Opposition to Spindrift was fierce.
What is your best guess why the atheist, the anti-prayer and the anti-paranormal crowd opposed Spindrift?
Co-founder of Spindrift, Bruce Klingbeil, said that besides the belief that the so-called quasi-research would throw the world into a pre-scientific era, the skeptics of prayer seem bothered by the subtext that the forces which maintain harmony in the universe are spiritual forces.
Materialism
Scientific skeptics and the atheists may say that prayer is an ancient superstition and a religious delusion. Some scientists may toss prayer into the unprovable pile. At best, science might conclude that intention and prayer are essentially the same influence as the placebo effect and the power of heightened imagination. That's it. Nothing more.
Physical science deals in laws, physical laws. For atheists and most scientists, material laws are as far as you can go to determine if there is anything else is in the universe. Atheists and most scientists say that physical laws show no evidence of an outside consciousness, law, or purpose guiding the universe or any organizing principles resonating behind the scenes.
Material laws rely on order. If the Divine is law, then the Divine is order, too. In league with others who build bridges between spirituality and science, Spindrift's work suggests that there are Divine laws of order that embrace the material laws and forces. The Divine laws, through the material laws we understand, maintain a sense of order in the physical universe. When some prayers and acts of compassion introduce changes and shifts, these shifts suggest that some prayers can be a conduit to the Divine laws that bring about examples of purpose and order in the physical world.
The blue and red pills
Both believers and skeptics use the symbolism from The Matrix. People who take the blue pill are brain washed. They can't think for themselves. Everything they repeat is a meme or from inaccurate information. People who take the red pill have a realistic picture of reality. They know the truth about how most things actually operate. Knowing the truth can be depressing sometimes especially when you can rarely have a decent conversation with your good friends who took the blue pills.
Opposition and humor
The skeptics and a number of believers were opposed to the experiments of Spindrift. The skeptics were scientifically minded in their dismissals. The believers were not happy about the taboo of testing scared prayer:
1) For the skeptics, Spindrift promoted ignorance and the mythology that prayer does something.
2) For the believers, their denunciations ranged from saying testing prayer was "tempting the Lord," to "testing is blasphemy," to "faith doesn't need any scientific evidence," to "What if the experiments don't work?," to "Satan is in back of all the Spindrift experiments."
There is a joke about the religious people who believe Spindrift is of Satan. They believe Spindrift's experiments of prayer are not demonstrations but are demon-strations. A subtitle of Bill Sweet's Spindrift book is Agents of Science or Satan?
Another joke goes that the believer says the source of mathematics is Divine. The atheist says the source of mathematics is a textbook.
It bolsters the atheists and skeptics when they diagnosis people who are emotionally disturbed who are attracted to work in religion and parapsychology probably more than in any other field. The skeptics and atheists revel over the fraud going on with most reality shows about psychic activities, the misinformation about the genuine accomplishments by religion and consciousness scientists, the control that religion and psychic claims have over people's lives, and uncheckable healers and psychics making money.
Above describes the surface evidence of why consciousness studies don't have much of a chance of success.
Spindrift describes the subsurface evidence. Spindrift postulates that our subconscious Defense Mechanisms have ganged up on us. These DMs have successfully disrupted progress in explaining spiritual and psychic effects going on in our world. Learn more about the Defense Mechanisms sabotaging our awareness of psychic phenomena on the Theory page, Theory 9.
Opposition to a Spindrift Experiment
A test that creates crosscurrents in the mind of a healer.
The following paragraphs are from pages 185 -186 of A Journey into Prayer. The results of this test suggest that we are unconsciously affected by our Western cultural belief that "more is better, bigger is better."...
An experiment with yeast was sidelined because of criticism that the experiment deliberately harmed yeast. Yeast was mixed in lukewarm water. A soldering gun was plugged into a random number generator in a computer. The random number generator controlled how often electricity flowed to the soldering gun. The generator produced zeroes and ones which switched on the soldering gun an average of 50% of the time.
The heat from the gun harmed the yeast. Spindrift people prayed to observe if the time the soldering gun was on could be shortened. Several test runs showed no effect on shortening the time.
Another person prayed and the gun stayed on more than 50% and did more harm to the yeast. Apparently the unconscious assumption was “more time must be better.” Our cultural heritage that “more and bigger is better” was factored into prayers tested at Spindrift.
When Bruce Klingbeil prayed for the yeast, an unexpected phenomenon occurred. The soldering gun turned on a little more than 50% of the time. However, the yeast itself did not get hot or harmed. Bruce’s loving thoughts protected the yeast from harm in this random number generator test involving deliberate harm.
Bruce was an experienced Christian Science practitioner. His unexpected results raised profound questions about cross purposes in a healer’s mind. Can a healer’s non goal-directed thought predominate to protect the yeast while his “bigger is better” thought lengthens the time the soldering gun stays on? If a healer decides to pray to shorten the time, is this decision to yield less heat goal-directed or non goal-directed?
John was excited about what could be learned from this HEATED yeast test. Then John said something to me like “We have enough people hating us now without asking for more hatred!” This test was literally put on the back burner.
This heated test was no worse than baking bread with yeast. Would the same protestors walk into a bakery and burst into tears over killed yeast? Would they throw themselves in front of a lawn mower because the grass was going to be cut down? No, but this specific Spindrift test upset them.
