Derrens back tonight with a new series I believe - if you're an atheist he's a magician, a theist then he's the new Jesus Christ as he performs miracles.
Originally posted by CDarwin: Derrens back tonight with a new series I believe - if you're an atheist he's a magician, a theist then he's the new Jesus Christ as he performs miracles.
I don't recall hearing any angel choirs or seeing the clouds riven, so I guess that he must just be another pretender?
What time is it, Mr Woolf? Time to mend your ways, for the end is nigh.
Originally posted by CDarwin: Derrens back tonight with a new series I believe - if you're an atheist he's a magician, a theist then he's the new Jesus Christ as he performs miracles.
For anyone who watched the programme on Friday night, he gave an ordinary man, with a self-cofessed poor memory, the ability to memorise several thousand books in just a few days. I'd say that's as good as any miracle that Jesus performed.
Originally posted by CDarwin: For anyone who watched the programme on Friday night, he gave an ordinary man, with a self-cofessed poor memory, the ability to memorise several thousand books in just a few days. I'd say that's as good as any miracle that Jesus performed.
Impressive. Did he create a universe and utterly destroy New York in the twinkling of an eye?
Bring someone back from the dead, maybe?
What time is it, Mr Woolf? Time to mend your ways, for the end is nigh.
Originally posted by CDarwin: For anyone who watched the programme on Friday night, he gave an ordinary man, with a self-cofessed poor memory, the ability to memorise several thousand books in just a few days. I'd say that's as good as any miracle that Jesus performed.
Impressive. Did he create a universe and utterly destroy New York in the twinkling of an eye?
Bring someone back from the dead, maybe?
You're confusing god with jesus.....no wonder you can't get to grips with science.
Originally posted by CDarwin: For anyone who watched the programme on Friday night, he gave an ordinary man, with a self-cofessed poor memory, the ability to memorise several thousand books in just a few days. I'd say that's as good as any miracle that Jesus performed.
Impressive. Did he create a universe and utterly destroy New York in the twinkling of an eye?
Bring someone back from the dead, maybe?
You're confusing god with jesus.....no wonder you can't get to grips with science.
I think that if you read your Bible, you will see that Jesus actually had quite a part in the creation.
What time is it, Mr Woolf? Time to mend your ways, for the end is nigh.
Is this considered a cultural programme because its a miracle, magic or just messing with societies known understanding of how things happen? Or is it simply entertainment. Derren admits at the beginning of the programme that he uses showmanship. What he manages to do is see things in a wider format than the ways we do things day to day. Derren practices for hours and hours to get his 'tricks' right which indicates it is not magic or cultural.
Originally posted by Elizabeth-Ford: Is this considered a cultural programme because its a miracle, magic or just messing with societies known understanding of how things happen? Or is it simply entertainment. Derren admits at the beginning of the programme that he uses showmanship. What he manages to do is see things in a wider format than the ways we do things day to day. Derren practices for hours and hours to get his 'tricks' right which indicates it is not magic or cultural.
Essentially anything we do is culture. Brown's tricks are part of our culture.
Derrens tricks appear to be miracles when of course they are not. He is honest, yet if he weren't he could get religious groups to vouch for his 'special powers'.
I very much enjoyed his book a year or two back, but was most surprised to read that he'd been religious himself as a student. I guess it gives him a bit more of an insight into how the mind can be fooled.
Originally posted by flibble: I very much enjoyed his book a year or two back, but was most surprised to read that he'd been religious himself as a student. I guess it gives him a bit more of an insight into how the mind can be fooled.
Most people are religious when young. Some never manage to give up, though.
Originally posted by flibble: I very much enjoyed his book a year or two back, but was most surprised to read that he'd been religious himself as a student. I guess it gives him a bit more of an insight into how the mind can be fooled.
Most people are religious when young. Some never manage to give up, though.
That's true. And yet others come to faith in later life, when they have seen that the pseudo - science which has been forced down their throats for decades is nothing more than a tissue of mutually interdependent lies, stung together, unwittingly, by men of vanity, under the instruction of the Prince of Darkness.
What time is it, Mr Woolf? Time to mend your ways, for the end is nigh.
Originally posted by CDarwin: Derrens tricks appear to be miracles when of course they are not. He is honest, yet if he weren't he could get religious groups to vouch for his 'special powers'.
He did something like that a couple of years ago called Messiah. From Wiki:
Messiah Shown on 7 January 2005, Derren Brown travelled to the United States to try to convince five leading figures that he had powers in their particular field of expertise: Christian evangelism, alien abduction, psychic powers, New Age theories and contacting the dead.
Using a false name each time, he succeeded in convincing four of the five "experts" that he had powers, and they openly endorsed him as a true practitioner. The fifth expert, the Christian evangelist Curt Nordheilm, whilst impressed by Brown's performance, asked to meet him again before giving an endorsement. The concept of the show was to highlight the power of suggestion with regard to beliefs and people's abilities, and failure to question them. Brown made it quite clear with each experiment that if any of the subjects accused him of trickery he would immediately come clean about the whole thing, a rule similar to one of the self-imposed rules of the perpetrators of the Project Alpha hoax. His conclusion was that people tend to hear only things that support their own ideas and ignore contradictory evidence; this is known in psychology as confirmation bias.
Until I saw that programme I wasn't particularly interested in Brown, but after seeing Messiah I had a lot more respect for him as it seemed like he was actually using his "powers" for good rather than pure entertainment.
"Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race." - Charles Bradlaugh.
