UK Psychics/spiritualists pissed about new laws.
Offline LONDON (Reuters) - Fortune-tellers, mediums and spiritual healers marched on the home of the British prime minister at Downing Street on Friday to protest against new laws they fear will lead to them being "persecuted and prosecuted".
Organizers say that replacing the Fraudulent Mediums Act of 1951 with new consumer protection rules will remove key legal protection for "genuine" mediums.
They think skeptics might bring malicious prosecutions to force spiritualists to prove in court that they can heal people, see into the future or talk to the dead.
Psychics also fear they will have to give disclaimers describing their services as entertainment or as scientific experiments with unpredictable results.
"If I'm giving a healing to someone, I don't want to have to stand there and say I don't believe in what I'm doing," said Carole McEntee-Taylor, a healer who co-founded the Spiritual Workers Association.
The group delivered a petition with 5,000 names to the prime minister's office, although Gordon Brown is away in the United States.
With the changes expected to come into force next month, spiritualists have faced a barrage of headlines gleefully suggesting that they should have seen it coming.
But many don't see the funny side. They say the new rules will shift the responsibility of proving they are not frauds from prosecutors and onto them.
"By repealing the Act, the onus will go round the other way and we will have to prove we are genuine," McEntee-Taylor told Reuters. "No other religion has to do that."
The government said the new regulations form part of a European Union directive that is meant to harmonize unfair trading laws across the EU. It will introduce a ban on traders "treating consumers unfairly".
The British Humanist Association, a charity which campaigns against religion and supernatural beliefs, said stricter regulations were overdue because the current laws don't work.
"It is misleading for spiritualists to claim that, as ‘religious' practitioners they should not be regulated under consumer laws," said Chief Executive Hanne Stinson.
"The psychic industry is huge and lucrative and it exploits some very vulnerable, and some very gullible, people with claims for which there is no scientific evidence."
Source: Reuters
What I don't get is that they claim this will remove legal protection for "genuine" mediums, yet if they can't prove what they is real then doesn't that mean they're not genuine? It just means people can no longer legally scam people. If they ARE genuine and CAN actually do what they claim, they've got bugger all to fear from this. It's just showing how dodgy and bad the whole industry is. I hope it covers things like homeopathic medicines too.
The line "No other religion has to do that" is quite a dodge. Every other industry has to. They should be comparing their work to other industries. Medicine producers have to prove their medicines can do what they claim it can, doctors have to prove they can do what they claim to do, same with mechanics, engineers, accountants, farmers, food producers etc etc etc. The line is also very pertinent, religion is the only industry WITHOUT such requirements. Why? The law should be extended to cover religion too so that NO industry is allowed to get off scott free.
Organised religion is the ultimate form of blasphemy.
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Eep, didn't add the link for source and can't modify the OP.
Source: Reuters.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Excuse me.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
"Physical reality” isn’t some arbitrary demarcation. It is defined in terms of what we can systematically investigate, directly or not, by means of our senses. It is preposterous to assert that the process of systematic scientific reasoning arbitrarily excludes “non-physical explanations” because the very notion of “non-physical explanation” is contradictory.
-Me
Books about atheism
No one saw this coming?
Heheheheh, I just kill me.
BTW, so long as NHS is paying for homeopathy, then the complaint has some validity. I think the same sort of law should apply to medicine, too.
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
FANTASTIC!
Be nice if all religions did have to do that.
Have they never heard of the burden of proof? I think all their complaing is a smokescreen for the fact they know they prey on the weak minded, and can no more heal or see the future than they can fly.
Psalm 14:1 "the fool hath said in his heart there is a God"-From a 1763 misprinted edition of the bible
Argument from Sadism: Theist presents argument in a wall of text with no punctuation and wrong spelling. Atheist cannot read and is forced to concede.
Oh, wouldn't THAT be a shame? "We'll just assume you're fleecing people unless we can get some evidence that you're actually performing a reliable service" is a reasonable position to take.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
I think we have fraud laws in the USA. I don't understand why nobody has tried to go after Sylvia Browne, James Van Praugh (not sure I spelled his name right), etc. I lose my mind every time I see them on TV.
At the IPPL meeting a few weeks ago, they have a way to generate money where people donate things (nice things, usually) and you can bid to buy them, like an auction. One of the things to bid on was a stack of books by Sylvia Browne about how to talk to you beloved dead animals. I couldn't believe it. I don't know if anyone bid on them, but I wanted to throw them in the trash, but didn't...
Sylvia Browne is either a total nutcase or a fraud i Would guess the latter - though she could be both.) She claims to talk to the ghost of a several thousand year old Inca woman. One of her books was on the desk at work and I read it one night. I was alternating between laughing and shaking my head. The utter idiocy and gullibility of the general public never ceases to amaze me.
Matt Shizzle has been banned from the Rational Response Squad website. This event shall provide an atmosphere more conducive to social growth. - Majority of the mod team
Nice going. Only it would be nice if they banned homeopathy. (Wait a minute, It can heal dehydratation
) So it can be sold to heal that. 
Wow, You came up with the one thing Homeopathy can cure! Hey - those pills Luminon believes in are actually less effective than "water" homeopathy - they won't even cure that!
Yeah, I kind of wish any sort of treatment had to be evaluated - if not to be used, at least to be covered by medicare. If private insurance companies are dumb enough to pay for it that's their problem - but then they shouldn't either - keep costs down by not covering the (often more expensive) bulshit and cover more of the treatments/medications that actually work.
Matt Shizzle has been banned from the Rational Response Squad website. This event shall provide an atmosphere more conducive to social growth. - Majority of the mod team
That's the thing, this law shifted the burden of proof away from them unfairly compared to all other industries. It's now coming back in to line with everything else (other than religion).
I for one didn't. I couldn't see this coming because I had no idea such backwards laws are in place. I wonder how many other countries have laws like this.
Organised religion is the ultimate form of blasphemy.
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