quote:

AP-GfK Poll: Nearly 8 in 10 believe in angels

By JENNIFER AGIESTA, Associated Press – 2 days ago

Angels don't just sing at Christmastime. For most Americans, they're a year-round presence. A new Associated Press-GfK poll shows that 77 percent of adults believe these ethereal beings are real.

Belief is primarily tied to religion, with 88 percent of Christians, 95 percent of evangelical Christians and 94 percent of those who attend weekly religious services of any sort saying they believe in angels.

But belief in angels is fairly widespread even among the less religious. A majority of non-Christians think angels exist, as do more than 4 in 10 of those who never attend religious services.

Beyond the religious gap, women are more likely than men to believe angels are real, and those over 30 are more apt than younger adults to think they exist.

The finding mirrors a 2006 AP-AOL poll, which found 81 percent believed in angels.

Previous polling has found the public a bit more likely to believe in God, but far less likely to believe in other other-worldly beings. In May, 92 percent of adults told Gallup pollsters they believed in God. But just 34 percent in an AP-Ipsos poll in 2007 said they believed in ghosts or UFOs.

The AP-GfK Poll was conducted Dec. 8-12 and is based on interviews with 1,000 adults nationally. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Source:
http://www.google.com/hostedne...4713b1fd86c46970362c

No wonder Americans constantly do incredibly stupid things, like electing the wrong politicians. Americans can't think rationally. They're dumb or ignorant or just horribly irrational.

If anyone here really and truly believes in angels, please says so and tell me if you also believe in the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus. Why or why not? All are mythical fantasy creations with no reality.

Oh, and as a definition of angel, I mean this concept:

quote:

angel
[eyn-juhl]  
an·gel
   [eyn-juhl]
noun
1.
one of a class of spiritual beings; a celestial attendant of God. In medieval angelology, angels constituted the lowest of the nine celestial orders (seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominations or dominions, virtues, powers, principalities or princedoms, archangels, and angels).

Source:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/angel

Jeff

quote:

angel
[eyn-juhl]  
an·gel
   [eyn-juhl]
noun
1.
one of a class of spiritual beings; a celestial attendant of God. In medieval angelology, angels constituted the lowest of the nine celestial orders (seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominations or dominions, virtues, powers, principalities or princedoms, archangels, and angels).

Jeff,

Well, not exactly. That isn't how I would define the word angel anyway. The word for angel in Hebrew is malak (pl. malakim) which means a messenger. So an angel is a messenger or emissary of God, and I would say also an emanation of God.

The reason so many people believe in angels isn't because they are stupid or delusional but because angels really exist on the non-physical plane, and many people have had interactions with them. Often this happens at some extreme crisis point in their lives, when they are in immanent danger of death but are miraculously saved at the last minute.

Our dear departed friend William believed until his dying day that the Archangel Michael saved his life in the attack during the Korean War in which he lost his leg. I believed him and told him so on a number of occasions. I didn't say it just to humor a foolish old man but because I believed him.

Another friend of mine had a similar experience, and sent me an email about it shortly after we became Facebook friends. This guy is one of my old Prodigy friends. He sent me a written account of his experience, along with the pictures of his van after it was totalled. He was blind drunk when the accident occurred and he should NOT have lived though it. Of course he was badly injured but he lived to tell the tale. He credits his survival to the mysterious and comforting presence he became aware of at the time, who he perceived as female and referred to as "She."

Again I believed him, because I'm one of those 8 out of 10 people who believes in angels, though they may be called by other names in other cultures and even in this one. I even suggested to my friend that he may have rated an intervention from the one who is sometimes called the Queen of Angels, about whom I was just reading in another context yesterday.

By "angels" I mean non-corporeal beings of a beneficient nature who are deeply interested in humans, who can communicate with them under special circumstances, and who sometimes intervene on their behalf.

--Linda

Jeff

Good subject.

Your heirarchy may be faulty, as a French Christmas carol, The Sleep of the Infant Jesus, says he was watched over by seraphim and cherubim, a thousand each.

I might suggest that belief in angels is inside the experience of being Born Again, which would give the believer a identifyable source of strength. The good angels stick around, the bad ones operate in the hid-and-run mode.

On the other hand, Mohummed was dictated to by an angel, and he was consistent in his visitations according to the need of the desert tribes.

One might even wonder if the flaming bush seen by Moses was angelic.

Onward,
Donald

quote:

I might suggest that belief in angels is inside the experience of being Born Again, which would give the believer a identifyable source of strength.

Donald,

Plenty of people who would never refer to themselves as "born again" believe in angels. They believe in them because they have experienced them, and angels in no way favor born-again Christians. My Prodigy friend who was miraculously saved from the consequences of his own weakness and stupidity in a horrible drunk-driving incident is a Unitarian Universalist.

