.