But we aren’t at lunch, are we? We are posting on the Straight Dope Message Board, where the main purpose is to fight ignorance and the rallying cry is “Cite?” I don’t recall anyone screaming, btw.
I actually had some weird symptoms about six years ago (blacking out and almost fainting at work, seeing lights and stuff like that) and got a CAT scan looking to see if I had a brain tumor, but they didn’t find anything. That was a while ago, though, I’ll admit.
And how, exactly, could she possibly prove Marcus was real over the Straight Dope Message Board? We aren’t at lunch; we can’t see any dice. It’s pretty harsh to demand she cite something that’s unprovable due to the forum we’re discussing it in.
Again I ask, would anyone be defending the claimant if the claim had been teleportation? Would y’all be calling for tolerance, or would you be asking for evidence?
Did you tell them about the hallucinations? It sounds like there’s definitely something neurological going on, and it could be life threatening. I think you should definitely see a neurologist and possibly a psychiatrist. I’m not talking about couch therapy, here, just getting tests to make sure there’s nothing physically wrong with your brain. You have to be honest with them, though. Tell them about these “Marcus” experiences.
I didn’t tell them about Marcus because I didn’t consider him to be a hallucination. They never did figure out what caused the problems I did report. I just stopped having the incidents of feeling faint and seeing lights. I assumed I was just really tired at those times or something like that.
If you are a Christian, have a little faith!
He: I can teleport!
Me: Can you prove it?
He: In person, sure I could. Not over a message board though.
Me: I’m not going to see you in person.
He: Then I can’t prove it to you, no.
Me: Well then I can’t accept that you can teleport.
He: I don’t care if you do or not; it’s no skin off my nose. I’ll still be over here teleporting around though.
Me: Yeah, you have fun with that.
They: Teleportation is impossible! He’s a liar! He’s nuts! I know it!
Me: And how do you know that exactly?
They: Teleportation is impossible! He’s a liar! He’s nuts! I know it!
Me: Umm, yeah.
They: The power of Science™ compells you! The power of Science™ compells you! The power of Science™ compells you!
(Me dives into a pointless internet fight.)
Edit: (And I ain’t a Christain. Atheist is me.)
I’m pretty sure that begbert wouldn’t have posted what he did if he had a problem with people asking for evidence. He seemed to be against those who aren’t asking for evidence.
My client who thought there were little men inside her jaw jerking her jaw from time to time didn’t think they were hallucinations, either. That’s part of the nature of hallucinations.
Maybe you should think about how silly this sounds? You say you’re a skeptic. Have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor? What’s more likely, that a person would hallucinate a gost or that a person would actually see a real ghost?
Do you understand that people always think delusions are real? If you know it’s not real, it’s not a delusion.
I’ve switched now from thinking you’re making it up, to thinking you’re afraid to seek help or tell anybody because you’re afraid you might get locked up. I think the odds of that are really low, though. The more likely scenario is treatment through meds and/or surgery. I said before that I didn’t get a schizophrenic vibe from you and I still don’t. I think you should still get yourself evaluated again, though. You might just save your own life.
Paired with the other reasons for seeking help (feeling faint and seeing lights in the past) along with the voices/feeling a ghost’s presence, I know I’d be pretty worried if that were happening to me, or to someone I knew. It just sounds really, really scary.
Yeah, my grandmother started having hallucinations when her Alzheimer’s progressed. She would see small children playing outside on the porch. She could have conversations with these children. She really saw them. For her, they were really there. She would become quite upset with other people who told her that there were no children playing on the front porch. She would say, “But they’re right there.” She would say, “I’m not crazy. They’re RIGHT THERE.”
I am quite sure that in her mind, they really existed, and could be seen and heard. Maybe even touched. But really, there were no children there. It was an artifact of her damaged brain. I have only been superficially following this thread, but this statement of yours jumped out at me. I would strongly consider going back to the neurologist and reporting this as a symptom.
Just wanted to say, that for all my support (well, support on the basis of “the enemy of my enemy…”) - if Marcus can’t pass a dice test, in front of a friend whom you’re reasonably confident is sane, then hie thee to a doctor post haste!
So… how can we be sure the friend is real?
I’m gonna go now, this has ceased to be fun.
You know when I read your first post about Marcus, I thought to myself, “A little Depakote will clear that right up.” I don’t think you have anything going on that is related to schizophrenia, but I am concerned that you have something neurological going on, temporal lobe maybe.
On the other hand, I’m pretty live and let live about delusions… if you are taking care of yourself and holding down a job and have healthy relationships, and you aren’t forcing people in your life to acknowledge Marcus as real to them in order to be with you, what the hell.
Of course, you know that you could be forcibly admitted to psychiatric care for believing this sort of thing, so I wonder why you talked about it on a message board. Are you ready to give him up?
IMHO is for fighting ignorance?
As for screaming, from th OP:
I would say the all caps line is easy to read as yelling, maybe you don’t.
Well, if the friend can pass an objectively monitored dice test, you should be okay.
Of course, to conduct such a test, you’d need a second (third?) friend, who you’d also have to objectively verify…and of course his test would require a fourth objective observer…
You know, this could be tougher than I thought.
The whole website is built around that credo. Why should one particular area of it be exempt from that?
While I feel, personally, that the subject of the thread might want to get this checked out medically, since around 20 years old in college is the time when sometimes certain conditions show up, I feel that some of us are getting a little overly invested in the issue, whether indeed with the subject’s best interests in mind or as a pulpit du jour from which to battle the spottiness of the sense of skeptical inquiry that is putatively a raison d’etre of the boards.
So a thought–something I’ve been thinking about for a while, actually: Although I’m a major cynic and skeptic, I’ve gotten used to the culture of SDMB over the years. For a while (during the Great Atheist Wars of oh-whatever) I started to get very irked at what I saw as a lot of. . . well, ignorance not being fought on the board and I would mutter things through clenched teeth.
But I also really enjoy the range of views on the board—including the misguided, the misinformed, patently bizarre and cockamamie—so I’ve learned to lighten up a bit and roll with the craziness.
So when bizarre and cockamamie get too irritating for a moment, I head over to another more skeptical, no-holds barred, million-dollar-challenge-y board (which I discovered in a moment of huffy materialist evidentiary stamping about) where I can rant with people who share my (lack of) beliefs, and leave the friendly, inclusive SDMB as it is, where I can chat about a range of interesting things even with people who have some beliefs that I find complete poppycock.
This is my “interesting cocktail party” board, while the other is my “listen up, you primitive screwheads, this is my BOOMSTICK” board. The separation of my two board lives makes me happy and pleasant over here, where I can stop ranting about sugar pills and orbiting teapots and sasquatch and rant instead about the value of abstract expressionist painting and whether the Doctor and Captain Jack ever made out and how MS Word can eat a giant bag of dick.
As soon as the SDMB introduced fora outside GQ it changed its character, but I think in the long run, although I wish the ship were tighter at times, I accept that this board is the way it is and there’s a lot of be enjoyed and I don’t think the ship should BE tighter.