rigorousintuition.ca

If you check the video I posted, it appears as though he may be drinking the bath water and/or craftily sneaking snacks. Maybe. In any case, it would seem that, as you might suspect, there are reasons to validate his abilities that have nothing to do with science.

barracuda wrote:If you check the video I posted, it appears as though he may be drinking the bath water and/or craftily sneaking snacks. Maybe.

Hmmm.

Dr Sudhir Shah, [neurologistand head of Ahmedabad's Sterling hospital and the doctor who oversaw the tests], is a deeply religious Jain. As the president of the Indian Jain Doctors' Federation (JDF), he proposes that via research, the still imperfect science of medicine is to be brought in line with the Jainist '"super-science" as revealed by the omniscient Lord Mahavir. We can only wonder whether his researcher eyes are sometimes clouded by religious zeal. Interestingly, many members of his team are Jains and his partner in the Manek test was a former president of JDF too.
[...]
One reason is that Indian politicians nurture and shelter gurus to give them spiritual credibility, use their followers as vote banks, or to mask sexual or criminal activity. That explains why India’s Parliament has never tightened the 1954 Drugs and Magic Remedies Act, under which the maximum punishment is two months in prison and a 2,000 rupee (£29) fine.

Another reason is that educated, middle-class Indians are feeling increasingly alienated from mainstream religion but still in need of spiritual sustenance. “When traditional religion collapses people still need spirituality,” he says. “So they usually go one of two directions: towards extremism and fundamentalism or to these kinds of people.”

Sanal Edamaruku is the founder-president of Rationalist International and the president of the Indian Rationalist Association.

He's a "guru-buster." I guess he's India's answer to the less-than-amazing and ever-so-slightly-dodgy Randi.

I doubt he can be relied upon to provide an objective assessment of the alleged holy man's abilities.

Maybe he thinks it's a psy-op, too.

Sanal Edamaruku wrote:As there are few things so well established as the biological law no human (and no animal) can survive without the regular intake of food and water, it may be sensible to approach his claim with a degree of scepticism. It is not usually very difficult to expose such characters; I have done it in several cases.

It's a very great shame he doesn't expose Prahlad Jani then. All he does is declare that the claims cannot be true, therefore they are not true. He exposes nothing, and simply asserts that Prahlad Jani "must have been" sneaking in food and water. As to complaining he might have had a sip or two when bathing with his jug, the claims made were that he could survive on no food and small amounts of water, so the water intake is conceded.

I don't like credulous superstition, but neither do I like these skeptic debunker types. They are not objective, like Dawkins they come to resemble the very enemy they oppose. They have their own irrefutable yet ludicrous dogma and the unwavering certainty of the fanatic.

Nonetheless, it is Dr Sudhir V Shah who is the empirical scientist, with over twenty years of experience and a great deal of published work in the neurosciences. Sanal Edamaruku does have master's degrees in politics and international studies, but is little more than a journalist and professional "skeptic." It seems Sanal believes his motives are pure because he is an athiest, whereas all of Dr Sudhir's work is suspect because he follows the philosophy of Jainism. And Prof Steven Jones is a mormon too, did you know that?

I'm an atheist myself, but I'm not a member of the materialist reductionist darwinist empiricist religion-hating scientism cult, that believe they have all the answers. I'm more of a proto buddhist. And yeah, I believe in kundalini energy. Maybe its orgone.

Sanal Edamaruku wrote:Another reason is that educated, middle-class Indians are feeling increasingly alienated from mainstream religion but still in need of spiritual sustenance. “When traditional religion collapses people still need spirituality,” he says. “So they usually go one of two directions: towards extremism and fundamentalism or to these kinds of people.”

That's an interesting observation, though.

I need to stop rambling now, my clock says 11:11.

justdrew wrote...

I don't get it. If this is real, this guy is the "free energy" device we've been looking for, clone him. Has he had a colonoscopy? Hard to believe he can replenish his body's matter, dead skin cells, etc, normal cell death, the need to manufacture neurotransmitters, etc. His entire metabolism should be completely weird at least.

Reality is much stranger than we are currently able to conceive. Our materialistic normative science inhibits any attempt to extend causality into more subtle realms.

You'd think people would be demanding more extensive study of this medical marvel.

This is a defacto fraud for most, and a quite possibly a fraud anyway, so it’s much easier to dismiss than it is to ‘demand more extensive study’.