really? I sleep with a fan on every night, even in the winter (windows open too)SeaCalMaster said:
Just stupid! The things people believe!
- Thread starter hazakura
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Oy, I read the whole thread (glanced, really, so I wouldn't get distracted) and I saw no one actually comment on this! For shame! The reason people believed that "being surrounded by fire" prevented the Black Death, was because of fire's "holy and spiritual powers". In reality, it prevented the Black Death because the fire kept the rats away, and the rats carried the fleas that spread the Black Death. So yeah, it DID, but not for the reason they thought.Lvl 64 Klutz said:
There is *ZERO* 'scientific evidence' that Jesus existed. There's more evidence that Luke Skywalker was a real person than Jesus Christ.
Something else that cracks me up is Homeopathic medecine. Basically, a Homeopathic remedy is more potent the LESS of the active ingrediant there is in it. So the 'most powerful' homeopathic medecines are... PURE WATER.
Something else that cracks me up is Homeopathic medecine. Basically, a Homeopathic remedy is more potent the LESS of the active ingrediant there is in it. So the 'most powerful' homeopathic medecines are... PURE WATER.
I suppose we could argue the existence of the christian diety untill we are blue in the face.
Personally, I try to set some ground rules when debating, such as not resorting to scripture or using "faith" as a base answer.Tangible evidence would convince everyone, but the rebuttal would be "everything that exist is proof !" or some such nonsense.Hypothetical theories abound.
My beleif is that a good christian, muslum, jew, satanist, doesn't need to argue the facts if what they hold thier beliefs true.A bad fanatic wants you to agree with them, they need your conviction to make their own conviction plausible. "Everyone agree's with it, so it must be true!"
If I owned an orphanage, I would make a religion based on that we are the imagination of a giant sleeping sea turtle. There would be a sacred text filled with laws and doctrine.I would qoute scripture to show parallels to life issues.I would make an alternate entity that clashes with the sea turtle, one that causes misery and suffering, and condemns your soul apon death for not believing in the turtle.There would be holy days and holidays where I would buy conformity through the issuing of wrapped up presents and chocolate sea turtles,(there will be eggs with the chocolate,because unlike bunnies, turtles make eggs).Then I would release the followers on an unsuspecting world.Conform through confusion.Building churches and finding followers.
Well, finding followers who believe everything that they read, because its status qou.
The people of the world will always fall into one of two catagories:1.People that do what they're told. Or 2.People that think for themselves.
Personally, I try to set some ground rules when debating, such as not resorting to scripture or using "faith" as a base answer.Tangible evidence would convince everyone, but the rebuttal would be "everything that exist is proof !" or some such nonsense.Hypothetical theories abound.
My beleif is that a good christian, muslum, jew, satanist, doesn't need to argue the facts if what they hold thier beliefs true.A bad fanatic wants you to agree with them, they need your conviction to make their own conviction plausible. "Everyone agree's with it, so it must be true!"
If I owned an orphanage, I would make a religion based on that we are the imagination of a giant sleeping sea turtle. There would be a sacred text filled with laws and doctrine.I would qoute scripture to show parallels to life issues.I would make an alternate entity that clashes with the sea turtle, one that causes misery and suffering, and condemns your soul apon death for not believing in the turtle.There would be holy days and holidays where I would buy conformity through the issuing of wrapped up presents and chocolate sea turtles,(there will be eggs with the chocolate,because unlike bunnies, turtles make eggs).Then I would release the followers on an unsuspecting world.Conform through confusion.Building churches and finding followers.
Well, finding followers who believe everything that they read, because its status qou.
The people of the world will always fall into one of two catagories:1.People that do what they're told. Or 2.People that think for themselves.
Scientific evidence or not, ask around, about 90% of the world, Christian, Atheist, and everything else, agree that Jesus Christ at least existed as a person.Grampy_bone said:
90% ? That seems rather too big. Although one can never estimate something like religion, i think these numbers look more appropriate:Lvl 64 Klutz said:
Christianity: 2.1 billion
Islam: 1.5 billion
Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion
Hinduism: 900 million
Chinese traditional religion: 394 million
Buddhism: 376 million
primal-indigenous: 300 million
African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million
Sikhism: 23 million
Juche: 19 million
Spiritism: 15 million
Judaism: 14 million
Baha'i: 7 million
Jainism: 4.2 million
Shinto: 4 million
Cao Dai: 4 million
Zoroastrianism: 2.6 million
Tenrikyo: 2 million
Neo-Paganism: 1 million
Unitarian-Universalism: 800 thousand
Rastafarianism: 600 thousand
Scientology: 500 thousand
Although Christianity is the worlds largest, it's only about 33% of the worlds religion.This also includes:Catholic,Protestant,Pentecostal,Monophysite,Jehovah's Witness,Quakers,etc,etc.
Islam is a close 21% and oddly enough its Non-religious at 16%, go figure.
These amounts we're made by the Christian Science Monitor as of 2005.In 3 years, maybe a slight difference, but not that much.
You missed the point of my post... whether Jesus is the Son of God or not wasn't what I was addressing, most religions still believe Jesus was a real person.
Jesus was the sixth god to be supposedly born on the 25th of December (although supposedly that was just made up, we don't know when he was born). He is the sixth legend/god person to be born of a virgin in history, coming in third in the boy teaching in the temple and a distant second in the walking on water and sermon on mount stakes. Any scientific evidence you claim to know of of the existence of god is pure baloney propaganda. I find it hard to believe that a non-christian scientist would every find that conclusion.
Remember kids, "scientific" testing with a preconceived notion in mind isn't science, its propaganda.
Yes Jesus (Greek for Joshua by the way, just shows how many times the bible has been translated and rewritten badly, he wasn't called Jesus, that simply an artifact of some stupid scribe).
Right, Icame here to fight alternative remedires and paranormal powers not Christians so i will now focus on those beasts:
Faith in pseudoscience is rampant. Everywhere you turn, intelligent people fully accept the existence of anything from psychic phenomena, to angels, to new age healing techniques, to ancient health schemes based on mysterious energy fields not understood by science. Most of these paranormal phenomena rely on "energy," and when the performers are asked to explain, they'll gladly lecture about the body's energy fields, the universe's energy fields, Chi, Prana, Orgone, negative energy, positive energy, and just about anything else that needs a familiar sounding word to explain and justify it. Clearly, there are too many loose interpretations of the word energy, to the point where most people probably have no idea exactly what energy really is.