He was "born again" to the extent that he stopped drinking after the accident, but that's as far as it went. His basic liberal and freethinking mindset did not change, nor is there any reason why it should.

--Linda

quote:

The reason so many people believe in angels isn't because they are stupid or delusional but because angels really exist on the non-physical plane, and many people have had interactions with them.

Your evidence for such an astonishing statement is what, exactly? Do you have any proof that angels exist on "the non-physical plane." Can you even explain what the heck a "non-physical plane" is and how something can exist in such a thing? Doesn't existence mean a physical plane--you know, something that can be observed in a tangible, provable way?

I realize you're sincere just as you realize I'm sincere. Is there no way we can speak the same language and have a discussion, or are we simply doomed to consider each other misguided for the rest of our lives.

Jeff

I came across this quote from Hitchens in another article I read today:

quote:

“One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge.”

Source:
http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-...86624/about-nothing/
(quoting from Hitchen's book God Is Not Great.

Angels, demons, fairies, goblins...all such mythical creatures...represent primitive thinking from primitive times. That such ideas still hold sway in today's world is astonishing to me.

How can, for example, the billion Catholics in the world really believe that every official canonized saint performed miracles AFTER HIS DEATH. That, after all, is required to become a saint.

Jeff

quote:

Your evidence for such an astonishing statement is what, exactly? Do you have any proof that angels exist on "the non-physical plane." Can you even explain what the heck a "non-physical plane" is and how something can exist in such a thing?

Jeff,

My mind or consciousness (as opposed to the neurons of my brain) obviously exists on the non-physical plane. So do my emotions, and so does my intuiton. I consider intuition a discriminatory function, sometimes described as "reason in a hurry." It is a way of discerning significance, i.e. "Pay attention, because this is important."

Just as I have five physical senses for perceiving and interacting with the physical world (hopefully with SOME small degree of effectiveness, although this was not much in evidence yesterday), I believe I also have a sixth sense for perceiving and sometimes interacting with the non-physical world. So do you and so does everyone, because it's part of our birthright as human beings.

We all have psychic abilities that in most people living in Western cultures remain undeveloped, since we are a very logos-oriented culture. I am too for the most part, yet I have experienced telepathy with other sympathetic humans, with those people who come in on my wavelength like my good friend Bluelamp. He "knew" I was looking for him several years ago, so he looked for me and found me on Democratic Underground...and on an ET topic, no less!

No, I don't have any "proof" of this that you would accept, but I also don't think I'm under the slightest obligation to provide you with any. I don't HAVE to provide you with any kind of proof in order to say, "I had this amazing experience..." and kick it around with other people who have had similar experiences, in most cases far more spectacular and more uncanny than mine.

People get tired to having to "prove" something in order to earn the right to discuss it. They also get tired of being told they are de facto irrational, delusional or engaging in superstitious or magical thinking (in the negative sense) just because they have had these experiences and want to talk about them without being shouted down by the professional skeptics.

Still, I'm glad you started this topic because it gives me an opening to start a new topic of my own that I've been mulling over for weeks. This is as good a topic as any for the more traditional angels and demons and elemental spirits. But there have also been some interesting developments in the ET and science fiction and pop culture fields that I know will interest you even if they make you angry.

More and more, so-called "extraterrestrials" are now being called "ultraterrestrials" and the current thinking is that they are not from other galaxies, but from the non-physical dimensions of this one. In other words...ETs are the angels, devils, gods, nephilim and elementals (elves, gnomes, etc.) of traditional religion and folklore. Just like Bluelamp and Glenn have been saying all along!

Yep, there's AAT (ancient astronaut theory) in the mix along with generous helpings of conspiracy theory. I don't know how high your tolerance is for high strangeness, but mine is limited only by my current state of information. Also, I recently discovered this great blog where the regulars are light-years ahead of me. These are some of the sharpest, most rational people I've ever met AND the most daring and imaginative in their speculations. I'm going to have to spend a lot of time playing catch-up, but I have a feeling it will be worth it.

--Linda

Jeff
Long ago the Bible noted three planes of existence: Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Nowadays the discussion has broadened to include other universes, which presumably have some purpose in spirituality.

The key word in this string is "believe".

Donald

Donald, I strive to not believe in anything without some kind of convincing evidence. To me, anecdotal reports are not evidence. Quoting the Bible is meaningless to me--it's just a book written by hundreds of people, each with an agenda. It's also been mistranslated and added to and altered many times over the centuries.

Linda, it may be obvious to you that your mind exists on the non-physical plane. It's not at all obvious to me. Something that's said to exist on the non-physical plane (again, whatever the heck that is--I understand the concept but I have no evidence it exists) should be able to exist without a physical component. But when your physical body is dead, your mind is dead too.

