I've deliberately avoided reading this thread for the past few days, but curiosity finally got the best of me and I read all six pages with some interest.
I'm a rationalist myself. Things happen for reasons. Magic is just an effect with an obscured cause. I'm open to the possibility that there are physical phenomena whose cause we do not adequately understand at present. I also realize that we sometimes "experience" things that did not happen. Memory is malleable and greatly influenced by what we believe or fear.
I read rem's posts with considerable interest because his thinking almost exactly matches my own. Of all the paranormal phenomena, it seems that auras should be the easiest to confirm. Perhaps at the next apostafest, we can find two people who can easily see auras, and ask them to write down their impressions for a succession of ten or twenty people. Even this casual method would be quite interesting. Like rem, I'm interested in 1) ascertaining whether the phenomenon has any objective basis, and 2) understanding what the physical cause is.
I have to say to Nathan that you do come off highly confrontational. I too demand rational evidence for the things in which I believe. When reading the account of the boy who predicted football injuries with 100% success, I wondered if perhaps the misses were simply not noticed because they were less spectacular. On the other hand, if it is really true that his injury predictions actually occur with that level of success, then statistically it is highly improbable that it is by chance.
I'm not saying that I believe in the boy's abilities, but that it would be presumptuous for me to declare that he does not have them. And I can understand how this type of ability would be difficult to check in laboratory settings, since the boy apparently does not call the injuries at will, but once in a while, spontaneously.
I have to admit that the absolute vacuum of scientific evidence for paranormal phenomena is damning. But I wonder if perhaps phenomena such as the football injury predictions actually are repeatable, but we simply don't know how to set up the correct circumstances. Perhaps there is a completely rational explatation at work but it only happens at highly specialized times, whose details we do not presently know.
Basically, my position is that it's best to view incredible claims with extreme skepticism, but I don't believe I have the right to insist that something absolutely does not occur and that believers must of necessity be duped, although this certainly occurs quite often too. In the case of auras, I don't see them, but must I insist that no one does? That seems a bit arrogant. And what if no scientific equipment can record them as they are seen by humans? That seems to imply that we have developed instrumentation capable of sensing every type of phenomenon in the universe, which claim is patently false.
I am, however, in agreement that until we can reliably reproduce and understand such phenomena, they are basically useless to us.
I read dolphman's story with interest. This is an instance where I would be interested in applying a very critical eye to the problem. For example, your claim of speaking Sanskrit is extremely interesting. From a linguistic point of view, this brings up many questions. Were these words spoken clearly? Since they are said to have come from some other power, were they spoken with an accurate pronunciation - not an Anglicised one? What rules of romanization did your girlfriend use when transcribing your utterances to search for them? For instance, The pinyin system of romanization for Mandarin is not intuitive. Xiexie is pronounced something like "shye-shye." If you were to hear this and type that into a search engine, you might get dubious results. Could your utterances also be mistaken for other languages? Had you ever heard or experienced (even through popular media) Sanskrit mantras before?
I'd be interested in following your story. Please post updates.
Interesting thread.
SNG