Yes, it´s time for a rant about FC again!
I was genuinely shocked when doing on-line research about FC and its derivatives. The technique is *obviously* fake. Even pro-FC´s documentaries can´t hide the fact that the poor autists are being heavily prompted by the facilitators...and often get the wrong answers anyway. Yet, FC is a world-wide movemennt?! Or cult. The implications are staggering.
Your local unfriendly Skeptic association often says that people (ordinary plebs) simply aren´t good observers or reliable eye witnesses. The FC phenomenon confirms this thesis *in freakin´spades*. Thousands of people apparently think they can communicate with their severely autistic children on a daily basis with this technique. And yet it´s all a puppet show and a delusion. It´s not like seeing a Bigfoot in the forest just once.
This seems to have consequences for how we look at eye witness reports of the supernatural. For instance Fatima. Or the 500 brothers who supposedly saw the risen Christ all at once after his resurrection. Or...anything really.
But then it struck me. The FC cult is secular (there is a New Age version, too, but the mainline FCers seem to be secular). So we have a case where thousands of people see a *natural* phenomenon which simply isn´t there. Which reminds me of C S Lewis´ quip that while most reports of the supernatural are false, most reports about natural events are also false. Indeed! Most things we see are lies.
But if that´s the case, we can´t be sure that the supernatural isn´t real. Maybe it still lurks somewhere out there...
The quest continues.
I must be showing my age. I can't for the life of me figure out what FC refers to!
ReplyDeleteOh, sorry. It means "Facilitated Communication". See here:
ReplyDeletehttps://ashtarbookblog.blogspot.com/2026/03/facilitated-control.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMn_sDCFAuI
Watched most of the 1993 feature. My heart goes out to the 'autists' their families and caregivers. And we thought we had problems. The issue does appear to be manipulated, your premise is there is some kind of telepathic connection between facilitator and subject? Then there is 'mass hypnosis'. Early one morning I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye on the kitchen floor. I huge water bug cockroach sort of insect. (No, I wasn't drinking alcohol in those days!) I was never able to verify it and never saw it or anything like it again. I assumed I had a sort of hallucination, filling in the blanks, or the case of the mind closing the missing arc in a circle. So transpose that to the "500 brothers" or UFO sightings, or the Fatima 'revelations' (not to disparage Medjugorje) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Medjugorje
ReplyDeleteand now, relating that predisposition of the human mind to make sense out of a mystery, which is how we have "modernized" as far as we have. Who was it, Earl Nightingale? that said everything starts out as an idea? And "we become what we think about." And so forth.