Yes, I know many here believe in spirits/angels/communicating with the dead/souls/ghosts/fairies/aliens etc. I know, Linda, you've said often that you believe psychic powers exist, that you've experienced psychic events, that you know those who regularly exhibit such powers. But I've been intrigued by the field all my life and I've yet to find any credible evidence that any of it is real. Nor have the great bulk of interested scientists who have investigated the field. WHY, pray tell, if these such things exist is there no way to prove their existence? Seems to me it should be very easy to show such powers in a way that would convince skeptics. I'm not that hard to convince. Give me a repeatable experiment that can be replicated and gives clearcut, non-random results.

Yes, of course, you've not under any obligation to explain or justify anything. But don't expect me to take you seriously if you won't deal with the obvious questions by using such an excuse. That's a sign to me that you secretly know that your position is indefensible, so you want to avoid a rational discussion of it at all costs.

Again, I know you're sincere. I just don't think that you want to test your belief by dealing with the hard questions, since you don't have any reasonable answers to them. It's like being a constant viewer of Fox News, accepting factless rubbish as truth because you're in a bubble that encourages those attitudes and such acceptance--and discourages skepticism of any kind.

I've read reports from believers for years and I've never understood why there's not an ounce of skepticism in them--why, in these meetings with psychics they never ask the obvious questions.

The simple truth is that these areas are no longer investigated by scientists because there's been plenty of research that has failed to demonstrate any phenomena that's worthy of further study. If one-tenth of what you believe is truth, everyone from the leading scientists of the worlds to the leading spy/military groups would be investigating and studying. Yet all the academic institutes for the study of these phenomena have been closed down because they never produced any worthwhile results. These areas are fringe and cult areas because there's simply no evidence for them. Investigating has proved to be a waste of time and money. Show that something exists to investigate and the best scientists the world has will be rushing to investigate.

It's called critical thinking, and not going by what you think is obvious. It's also called the scientific method, something that is a wonderful tool to distinguish reality from fantasy.

Jeff

Jeff,

There are a number of different ways I could approach this question and related ones, and what I'd really like to do is address them all at once! But since by my own choice I'm stuck with this linear discipline of writing as my preferred means of self-expression and communication, I'm going to have to deal with them one at a time whether I like it or not. So before I say anything more about angels or supernatural beings in general, or even try to address the issues you raised in your last post and previous ones, I need to know whether you believe the Universe is coherent and connected or not.

To me it seems impossible to see it any other way, but I also know this is a matter of individual preference, and some people choose to see it otherwise--they see life as a series of random, disconnected events with no coherence, no meaning and no purpose. History is just one damn thing after another and "life is a beech and then you die." Nihilism, I guess you'd call it. At least that's what the author of that Tablet piece you quoted on Christopher Hitchens would call it, and did call it. I read that article in its entirety last night, BTW.

Although the people who subscribe to this viewpoint or say they do like to think of themselves as hard-boiled realists, personally I think they are just habitually depressed. There is nothing the least bit "scientific" about it, because if the Universe is really nothing more than one damn thing after another with no rhyme or reason to any of it, science would not be possible. Cause and effect implies connection and means connection. Ironically, it's the so-called creationists who subscribe to this world-view rather than the evolutionists. That's an argument our friend Henry has often used in his debates with them, i.e. if a horse and a zebra were each a separate creation and they were not closely related species, why wouldn't their biology be completely different despite superficial similarities? How could you even talk about species AT ALL? Add to that the inconvenient fact that humans share 95% of their DNA with chimpanzees and...you get the idea.

Obviously I believe the complete opposite. I believe that everything in the Universe is connected in an infinite and ever-changing network of relationships. Of course we can only perceive our own little corner of it, but that doesn't change the fact that we are potentially in contact with ALL of it. When I learned about the metaphor of Indra's Net I knew I'd come as close to the capital-T Truth as anything I'd ever known before. Here's the nutshell description from Wikipedia:

quote:

Indra's net(also called Indra's jewels or Indra's pearls) is a metaphor used to illustrate the concepts of emptiness,[2] dependent origination,[3] and interpenetration[4] in Buddhist philosophy. The metaphor of Indra's net was developed by the Mahayana Buddhist school in the 3rd century scriptures of the Avatamsaka Sutra, and later by the Chinese Huayan school between the 6th and 8th century.[2]

Buddhist concepts of interpenetration hold that all phenomena are intimately connected; for the Huayan school, Indra's net symbolizes a universe where infinitely repeated mutual relations exist between all members of the universe.[5] This idea is communicated in the image of the interconnectedness of the universe as seen in the net of the Vedic god Indra, whose net hangs over his palace on Mount Meru, the axis mundi of Vedic cosmology and Vedic mythology. Indra's net has a multifaceted jewel at each vertex, and each jewel is reflected in all of the other jewels.[6]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra%27s_net

A couple of considerations here: For one thing, I don't understand why this model is even called a "metaphor." To me it's as accurate a description of the way things actually ARE as anything I've ever encountered. I also would have thought this was a Hindu concept because the original story comes from the Vedas, but the Wikipedia article is characterizing it as Buddhist. But since Buddhism itself originated in India, maybe I'm just splitting hairs here.

