Do you believe in the supernatural? Poll

[stevie_b]

That's a well-written and thought-provoking post Morpheus.

 

Honest scientists will only be convinced of the existance of ghosts and other supernatural phenomena if they can figure out a way to reliably reproduce their manifestations, and rightly so. So far, no such way has been found. This is either because these phenomena don't exist in the first place, or we're using the wrong type of stimulus to try and cause them to appear.

[TRD-1]

What a brilliant thread.

 

Im not into religion or science either so my knowlege on such things is limited......But words of a interesting thinker...."There is another world, but that world is hidden inside this"......Majority of religion and so called spiritual paths have become all full of rubbish now all the authentic messages have been forgotten all that really remains is a politicians interpretation which is just gonna be totally wrong.....Following all that shit is gonna be absolutly absurd and a waste I feel.

 

The way I see it is if all the really juicy people go to hell then that is where I would like to go, I mean all the real people, the people of integrity the people of high courage or direction are pretty much all sinners and they will end up in Hell, and that is where I would rather be, living in Heaven will be so boring, where everyone will be dead no high spirits, all trying to be good, no fast cars, just following the 30mph speed limit.....no thanks!....I think the Juices of life are in living fully and totally without any commandments, without any doctrines without any shit!.....I would promote freedom in this context, absolute freedom.

 

Purity - A pure life is a total life, purity doesn't mean being good or following a idiot, it means being total within urself being total in everything you do and the route to this wholeness, or to this depth/height is through awareness, through conciousness from all the masters and mystics who have experieced such a state have all stated over the ages about the importance of a personal quest into oneself, and in that journey is where all the answers will be revealled a journey from being a sheep to roaring like a Lion. This is the gift which is our birthright everyone's birthright.

 

Such a state of pure conciousness of such depth is difficult to explain and express but the closest expression or the closest feeling is when one makes love, sexual ejaculation is known as the closest feeling to the beginning of such a state, its known as the first step. Drugs things like LSD have all come into existence to replicate such a state, the height of such a enlightened one and his state of being is only expereinced through getting there urself, but these inventions of drugs etc have all been to try and get there as a shortcut to taste it, they don't even come close its like a very bad taste of the real experience.

 

Getting back to the topic, ghosts/supernatural as we know it, these I feel are all lower levels, we are alive we are much higher than dead people they have lived there lives and can't come back we are in the present its now our moment why waste it in such useless activities, there isnt much to be learnt from them, bad spirits, devil possession etc all is a fragment and been exploited from the real truth, the real authentic truth isn't no where near what we are shown or told.

 

So to keep urself from getting pulled in funny and wierd situations which ain't gonna make a difference to ur state, get on with modifing your cars and refine them as much as u can, make them creations of gods and through this refining maybe one day you will be able to direct that energy towards ur inner self and refine that to, its not difficult only takes a change in the direction of ur energy.

[jagman]

All of these people who claim some "extra" or "higher" sense , light workers,frequency resonators , et al , it is far more likely they actually have a reduced brain function , That would never sell though ,or be popular

it would be difficult for people accept they have some sort of retardation in brain function , does a retard actually know they are retarded?

Are the totally insane blissfully happy at a higher(lower) state ?

such supernaturals actually subnaturals ?

[Tannhauser]

Right, this is a bit of a monster reply.

 

Morpheus saidOk, I have nothing against real science and I take your point in the context within which you meant it and obviously agree in principle to the self-correcting methodology that you've explained but science means (the aquiring of) knowledge about the natural world.

 

The problem is corruption. Any experiment is only as good as the data and people aren't all honest, incase you hadn't noticed. I've said it before that my brother is a Scientist but by God is he blinkered. You cannot assume anything, if you're going to be scientific, right? Not even that the laws that you've been taught are all valid. My problem has always been that I didn't understand the higher maths and I could see that science didn't have all the answers and that acknowledged experts were asking absurd questions like, "Will time start to go backwards at the point of maximum entropy?"

You’ve raised two issues with science, or the people who practise it: corruption, and inability to think open-mindedly.

 

Starting with corruption. Some scientists are undoubtedly corrupt and – for example- falsify data. That’s part of any human enterprise. However, as a mechanism for finding out reliable information, it has several advantages. For a start off, its built on the principle of replicability. Results have to be repeated in order to be taken seriously. Secondly, in most cases, there is some transparency about raw data. Thirdly, there is peer review, which for all its faults can alert researchers to when data looks dodgy.

 

Compare this to the long history of fakery in many subjects that want to challenge conventional silence. There is absolutely no comparison between the two, The history of pseudoscience and paranormal experience is littered with charlatans, fakers, cheats, criminals.

