Posts made by Vorpal

@Jaded It did. I was so angry at the state in which it was left.
I certainly won't be buying any more games from that company, considering their work ethic.

Of all the things for sale there, I suggest you avoid Cosmonautica. It's a cool concept, but the game is essentially abandoned at this point in favor of their next game, the game feels unfinished and support is rather bad.

@surreality See, I wish people with places that do that would submit it to James Randi for study and experimentation. I mean, you'd think a hotel like that could benefit from the one million smackaroos.

My mother and I witnessed something like that ball, but orange in color, as it basically sped through our garden and vanished by one of the walls after passing fairly close to us (and leaving behind a very warm feeling). I still don't know what that phenomenon is, though I guess an abortive ball lightning is the likeliest explanation. The pity is that those balls never form when you need to get a hold of them for close study, so we know very little about them. Which is a pity, because they are cool.

you're basically demanding people act contrary to science here, man. You're saying people need a confirmed conclusion before they're allowed to even wonder about it in the first place. In order for someone to actually fit this thoroughly impossible standard? They would, yes, have to be able to see the future. Which is why I keep calling this out as total crazy talk.

I think you misunderstood what I wrote. I was referring to precognition and other psychic powers of that same ilk. The very concept of precognition essentially contradicts the very basic principles of cause and effect. If effects could exist before their causes, there really would be no such thing as causality. It’s why the whole concept of precognition and clairvoyance needs extraordinary proof- because to anyone who has even a slight grasp on the nature of the universe as we know it, it really does appear completely implausible. And I think that the experiments conducted by Randi and others concerning this alleged power have shown that it doesn’t seem possible at all.

Operating on a baseline sense isn’t operating from a confirmed conclusion, it’s operating from a base of confirmed data. You know that fire burns skin- do you really need to burn each one of your fingers to know that the principle applies to each fleshy digit? No, you act from an abstraction that has been formed from sensory data (yours, or someone else’s if you were the kind of sibling who tricked their younger brother/sister into touching things that burninate. THANK YOU, BRO) Similarly, the principle of causality is a thing. It’s a very major and important thing in this universe- it’s really what keeps shit from happening all at once. Just speaking on an epistemic level, making a claim that essentially bypasses causality is extremely far-fetched to the point of being one of those seemingly impossible claims. It’s like considering the possibility of a flying pink unicorn with rainbow-farting powers- it’s more likely to exist as a fancy or a thought experiment than in actual reality, and you’re going to waste a good deal of your life trying to find it or prove its existence. There are some claims that are too ridiculous to contemplate.

I'm definitely in that last group, and you can keep mocking me as a cultist who believes in magical pixies if you want for thinking, "Hey, that was weird. I wonder what that was. Nope, it's not that, or that, or that, or damn it isn't that either, apparently we don't have a solid explanation for whatever the fuck that was yet. Freaky!"

Again, I think you misunderstand me. Wondering about something isn’t bad. What’s bad is reaching the conclusion of “Well, I can’t explain this, so it has to be supernatural and/or mystical.” Leaving a case folder open is perfectly fine, it’s part and parcel of science- it’s filed under “shit for which we need more information to explain in the future.” However, due to what we know of the nature of the universe, the explanation is not likely to ever be related to ghosts or a divine being. To some ancient cultures, our computers would appear like some serious magic except, maybe, to cultures that designed things similar to the Antikythera mechanism (although it appears that the Greeks had a massive brain fart at some point after 205 BC and completely forgot how to make stuff like that until the 14th century came around,) information and research kill the supernatural pretty quickly.

I honestly don’t think we’re ever going to find evidence of souls or spirits. If anything, the more we know about our brains seems to indicate that consciousness and what we perceive as our self are real phenomena, but they’re byproducts of our biological nature and not the effects of a supernatural entity acting upon a body. This means that it is most likely that, when we die, we die for good. It’s a very unpleasant thought for most of us, but I honestly think that avoiding that very likely reality can rob us of experiencing life to its fullest if we’re confident that, like Celine Dion, our hearts will go on in another life after this one. One of my favorite moments from one of my favorite movies (“Antonia’s Line” http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/antonias-line-1996 ) has a granddaughter riding on horseback with her grandmother. This scene takes place after the death of a character, and the little girl asks her grandmother what happened to them. Her answer is that they have been put in the ground and that eventually they will be part of the trees and the plants, and she asks her if he has gone somewhere else. Antonia simply says, “This is the only dance we dance.” I thought that was a very poignant way of putting it- there’s only one dance, so it would be a good thing to make sure we enjoy it as much as we can without being that jerk who does the funky chicken and elbows your aunt in the spleen while simultaneously stepping on your toes and farting in your mother's face.