And furthermore...once when I was channeling one of my sources informed me: "The World Wide Web is a good model of Indra's Net on this earth plane." So I wrote this down, and as the implications sank in I realized that the Web *IS* Indra's Net on this earth plane. And anyone with a computer can access it, and if they really want to they can activate it. They can make it WORK as it was meant to work! They can create links or contacts with other compatible minds, and (again if they want to) with the best minds that ever lived--with the dead through their writings which have been archived.

After a certain critical mass is reached, things really start to happen and that's why we have the Occupy movement now. I don't think there is any real debate about that, and the PTB hate it with a passion. That's why their are all these schemes to restrict net neutrality. The self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe KNOW and have known forever, that when enough human minds start comparing notes, they are going to come to certain conclusions. And those conclusions are going to be a threat to their hegemony for some very obvious reasons.

You are probably wondering what all this speculation has to do with the original topic of this thread, i.e. why do so many people believe in angels and other supernatural beings? Probably nothing directly, but it does explain (hopefully) why I believe in the reality of telepathy. I don't believe our minds are really separate from each other at any time. I don't believe they are "things," or anything like physical things. All are part of one immense collective mind or network or intelligence. Of course we have our own "local networks" (our neural networks or individual consciousness) and those we pay most attention to most of the time. But because we are conscious beings, we are potentially in contact with ANY part of Indra's Net at any time.

In other words, to me telepathy isn't "supernatural" at all, but completely natural and completely consistent with my world-view. Likewise with synchronicity. They are simply manifestations of how I believe the world actually works.

--Linda

quote:

if the Universe is really nothing more than one damn thing after another with no rhyme or reason to any of it, science would not be possible. Cause and effect implies connection and means connection.

Well, I do believe there are rules governing the universe. We know some of them and not others, yet. But that's not the same thing as cause and effect. We know, for example, that if we throw a ball up into the air it comes down. We are pretty sure about that in the large (leaving completely alone the questions about tiny subatomic particles or what happens near a black hole or in space where there's not enough gravitational force etc. etc.). But that does NOT mean that the action of throwing the ball up is the cause of it coming down. The cause is gravity, and that cause is independent of the action. In other words, forces do exist which act consistently, but we're often under the illusion that what we observe represents cause and effect. What we observe is not necessarily random, but can be the consequence of factors that we don't yet understand. I think we agree somewhat on that.

I'll also agree that the world acts in some ways similar to the way a group mind would work. At the time of Newton, mathematics was ripe for the invention of calculus. Progress had been made in math in a number of different locations so that some were able to take the next step. That's why both Newton and Leibniz developed calculus at roughly the same time, and why various researchers developed the seminal ideas of quantum mechanics around the same time, and why, say, Edison developed the light bulb and similar gadgets when other inventors were working on their own variations of those ideas.

But those examples don't mean that the group mind concept is anything except a metaphor. Indra's net IS a metaphor. It's not reality. It's an interesting way to describe reality and to explain an observation, but that doesn't make it real.

I have no problem with philosophical ideas that we are "potentially" in contact with others mentally. I have no problem with any of these ideas--as long as they're viewed properly as ideas and theories. The question then is what happens when we apply research and the scientific method to these ideas. And, as I keep stating and you keep avoiding, the results then are that the ideas don't pan out as being real. I'd love to believe in telepathy and kismet and fate and star-crossed lovers and other romantic fantasies. But before you start explaining a phenomenom, you need to show that it exists. And that's where all this psychic blather fails completely. It's never been shown to exist, and it has been studied by many for centuries.

And, again, since there is NO believable or substantial evidence, why do you accept your feelings and the feelings of others that something like that is going on? Don't YOU believe in the scientific method? If such things as telepathy existed, surely we'd know it by now. Such things are psychokinesis, if it exists, should be very easy to demonstrate. Clairvoyance also. Precognition would raise extraordinarily interesting philosophical ideas(freewill vs. predetermination) that would have to be resolved and also could easily be demonstrated.

But every attempt to do so has failed. Every single one. No exceptions. The tests of the "gifted" psychics fail. The statistical tests of broad populations produce chance results. Much of the literature of "successful" tests turned out to be bad data, faulty analysis, lack of proper experimental protocols, or most often outright fraud. NONE of the "successful" results are replicated by other researchers. NONE.

