Poll: Do you believe in the paranormal? If not, have you ever wanted to?

[Level 7 Dragon]

Salute, Escapist.

I consider myself more or less a rationalist, so as of late I've been contemplating on why do people join cults and write conspiracy theories. The entire thing kinda is close to home since my granfather actually ran his own sect before passing away. His appartment was filled with religious icons and various shaman nick-nacks, which weirded me out as a kid.

I talked with my mother the other day and she said that what grandfather did was part of a larger trend that started with the Perestroyca and ended in the early 2000's. After the communist ideology started to crumble, large chunks of the population began converting to religion or acquiring an interest in the occult. There actually was one guy who claimed that if you put a bottle of water on a table in the same room as the TV with his show running that the liquid will gain a "special aura" that will "heal your illnesses". The sad thing is, he was topping the charts at the time. They even sold his "special" water at shops and markets.

Probably people need an ideology or something that reinforces their world view. Some people are just comforted by the idea of there being something beyond our understanding. At times, I certainly wish that was the case, even if it isn't.

What do you think? Is believing in something otherworldly part of human nature? Do you stand by some of the more common supernatural assumptions? Or is the practice of believing in gods and witches something humanity should abandon?

Captcha: Sharp Stick

 

[Erttheking]

No and no. If the paranormal did exist, politics would get worked into it and I'd hate everything to do with it. So probably for the best it stays in the realm of fiction where there won't be years of arguing about it and Donald Trump will never comment on it.

 

[Queen Michael]

I don't believe in it, and that's why I don't want to believe in it either. It's like this: Since it doesn't exist, I'd be believing something that wasn't true. It's like asking me if I want to believe that Africa is located north of Sweden, or that the square root of 9 is 2..

 

[DefunctTheory]

Well, I grew up Christian (Lutheran, to be specific), so I used to believe in the paranormal. I no longer do.

What do you think?

I think belief in the paranormal, in this age, is increasingly hard to justify, if it's justifiable at all.

Is believing in something otherworldly part of human nature?

Not otherworldly, per say, but believing in things you can't logically explain certainly seems to be part of the human condition, if not the condition for all living things with a sufficiently advanced brain. Whether that's some offshoot of false pattern recognition or something even more primitive is a subject that deserves its own topic.

Do you stand by some of the more common supernatural assumptions?

No.

Or is the practice of believing in gods and witches something humanity should abandon?

It probably should. Which isn't to say we should force that on humanity as a whole.

EDIT: I forgot: Would I like to believe it? I certainly like the idea of not dying forever in 40 or so years, so I suppose a I would like for there to be something after death. But what would be nice is not true, and I would prefer the truth over wishful thinking. There's no evidence of an afterlife, and most afterlives people have postulated sound pretty bad to me.

 

[KyuubiNoKitsune-Hime]

I consider my self a rational enough person with a good grasp on reality. Most of the time paranormal things to my mind come off as complete hogwash. Still I'm not discounting possibilities, which is why I will never go to the Goldfield Hotel in Goldfield Nevada and insult the ghosts that are said to live there. There is enough evidence to support their existence and that they're very vengeful, that's more than enough for me to want to keep a safe distance.

I also wouldn't be surprised if some cryptozoological creatures were proven to exist.

Still when it comes to things like werewolves and the occult, yeah it's pretty much all hogwash and superstition.

 

[Secondhand Revenant]

No I don't believe in it and I wouldn't want to believe in something I think is false.

It'd also be nice if it stopped being a thing people believed in general in my opinion, it causes trouble over an issue that doesn't really exist. It makes for interesting stories, but people don't need to genuinely believe stuff to keep stories around.

 

[Level 7 Dragon]

I also wouldn't be surprised if some cryptozoological creatures were proven to exist.

When explorers brought the platapus from Australia to Europe, the academia refused to research it since it assumed that it was some sort of a cruel joke, as the very biology of the animal defied the understanding of biology at the time. A mammal that lays eggs. The explorers actually had to bring a few more speciments from the far away continent to actually convince the zoologists.

Or when quantum mechanics were first introduced, many physisists lost their jobs because they refused to accept the fact that some events are impossible to explain through laws established by Newton.

I guess the idea of something happening that forces a shift in public understanding of something fundemental really tickles me fancy. But as I said before, I'll believe it only when I'll see it.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

No I don't, and no I haven't.

 

[Kinokohatake]

How about I am an atheist, a creature of logic, but have experienced things that I can't explain.

 

[Vicarious Reality]

I have no need to believe things

 

[the December King]

I'm the poster boy for... well, the poster- "I want to believe". As an atheist, though, I just can't accept things on faith. No empirical proof, and all that.

But it would be very exciting, at least to me, if there were ghosts, and demons, and angels, and gods. Zombies, and restless dead, and werewolves, and vampires... again, I do recognize that this would mean that some souls are in limbo, or hell, or unable to move on, etc., and that would be horrifying. But we're not really here to address the supposed reality the presence of the supernatural would entail.

