Spearthrower wrote:With such low numbers of members, we really don't need more
guard dogs barking at strangers. People have bad ideas, but surely that's why we'd want them to come here, to engage those bad ideas and increase skepticism and reasonable thinking about issues. Not keep everyone away who happens to believe in some woo?
Maybe so, but I don't expect anyone is bringing their woo here because they're looking for a way out, and we can't retrace the steps they took to find their way in. That's probably the only way for them to find their way out, and all the skepticism in the world applied to the end product doesn't try very hard to figure out how they took the steps they did. They wanted to take each step of that journey or they wouldn't have done so. The alternative is to discover they were forced into it. Unfortunately, even kindly skepticism is all too often taken as contempt. All woo has in common believing stuff with no better reason than that one wants to believe it, and any believer who admits that gets much kinder treatment from me than they might otherwise.
NoemaNovel wrote:Have you ever experienced something you couldn’t explain, or had a dream that disturbed you because it felt so real? Have you ever tried to explain this to anyone only to be told that you have “an over-active imagination”?
Why would I try to explain it to anyone else, especially if I understood (falsely or otherwise) that reality is what is going on in my mind and not necessarily in anyone else's? I'd have to believe that I can bring someone else into my reality, which is a bit of a paradox if I believe that my reality is just in my mind and his reality is in his. At that level, what's the point of talking to anyone about anything, especially if other people are just figments of my personal reality?
NoemaNovel wrote:Are you willing to help make this happen by sharing your own experiences of your reality with others who will not judge or criticise it but will accept it on its own terms?
Um, yeah. "Its own terms" are not
out there beyond someone's personal reality, are they? This is my guess as to why Hermit decided the OP was unmitigated drivel. It's all there in the OP, contradicting itself in layer upon layer of bullshit. In the case of NoemaNovel,
you gotta watch out for that first step; it's a doooooooooozy {Groundhog Day).
Hearing about someone else's experience under those circumstances is about giving them a voice. You don't need a voice if you just spend all day talking to yourself and the other folks talking about their experiences that are just figments of your reality.