I believe that if more people had a clear understanding of energy ? and it's not complicated ? there would be less susceptibility to pseudoscience, and more attention paid to actual technologies and methods that are truly constructive and useful.
A friend told me of her ability to perform minor healings, and her best explanation was that she drew energy from another dimension. She had recently rented What the Bleep Do We Know, so she was well prepared to explain that alternate dimensions and realities should be taken for granted, since science doesn't really know anything, and thus those things cannot be disproven. That's fine, I'll concede that she can make contact with another dimension: after all, the latest M theories posit that there are probably ten or eleven of them floating around, and I'll just hope that my friend's is not one of those that are collapsed into impossibly small spaces. What I was really interested in was the nature of this vaguely defined energy that she could contact.
I asked what type of energy is it, and how is it stored? Is it heat? Is it a spinning flywheel? Is it an explosive compound? Is it food? These are examples of actual ways that energy can be stored.
In popular New Age culture, "energy" has somehow become a noun unto itself. "Energy" is considered to be literally like a glowing, hovering, shimmering cloud, from which adepts can draw power, and feel rejuvenated. Imagine a vaporous creature from the original Star Trek series, and you'll have a good idea of what New Agers think energy is.
In fact, energy is not really a noun at all. Energy is a measurement of something's ability to perform work. Given this context, when spiritualists talk about your body's energy fields, they're really saying nothing that's even remotely meaningful. Yet this kind of talk has become so pervasive in our society that the vast majority of Americans accept that energy exists as a self-contained force, floating around in glowing clouds, and can be commanded by spiritualist adepts to do just about anything.
There is well known authority for the simple, concrete, scientific definition of energy. Take Einstein's equation, E=mc2, that every schoolchild knows but so few spend the 30 seconds it takes to understand. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Simplify it. Mass can be expressed in grams, and speed can be expressed in meters per second. Thus, an object's energy equals the amount of work it takes to move a few grams a few meters in a few seconds. Energy is a measurement of work. If I lift a rock, I'm inputting enough potential energy to dent the surface of the table one centimeter when I drop it. The calories of chemical potential energy that my bloodstream absorbs when I eat a Power Bar charge up my muscles enough to dig two hundred pounds of dirt in my garden. Nowhere did Einstein discuss hovering glowing clouds, or fields of mystical power generated by human spirits.
When spiritualists discuss energy, don't blindly accept what they're saying simply because energy is a word you're familiar with, and that sounds scientific. In many cases, their usage of the word is meaningless. When you hear the word "energy" casually used to explain a mystical force or capability, require clarification. Require that the energy be defined. Is it heat? Is it a spinning flywheel?
Here's a good test. When you hear the word "energy" used in a spiritual or paranormal sense, substitute the phrase "measurable work capability." Does the usage still make sense? Are you actually being given any information that supports the claim being made? Remember, energy itself is not the thing being measured: energy is the measurement of work performed or of potential.
Take the following claim of Kundalini Yoga as an example: "The release and ascent of the dormant spiritual energy enables the aspirant to transcend the effects of the elements and achieve consciousness." This would be a great thing if energy was indeed that shimmering cloud that can go wherever it's needed and perform miracles. But it's not, so in this case, we substitute the phrase "measurable work capability" and find that the sentence is not attempting to measure or quantify anything other than the word "energy" itself. We have a "dormant spiritual measurable work capability," and no further information. That's pretty vague, isn't it? For this claim to have any merit, they must at least describe how this energy is being stored or manifested. Is it potential energy stored in the chemistry of fat cells? Is it heat that can spread through the body? Is it a measurable amount of electromagnetism, and if so, where's the magnet? In any event, it must be measurable and precisely quantifiable, or it can't be called energy, by definition.
There's a good reason why you don't hear medical doctors or pharmacists talking about energy fields: it's meaningless. I think it's generally good policy to remain open minded and be ready to hear claims that involve energy, but approach them skeptically, and scientifically. The next time you hear such a claim, substitute the phrase "measurable work capability" and you'll be well equipped to separate the silly from the solid.
-------------------
Today we're going to head into the bathroom and suck the toxins out of our bodies through our feet and through our bowels, and achieve a wonderful sense of wellness that medical science just hasn't caught onto yet. Today's topic is the myth of detoxifixation, as offered for sale by alternative practitioners and herbalists everywhere.
To better understand this phenomenon, it's necessary to define what they mean by toxins. Are they bacteria? Chemical pollutants? Trans fats? Heavy metals? To avoid being tested, they leave this pretty vague. Actual medical treatments will tell you exactly what they do and how they do it. Alternative detoxification therapies don't do either one. They pretty much leave it up to the imagination of the patient to invent their own toxins. Most people who seek alternative therapy believe themselves to be afflicted by some kind of self-diagnosed poison; be it industrial chemicals, McDonald's cheeseburgers, or fluoridated water. If the marketers leave their claims vague, a broader spectrum of patients will believe that the product will help them. And, of course, the word "toxin" is sufficiently scientific-sounding that it's convincing enough by itself to many people.
Let's assume that you work in a mine or a chemical plant and had some vocational accident, and fear that you might have heavy metal poisoning. What should you do? Any responsible person will go to a medical doctor for a blood test to find out for certain whether they have such poisoning. A person who avoids this step, because they prefer not to hear that the doctor can't find anything, is not a sick person. He is a person who wants to be sick. Moreover, he wants to be sick in such a way that he can take control and self-medicate. He wants an imaginary illness, caused by imaginary toxins.
Now it's fair for you to stop me at this point and call me out on my claim that these toxic conditions are imaginary. I will now tell you why I say that, and then as always, you should judge for yourself.
Let's start with one of the more graphic detoxification methods, gruesomely pictured on web sites and in chain emails. It's a bowel cleansing pill, said to be herbal, which causes your intestines to produce long, rubbery, hideous looking snakes of bowel movements, which they call mucoid plaque. There are lots of pictures of these on the Internet, and sites that sell these pills are a great place to find them. Look at DrNatura.com, BlessedHerbs.com, and AriseAndShine.com, just for a start. Imagine how terrifying it would be to actually see one of those come out of your body. If you did, it would sure seem to confirm everything these web sites have warned about toxins building up in your intestines. But there's more to it. As it turns out, any professional con artist would be thoroughly impressed to learn the secrets of mucoid plaque (and, incidentally, the term mucoid plaque was invented by these sellers; there is no such actual medical condition). These pills consist mainly of bentonite, an absorbent, expanding clay similar to kitty litter. Combined with psyllium, used in the production of mucilage polymer, bentonite forms a rubbery cast of your intestines when taken internally, mixed of course with whatever else your body is excreting. Surprise, a giant rubbery snake of toxins in your toilet.
