Let me start this by saying it is NOT my intention to discuss religious or cultural beliefs here, just strange things that otherwise rational and intelligent people might believe.
Recently I was discussing ferrets with someone and she told me about a pet ferret her family had when she was a child. Tragically, the animal escaped into their backyard one day never to be seen again. She ended this story by saying, “The squirrels were really tame that summer, so I know he must have gone out and mated with one of them. They were tame because they came from him.”
Me:
One of my best friends believes in homeopathy, purely and wholeheartedly. And has seen it work first hand, knows it works on animals and babies, the whole shebang. Uses it for allergies herself and hey it works after a few weeks of using it. Oh, a few weeks after the pollen dies down? I didn’t ask her.
She also thinks that when I can’t sleep it’s due to a full moon. I’ve tried to tell her that I have a streetlight on all night every night of the year and that I also have blinds on the windows.
This isn’t supposed to be about religion, but this is, in a peripheral way. I had a friend in the Navy. We were good friends and hung out a lot. One day we’re having a discussion about I don’t know what, and he says very matter of factly that he and his family believe that everything in the bible is literally true. I was stunned, and in fact thought he was joking. “You mean even that Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, even though it’s not possible?” “Yes.” Shocked silence.
The anti-vax and homeopathy and alt-med woo crowd come immediately to mind.
I once had a friend (who is an engineer) tell me that the dinosaur extinction was the aliens cleaning Earth the way scientists clean a lab before the onset of an experiment. The experiment, of course, is us. Every so often, the aliens come back to take samples of their experiments. She is one sample, and showed me the scars of their tests and measurements on her arms.
Her arms had no scars or marks on them. None at all.
Considering how closely type 2 is tied to obesity, they’re not entirely wrong, are they? Eat “too much” sugary high calorie things → weight gain → diabetes.
I knew someone who thought storks were fictional creatures until she saw one in person…when in her 50s. And another person who was convinced black people didn’t need to wash their hair because when it’s dirty it falls out and is replaced by fresh, clean hair.
Well, I sort of like the way it blends the whole Chariots of the Gods and alien abduction woo. The cleaning of the world-lab is a nice touch. How does she explain the extant birds and reptiles/amphibians that remain?
LOL, I shocked a pair of lawyers today after being voir dire’d for almost an hour. As I was finishing the paperwork with one of the bailiffs she told me that I was the first person that had ever thanked the lawyers - they commented on it while discussing me :dubious:
Honest, my parents brought me up to be polite. I don’t see why I shouldn’t thank people for taking the time to work with me. [I think that the defendant’s lawyer struck me because I was death qualified.
Also, refined sugar plays havoc with your body. I’ve seen the effect white sugar has on people who aren’t addicted to it yet, and it’s scary.
Nowadays, food companies put sugar into everything, from breakfast cereals to Shake ‘n’ Bake. It’s hard to avoid the stuff.
It’s no great stretch of the imagination to believe that your glands (and your pancreas in particular) will be thrown out of whack by eating too much refined sugar.
I’ve long since concluded that there is nothing so completely deranged, impossible, absurd, ignorant, hateful, fringe, or just flat out stupid that there isn’t someone on the face of the Earth that honestly believes it.
It’s fair to say someone developed diabetes as a result of weight problems, and that they ate too much sugar. That still doesn’t amount to a direct cause and effect relationship since the same thing could happen to someone who ate no refined sugar. But when people say that, they’re not asserting a scientific principle, they are just saying the person was fat and eating too much sugar was a contributing factor.
I’d known her for 8 years by that time. That was 7 years ago. She’s to this day perfectly stable, with no symptoms of schizophrenia (which was my clinical and research focus in a previous career). I would classify it more as delusional disorder, except that this was the first time I’d heard her talk about it, and it didn’t appear to be the focus of her life or to cause any distress or dysfunction.
I don’t recall being shocked, but I’ve certainly been surprised before.
A good friend in college, while we were discussing the Dead Kennedys, opined that it’s too bad that nobody was willing to put Kill the Poor into practice. I’m still not sure if he was kidding or not, I like to think he was. This was probably the closest I’ve come to being truly shocked.
An otherwise unexceptional coworker, after a few beers, told me all about how the Masons run everything. He was an Australian born in Europe, and so probably didn’t have my background of knowing Masons as a bunch of squares who mostly just like to eat fried perch and play Euchre.
I was surprised when a plant manager felt the need to tell me about how he believed the Oliver Stone film JFK was truth. Mostly because I was making at least 50K a year less than him and was three steps below in the hierarchy. Like most plant managers, he cultivated a level-headed image. Again, it was after some drinks.
I was surprised to find out that there was a Marxist professor in the anthropology department at Michigan State University. I was also surprised how popular he was. Have to admit that he gave entertaining lectures and pointed out student foibles in an insightful manner. Don’t remember his name, though.
