The supernatural. Your thoughts.

[comeon93]

If we define the supernatural as ghosts, demons, witches, gods, esp, magic and the like, I'm going with no.

I've had lots of "supernatural", experiences in the past, all of which can be rationalized as natural now that I'm older and have developed a more skeptical way of thinking.

[scoundrel]

Spontaneous combustion used to be seen as a supernatural phenomenon; but part of this was that the process was unknown and the name for the event was very misleading. It is actually slow, not fast, and it is from an external cause, not internal. But even so, it remains a rather creepy thing, even though the science is now understood.

Being struck by lightning is a freak occurence but it has a scientific explanation. However, it still seems supernatural to many peoples' minds; even the event of an electrical storm feels potent and seems to express divine power, even when the thinking human mind knows it is a natural and not supernatural event.

Maybe there are no ghosts; but even so I do not voluntarily stroll around graveyards in the dead of night and I am not ashamed of the fact that such places at such times make me feel wary, nor do I think that to be foolish.

[Wendigo]

Ghosts are a tricky area, many say that unquiet spirits walk the Earth but considering so many people die horribly each year it is a wonder they are not seen more often.
All those nonsense ghost hunting programmes on TV have proved absolutely nothing just people sense odd feelings largely due to imagination and suggestion.
So many of us believe that our lives must mean more than this, that we have to go on somewhere (I don't) to an afterlife.
The supernatural is mostly what science cannot explain right now, there are some things I personally reject immediately like Angels & Demons, humans can be good and bad and angels & demons are just representations of the best and worst we can be.
I love a good horror movie but the most important element is our imagination and long may there continue to be unexplained events as without them life would be a lot duller.

[rotobott]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

Being struck by lightning is a freak occurence but it has a scientific explanation. However, it still seems supernatural to many peoples' minds; even the event of an electrical storm feels potent and seems to express divine power, even when the thinking human mind knows it is a natural and not supernatural event.

I once saw ball lightning, I thought it was an UFO at the time , maybe it was it seemed to disregard the normal laws of physics as far as I could tell, but it was interesting, to say the least.

[rodak]

A little slice of the supernatural from my own hometown.

http://www.roadsideamerica.com/tip/2636

My friends and myself "back in the mid 1980's" put as many hands on this thing as we could and were not able to get it to move.
If you look at the pic in the link you can see the unpolished area on which the orb is supposed to rest.
The unpolished area is how you can track the movement of the orb.

[MrLinc]

"The supernatural" is a term way too big to ask for a simple opinion. Still, it's a great topic to talk about.
Way too much stuff is included under the "supernatural" term, and some of it is real stuff that has not been explained by science yet, and some of it is just religious or mystical stuff.
And above all, it's not about "do you believe it or not?". It has nothing to do with it. For those of you guys who believe in God, do you think He cares about if we believe in Him or not? If He exists, He exists whether we believe in Him or not.
It's just an example, please don't take it personal.

Originally Posted by haroldeye

Because you cannot prove something exists doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Most if not all so called supernatural phenomena are or will be perfectly explainable once we have the means to quantify and measure them. Not that long ago people believed that lightening was the Gods throwing things at each other. Now we know better.

Exactly! Many things that science explain these days, were "supernatural" just 80, 100 years ago. Things that are basic for us and we take them for granted.

Originally Posted by gordian_knot

I was really into the occult when I was in my teens. There was an awful lot of esoteric literature around in the early '70s and I read loads of it. I even scared myself out of my wits with one book on magic rituals.

Now I'm in my 50s and it's now a case of wishing some of these things existed rather than believing them.

However, as has been pointed out, we're a long way from knowing everything. The BBC is running experiments on controlling a remote with brainwaves. It's not exactly ESP but technology will one day allow us to do all sorts of things with thought alone.

But it's not supernatural. If it exists it must be natural. If it's something weird it's just something we don't yet understand.

Ditto.

