Can anybody help me find a logical explanation for this stuff?

Kant's "Dreams of a Spirit Seer" was written in 1766, and the fire supposedly happened in 1759. I wish that Kant had put more work on trying to find whether or not it was true. You think that somebody would have looked in to it after Kant's book and either confirmed it or proved it didn't happen. But I guess the fact that nobody seems to have any proof written in other books around the time points to it not having happened.
 
Zanders said:
Next is something related to a man named "Wallace Fard Muhammad", the man that started "The Nation of Islam" (which barely has anything to do with Islam and is a racist cult) The information he gives is startlingly accurate for a man like him to know so long ago (unless I am misinformed)

""In 1930, when Master Fard Muhammad came, He told us that, “The total area of the land and water of the planet Earth is 196,940,000 square miles.” He said, “The circumference of the planet Earth is 24,896 miles,” and, all of us had to memorize this. “The diameter of the earth is 7,926 miles; the area of land is 57,255,000 square miles; the area of water is 139,685,000 square miles.” He said “The Pacific Ocean covers 68,634,000 square miles and the Atlantic Ocean covers 41,321,000 square miles.”

...

The information is not spot on, but some of it is still way closer than anyone should have been able to know at the time, especially somebody like him. Look the man up on wikipedia to get his back story, and also google his name along with "measurements earth water" and such to see more information on his supposed super knowledge.
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Wow, he knew the circumference of the Earth and the distance to the Sun, and only 2,170 years after Eratosthenes calculated both values with less than 1% difference from current measurements! Clearly magic powers are the only explanation.
 
Ferguson said:
Wow, he knew the circumference of the Earth and the distance to the Sun, and only 2,170 years after Eratosthenes calculated both values with less than 1% difference from current measurements! Clearly magic powers are the only explanation.
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Zanders,do some basic research about this kind of thing before you start being amazed.For example Cavendish weighed the Earth very accurately in 1798.Stay away from Wikipedia.
 
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Ferguson said:
Wow, he knew the circumference of the Earth and the distance to the Sun, and only 2,170 years after Eratosthenes calculated both values with less than 1% difference from current measurements! Clearly magic powers are the only explanation.
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Please ignore that one. As was stated earlier that one was bunk. The only one I am interested in now are the references to Swedenborg.

http://www.ccel.org/ccel/wesley/journal.vi.xv.vii.html

Here is the only mention of Swedenborg that I could find by John Wesley. The fact that wikipedia leaves out the story of him prediction the date of his death, and contacting Wesley because "the spirit world told him he wanted to talk to him" shows that the sources are rather spotty. And the stories on wikipedia that actually have sources are easily answerable, but most likely lead to other rumors and stories adding up. It seems anyone that mentioned Swedenborg is swarmed over by Swedenborgians and made a major part of his story.
 
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I'm trying to be as critical as I can and not just brush something off quickly with the most simple explanation I can find.
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Why are you willing to blow off the most logical explanation just because it is the most simple?

Zanders said:
But when one person has so many things written about them, doesn't it need to be looked in to?
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Zeus.
Paul Bunyan.
King Arthur.
Lancelot.
Merlin.
Isis and Osiris.
Hercules.
Odysseus.
Achilles.
Quetzalcoatl.
Dragons.
Gryphons.
Mermaids.
Sea serpents.

Yep, having a bunch of stuff written about something is proof that thing is true, all right.
 
If you go to the references section on the fire event, there is a source used other than Immanuel Kant's.

"The most extensive work is: RL Tafel, Documents concerning the Life and Character of Swedenborg, collected, translated and annotated (3 vols., Swedenborg Society, 1875—1877"

That is where a lot of valuable information should be, and now I will have to try and find it.

EDIT:

Found it. This should be a big help.

http://www.swedenborgdigitallibrary.org/tafel/tafeltc.html
 
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dafydd said:
Why?
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If you read that, it was written closer to a time where that information could have been confirmed, and it has more references and documents concerning the events. If you run through them and search "fire" there is some stuff in there. I haven't looked through all of it yet, but there is a part on it in the first one. To get closer to the specific page search "Kant" in the first volume.

It also has more than the fire. It covers the stuff on him and John Wesley as well. The keywords to look for are "fire" "Kant" and "Wesley. there are references usually given at the bottom of sections.
 
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(Zanders) Please be careful and unbiased when reading this stuff.
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Don't hold your breath, pal. A lot of the folks on this forum (and you DON'T know who you are) are about as close-minded as your average Christian fundamentalist, and their logic isn't much better. There's a lot of grandstanding, a whole lot of high horse riding, and a whole lot of "argumentum ad populum", especially of the snob appeal variety.

Nevertheless, if you sort through all the lockstep dreck of the zealots, you can find enough stuff of real value to make the forum worthwhile.

As far as I'm concerned you're one of the few true skeptics I've met here. Keep it up.
 
Elizabeth I said:
Why are you willing to blow off the most logical explanation just because it is the most simple?
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To search for other logical explanations isn't blowing off an existing one. It's what skeptics do. You might want to try it sometime.

Yep, having a bunch of stuff written about something is proof that thing is true, all right.
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The poster is asking whether something is "worth looking into" and you are suggesting that he's considering himself to have proved that it is true. Of course, you're not so obtuse as to be unaware of the difference, so it would seem that you are being intentionally dishonest.

I won't say you're in good company, but you're certainly in a lot of it.
 