I do love me some cryptozoology, however. Lots of cool things, yet to be discovered...

 

[Thaluikhain]

How do you define "paranormal"? Usually it's along the lines of "stuff we know is made up", even if it's not phrased that way. Aliens might be real, so they aren't paranormal. Various as yet unidentified creatures on Earth might be real, so they aren't paranormal. Bigfoot isn't real, so he is paranormal.

So...no. And I don't feel any reason to want to believe, there is enough stuff that does exist, and plenty more that legitimately might exist for all we know.

 

[Smooth Operator]

I certainly love to imagine there is fantastical shit around, but reality always spoils the fun.
None the less going down the rabbit hole of "what if" is an exercise I will always enjoy to some extent, and the closer it flies to some un-explained phenomenon the more enticing it is.

In short I prefer to imagine there is some hidden island where they secretly breed dinosaurs, be it actually the case or not.

 

[FPLOON]

Meh... I'll take whichever honestly... I mean, it's not like we found all the answers yet, let alone stopped being wrong in general...

Other than that, I did believe in a lot of shit when I was younger to the point I just told myself "Just take those thoughts and put them into some kind of coherent story or some shit, yo"... except the theory about God creating Science as an alternative to believing in Him because 6-year-old me hasn't even touched the bible yet...

 

[fenrizz]

Nope and no.

While I find certain paranormal concepts interesting, I certainly don't believe in them.
That being said, I am guilty of performing rituals to please the Random Number God.

I'll leave this story of Niels Bohr that I feel is relevant:

It is said that a visitor once came to the home of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr and, having noticed a horseshoe hung above the entrance, asked incredulously if the professor believed horseshoes brought good luck. "No," Bohr replied, "but I am told that they bring luck even to those who do not believe in them."

 

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

Nope, and there's no quicker way to make me angry than by insisting on the paranormal.

I'm not going to claim to be logical or reasonable as a person, but anything that relies on sweet-talking and aggrandizing natural phenomena that isn't easily explained through basic observation is bull shit.

What infuriates me more is people who won't shut the hell up about how they believe it and how they think that everyone else is below for them for not doing same.

 

[Harlemura]

I pretty sure no paranormal or supernatural stuff actually exists but I still like to believe there's some unexplained spooky shenanigans out there, even if there is next to no proof. Ghosts and spirits hanging around is one I'm fond of, for example. I mean, it's mostly because it's an alternative to either just being straight up gone into the void when you die, which is a sad thought, or going to heaven or hell, which I hope isn't the case post-mortem because I'm pretty sure I'm not heading skyward.
I don't think there's anything wrong with believing in the paranormal and such, but I think it's something to keep to yourself. Convincing yourself that it's 100% real, or even worse trying to convince someone else it's real, is taking it too far.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I'm not one for only logic and reason, because what's the fun in that, but I don't believe in the paranormal. If by 'paranormal' you mean ghosts, demons, and aliens. I feel that's a bit too easy an explaination for some of the crazy, unexplainable shit that's out there.

 

[Kaiser6012]

...Hm. An interesting set of questions. Let's boil it down.

Humans, by nature of being creatures who rely upon their intelligence, will try and rationalize anything they come across by whatever means they have at their disposal. Gods, restless spirits and poltergeists, demonic possession and aliens have all been used to explain phenomena unexplainable at the time. We want to know, and sometimes our brains make some fantastic leaps as to what is happening. So, in a way, we are predisposed to believing in the paranormal as both a defense mechanism (better to believe that shadow's a threat and find out it's not than to believe it's nothing and find out it belongs to a tiger) and as a rationale.

As for if I, personally, believe in the supernatural... well, it's tricksy. I would like to believe in some form of afterlife, but have no evidence to suggest such a thing would exist. I suspect that, yes, a lot of "hauntings" can be put down to suggestibility and parlour tricks, but that there is so much apocryphal evidence that one can't discount the possibility. I don't think we've been visited by aliens, but that the universe is simply too vast to not have life out there somewhere.

As for other people? Do what you will. If you lead a happy life, that's awesome. Do you, and do you well.

 

[Ogoid]

I believe something; I'd have a hard time explaining precisely what it is.

I wasn't particularly religious as a kid even though I grew up in a Lutheran household, but I was always interested in occult stuff (Tarot cards, I-ching readings, that kind of thing).

From my late teens to my mid twenties, I went through a phase in which I would read anything religious and/or occult I could get my hands on - Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Thelema, Buddhism, Spiritism, Theosophy, etc., with a dash of Jungian psychology thrown in for good measure.

In the end, I think all those things kinda coalesced (or maybe boiled down into their essentials, which were basically the same for all of them as I saw it) into something more or less concise but which I'm not quite able to rationally grasp, somewhere in an intuitive, sub-conscious level of my mind.

I suppose I personally believe a matter of clear-cut "existing" or not in the physical sense - in the sense in which people generally understand things to "exist" or not - is kinda beside the point when it comes to the "supernatural".

That probably made no sense whatsoever, but it's the best I can do in trying to explain it, I guess.