Your posts seem to say that you know what you know and don't care about any evidence. Well, good for you. I need evidence that something exists. I need evidence for Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy. We all agree I'm not going to find good evidence for those things. But I also need evidence for angels, for example, and I don't see any. You may agree with my skepticism or not about those. And I also need evidence for psychics and telepaths and channelers. I need evidence that dead people still have consciousness of some kind and can communicate with the living. I think it's fair to say you believe in those things. Can you understand that's just as nonsensical to me as believing in Santa?

Jeff

quote:

I need evidence for Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy. We all agree I'm not going to find good evidence for those things. But I also need evidence for angels, for example, and I don't see any. You may agree with my skepticism or not about those. And I also need evidence for psychics and telepaths and channelers. I need evidence that dead people still have consciousness of some kind and can communicate with the living. I think it's fair to say you believe in those things. Can you understand that's just as nonsensical to me as believing in Santa?

Jeff,

By constantly making these analogies between Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy and telepathy (among other things) are you just trying to goad me into replying? I wouldn't really mind except that I already posted one long note on this thread today, and I've also been having computer problems.

On top of that I'm in a fiercely bad mood because I had a completely horrible holiday weekend, culminating with a tote bag containing my journal getting stolen from my front yard! It was my current journal and that writing is irreplacable (it was handwritten). I have to tell you honestly that a big part of the reason I spent so much energy on my last post and the "Secret Sun" post last night was simply to distract myself from how awful I was feeling. It worked, but only temporarily.

Anyway, the reason I don't put telepathy (among other things) on the same level as Santa Claus is because I have actually experienced it. I have NO reason to believe that Santa Claus is anything other than a fable people tell their kids. Likewise with the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, of course. It isn't a matter of "evidence" so much as experience. Santa Claus always turns out to be a guy dressed up in a Santa Claus outfit, usually with a fake beard unless he happens to have a real one, working for minimum wage at a department store before Christmas. I have never had recurring dreams about Santa Claus, never had a "great dream" about Santa Claus, never met Santa Claus on the astral plane in an altered state of consciousness. "Great dream" is a Jungian term. It refers to a dream you believe to be true and important and furthermore feel almost compelled to share with others. That's what distinguishes it from an ordinary dream.

Furthermore, I have never met anyone else either in real life or online who has had such contacts with Santa Claus either. I'm not saying it's never happened, but if so it isn't a topic of discussion on the synchronicity and high strangeness blogs I frequent. Nor has it ever come up in my private email correspondence.

Telepathy OTOH is a whole other story, and so is contact with supernatural beings such as angels and perceived extraterrestrials.

--Linda

Jeff,
     Linda has a point. If telepathy and other paranormal phenomena occur for her with regularity, it is to be expected she would believe in them sincerely. Naturally, since you have had no such experiences yourself, you ask for verifiable evidence of their existence, although you're confident it cannot be provided. You are aware, of course, that no way exists to disprove with certainty that the supernatural is a fiction, even though you disbelieve in it with all your heart. Thus, what we have here is but a rising disputation, with no chance a productive discussion may emerge.
     If we could explore the reasons why some of us believe while others cling to skepticism, I would listen avidly in high hope of learning something.
Seán

quote:

Linda has a point. If telepathy and other paranormal phenomena occur for her with regularity, it is to be expected she would believe in them sincerely. Naturally, since you have had no such experiences yourself, you ask for verifiable evidence of their existence, although you're confident it cannot be provided.

Sean,

Not so fast there! Telepathy occurs to me with regularity but not other psychic phenomena. The telepathy is of a fairly low-grade nature, or what I would consider the natural working of Indra's net. As I already said, I believe Indra's net is real and not just a metaphor. But even when not spectacular or earth-shaking, I still pay attention to such phenomena and take them seriously. I'm not sure exactly where empathy leaves off and telepathy begins, because there doesn't seem to be any clear line of demarcation. It's also very much an emotional thing and to some degree a physical thing. I often feel emotions, including those coming from other people over the Internet, as physical sensations in the appropriate energy centers or chakras, most often around my heart.

Thoughts and images may also occur to me but it's NOT primarily an intellectual thing. Also specific ideas (like the mention of a specific book) most often present in the form of synchronicity--i.e. two people who don't know each other mention the same book to me within a short period of time.

In one really spectacular instance on Prodigy Classic years ago, THREE of us quoted the same quotation on three different forums on the same day! One of the three people was me, another was Bluelamp, and the third one was a hypnotist and psychic I exchanged notes with on the Supernatural board. His screen name was Doc Fox, and he and I used to engage in some half-assed psychic experiments in late-night chat sessions. Basically, he was trying to show me that telepathy worked over the Internet the same as in RL, and that it also worked between people who had never met in person. I didn't require much convincing because I had pretty much figured it out on my own by then anyway. Also, my standard of proof isn't as high as Jeff's and I don't require repeatable experiments and formal controls, ESPECIALLY not when I am personally involved!

