I hope you washed yourself thoroughly afterwards, Daniel.
I believe I’ve seen that show. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, the couple who contacted Vlad the Impaler said he had mellowed over the years.
I’ve always thought the occult/voodoo/witchcraft/vampirism was interesting. I’ve read a lot about it and use it as grist for fiction, but I don’t think it’s “real.” For example, I’m sure there are people who drink blood and proclaim themselves vampires, but I don’t believe they would die if they didn’t get it. If I heard someone put a curse on me, I would be disturbed because it would mean someone desired to do me harm, not because it would supernaturally take effect.
I knew a whole lot of vampires in high school. Hence, I don’t believe in real vampires. Back when I used to read a lot, I read a whole bunch about various myths and legends and folklores and the like, and I have always been facinated by that. I have a very over active imagination as well, and there are time where I just can’t deny the fact that there’s much more to this world than what I can see or comprehend.
I’ve been raised Catholic, and I don’t believe everything there. Actually, I don’t believe much of any of it anymore, except that there is a “God” and that my goal in life is to grow close to him, love her, and live my life according to it’s ideals (which basically mean “Don’t treat people like shit and respect yourself”). Religion’s a tool, in my mind, to be used to develope better understanding and a closer relationship to this ideal.
With my skeptic view of “my own religion,” I find a lot of occult things foolish. I like the idea of Wicca and other nature based beliefs, because there’s no way I can discount a creator’s hand in everything natural, and thus drawing from that to gain insight seems very realistic and plausible. I have yet to get past my engrained “creepy” feelings though, when it comes to actual practices. I’ve chosen Catholocism as my tool, so even though I’m doing a piss poor job following it, I can’t quite bring myself to engage in activities that seem to be polar opposites in terms of rituals. Rituals have always bothered me. Some make sense, some build community, and these are the ones I appreciate most. Some are just ridiculous, but I’ve got a lot of growing and exploring to do, so we’ll see.
My friend has read my terot before, and I’ve had my palm read a few times. All of which indicate I’m bound for some happy life with the woman I love. Unfortunately, life’s giving me the impression that “the woman I love” died in a horrible car accident as a small child and I’m destined to die alone. I don’t place much in those, because they’re a lot like fortune cookies…meaning, they don’t really tell a future, but give you a list of items you can arrange, examine, and pull some meaning from. Like “Get your ass in gear if you’re not happy with the way things are.” That’s what the cards keep telling me, anyway.
I’m with lno.
I’d just as soon play with Barbie Dolls, fill out a coloring book and play hopscotch in public as play around with the occult. It would just as accurately display my gullibility and childishness without having to dig up all that tedious black clothing and paraphernalia … it would probably be cheaper, too … ooh, look at me, I’m dressed all in black and reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards while wiping my ass with a deck of Tarot cards ™. I bet my Mom would be sooo offended …
Oh, I agree. But you don’t need to go any further than Homo Sapiens to find its source. Ain’t nothing a ouija board can do that will bring it to you, and the only demons that exist are those we make for ourselves in our own minds.
IMO, that is.
Well, said, Ferrous. Unfortunately, I fully agree with you. Wish I didn’t. I honestly wish that I could/would experience something supernatural. I like the idea that ghosts and channling and the occult are real. However, when it comes down to it, I just don’t buy it.
I think a lot of people get into that stuff because it makes the world seem just a little more interesting.
I played with Tarot cards a long time ago, back when I was exploring all kinds of different things. It didn’t take much time for me to realize it was a bunch of bunk, but not without its purposes. The readings you could get from the cards were pretty vague and could be applied to anything, but most people would subconciously interpret them towards whatever was on their minds. Thus it was a somewhat useful tool for looking into your subconscious - kind of like Rorschach ink blots.
I also had a friend who claimed creepy stuff with a Ouija board, but I never saw any of it.
That kind of stuff doesn’t scare me much - I don’t put a lot of stock in it. I like reading about such things, but I don’t take it very seriously.
The vampirism stuff gets me not because I believe in it, but because I know there’s a lot of kooks who do believe in it. Most of them are harmless kooks, but the ones who aren’t are scary.
My mother is a witch [ie - Pagan/White Witch] and I dabbled in it for a few years, but now I’m resigned to being a plain ol’ Athiest. Sometimes I perform spells, etc, and I wouldn’t call this “dark stuff”. It’s just a religion, and casting spells is like praying.
But anyways, I’m sure you all already know this.
As for Ouija boards, I personally find them bogus, part of me likes to run away with the fairies and hope that Ouija boards really do work, but I’ve personally never been in a situation where it’s worked. I think that Ouija boards are far more dangerous than casting spells, due to people who don’t understand what spirits are out there.
Vampires don’t exist. Deal with it. Move on.
I’m throwing my lot in with the rest of the skeptics. While I try not to dismiss anything ‘a priori’, these things have been investigated and the evidence is pretty dismal.
I do have a close friend, however, who I consider to be a reasonably intelligent fellow, who wouldn’t let me play ‘Doom’ on his computer. He considered certain aspects of the game “demonic”.
Oh, yeah. If evil could be personified, I bet it would look alot like Hilary Rodham Clinton.
A good book on the origins of vampire myths is Vampires, Burial and Death by Paul Barber. A bit of a bucket of cold water if you subscribe to the fangs-and-kinky-sex version of vampires, but deeply moving in its own way.
Since I’m here, I’ll go the extra mile and say that all paranormal activity is either faked or imagined. Period. Banking on the veracity of that untested .0001% when a phenomenon has been shown to be 99.9999% nonexistent is intellectually dishonest if you only apply your extreme optimism to sexy or interesting phenomena.