My brother's wedding was so fun...

Basically, I have had three groups of friends who were dead set convinced they were the reincarnations of the Arthurian Court. (Seriously, I totally dare you to even try to count the number of ways in which that's funny.)

Oh man, that is Nikki Minaj levels of cray right there. I do have a dear friend who fervently believes she’s a fairy, and she has found several people who share and reinforce this delusion.

I am not entirely unfamiliar with delusions- my partner of twelve years is Borderline Personality Disorder (previously diagnosed as Bipolar) with atypical psychosis, and there was a period of three months about two years ago where he basically suffered from clinical lycanthropy. During that period he basically believed he was turning into a raccoon. They eventually found a dosage that stopped the delusions, but man, it’s one hell of an ordeal. This is one of the reasons why, when one of those ‘Otherkin’ people come up to me and tell me how they have a wolf inside waiting to come out, I just want to go bitch, please.

Once, while going to a movie with my partner (can’t remember which movie), we had this guy basically add himself to our outing. He vehemently stated to us that he was an actual motherfucking elf (because this shit just happens to us). He was very invested in telling us that everything that J.R.R. Tolkien had written had really, really happened and that he was here as a spearhead to herald the return of the elves (even though Tolkien pretty much made it very clear the elves were not coming back, like, ever, because they basically went to the Middle Earth equivalent of heaven.) He bought tickets to the same movie, sat next to us throughout the entire thing commenting ad nauseam. We tolerated it. And then when we came out, he made it clear he wanted to come with us to dinner. We made it clear that no, we would go this way, and he would go that way, and he disagreed. At one point, he started clutching the cane he was carrying rather menacingly (sidenote: he didn’t need the cane, he clearly was carrying for ornamental purposes and it was this fancy frilly shit with carvings and metal, and I’m sure it was Burdened With Great Purpose and Significance or whatever, but it still would’ve hurt.) Eventually I had to tell him that if he didn’t stop following us, I was going to knee his Tom Bombadil so hard that he would probably never get to ring his dong dillo again. That got the message through.

" I cheerfully told them, "Elaine. You know, Lady of Shallott. In fact, I better leave, get back to my loom an' shit, 'cause if I stay out here too long I am clearly going to die." I am still sad no one realized this was an excuse to flee like rabid dogs were yapping at my heels, or why it was also funny.

Oh god, that is absolutely hilarious. That almost reads like a Hark! A Vagrant comic. In fact, you should totally send her your story and demand that she turn it into a comic. If you haven’t seen the comic she made of the Lady of Shalott, then you have to see it right here: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=360

Conversely, when I was much younger, friends of the family owned a restaurant, in an old mansion that had formerly been a residence (and I think a boarding school). I stayed there multiple times with their daughter, who was a friend of mine. I dismissed her family as a pile of the flakiest cornballs ever when they'd go on about how the place was haunted, etc. Until I spent a handful of years watching weird shit constantly happen there.Do I think there's 'ghosts' there? Not necessarily. I absolutely see how and why they think there were, though, from things I witnessed repeatedly myself, that I certainly can't explain. Does it mean I agree with their assessment? No. It does, however, mean I'm not going to make fun of them for believing what they did after the experiences they've had, because I can absolutely see how they came to those conclusions

I can see that. Now we know that old houses tend to have a high chance of becoming infrasound factories due to several reasons (materials, for example)- it’s notable that ultra-modern super-slick chrome-and-glass houses and buildings are much less likely to report hauntings. There’s a very big chance that a large part of it is our brains reacting to environmental cues of which we were not aware until recently (and likely there are still some we have not detected yet) and flipping all sorts of survival-based triggers that send messages of fight-or-flight and get translated into the weirdest things. Combine that with old houses and their propensity for settling (and thus sending objects rolling off shelves), the obligatory dimmer lighting and lived-in spaces, and you have a recipe for a thriller.

I had a brush with what could have been called the ‘supernatural’ in my youth. My bedroom was infamous (no get your mind out of the gutter right now) for being ‘haunted.’ Nobody who slept in that room could get a good night’s sleep- they were always having bad dreams. This started as far back as my brother’s teenage years (we’re 11 years apart) when he slept in that bedroom. At random moments, if you were by yourself, you could get this oppressive sensation that there was a presence nearby, watching you. It would happen at random times, and when it happened I usually bolted from the room like Hatsune Miku after finding out what that ‘rule 34’ thing is. There were constant ‘sightings’ by me and other people in the room, perceiving someone just out of the corner of your eye, but who were not there when you turned to look at them fully.