I would NOT be so quick to assume that Jeff has had "no such experiences," though. Have you noticed he hasn't said one way or the other? I suspect he may have had quite a few of them, possibly more frequent and/or more powerful than mine. The problem is that he doesn't know what to do with them intellectually. He loves science fiction and imaginative literature and keeps up with all the latest developments in psychic research. It's obvious that the subject fascinates him. So far, though, nothing has met his high standard of proof. For me anecdotal evidence is sufficent, especially when it's my own first-hand experience. For him it obviously isn't.

What Jeff doesn't realize (yet) is that he's had a couple of possibly-telepathic interactions with me on this topic already.

--Linda

No, Linda, I haven't had any telepathic experiences. That doesn't matter. I'm perfectly willing to believe telepathy exists if I had some evidence. Anecdotal reports are not evidence.

You have to distinguish between what you BELIEVE has happened and what has actually happened. I've never doubted your sincerity. I believe you honestly think you've had telepathic experiences. I simply don't believe that's the case.

As I keep saying, such abilities can be tested. If they're real, they can be shown as being real even to skeptics. There's been enormous work over centuries trying to show telepathy is real--and, again, the research has ALWAYS failed to prove the case.

Here's some sensible stuff from Wikipedia about anecdotal evidence:

quote:

Anecdotal evidence is often unscientific or pseudoscientific because various forms of cognitive bias may affect the collection or presentation of evidence. For instance, someone who claims to have had an encounter with a supernatural being or alien may present a very vivid story, but this is not falsifiable. This phenomenon can also happen to large groups of people through subjective validation.

Anecdotal evidence is also frequently misinterpreted via the availability heuristic, which leads to an overestimation of prevalence. Where a cause can be easily linked to an effect, people overestimate the likelihood of the cause having that effect (availability). In particular, vivid, emotionally-charged anecdotes seem more plausible, and are given greater weight. A related issue is that it is usually impossible to assess for every piece of anecdotal evidence, the rate of people not reporting that anecdotal evidence in the population.

A common way anecdotal evidence becomes unscientific is through fallacious reasoning such as the Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, the human tendency to assume that if one event happens after another, then the first must be the cause of the second. Another fallacy involves inductive reasoning. For instance, if an anecdote illustrates a desired conclusion rather than a logical conclusion, it is considered a faulty or hasty generalization.[12] For example, here is anecdotal evidence presented as proof of a desired conclusion:

There's abundant proof that drinking water cures cancer. Just last week I read about a girl who was dying of cancer. After drinking water she was cured.

Anecdotes like this do not prove anything.[13] In any case where some factor affects the probability of an outcome, rather than uniquely determining it, selected individual cases prove nothing; e.g. "my grandfather smoked 40 a day until he died at 90" and "my sister never went near anyone who smoked but died of lung cancer". Anecdotes often refer to the exception, rather than the rule: "Anecdotes are useless precisely because they may point to idiosyncratic responses."[14] Even when many anecdotes are collected to prove a point, "The plural of anecdote is not data." (Roger Brinner[15])

More generally, a statistical correlation between things does not in itself prove that one causes the other (a causal link). A study found that television viewing was strongly correlated with sugar consumption, but this does not prove that viewing causes sugar intake (or viceversa).

In medicine anecdotal evidence is also subject to placebo effects:[16] it is well-established that a patient's (or doctor's) expectation can genuinely change the outcome of treatment. Only double-blind randomized placebo-controlled clinical trials can confirm a hypothesis about the effectiveness of a treatment independently of expectations.

Sites devoted to rhetoric[17] often give explanations along these lines:

Anecdotal evidence, for example, is by definition less statistically reliable than other sorts of evidence, and explanations do not carry the weight of authority. But both anecdotal evidence and explanations may affect our understanding of a premise, and therefore influence our judgment. The relative strength of an explanation or an anecdote is usually a function of its clarity and applicability to the premise it is supporting.
—[18]

By contrast, in science and logic, the "relative strength of an explanation" is based upon its ability to be tested, proven to be due to the stated cause, and verified under neutral conditions in a manner that other researchers will agree has been performed competently, and can check for themselves.

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

I'm sorry about your lost notebook, truly. As a computer guy, I wonder why you didn't make a copy; it's so easy to do these days. Anything important to you that can be backed up in some fashion should be, for this very reason. My apologies for giving a lecture when you're least likely to want one, but everyone should heed that message.

Jeff

quote:

no way exists to disprove with certainty that the supernatural is a fiction

Sean, the word itself sort of shows it doesn't exist. How can anything real be SUPERnatural? Either it's natural or it doesn't exist.

