h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>..I belong to the New Old New Reformed Church of the Flying Ant Spaghetti Monster.<



You honestly believe it's proper to place the meatballs atop the cheese?

That's just so wrong!

'Pointing out , to the ghost/god/psychic believers , that none of there beliefs hold an ounce of water is a waste of time . They are not rational people . Common sense and reality mean nothing to them . They only see and believe what they want to see and believe . Scientific method and proof are not in their vocablary'

Please don't talk about me as if I wasn't here, it's really rude. Also, you're entirely wrong. I'm not trying to reject scientific method, I'm trying to point out that something widely dismissed under the banner of irrational belief might proof to be genuine if explored scientifically.

'No scientist can make a definitive statement; that wouldn't be 'science'.'

True, but it hasn't stopped several people on this thread making definite statements.

'But for reasons of practicality it is reasonable to presume the certain things are highly unlikely, such as unicorn bones, father christmas and talking to dead people, not to mention the flying ant spaghetti monster, not to mention old big daddy in the sky and having a chit chat with dead people'

Well you're lumping a lot of thing together and that doesn't really constitute much of an argument. Actually, there isn't anything massively implausible about unicorns because they aren't (physically at least) that different from, say, deer. Or Rhinos, for that matter. Anyway, why is it reasonable to presume things highly unlikely? If you went back 200 years and told the people of London that they were all dying of Cholera because of tiny little invisible animals floating around the the air and swimming in the water and charging around in their blood stream they would probably have chased you out of town or locked you up. They certainly, if applying your 'it's reasonable to presume' brand of science, wouldn't have taken you seriously. They would, as we all know perfectly well, have been wrong, fatally in some cases. I think it's probably more reasonable to admit that, nine times out of ten, you haven't got a blind clue how anything works, much less why, that you don't know what lives at the bottom of sea, or why planes fly or what the hell gravity is and you certainly don't know whether or not the entire personality of a human being (or a horse, or a dog) is contained within their brain.

Incidentally, can I just ask exactly what the point of this thread is? I saw a thread in Ask entitled 'Let's Diss Nigella'. I have no major grudge against Nigella Lawson, so I didn't bother, but I new what I was walking in to. Are we here having a serious conversation about the possbility of an afterlife of some sort, or are we just sitting around bitching about stuff that we don't believe in for no really good reason?

'Prior to the Fox Sisters people did not do this pyschic stuff.'

Not sure that's really true. Exactly how old are the Fox sisters? People have believed they can communicate with their ancestors for generations. Your story about the Fox sisters illustrates that it's pretty damn easy to make a buck out of claiming you can talk to the dead, for precisely the reasons Blicky outlined earlier. That doesn't prove that it was them who came up with the idea (it wasn't) or that nobody at all can do it.

>>Anyway, why is it reasonable to presume things highly unlikely? If you went back 200 years and told the people of London that they were all dying of Cholera because of tiny little invisible animals floating around the the air and swimming in the water and charging around in their blood stream they would probably have chased you out of town or locked you up. They certainly, if applying your 'it's reasonable to presume' brand of science, wouldn't have taken you seriously. <<

Benjamin I don't think you can begin to compare the Britain of 200 years ago to the one today. The biggest factor being 'education'. At that time 90% of the population were uneducated illiterates. Today despite the limitations of our less than perfect education system, 100% of people receive the basics of education to allow the minimum of the 3Rs and for very basic scientific ideas to be understood.

200 years ago science was still in its infancy. The 'scientific method' which relies on proper experimentation, including the concept of repeatability of an experiment giving the same results, leading to the concept of reliable evidence was only just beginning to be an accepted part of our western culture.

I don't know what you are trying to say by comparing the present day understanding of things with our knowledge and understanding of 200 years ago, when many people were still all too easy prey to excessively superstious ideas.



>>Incidentally, can I just ask exactly what the point of this thread is? I saw a thread in Ask entitled 'Let's Diss Nigella'. I have no major grudge against Nigella Lawson, so I didn't bother, but I new what I was walking in to.<<

Again I am unsure what your point is. Topic drift in threads is a valued and enlivening part of this site. I don't think we have veered to some kind of ludicrous degree away from the original point. Just interesting development of ideas and discussion.

