Talking to the Dead

When it comes to practitioners of the supernatural, for the most part I consider them relatively harmless, at worst they are con men, at best harmless kooks. When it comes to those who can claim to speak to the dead though, I think the exact opposite, while I hope that the majority aren't acting maliciously, I do believe that all of them are doing harm.

But before I get into why I think that, let's get this off the table first. No one can speak to the dead. There is not one shred of scientific evidence to support it, be it psychic energy or mystical powers. None, there is no science backing up anyone claiming to speak to the deceased. What all of these mediums are doing, whether they're aware of it or not, is an old stage trick called cold reading. If you ever watch these people you can see it in action. Basically it begins with throwing out extremely vague questions, and then allowing the subject to fill in the detail. If you'd like to see more on that, I'd suggest you Google cold reading and James Randi.

So what do I mean when I say that all these mediums are doing harm? Well first of all, they're lying to their subject. They aren't in communication with that person's dead loved one. And to say they are is just plain cruel in my eyes. While mediums are good at providing generalities, what they cannot provide to their clients are specifics, at least real ones anyway. What happens to the subject that needs specific questions answered? Only two possibilities exist in that case, the medium either cannot supply it, or they lie and make something up.

The other thing that they are doing is interfering in the grieving process. How exactly is someone going to come to accept that a loved one is gone when they can talk to them whenever they want through a medium?

Many will say that whether real or not, mediums can provide comfort to the grieving. To me it seems a false comfort though. Instead of being comforted by memories you shared with the deceased, the comfort is coming from lies told to you by a stranger. And while it may be comforting, all it's doing is prolonging the grief, because inevitably one of two things will happen. Either the subject runs out of money, and the medium move on to another paying customer(I don't know of any that provide this service as a charity), or the subject eventually realizes that they've never been in contact with anyone, let alone the person they lost. At which point the grieving process has to start all over again.

Perhaps I'm wrong on this, but to me, comfort through lies and deception, no matter how well meaning, seem like no comfort at all.