It's important to note that the only recorded instances of these "mucoid plaque" snakes in all of medical history come from the toilets of the victims of these cleansing pills. No gastroenterologist has ever encountered one in tens of millions of endoscopies, and no pathologist has ever found one during an autopsy. They do not exist until you take such a pill to form them. The pill creates the very condition that it claims to cure. And the results are so graphic and impressive that no victim would ever think to argue with the claim.
Victims, did I call them? Creating rubber casts of your bowels might be gross but I haven't seen that it's particularly dangerous, so why are they victims? A one month supply of these pills costs $88 from the web sites I mentioned. $88 for a few pennies worth of kitty litter in a pretty bottle promising herbal and organic cleansing. Yeah, they're victims.
It's already been widely reported that alternative practitioners who provide colon cleansing with tubes and liquids have killed a number of their customers by causing infections and perforated bowels, and for this reason the FDA has made it illegal to sell such equipment, except for use in medical colon cleansing to prepare for radiologic endoscopic examinations. There is no legally sold colon cleansing equipment approved for general well being or detoxification.
As usual, the alternative practitioners stay one step ahead of the law. There are a number of electrical foot bath products on the market. The idea is that you stick your feet in the bath of salt water, usually with some herbal or homeopathic additive, plug it in and switch it on, and soak your feet. After a while the water turns a sickly brown, and this is claimed to be the toxins that have been drawn out of your body through your feet. One tester found that his water turned brown even when he did not put his feet in. The reason is that electrodes in the water corrode via eletrolysis, putting enough oxidized iron into the water to turn it brown. When reporter Ben Goldacre published these results in the Guardian Unlimited online news, some of the marketers of these products actually changed their messaging to admit this was happening ? but again, staying one step ahead ? now claim that their product is not about detoxification, it's about balancing the body's energy fields: Another meaningless, untestable claim.
But detoxifying through the feet didn't end there. A newcomer to the detoxification market is Kinoki foot pads, available at BuyKinoki.com. These are adhesive gauze patches that you stick to the sole of your foot at night, and they claim to "draw" "toxins" from your body. They also claim that all Japanese people have perfect health, and the reason is that they use Kinoki foot pads to detoxify their bodies, a secret they've been jealously guarding from medical science for hundreds of years. A foolish claim like this is demonstrably false on every level, and should raise a huge red flag to any critical reader. Nowhere in any of their marketing materials do they say what these alleged toxins are, or what mechanism might cause them to move from your body into the adhesive pad.
Kinoki foot pads contain unpublished amounts of vinegar, tourmaline, chitin, and other unspecified ingredients. Tourmaline is a semi-precious gemstone that's inert and not biologically reactive, so it has no plausible function. Chitin is a type of polymer used in gauze bandages and medical sutures, so naturally it's part of any gauze product. They probably mention it because some alternative practitioners believe that chitin is a "fat attractor", a pseudoscientific claim which has never been supported by any evidence or plausible hypothesis. I guess they hope that we will infer by extension that chitin also attracts "toxins" out of the body. Basically the Kinoki foot pads are gauze bandages with vinegar. Vinegar has many folk-wisdom uses when applied topically, such as treating acne, sunburn, warts, dandruff, and as a folk antibiotic. But one should use caution: Vinegar can cause chemical burns on infants, and the American Dietetic Association has tracked cases of home vinegar applications to the foot causing deep skin ulcers after only two hours.
Since the Kinoki foot pads are self-adhesive, peeling them away removes the outermost layer of dead skin cells. And since they are moist, they loosen additional dead cells when left on for a while. So it's a given that the pads will look brown when peeled from your foot, exactly like any adhesive tape would; though this effect is much less dramatic than depicted on the TV commercials, depending on how dirty your feet are. And, as they predict, this color will diminish over subsequent applications, as fewer and fewer of your dead, dirty skin cells remain. There is no magic detoxification needed to explain this effect. (Later news: In fact, Kinoki footpads contain powdered wood vinegar, which always turns brownish black when exposed to moisture, such as sweat. - BD)
Anyone interested in detoxifying their body might think about paying a little more attention to their body and less attention to the people trying to get their money. The body already has nature's most effective detoxification system. It's called the liver. The liver changes the chemical structure of foreign compounds so they can be filtered out of the blood by the kidneys, which then excrete them in the urine. I am left wondering why the alternative practitioners never mention this option to their customers. It's all-natural and proven effective. Is it ironic that the only people who will help you manage this all-natural option are the medical doctors? Certainly your naturopath won't. He wants to sell you some klunky half-legal hardware.
Why is it that so many people are more comfortable self-medicating for conditions that exist only in advertisements, than they are simply taking their doctor's advice? It's because doctors are burdened with the need to actually practice medicine. They won't hide bad news from you or make up easy answers to please you. But that's what people want: The easy answers promised by advertisements and alternative practitioners. They want the fantasy of being in complete personal control of what goes on inside their bodies. A doctor won't lie to you and say that a handful of herbal detoxification pills will cure anything that's wrong with you; but since that's the solution many people want, there's always someone willing to sell it.
Decide on your stance after checking what is real and what is hoey:
http://skeptoid.com/
Remember kids, "scientific" testing with a preconceived notion in mind isn't science, its propaganda.
Yes Jesus (Greek for Joshua by the way, just shows how many times the bible has been translated and rewritten badly, he wasn't called Jesus, that simply an artifact of some stupid scribe).
Right, Icame here to fight alternative remedires and paranormal powers not Christians so i will now focus on those beasts:
Faith in pseudoscience is rampant. Everywhere you turn, intelligent people fully accept the existence of anything from psychic phenomena, to angels, to new age healing techniques, to ancient health schemes based on mysterious energy fields not understood by science. Most of these paranormal phenomena rely on "energy," and when the performers are asked to explain, they'll gladly lecture about the body's energy fields, the universe's energy fields, Chi, Prana, Orgone, negative energy, positive energy, and just about anything else that needs a familiar sounding word to explain and justify it. Clearly, there are too many loose interpretations of the word energy, to the point where most people probably have no idea exactly what energy really is.
