Representatives of the church, science and psychics discussed the legalization of paranormal abilities.
Recently, the legislators of the Leningrad region proposed to legalize the activities of psychics. According to the bill, it is supposed to create a special register of sorcerers, as well as give them the right to engage in "occult and magical activities for health purposes." According to the authors of the initiative, the state will be able to attract additional money to the treasury at the expense of legal magicians.
A press conference "Wizards in Law" took place in Moscow today. The list of those who are not indifferent to sorcerers turned out to be impressive: archpriest, deputy, psychic, clairvoyant and member of the commission for combating pseudoscience.
The conference was opened by the author of the bill, deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Leningrad Region Vladimir Petrov. He immediately stressed that the law on the recognition of occult-magical activities must be adopted and there are several reasons for this. On the one hand, the state has already recognized their activities. The Rosstat classifier includes the professions "astrologer" and "medium". In addition, the market for magicians and psychics in Russia could be billions of dollars, the deputy said. And this is already an increase in the budget due to taxes.
“Services of an occult and magical nature are provided on the territory of the Russian Federation in a fairly large volume. According to various estimates, the figures are up to two billion dollars,”Petrov said. Magicians should be separated from traditional healers who have already found their place in the law (amendments to Federal Law No. 323 "On the Basics of Health Protection of Citizens" - Indicator. Ru). Those who want to work as a traditional healer are issued a special permit. According to the deputy, it is necessary to adopt a law that would separate psychics, magicians, spiritualists and astrologers from the same people who are engaged in traditional medicine and whose activities are regulated by law.
The state recognized that astrologers and mediums exist, but did not regulate their activities by law. Therefore, a law is needed. Otherwise, the state should prohibit psychic activity on the territory of Russia, Petrov said.
In the bill, the concepts of "magic" and "extrasensory perception" are spelled out as an activity that cannot be defined or refuted by anyone except the specialists themselves. Therefore, market participants must themselves determine who has psychic abilities and who does not, Petrov stressed.
Promotional video:
Psychic schizophrenization of the country
Psychic, clinical psychologist and finalist of the show "Battle of Psychics" Ziraddin Rzayev immediately noted that he was working "in the clinic under the license of the Ministry of Health." He stated that first, science needs to determine whether extrasensory perception exists, and then to pass laws. “I do not deny that extrasensory perception does not exist, but I am against legalizing psychics,” Rzayev said. However, it will be quite difficult for science to explain the existence of extrasensory perception, as well as the existence of angels or some diseases, the psychic said.
“The common disease herpes, which is in our blood, science does not know how to treat. Science is powerless from the point of view of science to explain how to kill the herpes virus,”Rzayev was surprised. In his opinion, the legalization of psychics will increase the number of fraudsters. “Corruption is everywhere,” the psychic summed up.
Clairvoyant, psychic, and clinical psychologist Alena Orlova disagreed with her colleague and supported the legalization and registration of psychics. Orlova complained that the media are paying too much attention to psychics and that occult-magical activities are attracting more and more "dishonest people." The immorality of the population, permissiveness and annoying advertising led to an explosive growth in the number of unscrupulous magicians.
“Some programs have created schizophrenia for the whole country, people began to think that everything is possible, everything is allowed, that you can force people to act, attract any benefits in this way, which in fact is just fiction,” Orlova emphasized.
Today, any "quitter" can call himself a psychic, and there is no way to check whether he has such abilities, Orlova complained. She called this practice "a crime against humanity." Many fraudulent sorcerers advertise themselves well and many people turn to them for help, sometimes with criminal desires. The problem can be solved by banning ads. "First of all, you need to protect people from advertising of this kind," - said the clairvoyant. “As in all civilized countries, we must create something like a trade union. Any people who interpret themselves as they like can enter there [s]. There should also be a commission of claims. Block ads. To create a register of people who interpret themselves in such a way (as a psychic, - approx. Indicator. Ru) in order to have them registered, "Orlova summed up.
Scientific Church Unanimity
Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, like the clairvoyant Orlova, criticized the media for the coverage of witchcraft. “How can you legalize something that doesn't exist? How can you legalize what is harmful to people?”Chaplin asked the assembled journalists. The representative of the church is convinced that psychic activity sometimes helps people with money, in love relationships, but only for a while, after which it "falls apart like a house of cards." “On the institutions in which this activity is carried out, you need to hang some markers, like on tobacco packs' Gentlemen, it is dangerous here, harm can await you here!” - said Chaplin.
Science at the conference was represented by Alexander Panchin, a member of the Commission for Combating Pseudoscience. According to him, the scientists whom he managed to interview spoke out sharply against the legalization of magicians. Panchin recalled how in the United States in the late 1970s, the government spent half a million dollars on the study of people with allegedly paranormal abilities. They could bend objects and move them at a distance, find hidden things. Two years later, at a final press conference, they admitted that they had cheated.
If psychics are legalized, it "will give respectability to this profession," Panchin told Indicator. Ru. “They will be more trusted if they have state licenses - we are official healers, magicians, psychics. And in the long term, there will be more such services, and there will be more deceived people,”he said.
Today, there are special monetary bonuses for magicians - both in Russia and abroad. If a person proves that he has paranormal abilities, he can receive from a million rubles to a million dollars. For example, in Russia there is the Harry Houdini Prize. It is one million rubles and will be awarded to the first one who demonstrates paranormal abilities "in the conditions of a correctly set experiment." So far, no one has received the award.
“We conducted ten tests, not a single person demonstrated the abilities in which he believed,” said Panchin. According to him, psychics cannot be legalized, since they are either scammers or are sincerely mistaken. The guarantee of the result of the work of psychics will not help here either. Even if a person feels better after turning to a magician, from the point of view of the theory of probability, the healing effect of magic does not hold water. “People often face such a problem that they are promised something, it happens by itself, for random reasons. And people start to think that this is because someone helped them,”explained Panchin. People believe in magicians because they confuse cause and effect. “If the rooster crowed, and then the sun rose, this does not mean that if you kill the rooster, the sun will no longer rise,” the scientist said. So it's unlikelythat science recognizes psychics.
Consumers of occult and magical services
Lawyer Elman Pashayev said that it is not so easy to bring psychics into the legal plane. First, it is impossible to establish whether a person has psychic abilities or not. Secondly, there is a consumer protection law. “How will a deceived person apply to Rospotrebnadzor, Rostekhnadzor or the court that his right has been violated? What norm of the law will he refer to?”Pashayev asked. It is also unclear how the victims will prove that they were deceived or provided a poor-quality service.
Pashayev also did not agree with the demand of the psychic Orlova to prohibit clairvoyants and magicians from advertising themselves. According to him, this violates their rights as entrepreneurs.
The result was summed up by Deputy Petrov. He recalled how the law interprets occult-magical activity, and read out to the audience: "Occult-magical activity is understood as activity that turns out to be a person who believes that his abilities are supernatural, which cannot be scientifically evaluated …". After that, he stated that magicians exist as a phenomenon, they cannot be denied. Therefore, they must either be recognized at the legislative level or, on the contrary, banned. “The state should not behave like an ostrich that sticks its head in the sand,” Petrov snapped.