The Competition of Memes (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, July 19, 2010, 16:38 (5049 days ago) @ dhw

The biggest issue--and it is a BIG issue for me--is on how to deal with paranormal claims. To me, they always boil down to the issue of needing to "trust" that the person who's telling you the claim is telling you what he says he's telling you. In short; it's based largely on the word of the person telling you what's going on. -Then we need to look for more witnesses; did other people see the same thing?-This might give more credence, but what about claims that fly right in the face of common sense, such as a man coming back to life after being dead for three days? I can't speak for you, but in my case it's pretty simple: People don't come back to life when they're dead. All the evidence points to the opposite, and I'm not willing to suspend the laws of nature to allow for the risen Christ. -To me this is because the process of reasoning for Christ is identical to evaluating anyone else's claim about a ghost, OOB, etc. -Then--we need to take the reliability of eyewitness testimony into account. Don't know about the UK but here in the United States, eyewitness testimony accounts for 75% of cases that were eventually exonerated:-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_identification-So what this means, is that we can't even trust claims about other people in TODAY's time regarding more vulgar--but normal human actions? At best, we can trust 1 in 4; but how do you pick that 1 in 4?-So armed with this evidence in the background, what say you to my lack of trust in paranormal claims? Do you see a way around this that I do not have?

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"