Evil pilot fish. 'I know your dad!'
Hey, you want some coffee?
No, you're covered in bees!
Do you believe in Black Magic?
- Thread starter Virdi
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Hey, you want some coffee?
No, you're covered in bees!
This is not a game of who the **** are you.
Thanks for re-reading me.
The instance of this that really sticks in my mind (though I am not sure it is 'strictly' speaking documented) is in the book Walkabout. It this an Native Australian dies because he has decided he desrves to. He builds himself a platform lies down on it and his heart stops. This seems to me to be a situation where the brain can will the body to die.
Speaking as an Australian, I can assure you that it is documented. Death comes by psychosomatic stress as the result of a tribal practice known as "pointing the bone" (not as rude as it sounds).
It was performed by the kurdaitcha man, as punishment for a crime of which the victim was believed guilty. You can read more details (including a documented case) here.
If people want to believe in Black Magicks then fair enough, its up to their freedom of choice. After all it's no different from people believing that a magic skywizard created the world in six days and put fossils into the earth to test human faith in him.
Soldato
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"Did you believe in Dionosaurs?"
"Well yeah there wer fossils everywhere"
*BOOM*
"Aaaargh!"
"You ******* idiot god was ******* with you! flying lizards your a moron!"
"It seemed so plausible argh!"
~Bill Hicks
Sorry couldn't resist!
My personal experiences have led me to the opposite conclusion, but personal experiences help no-one in such a discussion, hence why I generally avoid referring to them.
I take a similar stance to you on most things, with the exception that I don't equate 'unproven' to mean the same thing as 'disproven', because they aren't the same.
I cannot prove that such things exist, I've seen evidence that could support the existance of such things, at least in terms of supporting the effects they can have and so on. I can also accept that the mechanism behind these occurances may be entirely different to current ideas about what causes them.
Likewise, I have met and seen such people who claim things that, under close examination, hold no evidence at all, I've seen plenty of people who prey on the uncertainty of my above statement and use it to make money, to power grab or to gain fame.
From my point of view, dismissing everything totally out of hand is no different to believing everything blindly. I doubt you've personally experienced an atom, dinosaurs or evolution, but I also doubt you dismiss those as readily...
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I loled quite loudly at that
Don't believe in magic and all that myself. I believe in science and what is physically possible.
The difference being I can read well documented evidence about dinosaurs and go to a museum and near enough touch their remains. This is a similar situation for evolution and the atom. I couldn't read every scientific document on them in my lifetime, even if I tried!
For nonsense like black magic, there is not one piece of documentary evidence other than fables and peoples' misconceptions about the unexplained.
Following logical reasoning is a world away from "believing everything blindly."
I believe there's more to this world than can be understood by "logic" alone. This is quite hard to explain, but to me it seems there are certain things for which applying science is not the correct approach to understanding.
One example is the spiritual world. I'm not one for ghost stories, and most people who think they've seen ghosts are probably delusional or mistaken. But I beleive that a human is more than a physical body, and that the spirit merely occupies the body.
Now I can't provide any evidence for any of this, but I also can't provide any to counter it. My mind is completely rational - I spend most of my day applying logic to solving scientific problems. But logic can only take you so far, and there will always be things that science cannot model.
One example is the spiritual world. I'm not one for ghost stories, and most people who think they've seen ghosts are probably delusional or mistaken. But I beleive that a human is more than a physical body, and that the spirit merely occupies the body.
Now I can't provide any evidence for any of this, but I also can't provide any to counter it. My mind is completely rational - I spend most of my day applying logic to solving scientific problems. But logic can only take you so far, and there will always be things that science cannot model.
Logical reasoning does not lead to the belief that things are impossible, unless you first put faith in the idea of logical positivism being relevant to all situations, and the scientific method being the correct and only information gathering tool for all situations.
A logical look at an untestable hypothesis leads to the hypothesis status being unknown, not false.
I loled quite loudly at that
Don't believe in magic and all that myself. I believe in science and what is physically possible.
You believe in a method designed solely to produce predictive models for predicting future data based on past emperical observations for repeatable, consistant behaviours (ie cause and effect)...
