Yes, the Young Chevalier walks amongst us again in the form of Mr Charles Boden. This gentleman recently turned up on the JREF Forums in the hope of stunning the sceptics with his account of uncanny experiences, such as being being the recipient of a medium's prediction that a member of a royal family with whom he had a connection would die within the week. Charles is also convinced that there is something weird about the fact that his knew his wife was pregnant when she was only two months gone.
This highly entertaining thread can be read here:http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=188210
He presented himself as an "ex-sceptic" despite the fact that he clearly knew nothing about cold reading, probability theory, confirmation bias etc. It later transpired that he is the author of a book in which he claims to be the reincarnation of Bonnie Prince Charlie and also contributes to a woo forum in which he talks about his other past lives as a World War II Luftwaffe pilot and a witness to the crucifixion of Christ. Oh dear...
http://www.freado.com/read/7923/descendant-of-kings
http://www.childpastlives.org/vBulle...=charles+boden
It's a fascinating demonstration of the mind-rotting effect of poor critical thinking skills and scientific ignorance.
I read that thread a few days ago and had a good laugh. To be fair to him he kept coming back to defend his position even after getting a bit of a kicking from the JREF posters.
He's still deluded though.
Indeed. I haven't read it all but I certainly don't accept some of the things he is saying. For instance the claim that someone predicted Diana's death a week before it happened. It is very well documented that no psychic, astrologer, medium, etc, predicted Diana's death in advance of the event; nobody claimed to have done so for at least a year afterwards. It is only long after the event that the scum started crawling out from under their rocks and claiming that they had foreseen it.Originally Posted by Oldcodger
It doesn't make him a liar but he is, at least, fooling himself with false recollections.
[Edit: read a bit more and he is caught out lying on several issues, posting one thing on JREF and something different on the loony believers' forum. ]
Last edited by Croydon Bob; 21st October 2010 at 03:11 PM.
Isn't it strange that only those who can recall being important people or living exciting lives seem to remember their past lives?
It's no stranger than the "fact" that hundreds of people alive today were all Cleopatra in an earlier life.Isn't it strange that only those who can recall being important people or living exciting lives seem to remember their past lives?
You could fill a field with all the people who think that they were Spartacus.
I'm Spartacus!!!
And so's my wife!!!
Seriously though, it was interesting to note that Charles got all huffy when someone discovered that he'd written a woo book and posted on a woo forum. Just like Mannion and Pengelly he interpreted a bit of very basic detective work as persecution. Clearly these twerps are accustomed to being surrounded by like-minded people with no real curiosity - and don't they realize that when they put stuff on the internet it's out there for everyone to see?
Last edited by Julia; 22nd October 2010 at 12:02 PM. Reason: Adding a bit
I read the first three pages, but found I was losing my apatite
THAT'S A PUN FOLKS!
What a proper Charlie. Not only did Mr Boden turn up of his own free will on a sceptical website and get soundly thrashed, he couldn't even get his own family tree right:
I somehow managed to miss this bit and had to start from scratch by discovering the Stewart/Gordon link for myself, although it only took me a couple of hours to prove Mr Boden wrong. Had I been armed with the quoted information it would have taken me five minutes!The fourth Lord of Appin, Duncan Stewart (1515-1547), married Janet Gordon, daughter of Lord John Gordon (1477-1517) and Lady Margaret Jane Stewart (1493-1517), eldest but "illegitimate" daughter of King James IV and Lady Margaret Drummond (1476-1501). I am descended from the 2nd son of Duncan Stewart 6th of Appin (b. abt 1570), John Stewart.
Using the ancient Scottish martial art of Google-foo, I established that Lord John Gordon was Janet Gordon's half-brother, not her father. He and Margaret Stewart had three sons - Alexander, James and George - but no daughters. Mr Boden is either incredibly careless (he claims to have spent twenty years researching his book "Descendent of Kings") or he simply ignored historical facts when they didn't mesh with his version of reality. So much for his royal descent, which is how he interpreted the "connection" with the royal family mentioned by the medium who supposedly foresaw Diana's death.
I don't think I'll be reading Mr Boden's book, which from the brief excerpts available online sounds like the sort of thing only a vanity press would touch with a claymore:
So it's "profound" in the vacuous New Age sense, then."Descendant of Kings" tells the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite Rising of 1745, together with the possible associations of his lifetime to another over 250 years later, in a profound reflection upon the purpose of our existences and the true meaning of life..." (back cover)
http://www.amazon.com/Descendant-Kin...88181&sr=1-2#_
The tags used by Amazon for this magnum opus are also intriguing:
'Nuff said!
Sadly, not only did Mr Boden not learn his lesson, he stomped off to a pro-reincarnation site and told a sob story about feeling threatened by the nasty sceptics.
*sound of world's smallest bagpipes*
Unfortunately for Charles, I later discovered that his claim to be descended from the second son of Duncan Stewart, 6th of Appin, couldn't possibly be true - John Stewart died without issue! Charles could have discovered this himself in five minutes by checking with Burke's Peerage, but I suppose that would have been too much like hard work and risked shattering his fantasy world.
Historians, what do they know? They obviously haven't discovered Duncan Stewart's long-term secret mistress...
Sorry, that should have been John Stewart, obviously...
I've never met Bonnie Prince Charlie (except possibly in a previous life I don't recall), but I did once, through an extremely bizarre chain of unlikely coincidences, end up having Xmas dinner with a peer of the realm, a retired colonel, and a lady whose life revolved around the fact that she sincerely believed that she had once been King James IV of Scotland. She even wore a sort of compromise semi-modernised version of his clothing, which made her look like a man who was very gay indeed.
The colonel, who was very old, and one of the last men in the British army with cavalry combat training in the use of the lance, and therefore knew quite a bit about horsemanship through the ages, told me afterwards that "James IV", who was a very nice person and obviously quite intelligent and sane except on this one topic, was in no way faking it for any base reason - she absolutely 100% meant it.
But at the same time, she blatantly wasn't correct in this belief. He told me about the time he'd taken her on a fox-hunt. He didn't want to, because she had cheerfully announced that, although the body she currently inhabited had never previously sat on a horse, James IV had been an expert horseman therefore she'd be fine. But she couldn't see any possible problem that might result from this, and insisted on going.
Anyway, they mounted up, and instantly this lady's horse galloped off at maximum speed in a random direction, and they never did get to chase any foxes because they were too busy looking for her. They eventually found her about 10 miles away - it would have been even further if the horse hadn't gotten tired.
Her explanation was that in the time of James IV, digging your heels into the horse's sides meant "Stop".
Great story with a moral for us all - "Reincarnation can be fatal".
By the way, the JREF thread started by Charles has gone crazy. I caught him out in the act of editing a Wikipedia article to bolster his claim to royal descent and he didn't like it one bit...
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