Can one see the future in a glass of water?
Sounds silly? Well, BBC2 television devoted 30 minutes this evening to the story of an Irish healer called Mary Malone who claims to be able to foretell anyone’s future simply by glancing at a glass of water. Clearly the presenter of the programme didn’t believe this, so why give her the oxygen of publicity? However, looking at her web site, I see that, over the last twenty years of travel, she has had extensive press coverage and participated in approximately 3,000 radio shows and over a 1,000 TV shows.
Of course, Mary Malone is not alone; the world is full of people who ciaim to be healers or clairvoyants or possessors of various psychic powers and even serious newspapers and magazines regularly carry daily or weekly horoscopes and columns on complementary medicine. I just wish that the media would bring half of the skeptism to bear that they do with people from other walks of life such as politicans or doctors or scientists. We all need to think critically and to use our reason.