• NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!

    Subscribe to The Paracast Newsletter!

Food for thought...

Forums New posts

Free episodes:

I feel your pain my friend. Why are we so apt to believe in this stuff? I wish a saucer would crash on the 50yr line during the superbowl. I wish a bus full of reporters would run over a bigfoot. I wish the Cubs would win a world series(sorry, Im a huge cubs fan....and yes, I know they suck). But these things will never happen. I will be really upset when I am 80yrs old and these "mysteries" are still out there and havent been solved and I must say a huge THANK YOU!!! to all the wonderful people who are truthfull and honest who are trying to figure these mysteries out and for making me want to belive a little more longer.
 
hahaha very funny wisenhimer. I knew i would catch some crap.....sheesh...being a cubs fan is tough, its like being.........well, its like being a cubs fan!!!
 
crabtown said:
I honestly want to believe in paranormal stuff. Really, it would be so neat if there were aliens, time travelers, ghosts, flying saucers, shapeshifters, transdimensionals, mind-readers, gods, shadow people, clairvoyants, bigfoots... you name it.
Click to expand...

Really? Isn't that a bit masochistic? Do you really want to live in a world with such things? This reminds me of a Sliders episode where they go to a world were magic is real and they have to try to cope with it. Maybe I just have a vivid imagination but the the idea of any of those types of things being actually real is disturbing and undesirable to say the least. The world seems hellish enough at times without shapeshifting, mind-reading used car salesmen getting over on us or jealous gods bent on teaching us a good lesson in humility by killing a bunch of us off, but that's just my take on it.

I do think the focus should be to determine if any of that business is real however, not because any should desire it be so, but in the eventuality that we have to locate and kill it.
 
Will Penguin said:
How much of human history that we take as a given can actually be "proven" to a scientific standard?
Click to expand...

Give an example so that I know what you mean, please. Do you mean something like the destruction of Pompeii? For that there's an entire city of evidence. The Moon landings? Plenty of photographs, film, and geological samples.
 
Angel of Ioren said:
Give an example so that I know what you mean, please. Do you mean something like the destruction of Pompeii? For that there's an entire city of evidence. The Moon landings? Plenty of photographs, film, and geological samples.
Click to expand...

No Angel, he's got a point... so long as you ignore archeology, anthropology, astronomy, geology, etomology, geneology... and so forth.
 
Will Penguin said:
I'll bet if you thought REALLY REALLY REALLY hard you could maybe think of a few bits of history we all take for granted that are not supported by such things, but rather by people's accounts.
Click to expand...

So you're not going to support your argument with examples? I'm not above saying, "oh yeah, you have a point," if you provide me with some good examples.
 
Will Penguin said:
I'll bet if you thought REALLY REALLY REALLY hard you could maybe think of a few bits of history we all take for granted that are not supported by such things, but rather by people's accounts.
Click to expand...
History is built from physical traces (buildings, art pieces, tools, etc) and, when possible, written records. Spoken traditions can also be a valid instrument of investigation, but always in a very cautious way (some peoples keep oral records, instead of written ones, making this type of work fall on the fields of anthropology and folklore). There's always a degree of speculation, specially when trying to make sense of civilizations who didn't create alphabets. For those cases, a sincere and serious archaeologist will just state that we don't have enough material to arrive to a conclusion. People have many misconceptions about the scientific methodology of History and frequently make assumptions based on the superficial view of the past brought upon the public by the Media. Spending a few hours at a library would certainly change a few minds on this subject.
 
Will Penguin said:
I'll bet if you thought REALLY REALLY REALLY hard you could maybe think of a few bits of history we all take for granted that are not supported by such things, but rather by people's accounts.
Click to expand...

I think the impetus is on you to supply the supporting evidence for your own argument isn't it? It seems a bit unfair if not unrealistic to insist that someone else do it.
 
The only way to prove any thing paranormal to yourself is to go out and research it yourself, both via book-education on researchers that have gone before you, and actual field work. A few things to watch out for....be very choosy of the books you read, and the field work will take mounds of time, money, and effort. Looking for yourself is the only way of proving such a thing, but even then it's only a personal fulfilliment. Even if you see a full-bodied apparition, Big Foot, or an honest-to-God flying saucer during your investigations, don't expect anyone to believe you any more than you're believing those that make such claims now.

Good luck.
 
crabtown said:
Can somebody help me with this, because I'd really like to believe.
Click to expand...
Errrm... Why is it considered such a good thing to believe? Faith is praised by every religion but I suspect it's because they need faith to plug up the holes in their theology. If you have no real proof of something that you desperately need to be true, why, just make faith itself the supreme virtue. Once you believe in something for which there is no objective evidence, the rest is easy and you can be endlessly manipulated by priests and Billy Meier and alkaline water peddlers and other con men. You want to believe... you've come to the right place. Most on this forum have a desperate need for the paranormal to be true. You don't seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid yet. There's a very good reason why not one shred of objective unambiguous evidence has ever been presented here or anywhere else. And I think you know what that reason is. Good luck.
 
MacDaddy said:
Errrm... Why is it considered such a good thing to believe? Faith is praised by every religion but I suspect it's because they need faith to plug up the holes in their theology. If you have no real proof of something that you desperately need to be true, why, just make faith itself the supreme virtue. Once you believe in something for which there is no objective evidence, the rest is easy and you can be endlessly manipulated by priests and Billy Meier and alkaline water peddlers and other con men. You want to believe... you've come to the right place. Most on this forum have a desperate need for the paranormal to be true. You don't seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid yet. There's a very good reason why not one shred of objective unambiguous evidence has ever been presented here or anywhere else. And I think you know what that reason is. Good luck.
Click to expand...
In courts of justice through-out the world the gold standard of evidence is multiple eye witness testimony. People make mistakes, yes , but not multiple witnesses. There is no reason for Christ's disciples to claim that they saw Him risen and yet there are hundreds of witnesses who say that he did just that. That is enough for me. That -and the feeling I get deep in my heart that Christ hears me and comforts me in times of need. You can make fun of Faith all you want but those of us who know better just laugh. You can deny it all you want but how do you explain the witnesses? That is what I don't understand about skeptics. The apostles were not starry eye believers who were in the habit of seeing things that were not there. They were hard nosed fisherman and pragmattic men of manual labor who had no illusions about the world and how it works. What they saw is what they saw and its up to the skeptics to explain it away. "But as for me and my house we will serve the Lord."
 
Cockapoo said:
There is no reason for Christ's disciples to claim that they saw Him risen and yet there are hundreds of witnesses who say that he did just that. That is enough for me.
Click to expand...

Well, I don't think you're looking at that properly. What you have is essentially an anonymous account describing an event where hundreds of people supposedly witnessed something. What you don't have is something written at or close to the time of the alleged event by someone who could have actually seen it. There is a big difference. When you say that there are "witnesses who say that he did..." you are misrepresenting things.You should say that you believe, for largely emotional reasons, an account written some 70 to 90 years after the alleged fact by a largely anonymous author. Which is cool if that is what you want to do, but to represent any of the books of the N.T. as eyewitness accounts means you have to ignore a great deal about what is known about the real history of the Bible itself.
 
Reality Tunnels (RAW): I'm beginning to believe this is as close to the truth as you can get. I think Paranomal is an oft abused term that is really meant to touch upon the greater problem of the subject-object realtionship. And try as we may, consciousness is far too subtle and slippery a phenemenon to ever measure, as Ken Wilber would probably say. So good luck trying to tackle it with Maths. Anyway, as for the perpetual suffering of The Cubs Fan, I can relate. Life long Cubs fan and completely unsure as to why.
 
Back
Top