There is no religion higher than Truth

As promised, myself and another couple of skeptics recently visited the Theosophical Society’s building in Wellington to hear their National President, John Vorstermans, give a talk titled “The Ageless Wisdom”. The Society has a great little building on Marion Street, with a comfortable library of esoteric mystical books at the front, and a large main room with lots of wood and painted mystical symbols. It has a particularly Masonic feel to it.

Inside, John’s talk started by covering the basics of Theosophy - that the Society is interested in finding the truth of all religions. Although this sounds like a good skeptical approach to spirituality, investigating rather than taking things at face value, in reality the organisation felt like it was diametrically opposed to skepticism. Whereas skeptics have so far looked into spiritual beliefs and concluded that none of them have any of the answers to life, the Theosophical Society considers that they all have the answers; or at least a part of the answer. We were told that members like to focus on different spiritual beliefs, such as numerology, astrology, eastern religions and the Christian Gnostics, and that belief in pretty much any idea is okay.

This behaviour is at odds with the society’s motto of “There is no religion higher than Truth”, and made it feel like they really don’t take their motto seriously. It came across as the members being spiritual tourists, dabbling in esoteric ideas without actually committing to them beyond maybe just learning the basics and memorising a few pithy quotes.

As with most spiritual groups, a single opinionated person started the modern Theosophy movement - in this case, Madame Blavatsky. She has the usual back story: a self-educated maverick, eccentric, with fantastical tales about her past and accomplishments, and an unwavering conviction that she had access to a deeper truth than anyone else about the world.

Back to the talk, which focused on three main ideas that are apparently core to Theosophy:

1. We are not individuals - we are all part of a single connected spirit. Each of us inhabits our physical body temporarily, and only part of our soul is inside our physical body. This spirit inhabits everything we see around us.
2. Everything is cyclical, and what goes around comes around. Societies come and go, ideas are lost and re-discovered, our souls return to the source and are eventually placed in new bodies (aka reincarnation).
3. Our purpose in life is to progress spiritually, and move up through the levels of spiritual understanding:

None of this struck me, or the skeptics with me, as very original. It just felt like a rehash of tired old New Age beliefs. However, the members were a really friendly bunch, and it was nice to chat with them, after the talk, about their beliefs and interests. I left with a handful of pamphlets and booklets, and will definitely be returning the next time there’s a free event.

Mark Honeychurch

Does the COVID vaccine contain a microchip?

I’ve watched a few videos online from a recent panic where people show themselves sticking a magnet to their arm at the injection site of their COVID vaccine. The same magnet pushed against other parts of the arm will fall off and not stick. Could this be proof that there’s a metallic microchip in the vaccine?

We can look to history to solve this one, as well as trying out a practical experiment. Back in the day skeptic James Randi went to Japan to take on the case of Magnet Men - people who could stick objects to their skin, claiming it was due to some kind of magnetism. Let’s see what Randi’s solution was:

Talcum powder! Randi’s observation was that flat metallic or magnetic objects, like coins or neodymium magnets, would stick to skin if it was oily or sweaty - and, for most of us, that’s pretty normal for our skin. By covering the person’s skin in talc, the metal object no longer has that layer to stick to, and the object will fall off.

Not content to accept this at face value, I employed the help of one of my daughters to test this out. As I’m a somewhat hairy man, our first task was to shave a patch of hair from my upper arm. Having completed that, we grabbed a small flat neodymium magnet and tried to stick it to my arm - success! Once in place, even tipping my arm beyond 90 degrees and shaking gently was not enough to dislodge the magnet.

Next we covered the shaved area of my arm in talcum powder, and tried again. No matter how much I tried, I could not get the magnet to stick any more. Of course, I haven’t had the COVID vaccine yet, but still the magnet stuck to my arm without the talc, and not with the talc - suggesting that it's not magnetism that's holding the magnet in place. We then tried the same experiment with a coin (a 20c piece), and had the same results. Without talc the coin stuck to my arm, but with talc it just fell off. I asked fellow committee member Bronwyn to try this experiment, as she has been given the COVID vaccine. In her case, magnets don’t stick to her arm even without any talcum powder - I guess she’s just not as sweaty as I am!

Of course, there’s another obvious reason why this isn’t real - technology just isn’t at the point where we can miniaturise a powered microchip to the point where we can inject it into someone. The dream of nanobots is decades away, and the closest we have today that is injectable is an RFID chip for pets - and it’s not small. I have one I plan to inject myself with at some point, but I’ve yet to find someone who’s game enough to stab me with the chunky needle.

Beyond just getting a chip inside someone’s arm, presumably the government needs their chip to actually do something like monitoring our location, and do it reliably.

For location, the vaccine chip would probably need to have GPS. I have a small GPS chip that I’ve played with in electronics projects, and it’s not small. We’ve shrunk GPS chips a lot, but not to the point where we can inject them - the smallest is about centimetre cubed. And, that chip will just receive location data from GPS satellites, it can’t send any data. To send data, you’d need another chip and an antenna. If the government wanted to use the phone network, that would probably need another 1cm chip for GSM.

And then of course there’s power. Without power, none of this is going to work. RFID chips can be as small as they are because they aren’t powered. When you hold them up to an RFID reader, within a cm or so, the reader supplies the chip with a small amount of power which they pick up via an induction coil and use to send a brief signal with their ID. However, unless the government is following everyone they want to track very, very closely with mobile electromagnetic induction coils, the chip in the vaccine is going to need a battery, or some previously unseen method of converting either the body’s movement or biological processes into power. And there’s absolutely no evidence that any of this exists as usable technology.

Obviously this is all very conspiratorial. To believe that it is true necessitates us thinking that governments around the world are suppressing knowledge about super advanced technology. Technology that has somehow been designed, tested, perfected and manufactured without anyone leaking it to the press or stealing the precious Intellectual Property and selling it to rival companies. I'm sticking with the belief that nobody can make microchips small enough to fit unnoticed into a vaccine, until someone can prove otherwise.