Agree.

 

 

Have any of your dreams NOT come true? What does this imply?

 

If this foretelling were possible, and reliable, imagine the implications for the stock market, the military, governments, etc. They'd be all over it.

 

 

Sorry -- I think what you've experienced is only coincidence -- nothing supernatural.

 

 

 

 

 

 

No, but it is true the other way around.

 

mind reading

onniscience

omnipresence

immortality

the ability to create matter from nothing

the ability to work "miraculous" cures

the ability to resurrect the dead

invisibility

etc.

 

Therefore, it should not tbe too big a stretch, I think, for a religious person to think that some humans or "spirits" could from time to time manifest similar "paranormal" powers. 

 

Essentially, I equate belief in the paranormal with belief in magic, and I think that any "god" is essentially a "magical" entity.

 

 Whattayall think? Belief in God = belief in magic = belief in paranormal?

Is it the same? Are religous folks more likely to believe in such "non-scientific" things?

 

Or is belief in an all-powerful, single God incompatible with, say, a belief in astrology?

I think you have to call it "The Shinning" or you'll be sued by the Kubrick estate.

 

However, telepathy is an interesting issue IMO although not really paranormal.

How is telepathy not paranormal? Telepathy is a form of ESP, namely thought transference. (usually done with those circle, square, cross, wave, star - cards)

 

Shouldn't it be a sense, just like hearing or vision? In this case it would be biological and/or physical, not a gift IMO.

It could be argued that ESP, Telekinesis and Forseeing The Future are all additional senses to the normally accepted 5. However, the Extra in Extra-Sensory means unusual, outside or beyond rather than in addition to, like extraterrestrial means beyond-earth, so my view is that telepathy would be a beyond-normal sense rather than an additional sense.

I think your figure of 60 billion is a little conservative - I'd put it at closer to 100 billion, which works out at 1800 dead people per square mile of earth, or one skeleton every 150 metres. If we consider that only a small proportion of land is actually populated, then this grave-density increases dramatically, which means that there must be some parts of the world where the ghosts must be standing shoulder to shoulder.

clarke2001 wrote: Aliens visiting us? Nah. Too naive. I believe in existence of life forms on other planets, even the intelligent ones, but visiting us? Why us? There are another 150000000000 stars only in our galaxy.

Also, none of them could actually get here, even if they wanted to - the closest star to us is Proxima Centari at 235 billion miles away, which is roughly 160,000 years by space-shuttle. Faster than light travel is physically impossible.

clarke2001 wrote: ESP? Clueless...but I think there is something. As Arthur C. Clarke once pointed it out - 95% of all that is rubbish...but which 5% is right?

The $1,000,000 http://www.randi.org/sylvia/ - Randi prize remains unclaimed. I remain a skeptic.

clarke2001 wrote: Prediciting the future? I do not believe in that, nor in destiny. On the other hand, there might be something in the theories of parallel universes, warmholes, streams of happenings and cosmical mechanics...but that's a huge stretch.

I agree, sort of... I understand that parallel universes are theoretically feasible, I'm not convinced they actually exist, or if they did, that we could 'enter' one.

clarke2001 wrote: Astrology is one of the worst piles of rubbish ever invented by the human kind, and it should be banned by the law in all the countries. It's too bad that inquisition in the dark ages didn't made astrology extint - by using the pyres for those who had tried to earn something on poor, naive people, desperately searching for a luck in their cruel reality.

Agreed, it's hooey, but banning it would be as wrong as banning the tooth-fairy. In the dark ages the Inquisition had no interest in astrology, they were only concerned with stamping out heretics. Astrology was only forbidden by the church as recently as the 19th century, and then only because it denied  free-will.

clarke2001 wrote: In my humble opinion, of course.

mine too

 

Not that I believe but according to some sources aren't we simple avatars of people that passed away? In this case with the population growth the problem will be the opposite - lack of souls for people still to be born.

 

(In any case, a "bigfoot' -- or large unidentified primate -- would not be a supernatural or "paranormal" creature.)

 

 

Where are the dead ones? the bones? (surely we'd have found the remains of such large animals, by now!)

 

Where's the poop?

 

Where's the bits of fur?

 

Where's the recent, reliable photographic evidence/pelts/tracks from: native Americans, loggers, prospectors, hikers, environmentalists, campers, etc?

 

 

 

it's probably because the USA is difficult to miss.

 

I think Mexico and parts of Bavaria/Switzerland have a larger number of sightings, but they probably don't fly too low because of the mountains, therefore do not crash.

 

I think it would be pretty cool to really have a lochness monster or bigfoot or something.

 

Yeah, they've become an urban legend, just like global warming and AIDS.

 

On topic, I'd have to say Ghosts and Aliens. Come on, with a universe like ours, there's got to be SOMETHING out there.

I saw a program on the Discovery Channel that said Bush was a Lizard-man from another planet.

 

As for religion, I'll say it then; Religion is simply a control structure allowing the intelligent to subjugate the lesser elightened masses.  Anyone who believes otherwise is sadly deluded.  (Ducks and covers).

PC never said it was a religion, or even a belief system. She was making a point about the way it was being offhandedly dismissed in this thread.