All of this eventually came to a head when my flute teacher had a pants-shittingly scary meltdown one day when she thought she was having a conversation (one-sided) with me out of the corner of her eye, only to find out that Macavity was not there I wasn’t there at all. The fact that, a second later, I came into the room from the door directly opposite to where she was facing finished freaking her out and she ran to my mother’s room so that she could have a place to Lose Her Shit. My mom digged into the house’s past and found out that the previous owner’s wife had died of cancer in that very room. Convinced that this meant her spirit was somehow hanging on, my mother consulted a psychic friend of hers, who suggested that she tear down the walls of the room and remodel it to ‘let the energy free.’
I went with it because it meant getting a bigger room in the end, with enough closet space to hide several dead bodies boyfriends at once (no, I really did hide a boyfriend there once. In the closet. Before coming out of the closet myself. So my mom wouldn’t catch me in the act. Yes, I was bad.) All I knew at the time was that whatever had been done worked, and everybody could sleep peacefully there again.

I always wondered exactly what the hell was going on with that room, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that I ran across studies about infrasound and saw, with interest, that every single symptom of the phenomenon happened in that room. The nightmares were, I imagine, caused by my subconscious picking up the frequencies and trying to wake me the fuck up because my primitive brain thought that there was a big old ass tiger ready to murderate me nearby. Something with how the way that room had been configured must have acted as an amplifier for infrasound, and it changed when the room was redesigned and rebuilt. It makes perfect sense now, of course- but I am not going to say that the sensation you experienced that something was coming to get you and you need to feets don’t fail me now out of there wasn’t incredibly real and visceral.

One unfortunate reality is that a lot of our systems are still wired to our very primitive survival mechanisms. Most of the time, that isn’t a big issue, but there are times when we are exposed to situations that remind our body of some ancestral terror-pocalypse and we simply lose our shit, see things that aren’t there or feel things solely for the reason of getting us out of there ASAP before that sabretooth tiger from millions of years ago decides to eat us.

Except this was not coming in reply to 'people believe this is real', but 'people believe this might potentially be possible'.

I would say the stance would be close to being the same. Even a claim of something that seems possible requires evidence when no documentation really exists. Such as Bigfoot- It is possible that there is a species of… whateverthefuck that we haven’t really been able to observe because it’s solitary, non-gregarious, it hides in caves playing video games all day, etcetera. But we’ll still have to prove the darned thing exists because the photographic evidence is so suspect, and there are hucksters all over the place who have successfully recreated sightings and footprints. So, there’s definitely a lot of static in there. With claims of TK, TP, Precog, there’s an even higher threshold due to a few things.

Let’s take ESP/precognition/clairvoyance as an example. Some people consider it a possibility… okay. The issue with that is that just by itself it manages to break the universe in such a way that even The Final Pam would go ‘no way!’ By seeing the future before it happens we’re basically saying that we can observe an effect before its cause.

Even the scientific concept of Retrocausality doesn’t quite work that way. For TK, we know just what meager amount of electricity the brain produces, how would it be capable of producing enough to move an object by means of the Lorenz force (which is the nearest mechanism I could even imagine would apply in this situation- and you’d still need a motor of some sort)? These are some pretty fundamental principles that are being rewritten, and I don’t think that a lot of people who believe such things are possible have really thought about the nature and repercussions of those ‘ifs’. Most of these claims go beyond the merely possible- they’re essentially about breaking the laws of physics, causality, and fashion (no, seriously, have you seen how most psychics dress?)

...the bolded bit totally earned an upvote. And coffee, spit-taked all over my monitor.

I take no responsibilities for ruined hardware >_>

I find hopelessly disingenuous and playing semantic games to weasel around them is growing a little tiresome (…) Now, you're arguing for the use of common parlance and 'you know what I meant'.

Let me go back to that, briefly. Ganymede was lamenting the fact that the thread included an actual discussion of contrary opinions. This isn't playing semantics, the OP titled the thread "Do you believe in paranormal things?", the thread was not titled "People who believe in the paranormal, represent!" This isn't an appeal to common parlance, it is an appeal to inference. The reason why such cutting procedure exists in a court of law is because we storytelling monkeys find it natural to expand upon a statement. If you want only "Yes/No", you don't open a thread, you create a surveymonkey poll with just two switches. The intent was very clear, the question was meant to open a discussion.