Originally Posted by Wendigo

Ghosts are a tricky area, many say that unquiet spirits walk the Earth but considering so many people die horribly each year it is a wonder they are not seen more often.
All those nonsense ghost hunting programmes on TV have proved absolutely nothing just people sense odd feelings largely due to imagination and suggestion.
So many of us believe that our lives must mean more than this, that we have to go on somewhere (I don't) to an afterlife.
The supernatural is mostly what science cannot explain right now, there are some things I personally reject immediately like Angels & Demons, humans can be good and bad and angels & demons are just representations of the best and worst we can be.
I love a good horror movie but the most important element is our imagination and long may there continue to be unexplained events as without them life would be a lot duller.

Maybe (just maybe) you reject immediately angels and demons because you've got the religious concept of them (I'm just guessing and I might be completely wrong); what if they are mythical creatures that have nothing to do with catholic religion? what if they're actual beings in a different state of existence? what if they're just legends, like the Minotaur?

There's so much to talk about this subject, I don't want to make this post a long and unreadable thing.
Maybe some of you guys will like some tv show named, precisely, "Supernatural", airing in the U.S. on TheCW. Yeah, it's been around for like 10 or 11 seasons and keeps going on, but it's been spanning a lot of what we're talking about here, even to a point of showing angels as not so good beings and demons as not so evil beings. Of course it's just a fictional tv show, but it raises a lot of questions up in the air and we can't do anything but stare at them.

Great topic, please keep your posts coming, whatever it is you think about it! Thank you.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by howerd

It has been carbon dated & it turns out it isn't old enough to be genuine.

'The Shroud of Turin (Turin Shroud), a linen cloth commonly associated with the crucifixion and burial of Jesus Christ, has undergone numerous scientific tests, the most notable of which is radiocarbon dating, in an attempt to determine the relic's authenticity. In 1988, scientists at three separate laboratories dated samples from the Shroud to a range of AD1260–1390, which coincides with the first appearance of the shroud in France in the 1350s.[1]

There was a thriving market for religious relics in medieval Europe and I suppose the shroud was created so someone could make a fast buck. But it is still an interesting and historically important object and it would be useful to modern historians and useful generally to know how it was done. Its a conjuring trick rather than a supernatural phenomenon, but a clever and ingenious one and knowing the trick might help us know more about the people of its own time.

[Wendigo]

Originally Posted by MrLinc

Maybe (just maybe) you reject immediately angels and demons because you've got the religious concept of them (I'm just guessing and I might be completely wrong); what if they are mythical creatures that have nothing to do with catholic religion? what if they're actual beings in a different state of existence? what if they're just legends, like the Minotaur?.

I reject them because of the ludicrous modern religious nonsense that surrounds them, how as I have stated in another thread as an example an angel will supposedly appear to warn Doris from Milwaukee not to catch a bus or plane that subsequently crashes. So what about the others who are killed or injured in that crash? Were they God's idea of collateral damage?
We see what we really want to see, yes I reject immediately the religious aspect of angels and demons as pure wishful thinking but there may be beings/creatures not known to science yet that can account for some early tales.
Could the centaur have been created the first time a primitive mind saw a man on horseback?
Look at medieval maps and the creatures reported to have been around then, maybe they were what people imagined they saw when they first saw a strange new animal. Maybe many strange species were few in number and we hunted them to extinction.
Maybe some ancient artists may just have had a very vivid imagination and just created drawings of weird creatures for the hell of it

[Wendigo]

Originally Posted by gordian_knot

I was really into the occult when I was in my teens. There was an awful lot of esoteric literature around in the early '70s and I read loads of it. I even scared myself out of my wits with one book on magic rituals.

Now I'm in my 50s and it's now a case of wishing some of these things existed rather than believing them.

I've started buying a few of the more memorable books I originally read in the 70's & 80s on UFO's, The Bermuda Triangle, demonology, cryptozoology etc as I was really fascinated by the unexplained/supernatural then and have remained so to this day although none of the proof they foresaw then as imminent appears to have been forthcoming.
Like Jack the Ripper and Spring-heeled Jack maybe some things are better left unexplained.

[justme21]

Maybe there are no ghosts; but even so I do not voluntarily stroll around graveyards in the dead of night

I didn't believe in ghosts until I managed a cemetery.
Locked doors would open and close by themselves, footsteps would walk down the hall, and when a dog spent the evening there he went absolutely apeshit at nothing visible.
Maybe these were all natural occurrences that someday will be explained...maybe not.