Yeah, NFTs are legal, but tarot is considered fraud in some places.
The gist of what I was saying was like… There’s a lot of hypocrisy and a lack of consistency in those trying to claim that tarot (and other spiritual practices) is fraud.
For the record, I’m not trying to condone scamming people. 100% not! The story mentioned where $40m was taken sounded like a scam. If I recall correctly, they were telling people they’d be happier if they gave them all their money. Not sure what they were promising in return, but I guess they never delivered. (Then again, the whole story could be misrepresented. I can’t claim to know.)
I was drawing parallels between this scam and legitimate services to other things that are totally legal, where you can give your money away to someone/something else and get nothing of “objective” value in return, only things of subjective value that cannot be held in your hands.
Elaborating/rambling collapsed because it does go off topic a bit.
It’s kind of like how it’s normal to pay a psychologist $200 to talk to us for an hour, and how much value we get out of it cannot be measured in any quantitative way. But even psychologists feel a bit of that elitist shunning because psychiatrists are seen as more legitimate than them as they are allowed to prescribe medication, while psychologists cannot. (And if we throw in counsellors into the mix, they fall underneath psychologists! What a hierarchy.) But, all of them provide valuable services to people.
And we’re finally realising, to some degree, as a society, that you don’t actually need a university degree to be good at something. The whole software engineering world I’m in is proof of that, and it’s a much harder science than, say, for example, art history.
Now, I’m not saying that tarot readers are pretending to be therapists, but it’s close to saying you need a qualification to have a deep conversation with someone. Like, imagine asking one of our genius witches here, “Where’s your degree from Harvard on this topic?” Or telling some that all the knowledge passed down through generations isn’t legitimate because it’s not sanctioned by the pharmaceutical companies. We wouldn’t ask or say these things.
The reason why I bring this up is that, to people who think spiritual things don’t exist, there’s very little difference between people acting maliciously to scam people and those who believe what they’re doing and trying to use it to help people. We’re all just different flavours of jellybeans to them, and whether or not we’re going to get persecuted for it is likely going to come down to whether we make a lot of money with it or not. Basically, as long we stay poor, no one’s going to bring out the pitchforks.
Reminds me of the link someone shared recently that went into how witch trials, at some point, were likely to keep women out of healthcare. Sounds similar, doesn’t it? It’s just protectionism from industries that feel threatened by people being able to think for themselves.
Finally, the point to all of that rambling, because I’m not just pointlessly venting of fearmongering, is… Be careful, cover your asses, and let’s look out for each other, because we should be able to practice without fear of getting stomped on as “frauds” just because someone feels like it.