When you're well aware of what she meant

Not necessarily. I don't know Lithium well, and consider that I live about half an hour away from Boulder, Colorado, which is something not unlike the unofficial Sedona Embassy. I hear talk about 'energy fields' all the time- even from people who are somewhat scientifically literate but still fall for the Deepak Chopra/Marie Brennan/New Age Guru of the moment.

The argument she was putting forth are consistent with the arguments I have heard before: “How can you say there is no soul, if energy can’t be created or destroyed and the body produces a field of energy,” et cetera. Well, the electricity that is produced is the byproduct of a biological process. Nothing is destroyed when the body dies- those processes change, they don’t produce that electricity anymore, they produce something else as they break down.

To assume there is a soul means there has to be something ‘extra’ on top of all that. People assume that this means that the ‘mind’, and the ‘personality’ are that it, but they once again are the byproduct of our biological selves. It seemed to me that the energy field argument was the one being made, so I went on to mention that the popular conception of it vs. what’s actually there don’t exactly line up.

The sheer absurdity and internal contradiction of, "I don't believe in the impossible, ha ha!" when you're demanding that other people prove something actually exists before they could be even remotely reasonable to consider the possibility that something might exist for pages on end before this point. Talk about believing in the impossible, dang.

That’s a mischaracterization of the position, to be honest. There are things that, according to the knowledge we have accumulated so far, are possible, and there are things that are impossible. The survival of something ‘extra’ after the death of its body, the existence of a never-dying, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being that can rearrange the universe at a whim, these are things that are deemed unlikely or impossible.

If you’re asking someone to believe that they exist, proof is needed. I’m sorry, but that’s how thinking works- we are not called to disprove a negative so it is not up to us to prove something doesn't exist. Honestly, we'd be at it all of our lives, every moment of the day, for every weird creature you can come up with. To ridicule someone for demanding proof in the face of a claim offered without proof, a claim that -in the face of everything we know - seems positively absurd by making them seem close minded is only an attempt to displace the onus of proof.

Here, this is a tree- it’s solid, I can touch it, it’s rooted to the ground. If you want to make the claim that there is a Dryad spirit living within it- okay, I’ll believe it when you prove it to me, because all I see is the tree. When I cut it up, all I see are its rings. I can look at its molecular structure, I can even turn it into a chair, and there is still no Dryad. If we are to believe in dryads, then we’re going to have to find them, or sufficient evidence of them outside of fables and stories to make their existence a possibility. This also applies to god, spirits, ghosts, fairies and Justin Bieber’s talent- until proven, they are all claims with very little to support them. I admit they make for fascinating stories, but there's a difference between the story and the grain of truth that inspired it.

I'd say they are. The textbook "Desktops and Dungeons" traces the CRPG back to its earliest days, and it makes an argument for considering MUDs as multi-player iterations of single-player text-based CRPGs. The first generations of MUDs that were focused on stat-building and monster-killing alongside character role-playing were definitely CRPGs.

Most system-based MUDs would fall under the Multi-User CRPG label. Those MU*s that don't have systems or rules would most likely count as multi-user collaborative interactive fiction, I guess?

That may be applicable in courts of law, where communication is constrained by procedure. This is not a court of law, this is a discussion board, a forum. The operative word is discussion, it isn't a Q&A poll with only two choices, either. I think it's pretty self-evident.

I think that we are ignoring the context here. When someone asks "Do you believe in X?" the answer is never "Yes." or "No."

As can be seen in every affirmative post. No, it is always "Yes, because," "No, because." It is very disingenuous to pretend that a question of that sort is ever intended as a yes-no statement and on ne parle plus.

The issues I have with Klosterman is that he often drops the context in favor of his wit. This is something he does consistently, which is why his wit is so celebrated- his witticisms have the guise of deep pronouncements, making him somewhat of a popular culture Deepak Chopra. Hey, things change, perceptions change- well… d’uh, Heraclitus observed that as far back as 500BCE. The fact that perceptions change does not invalidate knowledge. Furthermore, the fact that science evolves over time and revises wrong assumptions and hypotheses does not mean that the entire field of knowledge itself is built on a pack of cards.

