The final word on John Edward

No, this post isn't dedicated towards ridiculing John Edward's beliefs. That'd be easy to do.

OF COURSE the dead don't actually 'exist', much less communicate things (except metaphorically through the evidence that their decaying bodies provide to the forensics!). I was more interested in the question of whether John Edward actually believed that he could speak to the dead. This question is now, perhaps, answered. So is he a liar preying on fools, or just a fool?

I think the Sydney Morning Herald's "Good Weekend" section provides a clue. In the weekly column, they ask various people the same questions every week. When John Edward was asked what his earliest memory was, he stated that he remembers his entire one-year birthday party vividly.
The problem, of course, is that this is entirely impossible. One-year-olds simply don't have the necessary areas of the brain developed to commit what they experience at their one-year birthday party in to their long-term-memory.

So what stands out is that Edwards is the kind of guy who can easily convince himself of that found to be logically or empirically impossible. Of course, it is glaringly more improbable, absurd to convince yourself that you can talk to the dead than that you could remember events from when you were a one-year-old. But we can just put him in the idiot basket, which is a lot more generous than what you could otherwise say about him.