I believe that if more people had a clear understanding of energy ? and it's not complicated ? there would be less susceptibility to pseudoscience, and more attention paid to actual technologies and methods that are truly constructive and useful.
A friend told me of her ability to perform minor healings, and her best explanation was that she drew energy from another dimension. She had recently rented What the Bleep Do We Know, so she was well prepared to explain that alternate dimensions and realities should be taken for granted, since science doesn't really know anything, and thus those things cannot be disproven. That's fine, I'll concede that she can make contact with another dimension: after all, the latest M theories posit that there are probably ten or eleven of them floating around, and I'll just hope that my friend's is not one of those that are collapsed into impossibly small spaces. What I was really interested in was the nature of this vaguely defined energy that she could contact.
I asked what type of energy is it, and how is it stored? Is it heat? Is it a spinning flywheel? Is it an explosive compound? Is it food? These are examples of actual ways that energy can be stored.
In popular New Age culture, "energy" has somehow become a noun unto itself. "Energy" is considered to be literally like a glowing, hovering, shimmering cloud, from which adepts can draw power, and feel rejuvenated. Imagine a vaporous creature from the original Star Trek series, and you'll have a good idea of what New Agers think energy is.
In fact, energy is not really a noun at all. Energy is a measurement of something's ability to perform work. Given this context, when spiritualists talk about your body's energy fields, they're really saying nothing that's even remotely meaningful. Yet this kind of talk has become so pervasive in our society that the vast majority of Americans accept that energy exists as a self-contained force, floating around in glowing clouds, and can be commanded by spiritualist adepts to do just about anything.
There is well known authority for the simple, concrete, scientific definition of energy. Take Einstein's equation, E=mc2, that every schoolchild knows but so few spend the 30 seconds it takes to understand. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Simplify it. Mass can be expressed in grams, and speed can be expressed in meters per second. Thus, an object's energy equals the amount of work it takes to move a few grams a few meters in a few seconds. Energy is a measurement of work. If I lift a rock, I'm inputting enough potential energy to dent the surface of the table one centimeter when I drop it. The calories of chemical potential energy that my bloodstream absorbs when I eat a Power Bar charge up my muscles enough to dig two hundred pounds of dirt in my garden. Nowhere did Einstein discuss hovering glowing clouds, or fields of mystical power generated by human spirits.
When spiritualists discuss energy, don't blindly accept what they're saying simply because energy is a word you're familiar with, and that sounds scientific. In many cases, their usage of the word is meaningless. When you hear the word "energy" casually used to explain a mystical force or capability, require clarification. Require that the energy be defined. Is it heat? Is it a spinning flywheel?
Here's a good test. When you hear the word "energy" used in a spiritual or paranormal sense, substitute the phrase "measurable work capability." Does the usage still make sense? Are you actually being given any information that supports the claim being made? Remember, energy itself is not the thing being measured: energy is the measurement of work performed or of potential.
Take the following claim of Kundalini Yoga as an example: "The release and ascent of the dormant spiritual energy enables the aspirant to transcend the effects of the elements and achieve consciousness." This would be a great thing if energy was indeed that shimmering cloud that can go wherever it's needed and perform miracles. But it's not, so in this case, we substitute the phrase "measurable work capability" and find that the sentence is not attempting to measure or quantify anything other than the word "energy" itself. We have a "dormant spiritual measurable work capability," and no further information. That's pretty vague, isn't it? For this claim to have any merit, they must at least describe how this energy is being stored or manifested. Is it potential energy stored in the chemistry of fat cells? Is it heat that can spread through the body? Is it a measurable amount of electromagnetism, and if so, where's the magnet? In any event, it must be measurable and precisely quantifiable, or it can't be called energy, by definition.
There's a good reason why you don't hear medical doctors or pharmacists talking about energy fields: it's meaningless. I think it's generally good policy to remain open minded and be ready to hear claims that involve energy, but approach them skeptically, and scientifically. The next time you hear such a claim, substitute the phrase "measurable work capability" and you'll be well equipped to separate the silly from the solid.
-------------------
Today we're going to head into the bathroom and suck the toxins out of our bodies through our feet and through our bowels, and achieve a wonderful sense of wellness that medical science just hasn't caught onto yet. Today's topic is the myth of detoxifixation, as offered for sale by alternative practitioners and herbalists everywhere.
To better understand this phenomenon, it's necessary to define what they mean by toxins. Are they bacteria? Chemical pollutants? Trans fats? Heavy metals? To avoid being tested, they leave this pretty vague. Actual medical treatments will tell you exactly what they do and how they do it. Alternative detoxification therapies don't do either one. They pretty much leave it up to the imagination of the patient to invent their own toxins. Most people who seek alternative therapy believe themselves to be afflicted by some kind of self-diagnosed poison; be it industrial chemicals, McDonald's cheeseburgers, or fluoridated water. If the marketers leave their claims vague, a broader spectrum of patients will believe that the product will help them. And, of course, the word "toxin" is sufficiently scientific-sounding that it's convincing enough by itself to many people.
Let's assume that you work in a mine or a chemical plant and had some vocational accident, and fear that you might have heavy metal poisoning. What should you do? Any responsible person will go to a medical doctor for a blood test to find out for certain whether they have such poisoning. A person who avoids this step, because they prefer not to hear that the doctor can't find anything, is not a sick person. He is a person who wants to be sick. Moreover, he wants to be sick in such a way that he can take control and self-medicate. He wants an imaginary illness, caused by imaginary toxins.
Now it's fair for you to stop me at this point and call me out on my claim that these toxic conditions are imaginary. I will now tell you why I say that, and then as always, you should judge for yourself.
Let's start with one of the more graphic detoxification methods, gruesomely pictured on web sites and in chain emails. It's a bowel cleansing pill, said to be herbal, which causes your intestines to produce long, rubbery, hideous looking snakes of bowel movements, which they call mucoid plaque. There are lots of pictures of these on the Internet, and sites that sell these pills are a great place to find them. Look at DrNatura.com, BlessedHerbs.com, and AriseAndShine.com, just for a start. Imagine how terrifying it would be to actually see one of those come out of your body. If you did, it would sure seem to confirm everything these web sites have warned about toxins building up in your intestines. But there's more to it. As it turns out, any professional con artist would be thoroughly impressed to learn the secrets of mucoid plaque (and, incidentally, the term mucoid plaque was invented by these sellers; there is no such actual medical condition). These pills consist mainly of bentonite, an absorbent, expanding clay similar to kitty litter. Combined with psyllium, used in the production of mucilage polymer, bentonite forms a rubbery cast of your intestines when taken internally, mixed of course with whatever else your body is excreting. Surprise, a giant rubbery snake of toxins in your toilet.