If someone stating what they think concerning a set of beliefs is 'cramming their beliefs down the throats of others,' I think your definitions are a little bit off. On the whole, Atheists aren't trying to write laws to favor mandates from one particular sky-god or another, and when a presidential candidate states that they're Christian they don't suddenly find themselves completely unelectable, nor are they trying to pass laws restricting people’s freedoms based on their religious beliefs. I rather think the venom is misplaced in this instance.
The reality that you hold beliefs does not make them exempt from criticism or examination. You have the right to believe whatever you want, but it doesn’t exempt you from the opinions of others. The same goes for me.

Anyways, back to the point: I do not think it is a stretch to say that the more we find out about the universe, the more rational –if surprising- our reality seems to be. It is a reality that seems to have little room for magic or the supernatural, and it is not likely that anthropomorphic personifications of some primitive principle or other that we call ‘gods’ really do exist out there, bending the laws of physics and the universe to favor people who say important words to them. If that notion is outrageous, then we may have different definitions of what reason is. As I understand it, it is the faculty by which we integrate the data that we receive from our observations into abstractions and concepts. The very notion of a god or supreme being isn’t something that is suggested by data, it is something that is suggested by emotion- the emotional need to have someone watching out for us and who has a plan that assures us we are on an orderly path in an intimidating universe. For such a creature to exist, however, a good amount of how the universe works needs to not be so, let alone concepts such as the law of identity would shrivel in the presence of a being whose one defining nature is its inability to be defined. If anything, the sustained belief in a god and in spirits requires a steadfast denial of the data we have accumulated. This is why religion rests on faith, not scientific proof.

In this instance, it would be those who consistently insist that something exists despite proof to the contrary that would be ‘cramming their beliefs’ down someone’s throat, by your definition of it. By my definition, they’re expressing an opinion- I think a terribly misguided one, since we exist in a rational universe, but it is ultimately theirs. For them to cram their opinions down someone’s throat, they would have to create laws to ensure that religion is taught alongside science as scientific fact, that their particular rituals be obligatory at public events, and that only people who are accepted by their religion have access to legal rights.

Mind you, some people who subscribe to these beliefs do support such initiatives, but they tend to be a vocal minority – to assume that all members of one particular religion share in the traits of its extremist is disingenuous. For starters, if it were so, we would already be under a theocracy (it used to be that way, several hundred years ago, but at least in the West most religions have learned to play well with others.) Nevertheless, I do think religious thought is harmful to the individual- it sets up a belief in the supernatural and encourages magical thinking, which will be detrimental to their ability in the measure that they compromise logic to it.

Free will, though, is a thing, and people can believe whatever they want to as long as they don’t force others to believe it by law. And people are free to comment on those beliefs, too. Ultimately, one side is closer to fact than the other, with reality being the ultimate referee for that sort of thing.

We're also talking about Chuch Klosterman here. The man whose main focus is popular culture, music and sports. While his approach to American studies is interesting, I would rather not take my cues on science from him. While his views on the shifting viewpoints of history have merit, there are some fields were that approach doesn't translate exactly. Klosterman is terribly witty, but I wouldn't advice taking science lessons from Dotty Parker, either.

Again, we go down to Pascal's Wager with this. What if we're wrong about Jehova? What if we're wrong about Zeus? What if we're wrong about the Spaghetti Monster, Azura Mazda and just about any religion that has already existed or will exist? While we may be uncertain about how some things work, I can definitely guarantee you that there is a colossal leap from that, to the existence of some sort of supreme being who is intricately interested in what I do with my genitals, whether or not people chant its name obsessively enough, and whether or not people wear mixed fibers. There's a difference between the possible and the absurd, especially for an absurd for which there is no conclusive proof.

You ask the question what if we're wrong? I rather think the important question is what if we're right? The placebo effect, Pascal's wager, they all fall apart when you entertain the possibility of a zero entering the equation. Not all propositions are equal and, once again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Over the millions of years that we have existed, we have more evidence for the life and mating cycles of the mosquito than we have for the existence of any god, anywhere.

@Faceless I've been 90% silver since my 17th birthday. Count your blessings Nobody believes I'm in my mid thirties.

My workplace continues to be awesome. Today is the first end-of-month we've had using the new system, and to thank us for the work we've put into making it a (relatively) painless transition, the CEO is buying all of us in the building lunch from Krazy Karl's Pizza.

Wootwoot

@Coin said in RL Anger:

@Vorpal said in RL Anger:

Hello, guy sunning himself on his lawn in a speedo. Yes, you're pretty damned hot. Unfortunately that speedo is way too small. Your Weinerschnitzel clearly thought the same thing and decided to make a break for freedom when you fell asleep on your lawn chair while you tanned. I didn't need to see that during my walking break.

