James Randi
From Philosopedia
Randi, James (7 Aug 1928 - )
Randi is a Canadian-born writer, educator, and magician whose given name is Randall James Hamilton Zwinge.
With Bert Sugar, he wrote Houdini, His Life and Art (1976). An internationally known conjurer and a skeptic, Randi lectures on paranormal subjects. Flim-Flam (1981) and The Truth About Uri Geller (1975) are two of his books. His work in exposing fraudulent faith healers has won him awards from the Council for Secular Humanism, and he is a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
He has become known as being “the most tireless investigator and demystifier of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims.” He has haunted the “psychic” spoonbenders, exposed the dirty tricks of faith healers, investigated homeopathic water “with a memory,” and “generally been a thorn in the sides of those who try to pull the wool over the public’s eyes.” In 1989, he wrote The Faith Healers, an exposé in which he offered to give $1,000. - it has since been upped to $1,000,000 - to anyone providing evidence of healing through prayer. His criteria for a cure by faith:
- - The disease must not be normally self-terminating.
- - The recovery must be complete.
- - The recovery must take place in the absence of any medical treatment that might normally be expected to affect the disease.
- - There must be adequate medical opinion that the disease was present before the application of whatever means were used to bring about the miracle.
- - There must be adequate medical opinion that the disease is not present after the application of whatever means were used to bring about the miracle.
No one yet has claimed this money despite its having been successively augmented by others. When he informs believers that he is not a believer, he finds they usually are
- infuriated by such a response. . . . [They] usually turn away and leave ringing in the air a declaration that there is just no point in trying to reason with me and that I will be "prayed for."I have no need of this patronization, nor of such a condescending attitude, and I resent it. I consider such an action to be a feeble defense for a baseless superstition and a retreat from reality.
In The Mask of Nostradamus (1990), Randi unmasks the 16th-century astrologer, including among other points that in the prophecy game it is important to make lots of predictions and hope that at least some of them come true.
In addition to his having been on the editorial board of The Humanist, the "Amazing Rand"� is principal investigator of the Council for Secular Humanism’s Faith-Healing Investigation Project.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke wrote an introduction to Randi’s An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (1995), a volume that alphabetically presents hundreds of entries, with cross-references, on topics such as the paranormal, supernatural, occult and mysticism, and fringes of science.
"We may disagree with Randi on certain points," wrote Carl Sagan, "but we ignore him at our peril."�
In 1986 Randi received a fellowship (often called the genius award) from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
In 2010, Randi in a post and on a radio interview came out as being homosexual at the age of 81:
