http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/superhor.htm

I had a rich imagination as a child. I’d dream up fantasy creatures at the bottom of the garden. I’d then construct elaborate traps to capture one and perhaps make it my pet. After numerous failures my nascent scientific mind began to wonder if they really existed.

Another early scientific experiment involved telepathy. I tied my little sister to a tree and promised immediate release if she could reveal which cards I was holding. The experiment failed and an intefering variable arrived in the form of angry parents.

As an adult I still love Star Wars and Jurassic Park. I’d love to one day write science fiction or fantasy. I find the natural world astonishing. Yes, the supernatural world fascinated and thrilled me for many years. I jumped from religion to ghosts to magic to psychic phenomena with glee – but invariably the realization struck home that there simply wasn’t anything there. I think it’s called growing up.

In fact, just a few Monday’s again a friend and I went to one of the NYC Monday Night Magic shows that skeptic Jaime Ian Swiss is apart of. One of the other performers did a trick that I was able to figure out based on my recent readings about how magic uses misdirection. So I kept my eyes on exactly where the magician was directing everyone else away from and saw the trick happen before my very eyes. Sure I didn’t get the same experience as most of the other spectators but I’ve had that experience before. Now my appreciation came more from respecting the artistry of a good trick done well. I think it could be argued that this is a deeper appreciation than simply being mystified and never getting the solution.

And of course even some of the biggest names in magic who are also skeptics have from time to time revealed how particular tricks are done. And now that we live in the information age, it’s not nearly as hard to find the solutions to many magic tricks anyway. You can even buy books by the magicians themselves that teach the craft on Amazon. It just seems silly to me that so much of the skeptical movement chooses to handicap itself by just accepting this tradition that probably goes back to the days where magicians had no hesitation about passing themselves off as genuine spiritualists, possibly designed as a means of keeping the scam going.

And when I mean by handicapping ourselves I’m thinking of videos I’ve seen of Randi where he was suggesting that guys who claim to talk to the dead are using simple magic tricks but stopped short of giving a lesson on how the trick is actually done, something that I feel would at least do as much short-term damage to these frauds as Randi’s initial exposing of Peter Popoff. If more people knew how to do this stuff, they would not be so easily impressed or fooled. Plus they might gain a new enjoyment by then performing the tricks on their friends.

And finally, I have a sneaking suspicion that the magic world would manage to still thrive in a world where more people knew the tricks. People like a good show. Hell, it might even push the magicians to work that much harder to revolutionize the industry with newer and increasingly more innovative ways to fool people.

With that said, I see Halloween as a once-yearly license to engage with superstitious/irrational fears in their own terms.

Maybe you should try to shift your framework totally to entertainment. I used to work at a major theme park, and we had to constantly lie to guests to keep up the ‘story’. Lie about real things, like that the guests were indeed digging fossil dinosaur and mammoth bones out of the ground, even though Orlando is pretty much all very recent carbonate rocks and the bones were fake. I had to reframe it as though I were in a play or movie, and the guests were playing along (of course, most of them weren’t in on the game). You are an entertainer, providing a days’ amusement to people, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Forgive the analogy, but a lap dance is just a lap dance.

Are you sure you aren’t a member of Congress as well? :P

I was Wiccan for twelve years; Halloween was a religious holiday for me. Now, I’m dressing up as a zombie with a zombie dog.