Looking for Skeptics

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Perhaps if she held it up to her ear and repeatedly read it, she'd be able to make out what this thread is trying to tell her.
 
TheDoLittle said:
Perhaps if she held it up to her ear and repeatedly read it, she'd be able to make out what this thread is trying to tell her.
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Seashells spring to mind.

If the spirits are so bent on revealing their wisdom of the ages to humanity, why is it that they refuse to be tested and cannot even manage to raise a connection, let alone a website?
 
abaddon said:
If the spirits are so bent on revealing their wisdom of the ages to humanity, why is it that they refuse to be tested and cannot even manage to raise a connection, let alone a website?
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Mayhaps they are stuck using a 110baud dial-up modem?
 
Maurice Ledifficile said:
Dude.That is so not funny. I second the spit-take.

:cs:
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I freely admit I was being flippant, but what is left? Flaccon claims the spirits are desperately trying to contact the living world. They are so desparate that those wiley spirits hide. yes they hide and go out of their way to hide. From everyone. Oh, except flaccon. they don't hide from her. For reasons unspecified. Goldilocks? I got some unattended porridge for you, sucker.
 
abaddon said:
Goldilocks? I got some unattended porridge for you, sucker.
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"Someone has been altering my sound files."

"Someone has been altering MY sound files!"

"Someone has been altering my sound files... and now teh skeptics think it's all in my head!"
 
abaddon said:
I freely admit I was being flippant, but what is left? Flaccon claims the spirits are desperately trying to contact the living world. They are so desparate that those wiley spirits hide. yes they hide and go out of their way to hide. From everyone. Oh, except flaccon. they don't hide from her. For reasons unspecified. Goldilocks? I got some unattended porridge for you, sucker.
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Well, it was to be expected... I'll remain inappropriately optimistic for a bit. The tough part for Flaccon is the idea that everything you've been hoping for is just smoke and mirrors.

Realizing your own mistakes and moving on, with your whole worldview readjusted, is not easy for anyone. Finding out in a short time that there are human causes for my divorce, that I've lost my father, and that the spirits are not going to comfort me or be my golden eggs would probably send me a bit bonkers and I would need some time to actually adjust and implement a new plan.

Perhaps if Flaccon had read Asydhouse's posts and understood what he was saying, the whole story could be looking at a different ending.

The worst part is that Flaccon will probably never realize the level of luck, the strange serendipity® involved in her encounter with Asydhouse.

There's your Goldilocks. How often does a True Believer® go on a forum and meet someone who has lived through an incredibly similar situation and who has made the decision to ditch the nonsense.

You'd think it would have hit home. I don't wish for any tests, I wish she would grasp this opportunity to progress and live freer than ever.
 
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Maurice Ledifficile said:
Well, it was to be expected... I'll remain inappropriately optimistic for a bit. The tough part for Flaccon is the idea that everything you've been hoping for is just smoke and mirrors.

Realizing your own mistakes and moving on, with your whole worldview readjusted, is not easy for anyone. Finding out in a short time that there are human causes for my divorce, that I've lost my father, and that the spirits are not going to comfort me or be my golden eggs would probably send me a bit bonkers and I would need some time to actually adjust and implement a new plan.

Perhaps if Flaccon had read Asydhouse's posts and understood what he was saying, the whole story could be looking at a different ending.

The worst part is that Flaccon will probably never realize the level of luck, the strange serendipity® involved in her encounter with Asydhouse.

There's your Goldilocks. How often does a True Believer® go on a forum and meet someone who has lived through an incredibly similar situation and who has made the decision to ditch the nonsense.

You'd think it would have hit home. I don't wish for any tests, I wish she would grasp this opportunity to progress and live freer than ever.
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Well, fellow traveller, I will allow that my internal, eternal optimist takes me down that same hopeful road. But my internal cynic tells me not to be surprised if it is a dead end.
 
I'm just enjoying the nostalgia. When was the last time any of you lot could claim broadband, wifi or generic "spotty service" problems as an excuse for not getting something done for any amount of time more than a few hours? I'm in farking Thailand, down on the Gulf of Siam, and the longest I've been without service has been two separate batches of 9 hours because the electricity (and thus the router) were turned off for a construction project. Actual down time from my ISP? Maximum four hours. About three times in the 15 months we've been here.
 
Maurice Ledifficile said:
Well, it was to be expected... I'll remain inappropriately optimistic for a bit. The tough part for Flaccon is the idea that everything you've been hoping for is just smoke and mirrors.

Realizing your own mistakes and moving on, with your whole worldview readjusted, is not easy for anyone. Finding out in a short time that there are human causes for my divorce, that I've lost my father, and that the spirits are not going to comfort me or be my golden eggs would probably send me a bit bonkers and I would need some time to actually adjust and implement a new plan.

Perhaps if Flaccon had read Asydhouse's posts and understood what he was saying, the whole story could be looking at a different ending.

The worst part is that Flaccon will probably never realize the level of luck, the strange serendipity® involved in her encounter with Asydhouse.

There's your Goldilocks. How often does a True Believer® go on a forum and meet someone who has lived through an incredibly similar situation and who has made the decision to ditch the nonsense.

