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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feng shui | 6/6 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:19:51.449274+00:00 | kb-cron |
...feng shui has become an aspect of interior decorating in the Western world and alleged masters of feng shui now hire themselves out for hefty sums to tell people such as Donald Trump which way his doors and other things should hang. Feng shui has also become another New Age "energy" scam with arrays of metaphysical products...offered for sale to help you improve your health, maximize your potential, and guarantee fulfillment of some fortune cookie philosophy. Skeptics charge that evidence for its effectiveness is based primarily upon anecdote and users are often offered conflicting advice from different practitioners, though feng shui practitioners use these differences as evidence of variations in practice or different branches of thought. A critical analyst concluded that "Feng shui has always been based upon mere guesswork." Another objection was to the compass, a traditional tool for choosing favorable locations for property or burials. Critics point out that the compass degrees are often inaccurate because solar winds disturb the electromagnetic field of the Earth. Magnetic North on the compass will be inaccurate because true magnetic north fluctuates. The psychologist Stuart Vyse has called feng shui "a very popular superstition." The American magicians Penn and Teller dedicated an episode of their television show Bullshit! to criticize the acceptance of feng shui in the Western world as science. They devised a test in which the same dwelling was visited by five different feng shui consultants: each produced a different opinion about the dwelling, showing there is no consistency in the professional practice of feng shui. Feng shui is criticized by Christians around the world. Some have argued that it is "entirely inconsistent with Christianity to believe that harmony and balance result from the manipulation and channeling of nonphysical forces or energies, or that such can be done by means of the proper placement of physical objects. Such techniques, in fact, belong to the world of sorcery." The usage of inward-swinging doors in the former Ozone Disco in the Philippines, due to feng shui belief that these "bring in money", has been blamed as a major factor on the huge number of deaths from the worst fire in the Philippine history, which occurred in 1996.
=== Reception within Western scientific philosophy === Feng shui has been identified as both non-scientific by both scientists and philosophers, while some have gone further to describe it as a paradigmatic example of pseudoscience. This has been because feng shui's characteristic geomantic claims are not amenable to test by the scientific method.
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=== Books ===
=== Theses ===
=== Articles and chapters ===
=== Blogs and online ===
=== Web ===
=== Miscellaneous ===
==== Traditional China ====
==== Post-1949 China ====
==== United States ====
== External links == Media related to Feng Shui at Wikimedia Commons The dictionary definition of feng shui at Wiktionary