 

Secondly, blinkeredness. It’s all to do with balance of evidence. Let’s say someone reports that they dropped a ball, and the ball just hovered where it was. Or a video appears on Youtube appearing to show this. Does this mean that the scientist should start questioning theories of gravitation? No, because its likely that there is some other explanation that accounts for the observation. We have so many experimental observations, and it predicts so many things successfully on a day t day basis, that its going to take something extraordinary to disprove it. A hovering ball is much more likely to be due to fakery, or someone being mistaken about what they have seen.

 

Is this blinkeredness? It certainly would be if it’s taken too far. If a scientist was to ignore real evidence that is reproducible and cannot be accounted for by other mechanisms, then yes. Unfortunately, the challenges from paranormal investigators are usually incredibly weak. Understandably, scientists don’t have the time and energy to respond to every ill-conceived crackpot idea, especially when they are talking to people who just cant understand why their revelatory new idea doesn’t work.

[Tannhauser]

Morpheus saidThe lack of common sense among some of these academics is astonishing, my brother included tenfold. There are documentaries made, seriously discussing this time reversal possibility, with reversed video of a dropped and smashed teacup rising off of the kitchen floor and reforming into it's original unbroken state. For a start, the teacup wouldn't exist and neither would any other 'solid' matter, as the atoms that made it up would have released all of their energy, which is what entropy means. It's a complete failure of logic, especially since gravity ultimately forms black holes from which not much can escape and everything would be trapped. Our spiral galaxy would have long since disappeared up it's own hole.

 

See above. I am imagining you assaulting your brother’s ears with an unrelenting stream of this sort of thing. No wonder he gives you short shrift.

 

Your appeal to common sense is ironic in the extreme given some of your beliefs. That aside, common sense is no guide in these matters, is it? Three hundred years ago, it was common sense that disease was caused by bad smells, or that witches made the cattle fail to deliver milk. I’ve no idea wat your teacup example is meant to prove.

 

Yet, if a witness not just a 'believer' says that they were taken aboard a UFO or saw a spirit/ghost the typical response (as Mr T. has already confirmed), is that it's either delusion, a mistake or a lie. Nowhere in that 'rigorously proven' model of reality is there any room whatsoever for the possibility of it actually being true; not because it can't be true according to the known laws of physics but because it shouldn't be true according to the individual questioned. They just don't believe in it! This obviously varies from person to person, hence the poll.

 

I think you do have a point here, but as pointed out above, one makes these sorts of judgements based on the totality of one’s experiences. For myself, I would certainly dismiss the testimony of seeing a spirit, for example, as a delusion, lie, or mistake. This is based on the following:

 

1) We know all sorts of mechanisms that can account for such visions that don’t involve the existence of spirits. We have evidence that these can produce similar experiences.

2) Spirits do not materialise under carefully controlled conditions. The only conditions under which they do appear are ones that cannot be checked and reproduced. Therefore, there is a lack of high quality evidence.

3) We know that many attempts to fool researchers have been uncovered.

4) A lot of witnesses to such events are not very credible – this is my subjective judgement, but it’s not based not on what they are saying. It’s based on my perception of their personality, intelligence, ability to analyse and interpret, and so on.

5) The deep need people have to believe in a world that science cannot explain, and for the world to be generally less mundane than it actually is.

6) My lack of direct experience of anything remotely paranormal

7) My observations of people that believe they are experiencing something paranormal.

8) The lack of any credible theory to explain the existence of spirits

9) Evidence that consciousness is a physical process that is tied to one three pound lump of material in the skull

10) Philosophical and logical objections to the notion of a spirit.

 

So, the next time I see someone claim that they have seen a spirit, to be honest, personally I do dismiss it as rubbish. I don’t need to go through all that reasoning process for each new example.

 

Having said this, if Princeton University started reporting spirits in a well-designed experimental protocol (read: can’t be easily faked), and then those results were replicated elsewhere, by different researchers, then I would begin to reconsider. But guess what? It’s not going to happen. It’s taken 100 years and –and as Jagman pointed out – a lot of time and money – but the paranormal is at the end of the road. The one exception is PK, in which there is a glimmering of a smidgeon of a shadow of a difficult-to-explain event. That’s it.

[Tannhauser]

Morpheus said:When trying to scientifically determine the validity of 'paranormal' or 'supernatural' evidence, the data is the perception of the experiencer as witness to the event/s, which, since we all experience reality - whether it exists objectively or not - according to our own worldview, makes for a tough scientific evaluation process. No matter the protocol or the controlled environment, scientists are still people and they tend strongly to form opinions according to their existing beliefs, especially when there's money involved, even to the point of denial of their own results and requesting a second opinion, in the case of 'impossible' cancer remissions from the use of the (Dr. Bob) Beck protocol, for example.

