Myself... I like hanging with other skeptics. I like the way they think. I find this group smart, insightful, honest, and funny.
I used to be a woo. Really. I bet I could have convinced myself that your (Navigator's) talk sounded like it made some kind of sense. But the more I listened, the more I realized that none of you are saying anything. My failure to compute had nothing to do with my intelligence and everything to do with the fact that woos never actually say anything you can pin down, test, or use. It really is exactly like Tom Cruise in his recent video... lots of words, emotions, veribiage, and platitudes... but nothing said that you can pin down or test or even summarize. It's like someone describing their alien visitation... you can see they believe whatever it is they said... but it doesn't make any sense with known reality and they always have excuses for why you can't test it. You conclude they are delusional... and go away or try to find out what makes them believe whatever it is they've come to believe.
I understand the thinking... but what I don't understand is the woo. Do they think of each other as woo? There's tons of magical beliefs and everyone thinks they have higher truths. I see no evidence of any "divine truths" or any form of consciousness that can exist absent a brain. The woo accept these premises as TRUE! They never have any evidence for doing so. They may as well accept that delusions and imaginary friends and all religions are true. Often times they'll say things like "truth is relative"-- Goofy. It isn't really. Objective reality doesn't change because you believe differently. You cannot make the moon be made of cheese no matter how much you believe it is. Woo confuse opinions for fact and faith for evidence. But airplanes fly whether you "believe" they can or not. They all seem to imagine themselves as profferers of truth while being clueless as to their own ignorance or what members here might teach them. They think they KNOW all the important stuff already. They even say inane things like "what does it matter if something is true or not".?
But to skeptics, it does matter. For some reason, every kind of woo is drawn here. There's the new agers, the conspiracy theorists, Mormons, Scientologists, fundamentalists, holocaust deniers, homeopaths, cryptologist and so forth. Like you, they never have evidence.... just platitudes, insults, and the "I'm offended card". The dish out insults and arrogance and then complain exactly like you when it comes back to them. They insult some of my very favorite posters with nary a clue as to how woo-ish and obnoxious they sound. They don't ever seem to realize that they sound exactly like the people they would consider woo. Do you believe in demon possession...? If not, why not? If not, why should we accept your woo as being more true than that?
Woos appear to want their opinions respected without even asking if anyone else has one! They imagine themselves much nicer and more socially gifted than is warranted by their posts. Most of us are scientifically literate, and we understand how the scientific knowledge and data on a subject would take off, be tested, and grow if any of this stuff was true. We know that real truths are trumpeted and tested throughout the scientific world and not revealed by self appointed experts on a skeptics forum. Heck we spend millions to collect space dust... and we are supposed to imagine that some one with a messiah complex on a skeptics forum is going to give us a piece of the super duper wisdom that made him into the magical super guy he imagines himself to be.
We have heroes and people we admire... they aren't mystics or gurus or priests or prophets or psychics. They are the people who teach us how readily people (including us) can be fooled by such people. They teach us measurable, objective facts. We tend to admire people like James Randi and not the steady stream of woo who visit to try and convince us their woo is true. It's easy to convince a skeptic... you should see what the people here know. All you need is measurable, replicable, evidence. That's it. You can't repress useful knowledge. Heck, if you could prove any of the stuff you say, you could get a million bucks and the publicity would make you richer and tons of people would be in on the magical secret that you think you have.... they could use it, refine it, and hone it even... that's what science does with real knowledge, you know.
And you did the big woo thing... you judged skeptics as a group... you don't even know us... you've read very little here. You joined to preach while disingenuously pretending to have a deep discussion about whatever magical secrets or "divine truths" you think you have. You give us no reason to treat you differently than other woo. You are so very much like them... even the ones you consider woo. And you claim that "we" are immature. But that applies more to you. You came to a skeptics forum to preach woo!
We already know that dialogue with people of faith is difficult, because they accept a false premise from the get go-- that you can know stuff through faith... that faith is necessarry and good. There is no evidence that people can know anything through faith and there's lots of evidence that people believe all kinds of wacky things on faith. There's also lots and lots of evidence all over this forum that when someone believes something on faith, they are not amenable to reason. No amount of evidence can get them to change their mind. And yet, actually, measurable, scientifically valid evidence can get a skeptic to change their mind. Who, is the more open minded one. Sure, we'd all love to believe that some woo somewhere is true... who wouldn't? Who hasn't? But we would rather not know something than believe a lie. And good information tends to spread quickly...when you are on the right track, the evidence materializes. But the evidence never materializes (despite eons of belief) for things like souls, gods, demons, astrology, supernatural explanations, big foot, homeopathy, etc. They all are built on a false premise. You'd need to establish the premise is true before you could prove your case. You would have to prove that consciousness COULD live absent a brain before we'd care what you had to say on the topic more than what TOM CRUISE has to say about thetans. We don't have a good reason to believe that invisible, immaterial forms of consciousness absent a living brain can exist. We know lots of people believe in such things... neurology even has some great clues as to why. But billions of people believed the earth was flat. It doesn't make it true.
(Tough. In maatorc's mind I am your female counterpart whether you like it or not.)