It's important to note that the only recorded instances of these "mucoid plaque" snakes in all of medical history come from the toilets of the victims of these cleansing pills. No gastroenterologist has ever encountered one in tens of millions of endoscopies, and no pathologist has ever found one during an autopsy. They do not exist until you take such a pill to form them. The pill creates the very condition that it claims to cure. And the results are so graphic and impressive that no victim would ever think to argue with the claim.
Victims, did I call them? Creating rubber casts of your bowels might be gross but I haven't seen that it's particularly dangerous, so why are they victims? A one month supply of these pills costs $88 from the web sites I mentioned. $88 for a few pennies worth of kitty litter in a pretty bottle promising herbal and organic cleansing. Yeah, they're victims.
It's already been widely reported that alternative practitioners who provide colon cleansing with tubes and liquids have killed a number of their customers by causing infections and perforated bowels, and for this reason the FDA has made it illegal to sell such equipment, except for use in medical colon cleansing to prepare for radiologic endoscopic examinations. There is no legally sold colon cleansing equipment approved for general well being or detoxification.
As usual, the alternative practitioners stay one step ahead of the law. There are a number of electrical foot bath products on the market. The idea is that you stick your feet in the bath of salt water, usually with some herbal or homeopathic additive, plug it in and switch it on, and soak your feet. After a while the water turns a sickly brown, and this is claimed to be the toxins that have been drawn out of your body through your feet. One tester found that his water turned brown even when he did not put his feet in. The reason is that electrodes in the water corrode via eletrolysis, putting enough oxidized iron into the water to turn it brown. When reporter Ben Goldacre published these results in the Guardian Unlimited online news, some of the marketers of these products actually changed their messaging to admit this was happening ? but again, staying one step ahead ? now claim that their product is not about detoxification, it's about balancing the body's energy fields: Another meaningless, untestable claim.
But detoxifying through the feet didn't end there. A newcomer to the detoxification market is Kinoki foot pads, available at BuyKinoki.com. These are adhesive gauze patches that you stick to the sole of your foot at night, and they claim to "draw" "toxins" from your body. They also claim that all Japanese people have perfect health, and the reason is that they use Kinoki foot pads to detoxify their bodies, a secret they've been jealously guarding from medical science for hundreds of years. A foolish claim like this is demonstrably false on every level, and should raise a huge red flag to any critical reader. Nowhere in any of their marketing materials do they say what these alleged toxins are, or what mechanism might cause them to move from your body into the adhesive pad.
Kinoki foot pads contain unpublished amounts of vinegar, tourmaline, chitin, and other unspecified ingredients. Tourmaline is a semi-precious gemstone that's inert and not biologically reactive, so it has no plausible function. Chitin is a type of polymer used in gauze bandages and medical sutures, so naturally it's part of any gauze product. They probably mention it because some alternative practitioners believe that chitin is a "fat attractor", a pseudoscientific claim which has never been supported by any evidence or plausible hypothesis. I guess they hope that we will infer by extension that chitin also attracts "toxins" out of the body. Basically the Kinoki foot pads are gauze bandages with vinegar. Vinegar has many folk-wisdom uses when applied topically, such as treating acne, sunburn, warts, dandruff, and as a folk antibiotic. But one should use caution: Vinegar can cause chemical burns on infants, and the American Dietetic Association has tracked cases of home vinegar applications to the foot causing deep skin ulcers after only two hours.
Since the Kinoki foot pads are self-adhesive, peeling them away removes the outermost layer of dead skin cells. And since they are moist, they loosen additional dead cells when left on for a while. So it's a given that the pads will look brown when peeled from your foot, exactly like any adhesive tape would; though this effect is much less dramatic than depicted on the TV commercials, depending on how dirty your feet are. And, as they predict, this color will diminish over subsequent applications, as fewer and fewer of your dead, dirty skin cells remain. There is no magic detoxification needed to explain this effect. (Later news: In fact, Kinoki footpads contain powdered wood vinegar, which always turns brownish black when exposed to moisture, such as sweat. - BD)
Anyone interested in detoxifying their body might think about paying a little more attention to their body and less attention to the people trying to get their money. The body already has nature's most effective detoxification system. It's called the liver. The liver changes the chemical structure of foreign compounds so they can be filtered out of the blood by the kidneys, which then excrete them in the urine. I am left wondering why the alternative practitioners never mention this option to their customers. It's all-natural and proven effective. Is it ironic that the only people who will help you manage this all-natural option are the medical doctors? Certainly your naturopath won't. He wants to sell you some klunky half-legal hardware.
Why is it that so many people are more comfortable self-medicating for conditions that exist only in advertisements, than they are simply taking their doctor's advice? It's because doctors are burdened with the need to actually practice medicine. They won't hide bad news from you or make up easy answers to please you. But that's what people want: The easy answers promised by advertisements and alternative practitioners. They want the fantasy of being in complete personal control of what goes on inside their bodies. A doctor won't lie to you and say that a handful of herbal detoxification pills will cure anything that's wrong with you; but since that's the solution many people want, there's always someone willing to sell it.
Decide on your stance after checking what is real and what is hoey:
http://skeptoid.com/
i really don't know where you were taught theology but you are definitely mistaken. there are drastic differences just between the various books of the apostles and that's just within the New Testament. i'd imagine the variations and differences get even more bizarre when you start examining the various iterations of the same books.thedrop2zer0 said:
hell, there are tons of books found amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls that weren't even included in the modern cannon that you consider the bible. i mean, did you know that there is even an Ebonics Bible? yup, the supposed word of God translated into urban slang and jive talk. if that and the King James edition doesn't dissprove your theory then i don't know what does.
oh, FYI, respected theologians understand the book of the apostles as altered versions of christ's gospel written specifically for their own congregation in order to address problems and vices that their church were going through.
For those of you who are tired of these long posts already just read these points:Grampy_bone said:
-Homeopathic medicine is 52 times medicinally pure, to guarantee one molecule of the active ingredient you would need more water than there is on earth.
