Empirialism

We-hay, seems I've started expanding my web presence. Thinking of starting up VLogging on YouTube like a hell of a lot of other bored adolescents with a webcam ranting and stuff, hopefully with a smidgen of originality. I've started getting back to www.skepticforum.com, which is good for morale (someone actually missed me there!). How sad this all is, but then a lot about my situation is, so in fact none of it is. ha! Aaaaaanyway found this in a post and was authorised to move it here, I liked it, though I'd share (how sickening):

Catholic Protestant
Muslim and Jews
Look at each other
With frightening views
What are we doing
This isn't God's plan
Meant to be brothers
Our family of man
Seems to be something
That gets in the way
Confusing ours minds
From what his words say
Love one another
The gist of his book
No matter the language
Nor how it may look
I've missed something
I don't understand
WHO is it then
If it isn't God's hand
Who darkens dreams
With hatred and fear
Clouding our vision
Till nothing is clear
Sharpens our rage
At the point of a knife
Who sends the misguided
To cause loss of life
Who wants the world
To tremble and shake
Who takes innocent
Lives in his wake
Who breaks a spirit
Then fills it with hate
Demonic decisions
Sealing their fate
Who takes a man
And warps his soul
Death and destruction
His devious goal
Who turns souls black
With power or greed
Who preaches hate
Planting the seed
For the slaughter of others
But who do we blame
The ultimate evil
It's done in God's name

M@C

Does this make sense to you?

New Agers get on my nerves, because I consider it an insult to my intelligence that they would have me take them seriously. An example from today's JREF Swift:

Q: What happens when you die, Deepak?

Chopra: What happens when you die, is you return to where you always are. If you realize right now that there's no such thing as a person, you'll be all set.

Q: What do you mean, I'll be all set?

Chopra: Then if you shift your identity to that consciousness that is differentiating as observer and observant, you'll know there's nothing to fear.

Q: You have no fear of death.

Chopra: No Sir! Why? Because I don't exist in the first place!

Q: Can you get reincarnated as a soul?

Chopra: [Sighs] Wisps of memory and threads of desire, which are specks of information, latch onto specks of consciousness and show up as recycled human beings. But in the bigger picture, the observer, the observed, the process of observation, is a single reality.

Q: So... Deepak Chopra, as I know him [questioner taps the sitting Chopra solidly on the knee for effect] my friend Chopra... doesn't exist?

Chopra: A transient behavior of... the total universe.

Deepak Chopra... waste of space.
It's all playing on words generally associated with a bit of quantum physics, "the observer, the observed", without ever actually saying anything.
Metatwaddle like this is dangerous, because people start believing they're thinking when in fact, it's all just "quack, quack, quack".
This is why critical thinking and education are important.

Also, from a simpler linguistics point of view, look at "[sighs]" when the word "soul" is metnioned. Here is the mark of someone who might actually be clever and has realised that there really is no such thing, and reckons that he has to go further with the weirdness to convince his fans that what he's got is the end-product of a long chain of reasoning.
Unless, of course, he's really talking major bollocks completely detached from any form of even (slightly) reasonable spirituality.