gailsimone:

girl-in-c-major:

gailsimone:

Some of you may know that I am a genuine card-carrying skeptic, which doesn’t mean, as is often said, that I don’t believe in anything. What it means is that I don’t believe in extraordinary things without evidence. Someone’s opinion or anecdotal evidence isn’t enough. This is a big problem on the…

I believe that there is always something amazing that man does not know, has not discovered or can not comprehend. So, I think it’s possible that things that can be described as paranormal exist.

Okay, but see, I think that’s an odd position. There ARE miracles and bizarre things discovered all the time…it’s just that they involve the natural world. We’ve recently seen several “Lazarus species,” animals we thought extinct, confirmed as alive in the last few years. A seventeen year old girl invented a new method to fight cancer. We have found new fossils of transitory life forms, there may be parts of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity that we will have to update, we may actually be able to clone a wooly mammoth in a matter of a few years, we can grow flesh on a rat…

Why aren’t these things capturing the imagination like a monster in a loch or an idiot who goes on tv and says he can talk to dead people using cold reading techniques that have been around for over a century?

Carl Sagan said we live in a Demon-Haunted World. I’m just wondering why the miracles that can’t be proven are so much less urgent to most people than the ones that can.

I think it comes down to having (or desiring to have) faith. So many of us have been soured to religion and gods, or even if not soured to to them for various reasons do not believe in them or don’t wish to always focus on that aspect of faith. You can believe in god(s) and also in the supernatural/paranormal as a less world-shattering sort of faith.

The supernatural/paranormal is something that can be believed in such a way that is often more plausible than a god. It’s less intimidating as well. Something paranormal/supernatural gives us that same warmth of having faith in there being things out there beyond what is known, often that which cannot really be proven or disproven. But unlike a god, these aren’t things that have power over us. They’re something you can believe in, that you could believe might one day touch your life and change it, but it’s existence or lack thereof would not redefine your life entirely. If the paranormal/supernatural entered your life as something that definitely existed after all, it wouldn’t be something that had the power to alter your very existence by it’s will.

There’s another aspect to it as well. Most of us never had to be taught that the paranormal existed. We further justified as we grew up, but even a child knows there’s monsters in the closet and the odd things in the woods are homes for tiny people. Children have imaginary friends and don’t second guess it. We’re taught to name them fairies and boogey monsters. It feels more intrinsic and natural. Scientific achievements are more difficult to be fascinated by because they require more learning. They don’t feel like a natural part of the world that you always knew was there, visible just at the corner of your eye.

I think the strength of belief in something paranormal is about that idea of something mortal and tangible that we’ve always felt was there. About the stories we grow up with living on and the continuation or the oral tradition and the mystery of life without being overwhelming.

I don’t know if I’m articulating my point at all, so I’ll stop rambling there.