My beliefs align somewhat with "new age" thought..

this post/ thread is loooong overdue. i'd probably quintuple rep this post if i could

 

I see no more delusional thinking here than anywhere else. A cursory statistical analysis would probably show a greater volume of delusional thinking outside of the psychic forum.
I will admit that delusional precepts are more overtly evident in a forum that is by it's very name, controversial. The delusions of everyday concerns and discourses are far more covert and not generally recognized.
I watch every day on every forum, whole conversations, great soliloquies of the most profound perspectives based on false premises. A premise can loose it's integrity by virtue of a single poorly chosen word in the wrong place. Always and never immediately spring to mind.
When you say psychic or new age, or political, etc. we are mostly dealing with specialized vocabulary.

 

Thank you. I felt very alienated until this post =P

I find some of the people on this site read between the lines too quickly. It keeps me on my toes, so I like that. But a lot of times, it just makes me feel like people want to be mean to me =P
This could make an interesting topic.

Good point.
Many elements of the common thought are based on purely misinterpreted ideas and poorly generalized happenings. We are all somewhat delusional, by the very ideas of perception and individual thought.

 

What we have here, gentlemen, is a failure to communicate.

 

THIS is how you get pos rep, peeps. Such a great movie.

 

I've been hearing that quote a lot ever since I moved to Oklahoma.
Too much, some would say.

 

The best part is a lot of them seem to really believe in their Harry Potter worlds.

 

The rational and scientific comprehension of the world was a reality tunnel designed to view reality in a way that would allow someone to produce the most amount of money off of reality. Or work in the shadow of someone else who produces the most amount of money off of reality.

If you no longer care about making more money than other people, I think the need for a scientific and rational mind just goes right out the window.

 

Nice job at biting cynicism, but a bit misplaced, I think. It might be more true if you substitute the word "technological" for "scientific."

You certainly could think of science as a "reality tunnel," in the sense that a scientific experiment is an attempt to narrow down a question and the test of that question to a difference in one variable and no more. It's impossible to learn anything about the physical world if you try to address multiple variables simultaneously. Done properly, scientific experimentation is a very slow way of learning about the physical universe, but it gets the job done, and it's the best way we've found so far of getting the highest degree of foolproof answers.

At the same time, lots of people MAKE science into a tunnel, by erroneously thinking of it as a complete system of knowledge, which it is not. For example, the statement, "Science has not proven the existence of psychic phenomena, THEREFORE psychic phenomena do not exist" makes an erroneous conclusion, and is based on illogic and incorrect assumptions about what science is and does. But lots of people's thinking falls in line with that statement.

 

Fortunately cynicism is not an indiscriminate contagion, let's say, like biting flies.

 

However it can sometimes become personal, as in biting my butt.

 

Like I say, becoming personal is discriminating, but it need not be.

 

I'm glad I got you to clarify that, Dr dope. I suppose you might even say that in the case of biting cynicism, you only get bitten if you make yourself a target.

 

If I defend myself, I am already attacked.

 

I am not!!! And I am offended that you suggested it!

 

You notice how it is the offended who choose to become offensive. The offender is just doing what is natural and good to him based on his model of what that good looks like. Not that the offended deserve to be offended, it is just thus.

 

I do notice. And the one who chooses to be offended hence villifies the victim.

Thus the innocent are crucified or sent to rot in prison.

 

I've got your back on this one too. I wouldn't have expected any other response than what you got when posting it in this forum, but yeah... most of it is pure fantasy. Stuff people believe for no real reason just because it seems interesting. I guess it lends another dimension to reality that some people find interesting.

That said, I've heard some pretty interesting firsthand stories that I can't discount. It seems like there's a little more out there than meets the eye, anyway.

 

Most of the response Duck got seems to be of the taking-offense variety. I don't think anybody really addressed Duck's question very well.

I would have tried to address it better, but at the time I was just tired of repeatedly posting the same kinds of explanations to skeptics, and I wanted a break.

Certainly there's some of that, but I would bet it's less than you might think.

Just so. I might be inclined to repeat some of my stories yet again now that I've had a breather, but I'm not sure Duck shows up on this thread anymore.