[davem]

Alatar, Tarot works. I've studied it & used it, therefore I know it works. Sorry if accepting this would shake the foundations of your Weltanshauung. Actually, I'm not concerned whether you or anyone else believes in tarot, astrology, I ching, Faeries, or anything else, because I'm not out to convert anybody to anything. That was absolutely not the point I was making. The point was I tried Tarot with an open-minded attitude & it worked. That does not prove any particular theory about tarot. It is simply a 'fact'. I can't explain how or why it works. I don't 'believe' anything about it other than that it worked when I used it.

You apparently have a belief system that requires Tarot not to work. I don't even have a belief system that requires it to work. It just worked.

The wider point was the way we accept or reject things based on our underlying weltanschauung rather than approaching life in as unbiassed open-minded way. I'm not even saying it will work if I use it again, just that when I used it it worked.

Ok. true story. I once saw a UFO. I was watching what I thought was an aircraft moving through the night sky. It travelled in a straight line & then suddenly moved at a right-angle (it didn't 'turn', just stopped & moved on at 90 degrees). It then carried on for a while & instanly turned at a right-angle again.

I have no idea what it was. Maybe it was a space-craft. Maybe it was an atmospheric phenomenon. Maybe it was an angel. Maybe I was deluded. The point is I have no idea what it was, but I experienced it & have no explanation to offer. I could have adopted any of those theories & explained it away. I'm not prepared to do that though. It just happened. I've met faeries & an angel & I've seen 'across time' at a stone circle. But I don't hold any complex theories to account for those experiences, because I'm not interested in doing so.

What fascinates me is the way people adopt complex belief systems (whether religious or materialistic) which will not permit certain things to actually exist, so that they have to construct all kinds of convoluted reasons as to why they're 'fake', or have to account for them in terms of 'Fallen Angels' mating with humans &/or animals or other equally outlandish 'theories'.

I'm sure you could put together a fascinating 'explanation' as to why my experiences happened (if only that I'm a bit of a looney or a liar), but I'm not interested, because your theory would merely be your attempt to fit my experiences into your reality. I'm not interested in putting together my own explanation so I definitely have no interest in anyone else's.

'Cold Reading' is simply an attempt to show you're cleverer than someone else - they're just so dumb that they can't see what's glaringly obvious to you. The fact that you can fake something doesn't in any way prove that every instance of that thing is a fake. People fake everything from dollar bills to Rembrandts - does that prove that all dollar bills & Rembrandts are fakes?