Welcome new Members! Introduce yourselves here!

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spoonerisms said:
Hello all,

I'm a long-time admirer of Randi and skeptic, but only joined the forums yesterday. I'm a college professor of philosophy and mostly teach critical thinking; I use Randi's Nova video in every class! Other than that, my interests are green energy, bicycling, and RC cars and planes.

Hope to meet some of you at this years TAM... I'm here right now!
-Spooner
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Heights to have you near, Spooner.
 
Hello there.

Some of you already know me given that I've been frequenting the chat for many months now, but I had may as well make an intro for the rest of those here since I have in fact made a few posts on the forum now. So, for those interested, here's a brief story of me.

I have grown up and still live in US along the coast of SC (southern east coast of the US.) I was raised Christian, of no particular denomination and my parents have always been rather conservative and to an extent what many may call your average southerner/redneck.

The first many years of my life were rather average. I had a few close friends that lived nearby and enjoyed doing live roleplaying (no costumes, we were only like 6-12 or so.) We also enjoyed our share of video games. I did well in school, reaching the honors program, but had difficulty making friends at school through much of my early childhood. From what I can gather now, most of the children seemed to think I was weird or gay. I don't remember much from my early and middle school years, but I do know that I didn't really have any close friends at school except one (who also happened to live nearby.)

In highschool I became slightly less socially awkward and finally started becoming friends with the honors group that I had already been in classes with for three years by then. I also came to realize around the age of 16 or 17 that I was transgender. I was in fact a girl and not a boy.

Fast-forwarding to college, I decided I didn't want to transition and took off to an art school for film. As much fun as it was and as many friends as I made, after a year of attended I gradually sunk into a major depression eventually hitting the point where I stopped attending classes, nearly stopped eating, and was hoping that I would starve to death. I landed in the ER and then to a psychiatric hospital. Sadly, I never came out as trans to any of them.

I also around this time became an atheist. During my time dealing with depression I not very surprisingly encountered the problem of evil, which I found to be unresolvable. After a few weeks or so of thinking about the whole thing, I went from feeling that I loved God to feeling that I couldn't worship such a heartless being and finally to just dropping the whole thing after realizing there wasn't any good reason to believe it all in the first place. From atheism I stumbled upon skepticism. I'd started getting into atheist podcasts and managed to stumble upon the SGU podcast.

Well over two years after my depression episode I am now 21, am now back in college to hopefully get into neuroscience, and am finally starting therapy for my gender issues. I plan to hopefully start hrt soon, this year if I can. My biggest issues right now is trying to figure out how to come out to family and how to deal with stress.

Soooo thats me. :p Hi.

:boxedin:
 
Tomboy said:
I'm a socially awkward introvert but that won't stop me from tentatively poking my nose in threads that interest me or where I think I might be able to offer help of some kind.
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If being socially awkward were a bar to participation, I think these boards would be terribly empty...
 
Hello I just joined

However I have followed James Randi and his speaking engagements awhile,seen all there is on you tube,and just figured I ought to join.I was worried to as I am not a total skeptic of many things.I know much is complete fraud when psychics are concerned,Ect.I do believe in aliens,and such things.I feared ridicule for this fact.However,I also know that these TV so called talk to the dead ppl are scamming folks,and things such as dowsers are fraud,Ect,so hopefully everyone can see I am not a moron,ha ha.I have interest in the exposure of such rip off artists,and of James speaking of religions Ect.I am someone educated,who still has a few supernatural beliefs.I also however try to know Crap when I see it,I am of the hop I will be able to post and talk with others,not with ridicule but educationally.Sorry for bad typing,I hate touchscreen.Thank you,I am learning a lot.:D
 
I'm a long-time Randi fan. I come from a long line of non-believers (we kicked religion to the kerb in the 1870's). I'm a retired writer/musician.

At present I'm bored with writing, sick of the museum aspect of art music, taking a break from writing trashy romance novels, practicing my instruments just enough for maintenance, and toying with the idea of throwing a rock through a neighbour's window just to liven things up around here.

I have three cats. That's really all you need to know about me.
 
Hi Neko,

:welcome2
Sorry to hear of your issues, I hope you now get the help you need to get to grips with them. Please do not let them deter you from joining in, nobody sees you, most of us leave our genders at the door when we enter. Just enjoy the lively discussions, and pitch in when you like.

Hi Meecepeece,

:welcome3 to you too, of course.
You are welcome to your beliefs, only expect us to ask you what makes you believe one thing and discard the other. Open any thread with "Proof for <insert woo here>" and see how we react.

And finally hi gsmonks

:welcome5
Coming to our little neck in the woods sounds like a very sound way to relax and take a break. Please, only throw this rock through your neighbour's window if you have a glass pane and a handyman ready?

Femke
 
Femke said:
Hi Neko,

:welcome2
Sorry to hear of your issues, I hope you now get the help you need to get to grips with them. Please do not let them deter you from joining in, nobody sees you, most of us leave our genders at the door when we enter. Just enjoy the lively discussions, and pitch in when you like.

