Is everyone afraid of offending commercial interests?
Topics like “The Q-Ray Bracelet” could be challenged. The methods commercial industries use to convince potential buyers of their products and services are certainly worthy of its own section considering how they are concerned about manipulating people’s beliefs. And a lot of their dependence on assuring the people’s trust is to encourage faulty thinking and religiosity.

First, Scott, you should read the rules section.  Blue is used only for official moderator statements.  Since you used it as your sig., only Doug or you can change it.  I suggest a different color, or Doug will do it.  I also don’t see that the Tree of Knowledge has as you say, a “[Death] grasp”.

I see this forum as a general discussion site, not a search and attack system.  If someone brings up a particular pseudoscience or alternative medicine item we do discuss and criticize it.  However, we are not the shock troops you seem to want us to be.  You are certainly welcome to start a thread about any product, post information about it, and point out its flaws.

Occam

I was pruning my quotation as you must have been commenting. The reference to “The Tree of Wisdom” is to the curse on Adam and Eve: Eternal Death. Most people don’t seem to recognize that this was the biblical curse due to their sin. Adam and Eve supposedly lived in Eden in an eternal capacity. The original writers were likely trying to rationally explain how mankind (Adam) became intelligent over all other creatures. So the myth is meant to explain that curiosity (unfortunately blamed on womankind) for wanting to be more than just mere dumb animals to the gods, ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and thus gained wisdom. The unfortunate side effect was that god abandoned mankind to struggle on Earth for a living outside of paradise and have ETERNAL DEATH.

That’s where a savior comes in later. To SAVE them from eternal death and have immediate passage to heaven upon earthly death.

I explain this to many Christians today who changed the meaning of what Jesus supposedly did. His actual “saving” was originally only to allow souls to go to a heaven when they die instead of rotting in the ground until the end of time. The Protestant movement protested indulgences sold by the Catholic Church. They said that only Jesus can “save” people from sins. This is where that came from.

I see this forum as a general discussion site, not a search and attack system.  If someone brings up a particular pseudoscience or alternative medicine item we do discuss and criticize it.  However, we are not the shock troops you seem to want us to be.

I think you Americans have a different mind-set when it comes to commerce and marketing. My brother was into Network Marketing Schemes, Get Rich Quick Books, and Motivational Speakers to the point that today we have a hard time communicating because they were his religious idols. At the times in the past when it got so bad I could not distinguish him between any extreme religious zealot or cult.

The likely reason I figure Skeptical Inquiry nor Skeptic Magazine ever touches these issues is because they are embedded in your economic “belief” system. If you attempted to challenge advertisers, you’d piss a lot of people in your community off who CAN close sites like this down! Unlike religion, industry has real power!

When I mentioned The Q-Ray Bracelet it was because it reminded me of some of the times they actually aired the commercial: during some serious skeptic program with James Randi! Go figure…

Scott Mayers - 23 November 2010 12:27 AM

The likely reason I figure Skeptical Inquiry nor Skeptic Magazine ever touches these issues is because they are embedded in your economic “belief” system. If you attempted to challenge advertisers, you’d piss a lot of people in your community off who CAN close sites like this down! Unlike religion, industry has real power!

When I mentioned The Q-Ray Bracelet it was because it reminded me of some of the times they actually aired the commercial: during some serious skeptic program with James Randi! Go figure…

I don’t know what you’re talking about, Scott, but really you need to do your homework before posting things in public. SI does plenty of articles on commercial scams that involve pseudoscience, and AFAIK virtually doesn’t take advertising. Since the website doesn’t take advertising either, who would “close it down” and how exactly would they do it?

As for the Q-Ray, a few seconds of searching found THIS article from May of this year in Skeptical Inquirer.

HERE is an article on them from Skepdic.

HERE from Quackwatch.

As to your question about why we don’t see “Consumer’s Skeptic” folders on skeptic forums, probably it’s because we think of things in terms of what the epistemic problem is (is it religion? alt-med? pseudoscience?) rather than whether the person foisting it on the public is making money from it. There are plenty of topics in skepticism where it isn’t really clear how relevant the money making is to the heart of the problem.

E.g.: do people make money from UFOs? Bigfoot? Sure they do. But are these then topics for “consumer skepticism”?

Anyhow any topics that would go into a folder for “consumer skepticism” will find their home in one of the other folders here. We get plenty of topics on issues relevant to consumers, on scams and the like. So I suggest that if you have topics you want to discuss, please go ahead and post them in one of the folders here.

I assure you that the decision to set up the folder structure was not made with the intent to hide or suppress anything. I don’t see how it could, anyway, since we don’t delete threads that follow our stated rules. Ironically, the only threads we will delete are those that are spamming products for sale!

Oh, I have nothing against your setup or any other skeptic site setup. My post was is not an emotional response to what should or shouldn’t be done either. I am merely meaning that I think that it would be a good idea for a consumer and marketing type category. You have “alternative medicine” as a logical category to its own as if it somehow stands out as something overly representative of a marketing scheme. My point is that a more logical and inclusive generic category like, “Consumer Products, Services, and Marketing” would be a better idea for one. For two, I assumed this rationale should be obvious before I thought of it. So I didn’t understand why it wouldn’t have existed.

I already know that you do discuss any issues like these without prejudice. You guys can classify things however you want. I would just classify things more generally to be more inclusive—not exclusive.

Example: A site on Atheism that has a subsection dedicated to Christianity but only has a subsection for general conversations that you may find topics on other religions. It exclusively emphasizes the relevance of Christianity and downplays the significance of the more inclusive class, “Organized Religions”.

We’ll keep it in mind. Thanks for the suggestion.