Monday, February 8, 2021

Jason Engwer either doesn't know about, or doesn't care about, authenticating evidence: The Enfield poltergeist farce, again

 I cannot believe what a dipshit Jason Engwer is.   I've written about his Enflield Poltergeist crap before.  See here and here.

He is expecting his readers to draw confident conclusions about the paranormal based on audio recordings of the "Enfield Poltergeist" that somebody else uploaded to YouTube.  See here.

Gee, Jason, have you never heard of authentication, and what is implied when you cannot or will not authenticate the evidence you supposedly want skeptics to deal with?

Or maybe you think authentication was invented only by skeptics to make sure they could get rid of most of the evidence for the spiritual world?

An examination of the people who uploaded that audio also doesn't inspire confidence:

https://www.youtube.com/c/TheParanormalDetectives/about

In other words, Engwer wants his Christian readers to think that these promises of authenticity are dependable, when in fact the "paranormal detectives" won't claim to have been the person who made the recording.  

That would be like me telling you that the moon rocks in my possession are not fakes.  Given that i wasn't the one who originally obtained them, how the fuck could I possibly expect you to believe that claim of authenticity was reliable?

Engwer is willing to talk all day and night about what he knows from the tapes, but he doesn't upload them, nor provide any authenticity declaration.  See here.

Engwer created a post entitled "The Enfield Poltergeist Tapes Made More Accessible",  but, as usual, he doesn't direct us to downloads of those tapes. instead, he boasts "I've only listened to a small minority of the audio so far. I intend to write posts about the contents of the tapes as warranted."  See here.

Engwers most comprehensive resource page for this paranormal fakery appears to be "The Enfield Poltergeist And Skepticism", but, as usual, he doesn't provide links to downloads of the audio, but instead boasts "After the digitizing of Guy Playfair's tapes was completed, I wrote a post about it."  LOL!  See here.

Let's just say that if Engwer were being prosecuted for murder in court, and the chain of custody for the incriminating recordings had all of the flaws the "Enfield tapes" do, Engwer would be screaming his head off that charges need to be dropped for lack of authentication.  We skeptics are not the least bit unreasonable to demand, before we turn over our entire lives to an invisible man, that the evidence in favor of the spirit world meets the highest tests of authenticity. Jason, did you forget that spiritual evil exists everywhere, and according to you, especially in the case of people who are considering taking the spirit world more seriously?

And so you think that believing some shit found on the internet should be "good enough" to pretend that the reviewer has been placed under an intellectual obligation to either confess the reality of the spirit world, or confess their bias against supernaturalism renders them unable to objectively evaluate the evidence?

So unless Engwer thinks the authentication tests required in a Court of law are unreasonably high, he cannot balk at skeptics who demand that checkable Affidavits of Authentication demonstrating a chain of custody and authentication accompany these alleged recordings from the 1970's, before there is any chance of this evidence foisting the least bit of moral or intellectual obligation upon a skeptic to 'explain' it.

Yes, that would make things impossible for Engwer, because the two girls who played this joke on paranormal investigators have never done what would otherwise be normal in court, and testified under oath to the authenticity of those tapes.  At most they visited the haunted house 40 years later, and they have appeared on talk programs, but they have never done anything remotely near as serious as testifying under oath.

So the truth is, you don't have the first fucking clue how much of such alleged audio is authentic and how much isn't.  Maybe Jason has a better idea, but that is hardly relevant to the skeptic, who isn't getting anything more from Engwer except endless trifles about how skeptics aren't dealing with certain details and have misinterpreted the evidence.

Release the properly authenticated Enflield recordings, Jason, or use up some brain cells trying to reconcile the obvious contradiction between your strong belief that this poltergeist was real, and your own refusal to release the relevant recordings.

NOW what are you going to do, Jason?  Maybe direct us to equally unauthenticated videos and audios "from the internet" ?

Since Jason cannot be accused of being retarded, it is certainly reasonable to infer that Jason's refusal to release the tapes is not due to oversight, but intention.  Well gee, if the tapes prove so much, why are you unwilling to release them?  Did you have a deal with SPR to keep the tapes private so other people could make money charging access fees?  What exactly?

Did you have a vision of God who told you to avoid writing down what the clouds said releasing the tapes?

LOL

Jason once said "The case and the tapes deserve further study."  See here.

Correction:  the case and the PROPERLY AUTHENTICATED tapes deserve further study.  Which apparently means they don't become deserving of further study until Jason decides that the unbeliever's peril in refusing to believe in the spiritual is so great as to "deserve" giving them Jason's best possible evidence...as opposed to his ceaselessly trifling about this shit as if he thinks it was the 28th book of the NT.

Jason's post at the Paranormal Detective YouTube channel from about January 2021 is:

Jason Engwer 

2 months ago 

Thanks for posting these clips. I've listened to all of the tapes, in their digitized form, and have posted a lot of articles on the contents of the tapes, if anybody is interested. Search for a post titled "The Enfield Poltergeist And Skepticism" at Triablogue. The tapes have a triple-digit number of hours of material, including a lot that hasn't been discussed publicly much or at all. The evidence for the case is much better than people typically suggest.

Then why aren't you releasing the full and properly authenticated audio?  Maybe you are afraid of bowling over the skeptics with so much evidence for the spiritual world that skeptics will start committing suicide?  YEAH RIGHT.  Triablogue exists for no other reason than to stomp down skeptical arguments.  So we are reasonable to believe that if you seriously believed the Enfield tapes proved your conclusions, you'd have uploaded them by now.  You've had since July 2018 to do this, but you haven't.  You forfeit your right to balk if skeptics become suspicious that you know your evidence is nowhere near as compelling as you pretend.

So now that we know Jason has all the tapes digitized, we have to wonder why he thinks it would be better for the world if they were only given mere tidbits of unauthenticated bits of the tapes here and there, downloadable without the slightest assurance of authenticity, interspersed with his endlessly trifling comments about how skeptics didn't account for this and that.  FUCK YOU.  

My reply to Bellator Christi's "Three Dangerous Forms of Modern Idolatry"

I received this in my email, but the page it was hosted on appears to have been removed  =====================  Bellator Christi Read on blo...