 

Agreed that all scientists bring their own prejudices. But any phenomenon that is real just won’t be denied. Observations create cracks in the theory, and eventually the theory becomes unsustainable. That’s happened countless times in the history of science. But that’s not happening with the paranormal. Odd experimental results do not, in isolation, build a serious case.

 

Science deals with the physical, as observable with current technology, though the spectrum is broadening all the time but it's restricted in it's understanding of the occult, (meaning simply, that which is unseen or hidden), for a simple reason, that being the nature of reality itself, beyond the five senses. We've all heard of and indeed used our sixth sense or gut instinct but science or those purporting to represent it, would have us believe that all that exists is what we can see, hear, touch, taste or smell, either directly or indirectly through the use of many forms of sensory augmentation, such as telescopes and MRI, for example. Infact, your sensory organs and even 'your' brain are simply instruments in the same way but that's another topic.

 

So , you’re postulating that there is some sort of sense that is beyond that of the senses. Furthermore, this isn’t a disguised version of our own biases, it’s actually a real phenomenon. If so, we should be able to establish it with a simple test, one that eliminates the possibility that we are using the existing senses. OK, how about Ganzfeld techniques to investigate ESP? There’s a case of science trying to establish that something unobservable can be real. Once again, thousands of experiments have failed to show any such effect.

 

Sadly, the rest of your post descends into world trade centre stuff. You couldn’t have picked a worse example of ‘scientific bias’ to further your argument. Actually, that’s not true, you could always go back to David Icke. But it’s certainly amongst the worst.

 

After every major event, outlandish ideas flourish briefly, then die a death. I would make a list, but such an argument would be doomed, since undoubtedly you would believe in every single one of those as well.

[tbourner]

The way I see it is if all the really juicy people go to hell then that is where I would like to go, I mean all the real people, the people of integrity the people of high courage or direction are pretty much all sinners and they will end up in Hell, and that is where I would rather be, living in Heaven will be so boring, where everyone will be dead no high spirits, all trying to be good, no fast cars, just following the 30mph speed limit.....no thanks!

 

I always assumed heaven would be personal, so if you like driving fast cars or having sex with 13 year old boys then that's what heaven would be for you, regardless of the laws that man made up (religious laws included). And similarly hell would be the opposite.

[Rob]

Sadly, the rest of your post descends into world trade centre stuff. You couldn’t have picked a worse example of ‘scientific bias’ to further your argument. Actually, that’s not true, you could always go back to David Icke. But it’s certainly amongst the worst.

 

I was finding it quite interesting until he started on the WTC. Please stop with the 9/11 conspiracies Morpheus, its a waste of your time.

 

Another point I like to make to "truthers" is," if George Bush was responsible for the organisation of a mass attack killing his own people and a huge cover-up to disguise this "truth" so that they could justify a war in Iraq, why then did Tony Blair allegedly only have to alter a document to achieve the same result?"

 

That's not a question I want you to answer, lest this thread turns into yet another 9/11 yawnfest.

[TRD-1]

I always assumed heaven would be personal, so if you like driving fast cars or having sex with 13 year old boys then that's what heaven would be for you, regardless of the laws that man made up (religious laws included). And similarly hell would be the opposite.

 

Interesting point, pretty much every time Heaven is mentioned, saints or fanatical followers of the religioin are mentioned, and Hell is always for individuals who refuse to follow and who do what they like totally disobedient towards god (God being the key word here, as heaven and hell are only present when god is present, when god is dead so is heaven and hell), the fact that majority of child abuse goes on in strictly religious atmosphere's due to the overly unatural laws they try to follow is quite obvious.

 

But there would be no age limits in hell, so If I was 13 and the person I liked was 13 to, when what the hell......

[Morpheus]

Yawnfest Rob?

 

Good luck making sense of the next few years guys. Mr.T. I have explained how spirits/unseen dimensions etc. can exist many times and it's accepted scientifically now, though obviously not by everyone.

 

To briefly re-iterate, we are only 'aware' of a tiny fraction of the observable matter in the Universe, by whatever method.

 

Therefore, the other 99%+ might just be significant perhaps? It's the cold/hot dark matter, depending on to whom you listen. I do agree that there are mechanisms within the brain that can reproduce 'experiences', e.g. OOBE's, a presence etc. with magnetic fields but the question as always, is why? Could not the natural, yet normally dormant areas of the right temporal lobe etc. be stimulated to do what they were designed to do, like EMS, for example?

 

If there was an afterlife or alternative/parallel dimension, would not a specialised organ (Pineal Gland etc.) for it's experience be useful, just like every other experience that we can have, has an associated organ or region of the brain? To argue that there's nothing else but what we can see is, well, blinkered!

 

I must admit that I do not have the right to question anyone's belief system, except when I feel that they invalidate mine, as it is based on experience.