<>

This could actually be quite an interesting question, if perhaps it was rephrased along the lines of "How do we decide whether a possibility which we can't prove or disprove is inherently likely or unlikely to be true?" and I would take the first draft of an answer to be along the lines of "according to how well it fits in with our general understanding of how the world works".

On this basis, people talking to the dead (or more accurately, the dead talking to people), is for me inherently highly unlikely. The idea just doesn't fit with our accummulated scientific knowledge and philosophical analysis. If it were true, almost everything I presume to know would have to be false.

But there are explanations of what mediums do that fit with my worldview. And no explanations of how "the dead talking to people" might actually work.

Noggin

Sorry , benjaminpmoore i wasnt aware that i was talking about you .
I feel the difference between cholera and talking to dead people is that as soon as somebody decided to look for evidence of very small thigs in water causing disease . Hey presto there was the evidence . But no matter how much people look for evidence of life after death , nothing .
As to the point of this thread , well i feel that as long as people continue to believe in supersitious nonsense . The less likely the human race has of tackling the very real and pressing problems it faces .

best fishes......tod

but prove it is all rubbish .

You have at your finger tips the largest ever information resource...use it.

oldrusty: How many psychics would you want us to show as frauds before you consider it proven that it is all rubbish?

Xanatic: you are wasting your breath. At this point, all the relevant information to show that psychics are frauds has now been given in the thread.

People who need to believe will always believe and ignore the facts presented to them.

oldrusty probably still wonders if father christmas is real, as no-one can prove for certain that he doesn't exist.

perhaps another question should be asked. What about dead people who seek to speak through the living? The flip side.

lol how many bad painters or plumbers do you know that give the good ones a bad name just becouse the likes of mr randi member of the magic circle now they are all con artists that have been caught out time again .

effers father chirstmas is real in the form of the chirstmas spirit that sadly is on its way out as people seem to forget the meaning of chirstmas .

The Christmas spirit is an invention, Easter doubly so.

Forget the heathen, commercialized travesties of chirstmus and aestar, join the millions* around the world in pious, holy celebration of Noodletide, which has been calculated to fall on March 13** this year***







~~~~

* Oh, alright, maybe two or three people
** Mistakenly called the 'ides' of March, due to an historic typesetting error
*** Actually Noodletide _always_ falls on March 13, except on alternate leap-years, when it is celebrated on August 19

well make it the 21 of may cause i cant get those dates off pmsl .

oldrusty

Once again, a totally illogical statement, bad painters or plumbers can still paint or plumb to a degree...their out put is real...what they do is real and can be seen...it is irrelevant about bad/good psychics because if the rational is that *no-one* can speak with the dead bad/good psychics are con artists.

ALSO, that old tired sad chestnut of magician=con-artists is trotted out again.

Magicians ARE NOT con artists, they do not claim to do anything they say they can i.e. fly, make the statue of Liberty disappear, cut women in half, make playing cards disappear from a deck into a wallet, make bottles pass through solid tables...they are all tricks which make these things APPEAR to happen.

When one goes to see a magician you know and they know that what they are saying and doind are two different things. You accept this because the experience of seeing the impossible is entertaining...I have shown a few friends how I do various tricks and they now do not ask as the mechanism is quite banal and ruins the experience...they would rather not know and, everytime I do the tricks really believe what is happening is happening.

But if they do find out their view of life doesnot fall apart. Unfortunately, for people who believe in spirits and an afterlife...to have convinced oneself so much that when one dies one will 'pass over' to find out that one HAS been conned and PROPERLY conned for years and one would have to change ones whole view of life is too much to contemplate and hence the ignoring and the cognitive dissonance that comes with it of refusing to accept the facts in front of them.

And one of the reflex actions is to say magicians are con-men just like psychics...the two are totally diametrically opposed in what they do and how they present themselves.

Does anyone know if dead dogs still woof, dead frogs croak, dead bees buzz, dead rattle snakes rattle or even dead death watch beetles, tap?

they do if you pump their lungs with air and squeeze them. Evidence of this can be found in scotland where dead cats are used in exactly this fashion for 'music'.

<>

The same can be said for the resolute non-believers! I read the other day (following a link from here, h2g2, about a noted sceptic who had an NDE...) A J Ayers is the name, it seems. The biter bit! Delicious!

VL