Hi Meecepeece,

:welcome3 to you too, of course.
You are welcome to your beliefs, only expect us to ask you what makes you believe one thing and discard the other. Open any thread with "Proof for <insert woo here>" and see how we react.

And finally hi gsmonks

:welcome5
Coming to our little neck in the woods sounds like a very sound way to relax and take a break. Please, only throw this rock through your neighbour's window if you have a glass pane and a handyman ready?

Femke
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You're my next target for that Tigger avatar, Femke. I absolutely detest the Disneyfied perversion of Winnie The Pooh. Makes me want to puke, it does it does.

Then again, I hate the Energizer Bunny, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, the Snuggle teddy bear, and every commercial example of adults imitating children, such as the talking puppy on that flea/tick collar commercial. Adults imitating children has always given me the creeps.

Probably has something to do with being raised on Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Kingsley, Edward Lear, and other writers who didn't treat children like morons.

In my estimation there's a special place in Hell reserved for Sesame Street and Dr Seuss. :)
 
gsmonks said:
You're my next target for that Tigger avatar, Femke. I absolutely detest the Disneyfied perversion of Winnie The Pooh. Makes me want to puke, it does it does.

Then again, I hate the Energizer Bunny, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, the Snuggle teddy bear, and every commercial example of adults imitating children, such as the talking puppy on that flea/tick collar commercial. Adults imitating children has always given me the creeps.

Probably has something to do with being raised on Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Kingsley, Edward Lear, and other writers who didn't treat children like morons.

In my estimation there's a special place in Hell reserved for Sesame Street and Dr Seuss. :)
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I tend to agree, but must put in a word for Dr. Seuss. Please remember that he goes back a long long way, and back in the days of Mulberry Street, Bartholomew Cubbins and the King's Stilts and such, he was a good bit more tolerable.

There will be a special room in Hell, deeper even than that for the Disnified Pooh and the gratuitously sexist movie version of Horton Hears a Who, for whoever did the movie of Stuart Little, and in so doing utterly and irretrievably blanked-up the humanistic message of the book. I loved that story as a kid, in part because, as is so important, Stuart Little is entirely a person.
 
Just to be clear. The bestest ever book I ever read, up until my sixth birthday, was The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.

Welcome aboard, newbs. I've met one or more of you in other threads, already. I'm one of the old geezers they allow to wander through the halls and drop in on conversations if I feel like it. (Hmm? Come to think of it, that's the way they treat all of us. Oh, well. There goes my "special bunny" status.)

Neko, I don't think we're going to worry about gender issues so much as how to pronounce "Neko". Is that like Nico or neck-o? Welcome. Make yourself at home. If you feel like talking, we're here. If you feel like wading into topics, well good on ya. Have a good time.

Meecepeece - we've had a lot of people come through here with inexplicable (to me) woo streaks in them. Some have ameliorated those positions considerably through discussion and self-examination and some haven't. That's just the way it goes. I wouldn't recommend (the hopefully tongue-in-cheek suggestion about) starting a "proof of..." thread. There's a rather infamous one that's gone on for a gazillion pages on "Proof of Life After Death". But if you have questions and want to examine them, check out the Psychokinesis thread in GenSkepPara as an example. There will be skeptics on the battlements, but people do take others' perceptions and beliefs seriously. We've got a number of deists and believers as members and to my thinking, that's no different than a belief in ghosts or other selected woo. I think we tend to give them a pass more than believers in psychics because we put the upper case F in Faith but believing in the Big Sky Daddy is ultimately not different at all (IMHO) from believing that cats are talking to us or that long gone relatives are sending us messages in our porridge.

GSMonks. Save your rocks for important things. Welcome to the monkey house.
 
Foolmewunz said:
Too complicated by half. In Chinese it's "mao" and sounds, with the proper tones, just like a cat's meow.
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And with that . . . all together now!

"Meow, meow, meow, meow,
meow, meow, meow, meow,
meow, meow, meow, meow,
meow, meow, meow, meow . . . "

:)
 
gsmonks said:
And with that . . . all together now!

"Meow, meow, meow, meow,
meow, meow, meow, meow,
meow, meow, meow, meow,
meow, meow, meow, meow . . . "

:)
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Where's my rock? :p

Talking puppies aren't cute but bad video-looped singing cats are? You're on the list, newb! :D
 
Foolmewunz said:
<snip> I wouldn't recommend (the hopefully tongue-in-cheek suggestion about) starting a "proof of..." thread.
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Sorry, language mixup. "Open" in Dutch just means click on an existing thread to read it, not specifically start one. And that was a serious suggestion, meecepeece, to help you get a feel for our need for evidence.

Nice tidbit about the Chinese word for cat.
Thanks.
 
It's Neko, as in "neck-o"

I'm not supposed to post links yet, but:

saiga-jp.com/dic/sound/g7/e78cab_neko.wav
 
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