/lit/ - Literature

>>18756235

>>18756289
3spooky5me

Carl Sagan - demon haunted world

>>18756320
Kek
I have seen this meme in use after so long.

>>18756396
>Carl Sagan

>>18756456
What's wrong with Sagan? I have that book on my backlog.

>>18756235
there isn't any, there is only coping, because an overwhelming amount of anecdotal evidence of all kinds of phenomena exists. to claim otherwise only reveals the narrowness of your experience, and an overeagerness to extrapolate things about reality based on your narrow set of assumptions about it.
I have no ideological horse in this race, it's just that I personally know people who have experienced things completely unexplainable and very unambiguously tangible(can't rationally be handwaved away as delusion or hallucinations or some kind of confusion), and some of those stories are as trustworthy as anything can be that comes out of someone else's mouth that you haven't directly experienced yourself. of course, no matter how close someone is to you or how trustworthy and truthful they seem, there's always the possibility of them lying or being confused, but past a certain point that becomes the far less rational conclusion.
anyway, don't be a retard. despite rationalism and scientific advancements and the stable image of reality that has been crafted, and a widespread secular attitude of "this is how it is and we have it figured out" that kids are inundated with, the world is in fact as full of mystery as it was centuries ago. you just live in an echo chamber

>>18756542
to add to this, of course ghost hunting shows are bullshit and of course the world is full of charlatans and frauds. nevertheless..

>>18756542
>past a certain point that becomes the far less rational conclusion.
I don't see how.
It is easier to believe that people get confussed or are just liars than to believe in paranormal shit, I don't want to sound like an euphoric reddit atheist, but souls not existing beyond the brain sounds much more logical and believable than any accounts of paranormal activity I've ever heard of.

>>18756662
>how
through how close those people are to you, the fact you're pretty sure they can be trusted - again, as sure as you can ever be of anything not directly experienced yourself - family members and close friends telling you intimate stories and the stories seeming as genuine as any you've ever heard unless you've already predisposed yourself towards disbelief, and finally the great abundance of these stories and experiences. to believe they are lying is to believe oneself to be personally surrounded by a hilarious amount of crazy people and complete psychos. which again, past a certain point, isn't that rational. not in my case anyway. I could relay you stories - but I won't. I think that would be meaningless because in your state of mind, it's just schizo shit or a made up story for the gullible by the amorally manipulative.
all of the above, of course, is presumably something you don't share in your own world, so that's the largest obstacle of even communicating to you my completely different perspective. hence my ongoing repetition of the point about your own experience and ideology dictating your thinking, but here I am presenting you with something different, for your consideration. there are plenty of people in the world who would simply laugh at your worldview, and at all the so called skeptics, because they have nothing to prove - they know of certain unbelievable things as clearly as you know of the normal things that surround you every day.
>logical
according to what, err, system of logic? what you mean to say is that you're indoctrinated into certain a priori assumptions about the world and whatever deviates from this, and from your own narrow experience interpreted through the lens of these assumptions, is considered illogical or irrational, and the attitude can be generally summed up as "that obviously makes no sense, bro!"
>believable
how is it inherently more believable? see above. people who are too convinced of their own rationality and consider themselves skeptics or whatever are often simply the most blind to their inherent biases.
and beyond this, the primacy of consciousness seems more intuitively convincing to me than the primacy of anything which must necessarily be filtered through, interpreted and in a sense, created by it as it constructs your reality, physically represented by the countless processes in your brain occurring continually, presenting "you" with what you think is Reality. but that's a wholly different conversation, anyway.

at any rate anon, I hope you give what I've said some thought instead of just reading it once and dismissing it with a short post. maybe life will surprise you some day and throw a wrench into the image of it you currently inhabit. curiosity goes a long way. I'm tired of typing already, I'll keep the thread open but I'm gone for now, have a good day

>>18756662
>>18756820
>>18756542
I always saw any stories of unexplainable phenomena to simply be odd coincidences and nothing more. we live in an imperfect world, maybe the lights flicker one too many times or a door opens and you don't like it, but it's nothing more than an oddball occurrence in the absurd world we live in. it's not ghosts or ghouls or demons, it's just how the world is. things fall, doors close, "voices" are heard all the time. doesn't mean it's ghosts.

>>18757088
please. you think I'm talking about flickering lights and shit?
read when I said
>experienced things completely unexplainable and very unambiguously tangible(can't rationally be handwaved away as delusion or hallucinations or some kind of confusion)
and take a hint

>>18757837
okay shit like "i saw a shadow man at 1 in the morning" i give little credence to because most of the time people psych themselves out over nothing simply because it's dark and no one's awake
and shit like "an angel came down and told me about hell" i attribute to preconceived notions of faith that people inflate in their minds and basically will into believing what was essentially a dream

>>18756235
Took a Parapsychology course in college.
Ghost seems mostly b.s, so is telekinesis and mind reading. Poltergeist events were the only ones that seemed not to be explainable right away.

>muh evidence
I think it is a waste of time to talk about about paranormal in this frame. If there was scientific evidence for paranormal phenomena it wouldnt be called "paranormal", at the same second you find a rational explanation for ghosts, they are just going to become part of nature, subjected to laws of physics and other such descriptions. With that said, people into paranormal can also make the mistake of aproaching it with an overly nominalist mindset, and at least for me that is basically missing the whole point.

>>18757896
I see you are a man of strong faith

>>18756553
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDJt2RqGsp9f9xEwcr-hd7Q

Do you really think all of the paranormal footage has been 100% faked?

>>18758393
no idea what that channel is, but I don't know, possibly not. just acknowledging that there's tons of bullshit out there

>>18756235
There's a larger catalog of books for the opposite

>>18757837
Describe the experience instead of just saying that you heard a believable story.

>>18758648
no

>>18758380
not really. it's complicated