Cont: Scorpion's Spiritualism, Part Deux

[JayUtah]

Your equation, post 527 where you say there are options A and B. Pixel42 gave no option B.

You've posted these same claims here for years, many times, and we've discussed them ad nauseam for years, many times. Pixel42 has been a vigorous participant in that debate. Why would you think she is not familiar with your claims? Why would you think that if she omits them once in the umpteenth recapitulation of that debate, that she has suddenly ceased to remember how we considered them?

I ask why you keep coming here to present your claims over and over again before an audience you know for a fact will respond in the way we do. It's clear you are grasping at straws to make it seem like people who have carefully considered your claims and properly reject them for lack of evidence are somehow closed minded for doing so. You can't really make yourself seem reasonable by making skeptics seem irrational.

 

[JayUtah]

You have reached your conclusions, and I have reached mine.

Agreed, but we have reached those different conclusions by following vastly different processes. You steeped yourself in an exercise designed to reinforce the belief you arrived at a priori. We followed an exercise designed to determine which of several hypothesis is the best explanation according to testable evidence. If you don't value conclusions arrived at by testable evidence, you're in the wrong place.

You could not possibly convince me all my experience is invalid.

Your experience is valid. Determining instead whether or not the facts it alleges are true requires an exercise you periodically invoke here but then don't want to participate in. It seems to serve your purpose to believe that those who reject your claims are closed-minded for doing so. You've justified your beliefs in your own eyes, according to your own criteria. Demanding that others accept that as valid evidence of truth per se is irrational.

If its any comfort to you every psychiatrists I ever saw wrote in notes they never thought I would see that I was delusional.

Yes, that's a common treatment outcome for schizophrenia.

I can go to another house in the same town, and hear mediums converse with the spirit world. I opted to believe in my own immortal spirit. Not in the scientific theory we are just a bag of chemicals. I fought that war and won it.

You engaged in an exercise that seems to have given you a degree of comfort. However, it is not an exercise that has any likelihood of discovering and testing the truth. And that's what skeptics are interested in. If you want comfort, stay in your church. But you seem to want to believe you're being unjustly persecuted, which is puzzling.

I know my mind is free with or without anti psychotic drugs. I can control my thoughts either way, and have a lifetime of doing it to prove it. That is because consciousness is not a product of the brain. It is the immortal spirit using the brain, and consciousness filters down into it through the etheric counterpart.

Mind over matter is a real thing.

So is spontaneous remission in schizophrenia, which occurs at a rate that is still too nebulous to measure accurately. It is possible you no longer suffer from schizophrenia so profound as to require institutionalization or pharmacological treatment. Schizophrenics are infamously incapable of metacognizing their own mental states. However, none of that makes your past delusions true, nor your present claims true.

If you cannot provide testable evidence for your claims, skeptics are not closed-minded to reject them.

 

[JayUtah]

Yea! that's the sort of thing a psychiatrist would say.

Yes, because it's medically defensible to say so. Whether you like it or not, there is a body of science that pertains to your condition and its consequences, which you have detailed at length. The insidious nature of your condition makes it difficult if not impossible for the patient to perform accurate metacognition. That in turn makes it difficult to treat without psychiatric drugs.

Which is why I no longer listen to them.

You're free to do so, so long as by doing so you pose no further danger to others and to yourself. However, you are not free to demand that we reject the obvious signs of an apparently correct, evidence-based diagnosis.

The best explanation for many of your claims, according to the evidence, is that they are manifestations of schizophrenia. If you don't like skeptics telling you that over and over again, then stop raising the issue over and over again at this forum. You won't get any different answer, and you should know that.

 

[JayUtah]

You've found a way of living with your problems that works for you, and I'm genuinely pleased for you. It's only when you come here and insist that your solution is something we should all accept as The Ultimate Truth, when it clearly isn't, that we have a problem.

