I am sincerely interested in the reasoning behind posting mystical ideas here and on other skeptic forums.
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What I’d really like to know is why would anyone post new-age woo on a skeptic forum? (Other than the obvious trolls.)
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To paraphrase Tolstoy maybe everyone one of them is crazy in a slightly different way. If they missed the first reality-turn and believe the woo, why is it that much more of a stretch that they think that this is the place to discuss it?
There are those pseudo-skeptical “ghost hunter” shows on TV which pretend to be skeptics hunting ghosts, but then the special effects are contrived to make it look like they find something. So they might think that we are similar folks with open minds.
Also, maybe we only get the tip of the woo-ice-berg—- maybe there are many more totally superstitious (or worse) folks out there. Sigh.
Having hung out at the Kerrville Folk Festival for 27 years or so I have certainly met my share of true woo believers. Music festivals seem to attract them, and the KFF runs for three consecutive weekends with many people camping and staying the full three weeks. Think Deadheads with better taste in music and you’ll get the idea.
I think you are right about the tip of the woo iceberg, but from my experience what we see are the outliers, those either modest in their beliefs or so emphatic that we do our best to run them off. Politely, of course.
I have the same experience at the Lark Camp music festival. There’s a certain hippy aesthetic in the folk music crowd that I love—-except when the talk turns to science or medicine!
Having hung out at the Kerrville Folk Festival for 27 years or so I have certainly met my share of true woo believers. Music festivals seem to attract them, and the KFF runs for three consecutive weekends with many people camping and staying the full three weeks. Think Deadheads with better taste in music and you’ll get the idea.
I think you are right about the tip of the woo iceberg, but from my experience what we see are the outliers, those either modest in their beliefs or so emphatic that we do our best to run them off. Politely, of course.
I think we have to balance political correctness with self-preservation. I agree that we shouldn’t be nasty to them (for example, responses to Missy that ran her off) but if we don’t help them move to other more genial fora for their thinking, we become inundated and our good, rational, secular posters begin to get bored and leave.
I think a lot of you is looking in the wrong direction trying to find answers.
What’s your real motivation for remaining “demystified”?
I consider mysticism to be the avant garde of language expansion, and you’re missing out on the thrill of it.
I can see your place though, but I’m not sure it’s here. You people should hang out on other non-sceptic, non-secular forums and enlighten them with your quality perspective.
I agree there’s a lot of bullshit going on, so why don’t you save us?
Welcome to the thread WeeDie. We have our most unusual suspect yet!
I’m not sure what you mean when you ask about “remaining demystified.” If you think I have lost my sense of wonder and mystery and what the universe contains, you are mistaken, Quite the opposite is true. After sobering up, I put away the Immanuel Velikovsky and Gary Zukav books and picked up Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan. Only then did I discover just how strange, wonderful and mysterious the universe is. There are far greater wonders out there (and in there, if you study string theory) than all the mystics together have imagined. Rather than diminish, my sense of wonder intensified when I began reading science. As for transcendent mystical experiences, I will never forget the sense of awe I felt the first time I looked through a telescope at a pair of interacting galaxies.
I spent 30 minutes on top of a ladder staring at that, taking in the interaction and wondering what was going on in those two galaxies. How many civilizations have risen and fallen since the light began its journey 300 million years ago? Were there something like dinosaurs there? Did any civilizations get destroyed due to the galactic interaction? That was truly a mind altering experience.
I truly do not care about the “avant garde of language expansion” when there is a huge universe to explore. I’m more interested in cosmology than new-age mysticism.
I have no desire to walk into someone else’s house and tell them they need to change how they live. I consider such behavior quite rude.
I spent 30 minutes on top of a ladder staring at that, taking in the interaction and wondering what was going on in those two galaxies.
Was your ladder so high it reaches HST??? And HST is not even in a geostationary orbit, that would be difficult with the ladder!
I assume you looked at some other colliding galaxies? Which ones?
GdB
That is the pair I looked at GdB. I was in the Davis Mountains in West Texas near the McDonald Observatory, looking through an 18-inch Dobsonian. The seeing conditions were nearly perfect, and my eyes were much younger than they are now. Of course, I couldn’t see color and I couldn’t make out the dust lanes, but the level of detail I could see was amazing. The problem is I have had a bad case of aperture fever ever since.
That is the pair I looked at GdB. I was in the Davis Mountains in West Texas near the McDonald Observatory, looking through an 18-inch Dobsonian. The seeing conditions were nearly perfect, and my eyes were much younger than they are now. Of course, I couldn’t see color and I couldn’t make out the dust lanes, but the level of detail I could see was amazing. The problem is I have had a bad case of aperture fever ever since.
Dobsonians are the best. If I didn’t live in a big city like NYC I’d want to have one in the back yard.
There’s good reason for discussing New Age Woo-Woo; not that you’re going to convince the True Believer of course, but many of us, in the words of Robert Anton Wilson, “wonder a bit.” We’re open minded, we allow the possibility of weird stuff happening and we like to think about possible explanations; we don’t immediately jump with all four paws on someone’s account of a strange experience simply because we have already decided that it “can’t possibly” be true. Back in the 18th Century the eminent savants of the French Academy of Sciences treated reports of meteorites in a similar way. In fact they were so adamant in their insistence that accounts of meteorites “couldn’t possibly” be true, they persuaded museums all over Europe to throw out their meteorite collections as “worthless rubbish”...
CSI was formerly CSICOP; the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of CLAIMS OF THE PARANORMAL. Thus, its main concern was with debunking “woo-woo”. The change of name to CSI - the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry - was a bad idea in my opinion, as it would seem to be a tacit admission that the Committee is no longer interested either in investigation or being scientific. Mere “inquiry” seems like a copout.
As for transcendent mystical experiences, I will never forget the sense of awe I felt the first time I looked through a telescope at a pair of interacting galaxies.
I felt similarly when my son was born. I was right there; even got to catch him and cut the cord! Totally amazing experience for me.
Was your ladder so high it reaches HST??? And HST is not even in a geostationary orbit, that would be difficult with the ladder! 