You do realise that as you get further and further into scientific endevours, it becomes less and less concrete until you reach the "these are our best guesses at the moment that work most of the time, but we know they are wrong somewhere because of x" point?
You sound like a man of faith, so what i just read doesn't really apply cause your biased. I just stated my own opinion on things on what i believe in.
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Well, I have a degree in Chemistry if that counts, pretty much everything in the third year of that course was as I described above.
The thing is there is no incompatibility between faith and science, unless you actually want to have faith in science in a way that is not supported by the design of the model.
I'm not biased in the slightest, science is fantastic for what it's meant to do, it's absolutely the best tool to provide a predictive model or a means to see what will happen next based on what has happened in a similar situation before and to come up with a means of linking those two together.
The problems come because, in order for science to do the above as well as it does, it uses a variety of assumptions, processes and eliminations to generate the predictive accuracy, and being able to predict what something will do is not the same as understanding why something does it. To take science as providing truth, rather than accurate prediction, you have to place faith in the assumptions of the scientific method to be correct for more than prediction, something that was never intended to be the case.
Unfortunately, they don't teach the applicability of the scientific method at GCSE or A level, which leads to a whole variety of common misconceptions as to what science is and what it's for.
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Soldato
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I lived for three years in a house with all the classical symptoms of a haunting. (Note at this point I'm not getting drawn into the causes, only the observations). We regularly had items go missing and turn up again, usually sat in the middle of the coffee table or waiting for us by the front door when we needed them. I have been alone in a locked house using the PC and the connection has died, go out to the landing (just outside my bedroom door) to find every cable unplugged from the router, and other similar experiences.
I have experienced strange physical effects from various martial arts exercises such as movement of objects or increased physical resistance in parts of the body.
I have seen the results of correctly used Wiccan spells in the form of a series of bizarre coincidences that probability would put as very unlikely, but made a lot of sense given the desire and belief of the people involved for success.
I have had a glass get hot enough to burn paper (and my fingers) before shattering when doing a Ouija board.
I think that's enough for now.
So do I, especially for series of events where the probability of an exceedingly unlikely naturalist explaination for each event is then multiplied by the series.
See above. Note also that I haven't attempted to provide any explaination of the events listed above, I have my ideas but cannot prove them, so they are more of a discussion point than anything else.
Meaning that even though I don't disbelieve in the possibility of these things, I have met plenty of charlatans, and plenty more who are playing on people's beliefs without really sharing them, otherwise they'd never sell some of the things they do (Grave soil and powdered bone being the most obvious examples, or crystal shops that keep their black tourmaline along with everything else. Why these things aren't a good idea only matters if you believe in the ideas first though)
but none of those things are things you have directly viewed or experienced, which was sort of my point in asking about them. What you've just said above shows that despite what you've said earlier, it is about science. You'll believe what science describes as the most likely cause for it's predictions, even if you cannot observe them yourself. If something cannot be studied accurately via the scientific method, or evidence is not obtained via such a mechanism, you won't believe it. That's fine, but if the scientific method is limited, then so are your views, and that's without the other points about the issues of putting faith in the assumptions of science.
I too believe the above to be true, or at least likely to be an accurate description of the likely mechanism by which the predicted result is attained, so that's not really the issue. The problem is usually with how science deals with results it can't explain, or ideas that it cannot reliably test. I would love to be able to investigate scientifically all the phenomena I've described earlier in this post, but to do so you have to first find the cause and effect relationship, and without that, any attempt is likely doomed to failure.
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Yes, the previous owners were our landlords, and prior to that it had been in our landlord's family for about 40 years. They never mentioned it until we brought it up though. Taken back far enough, the house was on the site of Plymouth prison.
I will also add we've had absolutely nothing of the same nature since we moved, nor have I experienced similar things in any of the other houses I've lived in, only that one.
Why hasn't it been then? There have been attempts to study various martial arts that have not resulted in any such explainations.
Think of them as prayer if it's easier.
That doesn't mean the same applies to everyone.
Science is not the sole provider of truth, it's not even a provider of truth, it's a provider of prediction. To take it to be more than that requires faith.
I'm not watching the program on C4, what's it about?