His4Ever, I’m suggesting, not that they’re “lying”, but that they saw what they wanted–and expected–to see. They were primed to see demon possession, so they interpreted what they saw as demon possession. Someone else, like a neurologist, or a psychologist, or even just another Christian who didn’t happen to believe in demon possession, would have interpreted what he saw very differently, as illness, or drugs, or hysteria, or “screwing around”, or “a bid for attention”.
Your spiritual.curiosity link has a list of “symptoms of spirit possession”.
The thinking person–that is, one whose mind is not already made up that all cases of “insanity” are actually due to spirit possession–will recognize immediately that all of these symptoms could also very easily be caused by things as disparate as Tourette’s syndrome, schizophrenia, brain tumors, LSD, Sudafed, too much caffeine, a drinking problem, job stress, teenage angst, poor social skills, or a messy divorce.
How in the world could practicing pendulum diagnosis of illnesses lead to demon possession? I don’t have the interest to go into it deeply, but apparently you dangle a special pendulum in front of the body, and it tells you what part of the body’s “rays” are out of whack.
How can this lead to demon possession? No spirits are consulted or called up at all–it’s just you and the plastic pendulum doohickey and the chart and the instruction manual.
While Googling “burn charming” (I still have no idea what it is) I came across this list of “FORBIDDEN PRACTICES OF THE OCCULT” which sounds similar to what’s in the spiritual.curiosity link.
Okay, how can dowsing be an occult practice? Like pendulum diagnosis, no spirits are consulted or called up.
If visions, trances, and dreams are occult practices, then how do they explain all the visions and dreams in the Bible? Joseph himself had an angel appear to him in a dream. And how about the Apostle Paul, with his vision of the sheet let down from the ceiling? Were all those prophets indulging in occult practices?
Hypnosis is not an occult practice. Hypnosis has been approved by the American Medical Association since 1959, and in 1998 and 1999 at least, it was covered under these health care plans.
As regards “wart charming”: My grandpa, one of the finest Southern Baptist gentlemen I ever met, and a true pillar of his church, once removed a wart on my finger by tying a string around my finger, removing the string, and then burying it. He told me, “By the time the string rots, the wart will be gone.” And it was.
So was he indulging in occult practices?
And I’m not even going to go into Harry Potter. How about Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”?
“Christian Science healing” is an occult practice? Christian Science Healing is Christian prayer. So Christian prayer is an occult practice? http://www.healing-cs.com/cs_healing.htm
Okay, so even if some things that happen have a natural explanataion. What about people who have used the board who say that after awhile strange things begin to happen like hearing knocking in the walls of their house? Knocking in the walls and other strange manifestations that are completely independent of the board. Things that never went on before they started messing with the board. What then?
No I don’t think the visions and dreams given by God are evil. Satan can use these things, too, for his purposes. It’s up to us to be discerning and know the difference. If somone is involved in some occult practive forbidden by God I can be pretty sure that their visions don’t come from God. Ask questions like does the vision or info from the spirit world contradict the Bible in any way?
There are only two sources of contact in the spirit world, God and His angels or satan and his demons. We need to be grounded in God’s word and prayer to be able to have the wisdom to discern the difference.
Short answer, I don’t believe them. If you can show that any of these things happened, you might get somewhere, but without a reasonable proof most people are likely to dismiss it. Exceptional claims require exceptional proof. It is far easier to assume that they are lying, delusional, tricked, or otherwise mistaken because everytime these claims have been investigated, that’s what was found.
I can show you claims by people of alien abduction, time travel, and the CIA controlling their thoughts by radios implanted in their heads. Most folks assume that they are delusional or lying because no one has ever been able to demonstrate those claims. The same holds for demonic possession through Ouija boards.
So, your only test for whether a Ouija board is being used for evil would be whether the answers it was giving contradicted the Bible? Most people don’t ask the Ouija board for theological insights–most people ask it about their love life, or whether they’re going to get that promotion. How would a Ouija board saying, “Yes, you’re going to get that big job promotion” contradict the Bible? And if it doesn’t contradict the Bible, then it must be okay?
Let’s just say that from the viewpoint of any kind of small-o orthodox Christianity, if you think you’re contacting angels this way, you must also think all the hot babes you meet in chatrooms are 18 and take a 36DD.
Okay, a question for those of you declaring the Ouija board evil - is a Magic 8 Ball evil?
Delphinus, to go back to the beginning, you asked for explanations of your own experiences, but then discounted the explanations provided - the ones about ideomotor effect and subconscious cueing. The reason you discount them is your own attempts at controls on the experiences. That is understandable, but the problem is the controls you employed were not really complete controls. Don’t get me wrong - I admire your foresight and attempts to control for fraud. Your method has a lot going for it in controlling deliberate manipulations. I’m willing to concede in 6 years of doing this you had at least one experience where no one was intentionally tricking you. But the point is, intentional fraud is not the only mistake to control.
The important point that you seem to be discounting as irrelevant is that the two explanations provided are subconscious. They occur without your knowledge that they are going on. Ideomotor effect is unconscious movements, usually on an unstable equilibrium. That’s like a dowsing rod, or a pendulum. In this case, the planchette serves as an unstable equilibrium. It glides smoothly along the board, so very small forces can make it move. Put 2 or 3 different hands on it, lightly touching so as not to weigh it down and make it stick to the board, and you have a recipe for “mystical” experience, because the motions of one person are felt by another person as totally external, and vice versa.