-Even if you did have one molecule of stuff, it would be pointless because its usually the stuff that you need least like caffeine in sleeping pills because "like cures like"
-Shaking the stuff in the water supposedly leaves an essence of the stuff behind, this may have been a reasonable assumption back in the 1800's when homeopathy was invented but now we know about molecules its more or less bunk.
-Homeopathy has no basis infact and is the most obvious scam of the lot. Even if the homeopath believes it too.
For those who like reading the long version, knock yourselves out.
Today we're going to take a tiny sugar pill, infused with specially charged water, and cure our ills in a novel way. For today's topic is homeopathy, one of my favorite of the many popular alternative medicine systems. Homeopathy has a large following, but I suspect that a large number of its customers don't really understand what it is. For example, I asked two friends who are homeopathy users, on separate occasions, to tell me about it. By coincidence both were attempting to treat headaches. Both friends had the same general understanding of what homeopathy is: They said it was essentially an herbal remedy, and that the small pills they were taking contained some sort of herbal extract. They could not have been more wrong. I wonder if they would continue taking it if they knew what homeopathy really is.
Samuel Hahnemann was a German physician. In the late 1700's, all medical conditions were believed to be caused by an imbalance in the four basic bodily humors: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Conventional medical practice was to attempt to equalize these humors by such practices as bloodletting, purging, or leeching. Hahnemann observed that these practices often caused more problems than they solved, and so he set about developing a better, safer way to balance the four humors. He reasoned that the body may be able to balance its own humors, if given a sort of "kick start" by administering a small dose of whatever poison or toxin was thought to cause the imbalance. He called this the Law of Similars. The obvious problem was that administering poisons and toxins would kill the patient, so he devised a system of massively diluting the ingredients with water. Hahnemann claimed that greater dilutions had greater effect in balancing bodily humors, and he called this the Law of Infinitesimals. His dilutions were as high as 1 part in 1030. This proportion is vastly larger than one grain of sand in all the deserts and all the beaches and oceans on the Earth. He published his theory in 1807, and homeopathy was born.
And then Hahnemann did a very subtle, a very clever, little thing. He made up a word. The word he invented is allopathy. Allopathy is Hahnemann's name for all evidence-based medical sciences. That's right: every medical discipline you've ever heard of ? including internal medicine, oncology, neurology, cardiology, psychiatry, pathology, surgery, infectious disease, hematology, geriatrics, gastroenterology, ophthalmology, radiology, orthopedics, nephrology, urology, pharmacology, emergency medicine and critical care ? they're all simply allopathy. Allopathy is only one word, so it's no better than homeopathy. They're equals. You have the musings of one guy 200 years ago on one hand, and on the other you have everything medical science has taught hundreds of thousands of researchers since then. Homeopathy vs. allopathy. It's nice to be able to conveniently dismiss so much with just one word. This makes it possible to offer the innocent patient Door A or Door B. Knowing nothing further about either choice beyond its one-word name, the innocent victim will probably take whichever the practitioner advises.
Homeopathy shares one very important component with most other alternative medicine systems. It was developed a long time ago, by one man, during a time when almost nothing useful or true was known about medicine, and it is rigidly required to stay frozen in time with the same original ancient worldview. Homeopathy, like other alternative medicine systems, does not, cannot, must not grow, evolve, or improve as we learn more about the human body. If it did adapt to new knowledge, it would cease to be homeopathy and would be something different.
This ability to include and adapt to new knowledge is the central strength of modern medicine. When we learn new things about the body, when we find a better way to treat a condition, we adapt. We publish the results and we train doctors on the new techniques. Every day, the knowledge base that modern medicine is built upon grows. The collective experience of researchers and doctors grows. But for homeopathy, and other alternative medicine systems, the knowledge base stays frozen in 1807. AIDS drugs, for example, are so much better now than they were just ten years ago, and ten years from now, they'll be even better (there may even be a cure). But with homeopathy, AIDS is treated the same way that any unknown illness was treated in 1807: with a vial of water, possibly containing a few molecules of some compound that are hoped might stimulate a balance of bodily humors.
Dilutions of homeopathic products that are sold today usually range from 6X to 30X. This is homeopathy's system for measuring the dilution, and it doesn't mean 1 part in 6 or 1 part in 30. X represents the roman numeral 10. A 6X dilution means one part in 106, or one in one million. A 30X dilution means one part in 1030, or one followed by 30 zeros. A few products are even marketed using the C scale, roman numeral 100. 30C is 10030. That's a staggering number; it's 1 followed by 60 zeros, about the number of atoms in our galaxy. In 1807, they knew more about mathematics and chemistry than they did about medicine, and it was known that there is a maximum dilution possible in chemistry. Some decades later it was learned that this proportion is related to Avogadro's constant, about 6 × 1023. Beyond this limit, where many of Hahnemann's dilutions lay, they are in fact no longer dilutions but are chemically considered to be pure water. So Hahnemann designed a workaround. Hahnemann thought that if a solution was agitated enough, the water would retain a spiritual imprint of the original substance, and could then be diluted without limit. The water is often added to sugar pills for remedies designed to be taken in a pill form. So when you buy homeopathic pills sold today, you're actually buying sugar, water, or alcohol that's "channeling" (for lack of a better term) some described substance. The substance itself no longer remains, except for a few millionth-part molecules in the lowest dilutions.
Let's look again at Avogadro's number. 6 × 1023 atoms is called a mole, a term any chemistry student is familiar with. How big is that number? Well, if you had 500 sheets of paper, you'd have a stack about two and a half inches high, like a ream that you'd buy at the stationery store. If you had 6 × 1023 sheets of paper, your stack would reach all the way from the Earth to the Sun. And not only that: it would reach that distance four hundred million times. Think about that for a moment. One sheet of paper, in a stack that's 400,000,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. That's a typical homeopathic dilution. Sounds pretty potent, doesn't it?
One explanation made by some homeopaths is that it works the same way as a vaccine: putting a tiny amount of a disease-causing agent into the body ? not enough to cause the disease, but enough to stimulate the body's natural defenses into fighting off that disease. Well, this is indeed the way a vaccine works, but it's got nothing to do with the way Hahnemann defined homeopathy. Vaccines are used to prevent an illness which does not yet exist in the body by triggering the production of preventive antibodies; and homeopathy is used to fight a disease already in the body, in which case any antibodies would already be in production. The number of the antibodies triggered by a vaccine can be measured in the bloodstream, whereas homeopathy is not intended to, and does not, produce any measurable reaction. Vaccines insert inert versions of the disease-causing agents into the body, where homeopathic substances are the same as that which causes the disease. Finally and most obviously, vaccines contain a large and fully measurable amount of active ingredient, whereas homeopathic remedies contain no measurable active ingredient. So homeopathy can indeed be said to work just like a vaccine; well, at least, it works just like a spiritual imprint of a vaccine.
