Psychic (Sylvia Browne) Who Said Amanda Berry Was Dead Silent After Berry Is Found Alive

[markpkessinger]

171. Nobody here has accused Ms. Browne of causing the women to be kindapped or hurt . . .

. . . So, let's dispense with that straw man, shall we? People are criticizing Browne over what she did to Amanda Berry's mother: she took away a desperate mother's last hope. It takes a special kind of vile to do that. She didn't have to pretend to have knowledge she didn't have. But then, if she had honestly said, "I don't know," it might have caused people to begin to realize she was running a scam. More generally, we are criticizing Browne for what she does to desperate, grieving people all the time: she exploits their grief for personal gain.

To be clear, I don't entirely discount the possibility of psychic phenomena (although I think if they do exist, there is nothing supernatural about them at all, but rather that they simply have not yet been understood or explained). I know someone -- a person who is almost like a sister to me -- who claims to have some psychic abilities (which she claims she inherited from her mother). I can't say for sure, other than that I have witnessed some rather uncanny things where this person is concerned. My friend is from, and lives in, Melbourne, Australia. She belongs to a group of folks who likewise believe themselves to be endowed with psychic abilities. But their group maintains, as a matter of ethics, a strice refusal by any of its members to ever accept any kind of payment in exchange for information they obtain using these abilities. As she put it to me once, "We believe these abilities are gifts to be used for the betterment of humanity; they are not ours to profit from." She added that she, and members of her organization, regard it has a hallmark of a fraudster to take any kind of personal gain from the use of purported psychic abilities.