Otherwise it’s faith, in which case you should all lay off the vampire kids unless you feel like taking all religion down with them. Christianity has plenty of its own blood-related weirdness, and if you’re willing to discard empirical proof as a barrier to participation (as most major religions do), you can hardly fault others for discarding consistency, logic, or good taste.
-fh
So, it’s looking like very few if any people have had an encounter with true evil; as some people have said, it looks like evil exists as a form of human behaviour. Very interesting. Logically, that might lead someone to think that God (as a polar opposite of evil) doesn’t exist either, except as the good form of human behaviour. I think I feel my paradigm shifting.
(Mods, if this is getting too Great Debatey, please feel free to move it.)
On the origin of vampire myths: it’s also hypothesized that people created monsters like vampires and werewolves to explain strange murders that occurred in their regions.
I told you, I met Dick Armey!
It is a good book, but it doesn’t go far enough; that is, it doesn’t attempt to explain the prevalence of vampire myths as far back as Assyria and Rome and as far away from the Balkans as China.
As far as ‘imagining’ paranormal activity, the only counter-evidence I can give you is anecdotal (that is, real-life experience instead of white-coat experience) and that is too easily dismissed. All I can say is, “I seen what I seen and I knows what I knows.” 
Well, what does Barber’s failure to explain those particular revenant myths imply?
Only if the someone in question has a particularly Manichean view of good and evil (which, I’ll admit, many of the fundamentalist types who see Satan behind everything seem to, whether they admit it or not). A lot of people view good and evil not as polar opposites, but more like light and dark - that is, the latter is just a lack of the former. Thus, a worldview that can support both transcendent good and mundane evil.
'Course, as a stone atheist myself, I’m more inclined to the view you outline in the quoted portion above, just not because of the logical progression you use.
And:
Apropos of nothing, but I just thought that bore repeating.
Surely such ideas of “good” and “evil” when applied to the supernatural are just as meaningless as when applied to the natural.
I mean if a person were to cast a nasty spell, intending to harm someone but the result through one thing and another was to the target’s net benefit, surely the magic couldn’t be called black? Similarly if you try to help someone (with magic or otherwise) and only make it worse, is that good or bad?
The effects of any actions whether they are a simple physical act, or some occult manipulation of ancient energies are too unpredictable in this chaotic universe to use the labels “good” and “evil”. I think what I’m trying to say is that Karma always applies. Evil is a very human thing and is always in the balance.
To me it just means that he focused on Western vampires, particularly Slavic ones, and their contribution to present-day vampire mythos. There’s certainly nothing wrong with a scholar doing that, of course, I wouldn’t that it is a tidy and comprehensive refutation of the possibility of the existence of vampires.
Note that I said the possibility of the existence of vampires; that’s all I believe in: the possibility.
One person’s ‘good’ is more often than not another person’s ‘evil’ and vice versa. As far as the JudeoChristian god, well, I’m sort of with Voltaire: If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. I think all gods are human-inspired manifestations of the collective unconscious, and that all ‘good’ and ‘evil’ stem from nature, of which humanity is a part.
Well, partly. That explanation becomes a little problematic when one considers that “getting into that stuff” requires that the believer has invented a whole lot of dark, nasty creatures that want to eat people’s souls, or whatever. Speaking for myself, I don’t need to make the world more interesting by fantasizing about somebody following me around looking for an opportunity to poke me in the kidney with a hedge trimmer.
I suspect that the prevalence of this type of belief is related to the human mind’s need to explain and categorize. It’s what allowed us to organize ourselves into effective hunting bands and pick out medicinal plants when we were still wandering tribesmen, and it’s what, in the long term, has driven our ever-increasing command of technology.
But understanding things is hard work, especially in the last hundred years or so as the amount of available knowledge has exploded. Time was, you could know almost everything about almost everything, because there wasn’t that much to know. These days, it’s not possible to have a comprehensive knowledge base about even a single field, say mathematics; the real experts specialize in a subarea of their given field. You can have a broad understanding of a lot of topics, but it’s a lot of work, and true expertise requires focus.
Most people, I believe, aren’t willing to make that effort to know about as many different things as possible. Instead, we’re happy with a “placeholder” explanation. We don’t like not knowing, i.e. having a total blank, but we don’t have time or inclinination to actually understand, so we fall back on some sort of simplification or falsehood. Consider how many people honestly think they know what really happened with the hot-coffee-in-the-lap lawsuit that was filed against McDonalds. Or consider how many people would be unwilling to put their face right up against the door of a running microwave. They don’t know how the microwave works, so in their mind it’s “dangerous,” and they’re content with the placeholder explanation that it would cause cancer or whatever. It’s not true, of course, but trying to explain why requires some understanding of electrical engineering, and after just a few seconds people’s eyes glaze over and they go back to the “well, I ain’t gonna do it” response.
Supernaturalism, in my opinion, is a major placeholder. If one believes that there are demons, dybbucks, poltergeists, past lives, and whatever else, one then has an extremely convenient bucket into which to toss all manner of what would otherwise be annoying unexplained facts. If one rejects these supernatural phenomena, then one commits oneself to a lifelong quest for understanding, because the human mind is simply not content holding onto unrelated and inexplicable facts; it’s automatic to try to group them either categorically or causally.
In short: It’s hard work to be curious and open-minded, yet at the same time apply critical thinking. Most people don’t bother, because subjects outside their core expertise are largely irrelevant to them, and that’s why, I believe, we will never get away from superstitions about evil spirits and precognition and life after death. We fear what we don’t understand, so our wholesale invention of these mythologies is, at its base, a psychological defense mechanism.
Just my two cents.