Zanders said:
Next is something related to a man named "Wallace Fard Muhammad", the man that started "The Nation of Islam" (which barely has anything to do with Islam and is a racist cult) The information he gives is startlingly accurate for a man like him to know so long ago (unless I am misinformed)

""In 1930, when Master Fard Muhammad came, He told us that, “The total area of the land and water of the planet Earth is 196,940,000 square miles.” He said, “The circumference of the planet Earth is 24,896 miles,” and, all of us had to memorize this. “The diameter of the earth is 7,926 miles; the area of land is 57,255,000 square miles; the area of water is 139,685,000 square miles.” He said “The Pacific Ocean covers 68,634,000 square miles and the Atlantic Ocean covers 41,321,000 square miles.”

“The Indian Ocean,” He said, “covers 29,430,000 square miles, and the lakes and rivers cover 1,000,000 square miles. The hills and the mountains cover 14,000,000 square miles; the islands are 1,910,000 square miles; and the deserts are 4,861,000 square miles. Mount Everest is 29,141 feet high, and the producing land is 29,000,000 square miles. The earth weighs 6 sextillion tons—a ‘6' followed by 21 zeros—and is 93,000,000 miles from the sun, traveling at the rate of 1,037 1/3 miles per hour. Light travels at the rate of 186,000 miles per second, and sound travels at the rate of 1,120 feet per second. The diameter of the sun is 853,000 miles.”

We were just students under a Master Teacher who asked us to study. Then, Master Fard Muhammad began to tell us about the distance of the planets and the life that is on the planets. He taught Elijah Muhammad, who was from the cotton fields of Georgia, and, who only went to the fourth grade of school. If you compare what Master Fard Muhammad said in 1930 (now 79 years ago), with the dimensions that the scholars have given, every year they have gotten closer and closer, until now their computations are similar with Master Fard Muhammad's. He is the man Who taught Elijah Muhammad, and came to raise us up from a dead level and make us rulers over those who once ruled us—not by guns and sticks, but by giving us a superior knowledge."

The information is not spot on, but some of it is still way closer than anyone should have been able to know at the time, especially somebody like him. Look the man up on wikipedia to get his back story, and also google his name along with "measurements earth water" and such to see more information on his supposed super knowledge.
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I'm going to opine that yes, you are indeed misinformed. All of this information would have been available in any encyclopedia in a library of that time, with the exception that Everest would have been given as 29,028 feet. I recall reading several of the given dimensions as a child in my mother's "The book of knowledge" that she had as a child in the 1930's.

I also find that the assertions in the third paragraph in your quote are not backed up at all. There are textbook examples of "argument from authority" fallacies: scholars are every year coming closer to Fard's numbers, therefore Fard is a visionary. The premise is completely false, therefore so is the conclusion. Then there's Fard is a visionary, Fard says there is life on other planets, therefore there is life on other planets. So, I believe this is nothing more than another example of a group trying to legitimize itself by setting up its founder as a supernormal visionary. In this case, it isn't a very successful one. The last sentence about how he came to make us rulers over those that once ruled us with "superior knowledge" is pretty much a giveaway of the intent of the statement; it is an attempt to recruit people who did not understand that this knowledge was available to anyone with a 6th grade education.
 
Well, I actually followed the link and found that one of my objections doesn't hold water. Swedenborg was already in London when he wrote to Wesley, not in Sweden at all. So the short timeline of correspondence is not a problem.

In "Documents concerning the life and character of Emanuel Swedenborg", Tafel, P.106, there's a more detailed version of the tale, attributed to a man called Hawkins, recollecting in 1826 what Smith told him in about 1787 (15 years after the event). Smith is described as "a man of great piety and integrity, who later became one of the first ministers in our (Swedenborgian) church". So, hardly a disinterested witness. Hawkins says Swedenborg wrote from an address in Coldbath Fields (now Clerkenwell, I believe) toward the end of February, barely a month before his death.

Predicting that he wouldn't survive 6 months isn't really miraculous for a man with, as it transpired, about 4 or 5 weeks to live, but we still have the problem that we're dependent on Smith's accurately reporting that Swedenborg predicted the specific date, and didn't embellish the story.

Since this is probably as close to the original source (the letter) as it will ever be possible to get, it simply boils down to whether you think Smith "improved" the story or not.
 
BobR said:
I'm going to opine that yes, you are indeed misinformed. All of this information would have been available in any encyclopedia in a library of that time, with the exception that Everest would have been given as 29,028 feet. I recall reading several of the given dimensions as a child in my mother's "The book of knowledge" that she had as a child in the 1930's.

I also find that the assertions in the third paragraph in your quote are not backed up at all. There are textbook examples of "argument from authority" fallacies: scholars are every year coming closer to Fard's numbers, therefore Fard is a visionary. The premise is completely false, therefore so is the conclusion. Then there's Fard is a visionary, Fard says there is life on other planets, therefore there is life on other planets. So, I believe this is nothing more than another example of a group trying to legitimize itself by setting up its founder as a supernormal visionary. In this case, it isn't a very successful one. The last sentence about how he came to make us rulers over those that once ruled us with "superior knowledge" is pretty much a giveaway of the intent of the statement; it is an attempt to recruit people who did not understand that this knowledge was available to anyone with a 6th grade education.
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Yes, I was being a little bit ignorant when I posted that one. Those claims got struck down rather early in the thread, and I have acknowledged that those claims don't hold up at all. I'm not even sure why it seemed impressive to me at the time.
 
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