Subconscious cueing is picking up minute or unconscious cues about the intended result. These can be very subtle, and as labeled, you are not aware you are receiving them and not intentionally acting on them.
Now put the two effects together. The subconscious cueing gives signals about the intended result. Your control was to have the “sender” keep hands off the planchette, and to not say anything. But there are still ways, such as eye movements, shrugs, breathing irregularities, and the like that can be used to influence the results and not be recognized consciously by either party. Couple that with the ideomotor effect where subconscious movements direct the planchette to the answer that is expected, and that provides an explanation.
And also consider this. You specifically stated there were times the planchette tried to give different answers than what you were asking, so you discarded them. From your second post:
So right there is an example of keeping the hits and discarding the misses. The planchette was spelling out an incorrect answer, regardless of what it was spelling out, and instead of calling it an error, you ascribe the mystical effect of something more important than the answer you want taking over. Doesn’t that sound a bit like you’re making excuses? If it answers correctly, then there’s something at work, but if it answers incorrectly, then obviously the power took over and did its own thing. Right. So anything that happens is evidence of mystical powers, and nothing is evidence against mystical powers?
Also, at one point you simultaneously dismiss it as both silly and dangerous. Whoah! That’s rather oxymoronic. If something is dangerous, than it certainly isn’t silly. If something is dangerous, you treat it with the proper respect and caution. If it’s silly, then it’s dismissed as unimportant - and danger is definitely important.
Anyway, there is another contradiction in your posts. First you say you are interested in researching Ouija. Then you state that you do not want to mess with it. Well, you can’t have it both ways. If you want to research it, you have to be willing to use it. Or perhaps you meant you wanted to gather information on what others have learned?
If you’re serious about finding out the truth, then you have to apply some scrutiny to the information you get. Critical evaluation of the content, and the people involved. Thus we fall back on the scientific method, and skeptical review. You seem wholely willing to apply skeptical thought to answers provided by skeptics, but are you willing to apply that same critical evaluation to claims made by the believers? Are you going to evaluate as critically the anecdotes, stories, etc as provided by His4ever and vanilla, or are you going to accept them at face value because you don’t think they’d be consciously lying?
happyboy said:
This is such a great debate waiting to happen, I’m surprised nobody called you on it. Being ethical does not require being God-revering. I’m sure GD is full of threads on just this topic.
KillerFig posted:
To which His4ever replied:
The relevance is that the journal in question is of very poor quality. Judging by the articles on either side of the one in question, there is no effort made by that journal to evaluate the articles, to look for flaws and verify the conclusions follow from the premises. In short, the journal is not reputable, so anything from within it is suspect. Does that mean that the article in question is therefore a definite lie? No. But it means that we cannot judge the accuracy and veracity of the statements. We have to accept the author’s words at face value, with no reason to conclude any confirmation of the events was ever sought. If the articles on both sides are blatantly wrong, what reason is there to conclude that the one between them is any better? Furthermore, the issue was not just the quality of the journal itself, but rather the credulity and evaluative skills of Edmond Gruss, the author of the book that cites that journal article as conclusive evidence. He’s willing to base a strong conclusion on an unreliable source. That does not bode well for his conclusion that supernatural events are proven for the ouija board.
I played with ouija boards when I was much younger. I honestly thought I was contacting discarnate spirits. I never became ‘posessed’. I drank too much and did all kinds of drugs at that point in my life too. I also believed in lots of things (like bigfoot, UFOs being responsible for crop circles, the existence of Satan, an illuminatti conspiracy controlling the politics & economy of the world) that I’ve since concluded either aren’t real or have decided not to make up my mind about. I’m not saying that I don’t believe in spirits today; some things I have decided not to make up my mind about. I think that makes me both open-minded and skeptical.
Maybe this is the wrong forum to say it, but a book written before the benefit of the scientific method, that contains stories about talking snakes, people living over 900 years, and an unfulfilled 2,000 year old promise that a dead man will return “soon” just seems a little suspect to me. It also says that we should stone homosexuals, doesn’t it? I think I’ll take my advice from other sources, thank-you-very-much.
I think that many people out there don’t know how to use a ouija board. You don’t look at the board. You close your eyes. There’s no cheating. You just close your eyes. I have played. My parents used to play and didn’t just get yes/no answers. They never looked at the board. Choke on this one: I even made a board by hand on a piece of cardboard with letters in a different pattern, blindfolded my parents. They never saw the board or where the letters were. I placed it in front of them so they knew where the edges were by feel. And they went on to have long conversations with Ian, someone who they had been ‘talking’ with for some time. This cannot be explained by science. Sorry folks.
Openzgate, you say that you are the one who told your parents that they were having a conversation with this “Ian”? Since you are obviously one who believes that a toy like the ouija board works, we have no reason to believe that you could serve as an impartial observer to the proceedings. Your parents only have proof that you observed them moving a piece of plastic or cardboard around on another piece of cardboard, and that you told them that they were “talking” with “Ian”.
But the point is, intentional fraud is not the only mistake to control.