Demons

by Amha·’aret 32 Replies latest jw friends

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  Amha·’aret

  I've been corresponding with a dub via email, talking about mostly evolution but now the subject has changed. She reckons there is proof for poltergeists and other demonic happenings. Many dubs, including my parents-in-law and local elders, have similar tales. I heard lots of scary stories when i was in, and the warnings usually involved not taking 2nd hand clothes/items in to the home or not listening to or purchasing music of certain bands.

  So has anyone on here any first hand experience of any spooky goings-on? For those who don't believe in the supernatural, what explanation is there for these kinds of experiences?

  Am
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  BluesBrother

  Like you I heard of lots of scare stories, both anecdotal and in the WT printed word, but first hand ? Nah!

  Do I know anyone personally who had a credible experience? No

  Urban myths, if you ask me...
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  jamiebowers

  For those who don't believe in the supernatural, what explanation is there for these kinds of experiences?

  On the part of dubs, I would say a vivid imagination. I believe in the supernatural, but I think cultish hysteria has caused such events surrounding used goods and certain music.
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  leavingwt

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaUeyO6oPmU
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  Amha·’aret

  I'm with you for the most part but this person says she has experienced these things herself as she was involved with the occult before finding "truth" with the witnesses.

  So I can't exactly go back and tell her she imagined it.
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  Tuesday

  I don't have any first hand, I can share a second-hand story though.

  So the legend goes my mother and her friend were on a study where the woman had poured three glasses of orange juice before they were there. One was in a small cup for me. They had the study and drank the orange juice along with me. They let me play around the house...(funnier given the circumstances). As they were studying every time they went to grab their book bags they were across the room. This happened several times, so cut to later on in the night. My mother says she got attacked by a demon who was trying to strangle her. She mustered up enough strength to call out "Jehovah" and the demon went away. A similar story from the other sister who was on the study as well. Me I was fine, which now thinking back makes me laugh a bit picturing the demon's conversation.

  "OK so we have to attack the two sisters who studied with our possessed person, oh and their little child."

  "Wait, let me see the name of the child...Tim."

  "Oh Tim, nah he's fine leave him alone he's cool."
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  Amha·’aret

  I watched Derren Brown's "Seance" (sp?) recently and that showed what a sham those ghost hunts are. I told this to my dub mother who said

  "The demons didn't turn up because they knew it was a hoax" !!!! I just about burst trying not to laugh in her face! Clever them demons, eh? Stupid people can fall for Derren's pranks but not them demons.
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  leavingwt

  In all seriousness, however, I'm told by several people that the book below is the one you'll want to read.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

  Here is one review I found online for the book...

  Just in time for Millennialist Fever, Carl Sagan raises his voice ever so slightly in defense of reason. That Sagan felt he had to write "The Demon-Haunted World" at all is depressing, but the book will serve as a candle in the dark to those desperately pressing the cause of Science, Reason and Skepticism in an anxious world.

  The book is a bubble-burster and will delight the hardheaded with its thorough and amusing debunking of contemporary pseudoscience. Alien abduction believers, crystal healers and Psychic Hotline fans will take offense. So will anyone who would rather posit a supernatural explanation for the extraordinary than subject the extraordinary to analysis. Even the more sensitive of those with more traditional religious belief systems are liable to cry foul.

  How dare he?

  Sagan dares because he sees his beloved hard science being set aside for a bunch of comforting claptrap, and he fears for the future of a technological society in which hardly anyone understands technology. Too many people are like his courtesy driver at a speaking engagement; they know more about aliens, pyramids and the Atlantis legend then they do about the Periodic Table.

  I don't know just how loony American society is, and Sagan takes some too-easy shots along the way. He devotes some space and merciless prose to the more fanciful of the tabloid press, the kind that uses front page photographs of peace-seeking visitors from beyond the Pleiades shaking hands with the president. Call me dangerously naive, Carl, but I have long been under the impression that people buy such publications because they're funny. Just because the "Weekly World News" is profitable does not mean we are heading into a new Dark Age.

  But the overall evidence Sagan presents for the argument that the world is going gaga is compelling, though frequently anecdotal. He tries to be polite about it; one suspects that he could have vented a lot more spleen on the subject and probably does elsewhere. But here he is trying to win the undecided vote, seeking to reach and gently tug at the intellect of those prone to abandoning it.

  Admittedly, I'm with Dr. Sagan on this one, and have been mostly in his camp for all my life. Those who wish to see science nitpicked, ridiculed and vilified have ample reading material these days. The testimony of alien abductees is compelling even to some prominent psychiatrists; New-Age beliefs are trumpeted from the top of the New York Times bestseller lists; Creationism is passed off by some as at least the intellectual equal of Evolution and certainly the more moral belief.

  All this is repugnant to the author, who states the case for Science with the clarity of language that has made him the leading spokesperson for the scientific community for the better part of two decades. Science is not a belief system; it is a discipline that demands the weight of evidence for its theories and truths. And it takes a lot of hard work and education to make a good scientist, far more than it does to make a good faith healer or astrologist.

  Sagan does not profess a problem with belief systems as comforting philosophies to explain what we cannot know; he makes it his business, however, to dissect human gullibility in matters where science can be used to test. He does so in such a way that will invite dismissal from the more fervent deists of the world, however. He would like to believe that there is a Heaven or some form of reincarnation so that he might be reunited with family and loved ones in eternity, he writes; sadly, his training leads him to believe that the possibility is remote.

  But for the scientist, Sagan argues eloquently, there is more wonder in nature, more mystery in the universe, more delight in the process of understanding than can be provided by any body of thought that relies on a substantial mythology, or worse, parlor tricks and superstition.

  How do we make more people understand that and appreciate Science and its proper role in human affairs? Predictably, perhaps, Sagan's prescription requires of society those things it seems least likely to give without having first gained the appreciation he seeks. Better, more educational television. More government subsidies for research and pure science. Better pay for more teachers. Innovations in teaching. Longer school days and years.

  That we will elect to make those choices as a society is, in sciencespeak, improbable at this point. But Sagan has put those choices on the table, and they deserve to be there.

  -LWT
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  Homerovah the Almighty

  Ignorance , fear of the unknown, emotional unbalance, hysteria these are all cumulative

  imaginative results that foster the emotional thought suggestions and ideology of the supernatural .

  In the very beginning of human history man has suffered through his own ignorance of the world

  he lives in and the world that surrounds him.

  Some of that of that unfortunate ignorance is still with us today .
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  Awakened at Gilead

  The Demon Haunted World is my all time favorite book I have read since leaving JWs... and I have read a lot of books... a must read!