No one is asking that EVERYTHING called supernatural be disproved. It's enough to be specific about certain things. All the research in the world can't disprove the idea that someone, somewhere is telepathic. We can only say that the notion is highly unlikely, violates all known physical laws in the large, has been researched often, and has NEVER been shown to be real. That's good enough for me to make the leap that telepathy doesn't exist. I don't believe dead people perform miracles and save the lives of people--but that's a Catholic requirement for a dead person to be declared a saint. I can't PROVE that never happens, but what are the odds? You can't prove I'm not seeing a little green man in my room right now, but I don't think you're going to accept that one is here simply because I type out that one exists. I may be deluded and believe that one is here; I may be kidding around; I may have all sorts of psychological reasons for actually believing in one or thinking I see one in some conscious state halfway between being awake and asleep. But my belief doesn't make it real either.

Let me give you an example. I quoted Hitchens yesterday and in Linda's response she said:

quote:

At least that's what the author of that Tablet piece you quoted on Christopher Hitchens would call it, and did call it. I read that article in its entirety last night, BTW.

But I never read any article in the Tablet--I don't even know what the Tablet is. That's just another example of leaping to conclusions, and believing the statement is true completely, never asking the obvious question about where I got the quote. I got it from an article in Salon, BTW; there are lots of quotes from Hitchens appearing now, of course.

I'm presenting that just as an example of the kind of thinking I'm talking about; of course it's no big deal.

I put this topic in the Religion forum for the obvious reason. So much in Religion is appallingly ridiculous to me. Many here will agree with me when I say that Scientology's view that Xenu

quote:

the dictator of the "Galactic Confederacy" who, 75 million years ago, brought billions[4][5] of his people to Earth in a DC-8-like spacecraft, stacked them around volcanoes and killed them using hydrogen bombs

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenu

Ridiculous, right?

Or Mormonism:

quote:

According to Latter Day Saint belief, the golden plates (also called the gold plates or in some 19th century literature, the golden Bible)[1] are the source from which Joseph Smith, Jr. translated the Book of Mormon, a sacred text of the faith. Some witnesses described the plates as weighing from 30 to 60 pounds,[2] being golden or brassy in color, and being composed of thin metallic pages engraved on both sides and bound with one or more rings.

Smith said he found the plates on September 22, 1823 at a hill near his home in Manchester, New York after an angel directed him to a buried stone box.

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_plates

Ridiculous, right?

Or Judaism/Chrisitanity/Muslim:

quote:

The Ten Commandments appear twice in the Hebrew Bible, in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. According to the story in Exodus, God inscribed them on two stone tablets, which he gave to Moses on Mount Sinai.

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments

Ridiculous, right?

Yet billions of people apparently believe the ridiculous story of God inscribing things on tablets, and disbelieve the similar story in Mormon belief.

All my life I've been trying to figure out why these ridiculous stories are taken as fact and truth without any evidence whatever by various people. I haven't had much luck figuring it out.

Jeff

Jeff

Your reference is to inspired writings, the circumstances of which have been glorified to emphasize their authenticity. In Christianity there are many such begging for authenticity, with most being rejected by authorities. The amazing thing is the quality of the writings accepted, and their usefulness for humankind. The Ten Commandments were a source of power for the Hebrews. Paul's Letters continue to be a continuing reference for many Christians. Mormonism was the result of religious feuds, and brought us the Rambler car and two related State governors.

Perhaps the amazing thing is that mankind did reject many of these writing.

Donald

Linda,
     Fair enough! I do admit I overreached by attributing to you psychic powers beyond the telepathic. I still maintain that telepathy and empathy are distinctly different. Telepathy relates to communicating information by some form of mental-contact; its potential usefulness has been usurped by our newly found ability to communicate anywhere with anyone with the aid of small electronic gadgets. Not so with empathy, which gift confers the ability to share or transmit a wide range of sensations. Despite the near unlimited opportunity provided by the WWW, empathetic interchange is rare, vituperation not included.
Seán

In my view the field of parapsychology does have good studies and good physics theories to justify its existence.

http://www.sott.net/articles/s...tice-and-of-a-Theory

I also think that eye witness testimony can be studied in a Jungian psychology way for patterns related to archetypes and the collective unconscious. Patterns from tons of data helps get around problems in any particular data. Indra's net is a great "testimony" for how things including time really have more connections than our current 4-dim Minkowski spacetime metric.

http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/Ganesha.html

Angels/Aliens would be users of a 6-dim Conformal metric which houses two 5-dim (de-Sitter and anti-de-Sitter) ones, the border of which is our 4-dim Spacetime. Getting off the 4-dim border is what our currently highly charged solar system "capacitor" may do in the next couple of years to get us back to Eden/the Golden Age. Parapsychology is kind of Eden for the electrons of the quantum consciousness Indra-Net mind.