So why do so many people claim that it works, and swear by it? Homeopathy has been tested over and over again, and though most studies show its effects to be consistent with the placebo effect, a surprisingly large number of studies do show that homeopathy produces results superior to a placebo. But in every one of these cases, doubts have been raised about the quality of evidence in the studies. According to the National Institutes of Health, "Problems include weaknesses in design and/or reporting, choice of measuring techniques, small numbers of participants, and difficulties in replicating results." A favorite study of homeopaths is that of the British Medical Journal in 1991, a meta-analysis of 107 controlled trials over a 25 year period. The majority of the studies did show some positive results, and homeopaths stop there. They stop short of the Journal's final conclusion, which was "At the moment the evidence of clinical trials is positive but not sufficient to draw definitive conclusions because most of the trials are of low methodological quality and because of the unknown role of publication bias." If you need the term "publication bias" translated, it means that the studies showing positive results were conducted and/or published by the homeopathy industry. The British Medical Journal went on to say "This indicates that there is a legitimate case for further evaluation of homeopathy, but only by means of well performed trials."
Well, good luck to you, gentlemen. The UK Society of Homeopaths has stated "It has been established beyond doubt that the randomized controlled trial is not a fitting research tool with which to test homeopathy." In other words, homeopathy has given itself a Get Out of Jail Free card. Tests are not adequate to test them. If you perform a clinical trial, and find that homeopathy is no more effective than a placebo, the reason for the failure is that homeopathy should not be tested. Claimed immunity from scientific scrutiny should stand out as a huge red flag. When you hear anyone defend their claim by stating that its effect cannot be detected through testing, be skeptical.
The upside of homeopathy is that it's not going to hurt anyone, since it lacks any measurable active ingredients. And when treating conditions that are not life threatening, like headaches or fatigue, there's no harm done. There is massive harm done when practitioners or store owners recommend homeopathy as a replacement for real medical treatment when a serious illness exists. Be vigilant, and protect the health of your family, your friends, and yourself.
I don't write these all myself, all the ones ive posted in this thread come from http://skeptoid.com/
My own attempts have a more bullet pointed format
Actualy, a basic car is a lot more complicated then a basic rocket. Off topic herej-e-f-f-e-r-s said:
.I doubt that how thing work: even every sensible law system is based around the simple fact 'not guilty until proven otherwise'.jim_doki said:
Pointing out that there is no evidence that supports the oposite of what your saying is in my book a desperate move, since saying it doesn't prove anything as well, thereby being a bit hypocretic... and you won't convince anybody.
And that positive atoms repel other positive atoms. Bring on the misery!PurpleRain said:
Not realy, since evolution is only apliable to species where the weaker individuals die or have no chance of reproducingthe monopoly guy said:
. Humanity is hitting the genetic buffers right now.Would be quite the tourist attection though. 'And to your left, we see the great Charles Darwin, rolling over in his grave at the amazing speed of 3 revolutions per second, wich is mostly thanks to the internet'.
What isn't these days? No, seriously?the monopoly guy said:
So that's why religion is still here...thedrop2zer0 said:
two possible explenations:thedrop2zer0 said:
It helps to stone, burn or in any other fasionable way kill those who disagree. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying christianity is an agressive religion or that any christian is a murderer. Fact remains however, that in the past, not believing in christ (or disagreeing with what was written) was a certain way to get killed.
What if a few men just found they thought thesame, wrote a book about it, a few others wanted a piece of the action and joined in as well, wrote some stuff that could be added to the old writings...
And because I'm still not sure I'll get flamed for this:
If you realy believe your religion to be the true religion, then how come there are so many religions with everybody thinking thesame? I mean, doesn't this prove that religion is nothing more then fancy story telling?
Anyways, to the topic.
I don't realy mind stuff like 'chinese healing' as it is presented back where I live. It's all very spriritual. That to me means that it's bullshit, and with me a lot of people. I mean, it's a bit like J RPG's: either you're already fond of it, bought it and tried it out, or it's appeal to you is so low you need to dig for it.
What can piss me off though, are commercials that pretend to give you a good deal, but are realy just messing with you. Recently seen some commercials advertising with '20 mBit/s internet'. Sneaky bastards! Most people would asume that it means thesame as 20 mb per second, but a byte (as in MegaByte) ussualy contains 32 bits (quick calculation: 20,000,000 / 32 = 625,000), making it actualy 625 kB/s. That's just exploiting: you won't know it until you've done some research, and I doubt you'll do research because it says 'bit' instead of 'byte' when you don't know a lot about computers.
I'd like to add that there were several hundred gospels written on the life of Jesus Christ, and yet only four made it into the bible. Remember, the bible as we know it today is the group of books that some church patriarchs decided was the word of God. Trusting the bible means trusting (among other things) their judgment and honesty.BallPtPenTheif said:
Anyway, on to other topics:
The things that really disturb me are the scientific inaccuracies that people take for absolute fact. For instance, there's this ludicrous idea that humans only use 10% of their brains, which just so happens to be everyone's favorite thing to spout off when supporting psychic phenomena. People also believe that your hair and fingernails grow after you die, that natural blonds will be extinct within about 100 years, and my personal favorite, that memories can be stored in your DNA. (No, it's not just AC; I've had people actually tell me this, thinking it was true.)
Logical fallacy: Appeal to popularity.Lvl 64 Klutz said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_popularity
Lots of people believed that the sun rotates around the earth; that doesn't make them right.
That few doubt the historicity of Jesus is probably due to the fact that the church made a habit of killing anyone who did so.
If you really want the truth from the horse's mouth, just enroll in seminary school. They'll teach you the same thing; that the Bible is fiction, Jesus never existed and it's all ripped off from older religions.
Why do they do this? Because as Robert A. Heinlein once said, "Faith is for the congregation; it handicaps a priest." They need to know the truth so they can gloss over it and keep doubting parishiners putting money in the collection plate. They believe it's okay to tell lies as long as your goal is to help people. Like parents to their children.