This is really what it comes down to. Scorpion, you seem to want to force a conflict over and over again with people who would otherwise see you as a success story: someone who has managed an otherwise insidious mental illness using only self-directed occupational therapy and participation in religion. I deal every day with people who have vastly different religious or spiritual beliefs—or none at all—and we all get along together fine because we respect the accurate basis of such beliefs and constrain them to appropriate expressions and settings.

You come here time and again to repeat your claims of spiritual manifestations. You say it's ostensibly to inform new readers, but this makes no sense: new readers here are more likely to be new skeptics, and those who invariably engage you are those with whom you've debated these topics over and over and whose reasoned conclusions you should know for a fact will not be swayed by your subjective beliefs. You seem to feel a periodic need to revitalize a story that people who reject your beliefs as objective truth can only be doing so irrationally and from a closed-minded position. You explicitly seek out an audience you know will refuse to endorse your religion and who will, in fact, challenge its claims on evidentiary and philosophical grounds. Then you translate this into a rejection of you as a person.

This, sadly, is not healthy behavior.

 

[Scorpion]

What makes you think that (the whole karmic angels thing)? Did the voices in your head tell you that or is it what the mediums say and you trust them because you believe you have seen proof of their powers or is it just an idea you heard from someone else and you liked it?

I attended many trance lectures at the spiritualist association in London during the 1970's. I must have picked up the idea of angels of karma from there. But to be honest I cannot really claim to know much about them.

Genuine question - I understand (though don't agree with) why you think telepathy is real, that something puts pictures in your head to paint* and that medium's can talk to dead spirits and give you previously unknown information about your family. I'm not clear on how that turns into karmic angels etc - apologies if I missed the connection.

See my comments above

W
*Since you believe in telepathy, why couldn't it be a neighbour, co-worker, whoever that put the picture in your head. Why have you concluded it's an angel / god?

I believe it is a sprit that is inspiring me, not God or an angel. I was once told by a medium that the spirit world had inspired me to do a blue and white painting but I did not think much of it. I had never told anyone at the church about it so how could she have known I did such a painting, and how could she have known I was not happy with it, unless a spirit told her?

 

[Scorpion]

This is really what it comes down to. Scorpion, you seem to want to force a conflict over and over again with people who would otherwise see you as a success story: someone who has managed an otherwise insidious mental illness using only self-directed occupational therapy and participation in religion. I deal every day with people who have vastly different religious or spiritual beliefs—or none at all—and we all get along together fine because we respect the accurate basis of such beliefs and constrain them to appropriate expressions and settings.

You come here time and again to repeat your claims of spiritual manifestations. You say it's ostensibly to inform new readers, but this makes no sense: new readers here are more likely to be new skeptics, and those who invariably engage you are those with whom you've debated these topics over and over and whose reasoned conclusions you should know for a fact will not be swayed by your subjective beliefs. You seem to feel a periodic need to revitalize a story that people who reject your beliefs as objective truth can only be doing so irrationally and from a closed-minded position. You explicitly seek out an audience you know will refuse to endorse your religion and who will, in fact, challenge its claims on evidentiary and philosophical grounds. Then you translate this into a rejection of you as a person.

This, sadly, is not healthy behavior.

Well you keep responding to me, so I might as well carry on.

 

[Scorpion]

You said you never accused her of ANYTHING after you left, but then go on to say that 3 years later you tried to get information about the staff trying to give you a breakdown.

Was Maria part of the staff? Are you accusing Maria of mentally torturing you?

I mentioned Maria in the letter to the general manager. I said I wanted a signed statement from her saying what she had done, and how and why.

Of course I received no reply.

 

[Myriad]

I mentioned Maria in the letter to the general manager. I said I wanted a signed statement from her saying what she had done, and how and why.

Of course I received no reply.

Dude, demanding a signed confession from someone absolutely counts as accusing them!

 

[Darat]

I attended many trance lectures at the spiritualist association in London during the 1970's. I must have picked up the idea of angels of karma from there. But to be honest I cannot really claim to know much about them.

...snip...