You'd think it would have hit home. I don't wish for any tests, I wish she would grasp this opportunity to progress and live freer than ever.
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That's what I had hoped too, but her immediate response was to focus on all the dis-similarities. As far as she's concerned, we are totally different... and I have to agree.

For a start, the first thing she said after my post, as I recall, was that she has never taken drugs. Therefore to her (and no doubt a lot of other people who would prefer to lay the blame at that bogey man's door, instead of reading what I actually said about it being during a time when I was not using drugs, but was not sleeping and eating much, and being stressed by paranoia about the war on drug users) my experience was an irrelevant break down brought on by my own actions with causes totally removed from her situation.

Secondly, I was raised in a family home where religion was unmentioned, so my default understanding of the world was naive atheism, i.e. theism and religion were simply absent from my consciousness until I had gotten well into my teens (there's no religious education in Canadian elementary schools), whereas it would seem that flaccon has been indoctrinated since a young age into believing in supernatural agencies, via the church at least... and we all know that churches love to talk about demons etc.

It was nevertheless hard work for me to free myself of the possibilities inherent in personal experience of weird things, and pareidolia is like malaria: it comes back in waves, and without a firm trust in science and hatred of religion and snake oil selling opportunism, it would be easier to remain a prisoner of the mental gaol house of religious belief. For flacon, trying to get help from the religious authorities as she apparently has done, there's no apparent bridge across the abyss of her fear, and she has no real hope of ever reaching the opposite bank where the country of reason and secular rationality breathes the clear air of freedom. She is doomed to dwell in the kingdom of the lord like a peasant serf hoping for leniency from the powers that be.

In short, she's stuck in the mud. As I said before, I'm very grateful not to have been born into a Catholic home! Or any other cult/religion, too.

:relieved:

ETA PS I got so carried away with my metaphor about the abyss of fear that I forgot to say the main thing that separates flaccon and I: she is completely convinced that she has been haunted for many years, and that her earlier experiences were real, and that she shared them with her family. She has the validation of other people sharing her history. She cannot conceive that she could be mistaken in that.

I tried to address that by talking about shared hallucinations, the fallibility of memory and perception etc. But I'm sure that all went like water off a duck's back. She's got two virtually insurmountable barriers to even beginning to take a pragmatic approach to testing the spirits/pareidolia hypotheses: 1) she can't imagine that her personal experience previously was "imaginary" (misunderstanding that the experiences were real, but she has misinterpreted them, with the unquestioning credulity and validation of her fellow family members at the time), and 2) it is very hard to begin to ascribe such apparently validated events to a failure of one's mental faculties. Ie it's hard to admit to yourself that you are or have been having a psychotic experience. Mental illness, whether acute or chronic, still has too much social stigma attached, despite something like 1 in 4 of the population experiencing some form or other of mental illness/breakdown at some time in their lives. It's hard to submit to the possibility, and possibly even harder to relinquish trust to a professional, especially while in the throes of the experience.

Pride, insecurity, distrust... you have to overcome the lot in order to place yourself into the hands of someone else. It takes a real bold and yet humble set of mind to take such a step, especially if you don't think you are having a mental aberration. I am really wondering what is happening with this GP. The doctor probably doesn't know how to handle flacon, as she is functional, and dealing with her problems in a proactive way. He probably hopes she will begin to open up to the possibility that she is mistaken through interacting with us here... Hence "keep the ball rolling"... but I suspect that flaccon is totally misreading his intentions.

All in all, I'm not hoping for any shift in flacon by now... if she was able to, I think she would have responded to these possibilities through reading this thread. I hope the GP gets a grip soon, because flacon isn't going to. Prove me wrong, flacon? Please?
 
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Foolmewunz said:
I'm just enjoying the nostalgia. When was the last time any of you lot could claim broadband, wifi or generic "spotty service" problems as an excuse for not getting something done for any amount of time more than a few hours?...
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I live on the very frontier of ADSL reception so I have winsomely capricious service. Sometimes I'll have to wait as long as 30 seconds for a connection.

zgxv.jpg




asydhouse said:
...
It was nevertheless hard work for me to free myself of the possibilities inherent in personal experience of weird things, and pareidolia is like malaria: it comes back in waves, and without a firm trust in science and hatred of religion and snake oil selling opportunism, it would be easier to remain a prisoner of the mental gaol house of religious belief. ...
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Amen!
 
Foolmewunz said:
I'm just enjoying the nostalgia. When was the last time any of you lot could claim broadband, wifi or generic "spotty service" problems as an excuse for not getting something done for any amount of time more than a few hours? I'm in farking Thailand, down on the Gulf of Siam, and the longest I've been without service has been two separate batches of 9 hours because the electricity (and thus the router) were turned off for a construction project. Actual down time from my ISP? Maximum four hours. About three times in the 15 months we've been here.
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Wish I was that lucky. I experience a few hours of downtime a month, regular as clockwork the router goes demented and refuses to connect. 9 times out of 10 a cold reset fixes it. About once a year it'll be unable to connect for a couple of days, in which case I use a BTFON hotspot if I can afford it (it's about £6 for 24 hours access and about £15 for 5 days), but very often the BTFON hotspot doesn't play nice and it drops out and won't connect for a day).
 
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