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The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to me, the more widespread is the decline of paranormal belief.
Scientists abandoned paranormal explanations of physical phenomena soon after 1828, when Wohler discovered he could make urea without the use of kidneys. WE STILL DO TODAY.
Pseudoscience, tricks, smoke and mirrors, snake oil salesmen and saleswomen, cold reading 'psychics' are destroying America's already precarious knowledge base. If you are desparate to believe something, try Science.
Do a small experiment. Ask a detective if he can recall any crime solved by a psychic. I dare you.
I am skeptical of MOST paranormal experiences. I would say 99 percent of paranormal experiences have mundane explanations. If you ask people about their "paranormal experiences," what you generally find are tall tales, coincidences, or people hoping that their loved ones still exist and attributing mundane occurrences to those dead loved ones. Most of this is not paranormal at all.
The other 1 percent of paranormal experiences, in my view, are real. These are the ones that interest me. Unfortunately, if you really want to find the true paranormal stuff, you have to wade through tons and tons of nonsense coming from, as you said, snake oil salesmen trying to make a buck, from people who just want attention, from people with mental illnesses who don't realize it, from people who want their dead relatives to be alive or who want their religion to be true, etc. But once you get through all the untrue stuff, you eventually find things that have no explanation within the realm of our current understanding. That's the cool stuff.
And to be sure, I don't think anything paranormal is truly supernatural. That would imply that the paranormal defies the laws of nature. I don't think that it does. I think the paranormal consists of things we don't yet understand because of our limited knowledge of the world around us, and because of our limited ability to perceive reality due to our five senses. If we found Bigfoot tomorrow, Bigfoot probably wouldn't be some magical being. He would be a species of primate that we just couldn't prove existed until now. It's the same with every other paranormal subject. It only seems paranormal because we don't have enough information to explain it. Once we do it would be, well, normal.
Or we have a brain capable of slamming shut at the wrong time.
I think when some people decided that their religion did not serve them well and was a collection of myths they also threw out all the valid material, that there is spiritual energy, that we do continue on without the body, etc.
Frankly, I have had some experiences in my life which, to me, are evidence of a sort and set me on a quest to know more. I think there are people who have had no unusual experiences in their lives which has caused the closed mind.
There are also those who, sadly, refuse to own up to the discovery of their own senses, probably because they care more of what their peers would think of them than what their own being is showing them as valid.
Yes, then there are the poor souls who may really be delusional or tormented by forces that they cannot control.
I couldn't possibly disbelieve in psychic phenomena because I've had several of my own experiences that defied all explanation. Proof and scientific study would be nice, but even without that, I know what happened to me. J.B. Rhine did run a lot of experiments at Duke in his time (there is still a Rhine Center but it's not affiiated w/Duke now).
Do a small experiment. Ask a detective if he can recall any crime solved by a psychic. I dare you.
The odds of a single detective applying in the affirmative are very low, but ask 1,000 detectives and you'll get several who used psychics in crimes.
A retired professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio disappeared. Having Alzheimer's he was presumed dead. His body was recovered, thanks to a psychic, since the police and volunteer searchers had already searched that area and found nothing.
According to the psychic, he was in a "patch of green" and that is exactly where the police found him, in a place they had over-looked. Apparently being disoriented, he sat down in thick patch of green grass in a field, fell asleep, and subsequently died of exposure.
And for the record, many police departments use psychics, they just don't publicize it.
Daring...
The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to me, the more widespread is the decline of paranormal belief.
Scientists abandoned paranormal explanations of physical phenomena soon after 1828, when Wohler discovered he could make urea without the use of kidneys. WE STILL DO TODAY.
Pseudoscience, tricks, smoke and mirrors, snake oil salesmen and saleswomen, cold reading 'psychics' are destroying America's already precarious knowledge base. If you are desparate to believe something, try Science.
Do a small experiment. Ask a detective if he can recall any crime solved by a psychic. I dare you.
Google JREF for more info.
The vast majority of paranormal claims are pure bunk, but not all of them. It's those 5% that fascinate me, and I'm sure science will eventually catch up them, just like they did with everything else.
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