Perhaps then you should do research - such as reading your own thread for when you told us all about them! We only know about karma angels from what you have said you know about them.

If you don't know about them do you accept that they may not exist?

 

[JayUtah]

I mentioned Maria in the letter to the general manager. I said I wanted a signed statement from her saying what she had done, and how and why.

That is as literal an accusation as can be had.

 

[JayUtah]

Well you keep responding to me, so I might as well carry on.

Your notion of carrying on seems to involve ignoring most of what I say, including the points raised in the post you entirely quoted. Would it be fair to say you're just trying to get attention by any means? Would it be fair to say you're saying things that you calculate will give you the best reaction from skeptics, and not the things you actually believe, are willing to discuss, or can prove?

 

[JayUtah]

Of course I received no reply.

What do you mean "of course?" Did you make the accusation and demand a confession believing that your request would be ignored?

 

[Myriad]

Perhaps then you should do research - such as reading your own thread for when you told us all about them! We only know about karma angels from what you have said you know about them.

I think I did first read the specific phrase "karma angels" from Scorpion's posts, but the concept isn't unusual under other names. For instance in (some branches of) Hindu the observing and recording of karma is handled by the Śravaṇas, reporting to Chitragupta, ultimately supervised by Brāhmaṇ. On the other hand, both in Asian cultures and Western occultism, there's an equally popular contrasting view that karma is automatic, inherent in cause and effect via some hidden mechanism.

 

[Gamolon]

I mentioned Maria in the letter to the general manager. I said I wanted a signed statement from her saying what she had done, and how and why.

Of course I received no reply.

So you DID accuse her of something.

How did I know that?

ESP. I read your mind and knew you were fibbing.

 

[JayUtah]

I think I did first read the specific phrase "karma angels" from Scorpion's posts, but the concept isn't unusual under other names.

I already knew the term casually, but I've never seen anyone jump into the idea with both feet as energetically as Scorpion. His theology has more middle-management demigods than an American healthcare insurance company.

 

[MarkCorrigan]

Well you keep responding to me, so I might as well carry on.

Because you keep returning here, to a sceptics forum, insisting that we are all wrong about the nature of the universe.

I promise, if you were to not come here and insist that we were all wrong about everything we wouldn't seek you out to discuss it, we would leave you in peace to live your life according to your own beliefs even if we think those beliefs are a half baked psuedo-philosphical grab bag of nonsense. We only confront the fact that we think that because you keep coming here and demanding we accept your claims as true.

 

[MarkCorrigan]

Your notion of carrying on seems to involve ignoring most of what I say, including the points raised in the post you entirely quoted. Would it be fair to say you're just trying to get attention by any means? Would it be fair to say you're saying things that you calculate will give you the best reaction from skeptics, and not the things you actually believe, are willing to discuss, or can prove?

It has been noted, including by myself in this very thread, that Scorpion has a tendency to utterly ignore large swathes of posts and pretend they do not exist. That this is an obvious example of intellectual dishonesty was also brought up, and ignored.

 

[arthwollipot]

I have no time to doubt my conclusions about my experiences any more. I was full of self doubt for most of my life, and I stopped painting years ago because of negative thinking. But I started again recently, and this time I am not going to doubt myself. I have wasted enough of my life thinking negatively, and I want to use what time I have left to paint beautiful pictures.

And I wish you the absolute best in your artistic endeavours. Nobody should ever be discouraged from creating art.

But I would like you to think about two things.

First: some of the experiences you have described on this forum are well-known symptoms of schizophrenia - in particular, vivid hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality.

Second: these symptoms went away while you were receiving treatment for schizophrenia.

Keep painting. Continue believing that nothing can take your art from you. Because nothing can.

 

[Darat]

I think I did first read the specific phrase "karma angels" from Scorpion's posts, but the concept isn't unusual under other names. For instance in (some branches of) Hindu the observing and recording of karma is handled by the Śravaṇas, reporting to Chitragupta, ultimately supervised by Brāhmaṇ. On the other hand, both in Asian cultures and Western occultism, there's an equally popular contrasting view that karma is automatic, inherent in cause and effect via some hidden mechanism.

