Tag: paranormal

Which conspiracy theory do you think is the truth?

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“Everyone believes at least one conspiracy theory,” says Asbjørn Dyrendal, a professor in NTNU’s Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies who specializes in conspiracy theories.

The more conspiracy theories you bring up, the more people answer yes to one of them.

That fact leads American conspiracy researcher Joseph Uscinski at the University of Miami to posit that all people believe in at least one conspiracy theory. Dyrendal basically agrees, but he modifies Uscinski’s statement slightly, saying all people believe some conspiracy theory “a little.”

As they do in many belief systems, degrees of belief can add up and sooner or later a generalized accumulation of quantitative beliefs topples over into a qualitative change. You’re now convinced.

It’s a conspiracy.

Paranormal vs. Sacred – which spooky system gets discussed?

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Practically anything goes at the American Academy of Religion’s annual conference, where scholars of dozens of religions convene annually to debate, relate and on occasion mate. Conversation ranges from the Talmud to tantra, from Platonism to Satanism…

What was almost impossible to find, at this orgy of intellectual curiosities, was discussion of the paranormal: ESP, premonitions, psychic powers, alien abduction and the like. This is a conference concerned with all sorts of supernatural and metaphysical claims. In panels, over coffee and during cocktail-hour quarrels, they talk of Moses at the burning bush, the virgin birth, Muhammad’s journey on a winged horse. So why nothing about, say, mental telepathy?

That is the question posed by Jeffrey J. Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice University in Houston and a renegade advocate for including the paranormal in religious studies. In his new book, “Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred”, he tries to convince serious religion scholars that they ought to study, say, ESP or alien abduction…

“There is resistance in the way our universities are set up, in the elite culture of higher education,” says Dr. Kripal, 48, who grew up in Nebraska and once planned to be a Benedictine monk. “Paranormal events completely violate the epistemologies around which we have formed our own knowledge…

In other words, it is one thing to study a miracle a thousand years old — that seems a safe question for the historian or the theologian. But what to do with people who say they were abducted by a U.F.O. last week?

Sitting here invested in nothing more or less than measurable, reproducible reality – the whole discussion is temporal. If some absurd concept, tale or hypothesis is old enough, found in sufficient dusty tomes inside sacrosanct walls – it’s believable. If it happened last week in Cincinnati, it’s just too easy to invalidate. Even for a True Believer.

RTFA. Have a good time.

Waiting for “Ghost Train”, man hit by Real Train

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A “ghost hunter” waiting for a phantom train on a North Carolina trestle was killed by a real one Friday after trying to save a woman, witnesses said.

Christopher Kaiser, 29, was killed and the woman was seriously injured investigators said.

Kaiser and 12 fellow ghost hunters had gathered on the 119th anniversary of North Carolina’s Bostian Bridge train wreck, The Charlotte Observer reported…

A woman who was with the group was seriously injured and airlifted to a hospital. Witnesses said Kaiser pushed her out of the way before he was hit.

I wonder if this will turn into the “curse” of the train of North Carolina’s Bostian Bridge train wreck. Superstition always finds a way to modify itself to avoid extinction.

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Thanks, Morey.

Dutch prisons use psychics to help prisoners contact the dead

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Paul van Bree, a self-styled “paragnost” or clairvoyant, has been hired by the Dutch prison service to teach prisoners how to “love themselves”.

“I tell them that dead relatives are doing well and that they love them. That brings them peace. Big strong men burst into tears,” he said.

Mr van Bree, who also publishes annual predictions of the future, claims to be from a long line of clairvoyants, including his mother and grandmother….

“With my antennae I sometimes reveal more than a psychologist or a prison welfare officer,” he said. “My work can be compared to mental health care in widest sense of the words.”

The Dutch employment service has also looked beyond the normal to use “regression therapy” and tarot cards to help the jobless.

Uncooperative welfare claimants have been told they will lose benefits unless they accept the guidance of a regression therapist to help them get in touch with their past lives.

It could be worse. They could send them a priest.

Boiling Floors is “supernatural world getting in touch”

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An Italian family fear their house could be haunted after the floors mysteriously got so hot they began to ‘boil’.

It happened on Sicily which is home to the almost constantly erupting Mount Etna, one of the world’s most active volcanos.

But Italian experts say there were no geological or scientific reasons for the freak temperatures at the family’s home in Riesi….

“It is very frightening,” said a neighbour. “When science and the natural world have no answers you have to think it was the supernatural world getting in touch.”

Yes, that must be it.