Pissing Off Friends

Ok so my roommate is going to massage school, one of the highest rated in the country I'm told, and he loves it. I think he likes the idea of helping people, he also likes the idea of touching mostly naked women all day. He's become good friends with the only other person from school who lives in our town, and therefore I've become friends with her too. And she's the shit, just a really chill really nice caring person. The tricky part is that she's very into like astrology, tarot cards, and shit like that. We've talked about religion and stuff a few times and I try really hard not to be condescending towards people beliefs but with pseudoscience its really hard. I try to frame everything from the perspective of simple curiousity which is partially because this allows me to question a persons beliefs without insulting them because I'm just trying to learn, and its easy because I'm just a curious person. But I can't fake the fact that underneath it all I think that stuff is crap, and she knows it. There is often a talk of energy but its never defined. If I continue with this its going to ramble, oh but look at the name of this site, try to bear with me. This bodily energy is often intermixed with universal energies coming from beyond. Now I should also say that I'm far from a scientist surely not an expert but I know a little bit about science. So when she says something like everything is made of energy, I say, "yeah sorta." I'm thinking of E = MC squared so mass can be converted into energy which is sorta like being made of energy. And it seems like we keep breaking particles down into smaller and smaller bits so I'm not confident to say what matter is really made of. Or another way to say that for the sake of conversation, "yeah." But I take serious issue when these ideas with no evidence at all are being TAUGHT to students. I'm still of the ilk that as long as you're not hurting people believe what you want, but I'm not sure how to define hurt. Does believing homeopathy hurt anyone? Not directly no, a bottle of water or a placebo isn't going to hurt anyone, but what if the person avoids treatment that works because they believe in something that doesn't? I honestly can't decide. There is a libertarian side that says, "fuck 'em if they're too stupid to find out if they're being duped." But my liberal side reminds me why my libertarian side always loses. If we had a society that was adept at disseminating truthful information then fine, fend for yourself. But there is SOOO much bad info out there that maybe we do need to protect the gullible. I need to back up for a sec. I guess I never looked into homeopathy before, holy skull-fuck batman do people really believe this stuff works????? I wonder how many people who buy into it even realize how the numbering system works? In most modern situations saying something is 30x would imply 30 times more than original, but oh no not in homeopathy, in homeopathy less is more 30x means that the original 10:1 solution has been cut thirty more times! 10:1 equals 1x, 100:1 = 2x, 30x = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000:1. Then it really gets silly 200C, ha! I'm not going to explain it here, just read this, but lets just say once your ratios are getting so big they compare them with the number of atoms in the known universe, you're probably in trouble. Anyway I was so blown away by what I just learned about homeopathy that I've lost the will to talk about anything else. I need to go warn people. Oh and none of this changes my opinon about my friend, shes still a great person, plus I don't know her stance on homeopathy. I just don't know how Im going to be able to not insult the shit out of this stuff. I suppose could just keep my mouth shut...


I'm screwed.