I agree it is hardly anything new but my point was that in this thread we've not told Scorpion he is wrong about his concept of karma angels by saying "..but in Hinduism..." all we have commented on is what he has told us about his knowledge of karma angels.

 

[Myriad]

I agree it is hardly anything new but my point was that in this thread we've not told Scorpion he is wrong about his concept of karma angels by saying "..but in Hinduism..." all we have commented on is what he has told us about his knowledge of karma angels.

All true.

What I was trying to get at is that we shouldn't always think of concepts like Scorpion's karma angels, adopted from phrases used by the Spiritualists he's listened to, as things people just made up. Instead, they're things they haven't made up. Not because they came from some other source, but because they're unformed concepts, literally not fully made up. They're like metaphors. They're not really metaphors because people claim to believe in them as literally real. But they're so vague their realness is beside the point. They serve the same role as metaphors in communication of ideas. They're placeholders in mental narratives.

Consider a more commonly mentioned (at least in the U.S.) variety of spiritual being, the "guardian angel." People believe, and will say, things like, "My guardian angel was watching out for me that day. If I'd been ten feet closer, that falling branch would have killed me!"

You might want to inquire further about what the speaker thinks actually happened. Where do guardian angels come from? How are they organized? Do they work round the clock, or in shifts, or are they sometimes absent? By what instrumentality do they influence events? Do they protect everyone, and if not, what specific things do you have to do to gain their protection? When your sister-in-law died in that car crash, had she done something to anger her guardian angel, or had she failed to earn a guardian angel's protection in the first place, or was hers off-duty at the time, or was it just not powerful enough over earthly affairs to protect her from the crash?

A few of the people you direct such questions to will answer something like, "Whoah, calm down, I'm just saying I'm glad I wasn't hurt."

A different few will regale you with elaborate mythologies about exactly what their guardian angel looks like, its name, and the entire day to day inside workings of the invisible bureau of angelic affairs, and so on, derived from folklore from various sources and/or their own imaginations.

But the rest, the majority, will just stare at you wondering why you're having trouble with basic communication, as though you'd asked them to repeat what they just said in Morse Code.

We think and communicate in narratives, and narratives take particular familiar shapes. "Subject did verb" is one typical shape, but a more useful one is "subject did verb because []." What goes inside the brackets is another narrative; this is how we link narratives together into bigger narratives, which is so beneficial that we've evolved, or learned, to feel comfort in doing so. Our brains are so used to processing that shape that if a piece of it is missing, we fill it in with a meaningless placeholder. "Because my guardian angel" is such a placeholder.

Does that seem silly, dumb, superstitious? Try "I was just lucky the branch didn't fall ten seconds later." That might sound more rational. But what does it actually mean? "The subject (a falling branch) did verb (missed killing me) because [I was lucky]. Why was I lucky? Because the branch missed me." Or equivalently, it missed me because it missed me. The concept of luck is the exact same kind of meaningless placeholder as a guardian angel. It makes just as little sense to try to probe it or elaborate on it. Can a magic potion (like in Harry Potter) or a gene (like in the Ringworld franchise) cause it? Can a curse take it away? Most people who casually mention luck in daily conversation don't make such category errors, but of course some do, which is why we all know about four-leaf clovers and Friday the thirteenth.

This also kind of reminds me of: "The expansion of the universe is accelerating because of dark energy. What's dark energy? It's the otherwise unknown stuff that causes the acceleration of the expansion of the universe." It's okay to not have any better explanation when there's limited information to go by, but note that the cosmology community did choose to give the unexplained phenomenon a name that makes it sound like something far more tangible.

In the end, "karma things happen because karma angels" means the same as "karma things happen because they happen." As far as I can tell, Scorpion doesn't have any more reason to care about those angels' exact nature, or the origin of the concept, than we have to care about whether that bridge we'll cross when we come to it is cantilevered or suspension.