So in Part I, we saw that Sam Harris, big-name atheist, claims psychic powers are being ignored by mainstream science, that speaking in tongues and reincarnation are worthy areas of scientific exploration, and nothing at all like religion. Also, meditation will make you a better moral person, in part because you see ‘lights’ and ‘bliss’ and so forth.

Remember boys and girls, before he started writing angry screeds, Harris was a grad student working in neuroscience.

Yeah.. that career wasn’t going far, I’d wager.

The more I read about Harris, the less serious he looks. Remember how he recommended (and still does, on his site) a book about Reincarnation? Wikipedia has a bit more on the ‘research’ of the man who wrote it, and how his work holds up when re-examined. Answer: not so well!

Sharada: Uttara Huddar was a woman in India who normally spoke Marathi. While in hospital undergoing psychiatric treatment, she began manifesting a personality called Sharada, who spoke in Bengali. Stevenson had recordings analysed by Bengali speakers, who disagreed among themselves about the subject’s fluency.[3] It cannot be ruled out that the subject may have learned Bengali earlier in life: both she and her father had a long-standing interest in Bengal, her home city had 1% native Bengali speakers, she had read Bengali novels in translation, and she herself had taken lessons in reading Bengali.[4]

…

Gretchen[6][8], an American woman named Dolores Jay who presented the life of a teenage girl in Germany while hypnotized by her Methodist minister husband. Stevenson reported that the subject was able to converse in German. Mrs. Jay did study a German dictionary at one point during the sessions, but Stevenson pointed out that she had already spontaneously produced 206 words before this event. Again Thomason’s reanalysis, while acknowledging that the evidence against fraud was convincing, concluded that Gretchen could not converse in German. Her speech was largely the repetition of German questions with different intonation, or utterances of one or two words. Her “German vocabulary is minute, and her pronunciation is spotty”.[9] When asked what she had for breakfast, she answers ‘Bettzimmer’, which is a non-existent word made up of the two words for ‘bed’ and ‘room’. Moreover she had some previous exposure to German in TV programmes and a “look at a German book”.

Wikipedia has other examples, those are just two of my favorites. Keep in mind, Stevenson only came up with 20 total, so that right there? 10% of the book Harris recommends. In the first case, the person had extensive exposure to the language before this ‘xenoglossy’, and the second? She couldn’t speak German, in any meaningful way whatsoever. Also, she watched German language tv. According to Wikipedia, those are some of the BEST, as well; in most of the alleged xenoglossy cases, they couldn’t ‘converse’ at all, just recite foreign language words like a bad dictionary, or a student in a tough spelling bee.

To compare, I bet I could pull off that much Japanese if you gave me a week with my anime collection, and I suck at language memorization (just ask any of my Latin professors).

Give me a break. Con artists of the world, might I suggest you pay a visit to Mr. Harris? It’s bound to be very lucrative.

Update: Uggh, looks like Carl Sagan might have bought into this stuff too, a bit.

In The Demon-Haunted World (1996), Sagan wrote that claims about reincarnation have some, though dubious, experimental support, arguing that one of three claims in parapsychology deserving serious study is that, “young children sometimes report details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation.”

Source, Wikipedia article on Stevensen, author of the Reincarnation book Harris likes

What precisely is so hard to understand, people? You die, you rot in the ground*. There’s just no plausible alternative. If you think you have one, GET SOME PROOF.

*(Or get reduced to ash, or eaten by birds in the desert, shot into space, what have you.)

Continues in Part II