Maybe it was a little raw and he wanted to cook it a little...

That's gonna hurt when it start to peel.

Over the years I have bought so many games during the Steam and GOG summer sales that, right now, I look over a sea of games that have "already owned" on them, and not a lot of them that I currently desire. So, for this summer at least my wallet is safe.

That being said, as soon as No Man's Sky comes out in August, I'm pouncing on that shit so hard the moment it is confirmed it is not a lemon...

Hello, guy sunning himself on his lawn in a speedo. Yes, you're pretty damned hot. Unfortunately that speedo is way too small. Your Weinerschnitzel clearly thought the same thing and decided to make a break for freedom when you fell asleep on your lawn chair while you tanned. I didn't need to see that during my walking break.

@surreality said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:

@Vorpal The edit prolly helps clarify the issue I'm having here; it may have gone in while you were typing, though.

You can probably see from that where I'm having an issue with this approach.

The problem is, plausible is a moving target.

I don't have an issue with things passing a plausibility test on a personal level -- hell, I think they should.

I do think any given thing stands or fails on its own merits or failings, however. Just because we put them under the same heading doesn't mean X impacts Y unless something more than the word used to describe them is the same.

The board should probably have a notice when an edit happens, but that would probably be asking too much of the system When it comes to 'plausible', I think we can make reasonable guidelines for each category. In Zoology, an unusually large primate species that, somehow, managed to remain undetected except for a few people for many years is a plausible, if unlikely thing. Whereas, for example, flying, fire-breathing dragons are completely implausible.

A big frickin' lizard with a nasty bite and/or corrosive spit might be more plausible. More likely are big lizards with bad bites and an overactive imagination.

@surreality said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:

You're also claiming, below that, apparently, that if you believe one thing even can be possible, you must believe all the rest are inherently true.

That is simply and transparently absurd.

No- I have already said that plausible things such as unknown species causing rumors that eventually get blown out of proportion is something that's perfectly plausible and possible.

Moving things with the power of your mind, seeing the future, the past, third eyes, astral projections, ghosts, fairies, demons and gods, however? No. I'm sorry, but I always find it interesting when a religious person dismisses certain superstitions or other religions as magic or barbaric, and then goes to their temple to pray (cast spells) at an invisible person whom they assume will re-arrange the universe so that they are kept from harm. Except that occasionally the deity is capricious or mysterious and allows truly horrible shit to happen, whereupon everyone remarks on 'mysterious ways' and hopes that they can somehow do better to be worthy of divine intervention to subvert cause and effect at some point in the future.

It's kinda magic. No, really. It's magic. So is believing that the power of your special thoughts will somehow affect mass and momentum and move that coffee cup across the table, or somehow cause your brain to uplink with someone else's. We have had no proof that life after death is a thing, and yet to obstinately believe in it is a part of magical thinking- it's believing what we want to believe about the universe because it brings us comfort. I want it to be, so therefore it must be so.

Ultimately, the concept of life after death is either not true, or it exists in such a manner that it is incapable of being experienced or proven- at which point it bears absolutely no relevance whatsoever to us.

@surreality said in Do you believe in paranormal things?:

@Vorpal I took precisely as much as I needed to to confirm the definition disagrees with itself, and is not, in fact, an excuse to say, "Since this word can apply to any of these things, any of these things can be used to disprove any other."

Which is what you keep doing.

You want to disprove Nessie? Disprove Nessie. But don't use table-tipping and faith healers to do it simply because people call both things 'supernatural' and think that's kosher reasoning.

Actually, it's not a matter of disproving, it's a matter of proving. If you have a supernatural claim, the onus of proof is on you.

As for Nessie the Loch ness monster? I'm afraid to say that now he is very much in the same category of the supernatural as faith healers, gods and fairies. The lake has been exhaustively searched, monitored, and it has been established no such creature could possibly live there under the conditions of the lake and its food chain. Yet belief on the fucker persists despite proof to the contrary- hence, it is superstitious belief, exactly along the same lines of the charlatans who wave crystals around and tell you that you used to be Marie Antoinette in a past life and, incidentally, you were also totally Tomyris and that is the reason why you can pull off such bitchin' headgear. And, by the way, we're all born with a mark of evil in our souls because a woman whose existence we can't prove snacked on a fruit at a non-specific time in the past in a non-specific place, and this is all true.