SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
44
El Ojo del Lago / August 2013
e This August issue will be Kay Davis’ last Lakeside Living column. he Kay has been with the eve vera rall Ojo, on and off, for several urceful, years, and a more resourceful, conscientious and loyal associate ow moves we will never find. Kay now nd as sshe he d oess oe on to new challenges, and does our entire staff wish her great success. Luckily, Sandy Olson, another member of the Ajijic Writers’ Group, will come on as the editor of the column,
co comm mme e commencing with our Sept p em September issue. Sandy liv lived in San Francisco before moving to Mexico. Formerly a community college instru instructor, she first moved d own here in 1988, to start down a sc scub ubaa diving business in scuba Zihuatanejo and relocated here last September. She can be reached at sandyzihua@hotmail.com Welcome, Sandy!
Dear Sir: The Editor’s Page in the July El Ojo extols the alleged psychic powers of Edgar Cayce, whose “readings” and prophecies, like those of every other so-called psychic, have been thoroughly debunked by scientific inquiry. As noted in Wikipedia, Cayce disputed the history of life on earth established by scientific evidence. He claimed that five human races, white, black, red, brown, and yellow, had been created separately but simultaneously in different parts of the earth, the red one on the mythical continent of Atlantis. He not only claimed that Atlantis existed, but that its inhabitants produced energy from a giant crystal ball and that the U.S. would discover in 1958 a death ray that had been used there. Cayce also claimed that “soul entities” on earth had interbred with animals to produce twelvefoot-tall giants. Scientists have shown that most of the information “revealed” in Cayce’s trances was derived from books that he had been reading, including books on the occult. He qualified his “readings” with phrases such as “I feel that” and “perhaps” to avoid positive declarations that could have been shown to be false, a method typically used by so-called psychics. There is no evidence that humans lead successive lives through reincarnation as Cayce claimed in the case of the nocturnally incontinent physician, and the subsequent end of the physician’s problem proves nothing concerning Cayce’s “treatment” of him. (Mere association of two events cannot prove that the first caused the second, and spontaneous remission of medical problems is common.) So-called therapists who employ “past life regression” to
examine patients’ alleged previous lives are universally recognized as charlatans. Supporters of so-called “alternative medicine” (sometimes confused with “holistic medicine”) that Cayce advocated have wasted millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayers money in failed efforts to demonstrate the effectiveness of various forms of quackery. The benefits of such treatments that some patients report have been shown to result from well-established and powerful placebo effects that often lead patients to fail to seek treatment that would be effective for their conditions. The fact that millions of people visit the Association of Research and Enlightenment does not demonstrate the validity of Cayce’s claims. Millions also visit the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico, where they can see models of extraterrestrials claimed to have visited the earth, but that provides no evidence for the validity of claims about UFO’s and extraterrestrials. For thousands of years people believed that the earth was flat and the sun revolved around it, but their numbers did not make their beliefs true. (Members of the Flat Earth Society still maintain that the earth is flat, just as the Creation Museum insists that humans dwelt with dinosaurs, the Discovery Institute maintains that humans did not evolve but were created by an intelligent designer, and the Heartland Institute insists that global warming is not happening.) There is much about the universe and the humans who inhabit it that is not yet understood, but that lack of knowledge provides no support for Cayce’s claims. He can be compared to