There are documents other than the Bible that acknowledge the existence of Jesus (as a man, not necessarily as God or even as a prophet).
There was one Jewish historian who turned traitor and began helping the Romans when Judea tried to regain its sovereignty. I can't remember his name but I do know that he briefly mentioned Jesus and John the Baptist and refered to John as a good man. (By the way, the Jews HATED Christians at that time.)
The reason I bring this up is because I don't like people saying that Jesus simply did not exist. I'm fine if you say that you do or don't believe that Jesus was the Son of God, that's your belief and I have no right to challenge it.
However, saying that Jesus did not exist when there is so much evidence to the contrary seems ignorant to me.
Most historians acknowledge that there was a historical Buddha, there was a historical Muhammad and there was a historical Jesus. Why isn't anyone here questioning the existance of the founders of Islam and Buddhism?
I'm not saying that they posessed any kind of divinity, just that a real person must have been around to start these three religions.
There was one Jewish historian who turned traitor and began helping the Romans when Judea tried to regain its sovereignty. I can't remember his name but I do know that he briefly mentioned Jesus and John the Baptist and refered to John as a good man. (By the way, the Jews HATED Christians at that time.)
The reason I bring this up is because I don't like people saying that Jesus simply did not exist. I'm fine if you say that you do or don't believe that Jesus was the Son of God, that's your belief and I have no right to challenge it.
However, saying that Jesus did not exist when there is so much evidence to the contrary seems ignorant to me.
Most historians acknowledge that there was a historical Buddha, there was a historical Muhammad and there was a historical Jesus. Why isn't anyone here questioning the existance of the founders of Islam and Buddhism?
I'm not saying that they posessed any kind of divinity, just that a real person must have been around to start these three religions.
Well, Buddha did give us Monkey, and the nature of Monkey was Irrepressible!
Hinduism gave us Ganesh and Shiva. "Please do not feed my god a peanut!"
Hinduism gave us Ganesh and Shiva. "Please do not feed my god a peanut!"
yes there was a man called Yehoshua Ben Joseph and his brother Jacob Ben Joseph, they are commonly known as Jesus and his brother James, along with their cousin commonly called John the Baptist, they were leaders of a group called the eseenesBeowulf DW said:
now the eseenes had 2 rulers, a God-king and a Earth-king, John and succeeded by Jacob was the God-king and Yehoshua was the Earth-king. the eseenes also had a thing called "virgin births" and how this worked was male members of the group posed as "angels" and impregnated the women who had "devine" births. now the important thing was to have the children born on 2 specific days, the summer and winter solstice, notice John the Baptist day is around the summer solstice?
they had certain phrases that we don't use often anymore such as "water to wine" this means to bless what you are drinking and there by turning it into wine, even tho it could still be just plain old water. the other is "amongst the dead" or "rising from amongst the dead", the dead in this instance means "someone not of your group"
if you follow what Jesus was doing he was trying to make a grand entrance and have the Jewish ppl think of him as the king of the jews. this failed miserably as we all know.
Jacob actually lead a revolt a few years after Jesus and John died, he was actually very well liked. there is actually tales of Jacob throwing out someone known as the great deceiver who was possibly Saul from amongst the eseenes because of things he was saying about his brother.
and as for the historian you are looking for his name is Josephus
Beowulf DW said:
Actually, calling Jesus real in the extreme vaccuum of evidence to his existance is ignorant. Bringing up Buddha and Muhammad is a logical fallacy; their historicity are separate issues with no bearing on this arguement.
There were no authors alive during the life of Jesus who wrote about him. None. Zip. Zero. Zilch.
The earliest part of the new testament are the epistles. These letters directly contradict the gospels and omit all the major details, such as the virgin birth, miracles, crucifixtion, etc.
No other third-party writings exist from Jesus's period which mention him AT ALL. The one you are thinking about is the Josephus account. Josephus was a jewish historian who was born after christ's death (making his account second-hand). In one book he wrote a paragraph which mentions Jesus. The problem is this paragraph was 'discovered' in the 3rd century by a Catholic bishop. Why was it not present in any book before this time? Why did it take three centuries for anyone to mention it? Why was it so dissimilar to Josephus's other writings? We'll never know for sure, but coincidentally at the time the church had a doctrine known as 'Pious Fraud' which stated it was perfectly okay to forge documents and falsify history if it supported the church's goals and dogma.
There are three other accounts which are used as proof of the historical Jesus. As before, none of them were written by anyone alive during the life of Jesus. They are incredibly vague and make one or two line mentions of people whose names sound sorta like Christ. Calling them proof is like saying gum wrappers are proof that Bazooka Joe is a real person. Again, none of them were written during Jesus' 'life' so it's moot.
This argument isn't new. The church was constantly heckled by critics in its infancy who called their messiah a myth and their dogma a rip off of older mystery religions and sun-god legends. It happened so often the church adopted the doctrine known as 'Diabolical Mimicry.' This states that the Devil saw the coming of christ and created the false religions ahead of time to preemptively discredit Him. Naturally this was seen as complete BS, so the church eventually switched to their more effective methods of destroying the records of the older religions and killing people who questioned them. This worked quite well and now it's an accepted 'fact' that Jesus is real and the only debate is whether or not he did this or that. Utterly superfluous really; there never was a Jesus Christ in the first place.
On that earlier subject; there are third party accounts of Muhammed written by people alive during the time. They differ drastically from the Qur'an, describing him as an alcoholic, wife-beating pedophile.
1) I only mentioned Buddha and Muhammed to offer some comparisons and as such they DO have a bearing on this argument. If it's true of those two religions (or at least just Islam) it might be true of Christianity as well.
2) If you don't trust the Church (I don't blame you), how can you trust whatever source you're using? If the Church burned the older documents and killed the questioners, what information are you going on? If it's information obtained recently through archeological digs and such, then by your own reasoning it's useless because this information was recorded after the fact.
3) Just because they opposed the Church, that doesn't mean that the opposers automatically told the truth. They may have had their own motivations, say...undermining an entity that they saw as a threat.
2) If you don't trust the Church (I don't blame you), how can you trust whatever source you're using? If the Church burned the older documents and killed the questioners, what information are you going on? If it's information obtained recently through archeological digs and such, then by your own reasoning it's useless because this information was recorded after the fact.
3) Just because they opposed the Church, that doesn't mean that the opposers automatically told the truth. They may have had their own motivations, say...undermining an entity that they saw as a threat.