I assume you don’t accept anything someone says no matter how stupid or far fetched, right? If your kid tells you a ghost ate all the cookies while his fingers are smudged with chocolate you don’t give him the benefit of the doubt, right? No, because you have common sense. If meannie’s bullshit story were true it would be the most significant thing that has ever happened on the surface of this world.
What if she was claiming to have invented sustainable cold fusion? Or have intimate knowledge that 911 was a government conspiracy? Or have a symbiotic alien living in her ass? All of those things are way more likely than having an emo spiritform fingerbanging an intarweb nerd.
It does, now that I see you’ve explained it. At the time, it wasn’t at all clear and I thought you were saying something else entirely. Comment (and emoticon) retracted.
Why not? Whatever your feelings on the subject, he might very well be right. They have, after all, identified a very specific brain region which when electrically stimulated triggers intense religious experiences. Cite.
You are correct, at least where I was concerned (although the thread had not yet been rezoned as a Great Debate when I posed my initial questions). I was curious of the details of her claim, which meenie7 mentioned very matter-of-factly. I also think she is either lying or deluded, but I didn’t see the point in berating her, on the off chance she truly believes what she says.
The worst thing about her post is that it attracted the interest of lekatt, whose return from the light is one of the most unfortunate things ever to happen to this board.
Do you want to know why I moved it from IMHO to Great Debates? If the OP had stuck with just the first two questions, it might have made a decent poll(with proper supervision, of course). Unfortunately, the last two questions guaranteed that debate would ensue, and since debates on the afterlife usually get hot and heavy, I moved it to Great Debates.
I agree that it is a false dichotomy. But AGAIN - she is not just claiming to experience a ‘ghost’ as we do see in many cultures. She is claimng that a ghost is her BEST FRIEND THAT NOBODY ELSE CAN SEE OR HEAR.
I don’t give a hoot what forum it is in, that deserves investigation.
Miss Hoover: You see, class, my lyme disease turned out to be [spells it on the board] psychosomatic.
Ralph: Does that mean you’re crazy?
Student 2: No, that means she was faking it.
Miss Hoover: No, actually, it was a little of both.
Perhaps, but let’s look at just how aggressive Dio has been. In the OP he said:
Not all that aggressive, at least the part about seeking help. More of the same in Post 11:
And in Post 15:
Stepping up the rhetoric in Post 17:
And so on. Nowhere did I find Dio demanding, “Hie thee to Bedlam, foul lunatic wench!” Y’see, Dio has NOT been particularly aggressive, though that hasn’t stopped some, like Frank, being totally out of line with him, so any accusations of his aggression are baseless, at least as far as this thread is concerned.
This is not to say Dio has not been a total dick in the past, nor is it intended to imply my support if he were to be a total dick in the future. I mean merely that he is not the dick in this thread.
Now that we’ve established that Dio was only kindly and generously seeking to remind meenie to seek professional help for her own good, I can’t help but wonder how many times he intends to do so. I roughly estimate ten to fifteen posts of his in this thread alone in which he expresses variations on this intent. This is starting to seem like obsessive-compulsive disorder to me. Maybe he needs help.
And I promise not to harp on it - one such suggestion is enough.
Which makes me wonder: is calling someone crazy to their face in “public” civil? I assume this is because they believe that the person in question is trolling, and because they don’t know enough about her to counterbalance her (frankly unlikely) story? Though to be fair, Diogenes did not dismiss entirely the possibility that he would lose respect for a person entirely because of one belief, just that he wouldn’t necessarily do so.
We’re not talking about a belief in this case, though. We’re talking about a factual assertion. It’s not somebody saying, “I believe in ghosts,” but “I talk to ghosts.” That’s not an expression of an opinion, but a declarative statement about reality.
Hmm, seems a little borderline to me. I see what you’re saying, but I somehow feel like there’s not that much of a line between “I believe in ghosts” and “I believe in ghosts, and there’s one right now!”
Yes, but the first thought that strikes me is that the two aren’t totally analogous. But I’m afraid I can’t really express why I feel that way, or if my feeling is actually supportable by logical argument. I’ll have to think about it and get back to you.
Sorry, I thought everyone who’s been around since 2002 is familiar with him and his stories, virtually all of which he later revealed to be works of fiction.
You’re still excluding the middle. Is it not possible that she’s been conversing with an actual person for the past 8 years but, being unable to find where this person’s voice is coming from, has identified the origin as a ghost?