quote:

Originally posted by Sean:
Linda,
     Fair enough! I do admit I overreached by attributing to you psychic powers beyond the telepathic. I still maintain that telepathy and empathy are distinctly different. Telepathy relates to communicating information by some form of mental-contact; its potential usefulness has been usurped by our newly found ability to communicate anywhere with anyone with the aid of small electronic gadgets. Not so with empathy, which gift confers the ability to share or transmit a wide range of sensations. Despite the near unlimited opportunity provided by the WWW, empathetic interchange is rare, vituperation not included.
Seán

It could be I'm using the word "telepathy" for what I experience as a kind of psychic linking through emails and discussion boards, especially with people I'm close to and have a lot of traits in common with. And YES, it can be negative as well as positive! It happens to me quite often, and is often but not always followed by some kind of synchronistic event. Maybe I should only use the word "telepathy" for those occasions when there seems to be an actual message, or when I actually hear another person's voice in my head. That doesn't happen nearly as often, but it does happen. Usually I'm in a hypnogogic state--half asleep and half awake. That's when the really weird stuff happens.

--Linda

quote:

But I never read any article in the Tablet--I don't even know what the Tablet is. That's just another example of leaping to conclusions, and believing the statement is true completely, never asking the obvious question about where I got the quote. I got it from an article in Salon, BTW; there are lots of quotes from Hitchens appearing now, of course.

Jeff,

Yes, you did quote from Tablet. To prove it, I'm reposting your note with the Tablet link. I was kind of surprised you'd use it as a source, especially considering the general tone of the article I read. It wasn't too sympathetic to Christopher Hitchens' atheism. Tablet is a fairly new online Jewish magazine covering religion, politics, history and culture...among other things. I like it very much because of its liberal orientation and have used it as a source in the past.

quote:

Originally posted by CompGuy:
I came across this quote from Hitchens in another article I read today:

quote:

“One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge.”

Source:
http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-...86624/about-nothing/
(quoting from Hitchen's book God Is Not Great.

Angels, demons, fairies, goblins...all such mythical creatures...represent primitive thinking from primitive times. That such ideas still hold sway in today's world is astonishing to me.

How can, for example, the billion Catholics in the world really believe that every official canonized saint performed miracles AFTER HIS DEATH. That, after all, is required to become a saint.

Jeff

I think what must have happened is that the Salon writer you were quoting included the Tablet link as a source, and so when you copied and pasted the quote you picked up the Tablet link as well, thinking it was the Salon link. But you were in a hurry and never bothered to check the link after you posted your note. So when I clicked on it a few hours later, I was very surprised to find the quote in the context of a somewhat critical article about Hitchens by a Jewish believer! That didn't seem like you somehow.

You were saying something about jumping to conclusions?

--Linda

Linda, my apologies. I did indeed quote from the Tablet, and I did indeed read an article there without realizing I was doing so. I'm sorry.

I was following a link about Festivus, saw the Hitchens quote. It was relevant to what I was writing, so I quoted it, linked to it, and promptly forgot what I was linking to.

It was an absent-minded moment; thanks for correcting me.

Jeff

quote:

Originally posted by CompGuy:
Linda, my apologies. I did indeed quote from the Tablet, and I did indeed read an article there without realizing I was doing so. I'm sorry.

I was following a link about Festivus, saw the Hitchens quote. It was relevant to what I was writing, so I quoted it, linked to it, and promptly forgot what I was linking to.

It was an absent-minded moment; thanks for correcting me.

Jeff

No need to apologize; I think it's funny!

On the eighth day of Chanukah my true love sent to me...

This link to a collection of Christopher Hitchens quotes

I haven't finished reading them all yet, but the interesting thing is that even though I don't call myself an atheist, I agree with about 90% of what he says. Here are a few of my favorites:

“Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely soley upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“About once or twice every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough—and even miraculous enough if you insist—I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?

Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don't believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart's content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others—while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity—so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called 'meaningless' except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one's everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities… but there, there. Enough.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22

Jeff,
     Except for one small nit I feel obliged to pick, I endorse your view: What you call ridiculous I would label incredible (in the sense that such matters are beyond my ability to believe). My reason for this small distinction is that "ridiculous" implies response by ridicule. Ridicule inevitably creates resentment in the ridiculed and is a call, to them, for a battle in which the first casualty will be reason.
     That said, there is no question that a large fraction of our species is influenced more by signs and wonders than by hard evidence. Moses supplied a fine example: His story of instructions, by God, delivered from a burning bush, is received more readily than would be a statement that the ideas came to him while he was gazing at his campfire. If we could understand why and how fantasy trumps the facts, we'd be on the way toward wisdom or, at least, an understanding of our race.
Seán