Erisian wrote:
You must be easily confused dd.
Nope, can't really say I am. Sorry.
Erisian wrote:
Is an open minded skeptic like me a non-raving lunatic?
Well, it depends on your definition of "open minded".
Erisian wrote:
Personally I believe what makes most sense given the evidence and I've had some pretty strange evidence in my own life.
Personal anecdotes do not count as evidence.
Erisian wrote:
Quantum physicists would have us believing in teleporting atoms and electrons that are everywhere at once as well as parallel universes and other wacky stuff and because we call them scientists we treat their word as gospel
Who's "we"? No, we don't treat the word of "quantum physicists" as "gospel". That's the realm of religion. That's not how science works. "We" treat the claims of quantum physics with validity because they can provide evidence for their claims. You might note that the more abstract theories, like string theory, are not accepted as fact because they cannot be proven nor disproven. There's simply no way to test the theory, so we treat it as it is, an interesting idea and not much else. The same goes for "pararrel universes" and whatnot - those are just ideas, and no one is treating them as "gospel" except for lunatics.
I think you're confusing real quantum physics with the pop-science version of it, the one that's mostly an abuse of scientifical-sounding terms by woo-peddlers and lunatics like Chopra, who simply abuse the fact that the phenomena of actual quantum physics are so counter-intuitive to people. Healing crystals not selling? No problem, just call them "quantum" and people will gobble them up.
But when it comes to the actual science behind actual quantum physics, like the uncertainty principle, wave/particle duality of light, quantum tunneling, etc. there's ample evidence for those phenomena. Here's the thing though - all those phenomena only work on very, VERY small scales, like the most basic particles - quarks, electrons, neutrinos etc. None of the quantum-mechanical effects are ever very likely to affect your life directly - unless you happen to get a job at CERN. Where incidentally, they just discovered evidence for the Higgs boson. They didn't take the word of someone that it exists - they built a huge, complex device underground to TEST the theory. And they found the evidence. Now THAT is how science works.
Erisian wrote:
and make our own atheistic religions out of their theories
No. Buddhism is an atheistic religion. Quantum physics is science, it is backed by evidence, and just because you can't understand the evidence doesn't mean that it isn't there.
Your entire argument is basically a huge appeal to ridicule fallacy: you point out at some of the most counter-intuitive aspects of quantum physics, assert that it doesn't make any sense (to you), and therefore it must be just made-up stuff that people believe because "scientists say it". To that, I say: **** or get off the toilet. If you have some evidence in your back pocket that disproves the last 50 years of scientific advancement, go ahead and present it.
Erisian wrote:
and then we run down those who think that maybe the mind is capable of more than we had imagined or maybe the laws of nature aren't quite as hard and fixed as we once thought.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
So show me the evidence. Real evidence. Or better yet, show your evidence to the James Randi Foundation and go cash that million-dollar prize. Why not? Show us all what you can do with your mind. Show us how you can bend the laws of nature. Until that, I'm not going to "believe" your ideas, and if that makes me "not open-minded", then I won't lose any sleep over it - if your definition of "open-minded" requires gullibility then I'll be glad to pass the membership of that particular club.