let me tell you what i think about prayer,one i'm sure the poverty area of new orleans had it share of people praying to god for a better life and what was gods answer,hurricane katrina?people in oklahoma where tornadoes have killed many were basically christian faith based people.the storms that hit the southeast where its considered the bible belt...the list goes on and on and on and on.so if gods answers to prayers is by natural disasters which he supposively created i don't want nothing to do with that faith.God works in mysterious ways my a$$ he/she/it don't work in anyways cause he/she/it doesn't exist.

science could be so far advanced right now but cause of the bible pushing jesus freaks around the world back in the day have caused us to be way behind

Maybe God's just really pissed off. Like you.

that thing people call god has been pissed off for over 6,000 thousand years,so i guess what it created wasn't so perfect now was it?..

It will be a nice world if they ever get it finished.

I know these beliefs are common. They may have value, but they are not 'scientific' in the sense of being built on testable claims, substantiated by properly blinded trials and other solid evidence. Just to be clear where I'm coming from, the fact that a claim lacks such evidence is not reason to automatically dismiss it.



There are some myths and exaggerations circulating regarding how native americans perceived and understood ships on their first exposure. As far as I'm aware, there is no evidence of a group of healthy humans who were all unable to visual register objects in their visual field due to their 'beliefs'. Some people have better ability to notice details, or better ability to distinguish between, say, a rope and a snake at a distance; more or less inclination to misinterpret what they see based on their tendencies to jump to conclusions; or to interpret what they see in ways that substantiate existing impressions; there's a whole list of psychological causes for one to perceive incorrectly, under the influence of one's beliefs or worldview, but being flat out unable to visually register something (as opposed to correctly identify something, or to notice something without subtle having it pointed out to you) has never been shown to be consequence of belief for a group of healthy humans. I'm pretty sure whatever form of the Indian/ship story you heard was simply a falsehood.



I'm not convinced that we know what animals see - only how they respond to things. I've heard (unverified) that frogs will starve rather than eat dead bugs, along with the claim that frogs cannot see non-moving insects. Maybe this claim is also a falsehood, or maybe someone jumped to the wrong conclusion (and really, frogs 'see' dead flies, they just don't 'identify' them as flies), or maybe its true that frogs can't see dead flies (lacking sufficient resolution?)... if so, this need not have anything to do with humans.


Edit: I do believe that if you give a person limited opportunity to perceive something, their beliefs may prevent them from noticing something. This is a matter of having something register in your consciousness, and no longer applies when one's attention is drawn to something.

There are probably a lot of things that go unseen or unnoticed simply because they did not register in a person's consciousness.

Isn't registering in your consciousness part of the whole process of 'seeing?' I think this is what may be happening. You could be looking right at something but it just blends in with its surroundings and you can't identify it, so you don't 'see' it.

A hypnotist claimed that he hypnotized a woman so that she could not see anyone in the room. When a man walked in smoking a cigarette, all she saw was this cigarette floating across the room by itself.

That happens to me all the time! I get this vague notion that someone
is trying to communicate with me while I am reading mingle2 posts but
all I see on my computer screen is random nonsensical jibberish!

That happens to me too. I sometimes just skip the post.

Yes, thats how I'm using the word 'seeing' also. My beliefs influence how I direct my attention, and therefore its not uncommon for my beliefs influence what I see. This is a matter of habit, not of ability. I have every reason to believe that any object which will register on an unmagnified, visual spectrum video camera is also see-able by me and most healthy, sane humans...though we may need to have it pointed out to us, and we may not (lacking information or context) be able to properly interpret what we see.




You know what would be really cool? Write a word on a piece of paper, fold it, and carry it over the space directly on the other side of the man she couldn't see, then unfold the paper and ask her to read the word. I predict she wouldn't be able to, because the man is in the way, preventing her from actually seeing the paper.

Just as with animals, its not easy to determine exactly what another person actually sees, just how they react to things and what they say they see. Maybe he hypnotized her in such a way that she lied. That may sound unlikely, but its less unlikely than her not being able to see someone.

I'm open to the possibility that this story (woman says she couldn't see the man) may be true, and I'm curious about about carefully investigated and documented occurrences of such thing.

It was in a book I read about hypnotism.

There was another story where a hypnotist did something like that. He hypnotized a man so that he could not see his daughter and she was standing right in front of him. Then he held up a card from a deck of cards behind the girl and asked the father to identify it. He did, correctly.

Did he see it? Maybe. If so, then what does that tell us? If we are all actually just vibrations and reflections of light, if we can tune out certain vibrations, we should be able to see through things.

If this is the case, it would be cool if we could train ourselves to see through walls and stuff. We could have Xray vision.

Then Xray machines would not be needed. Doctors could just look at our body and see inside.

Power of the mind.

One story was of a man who was hypnotized and told that he would die on such and such a date one year from then.

He was in perfect health, and he dropped dead on that day.

This to me seems incredible. I don't know if I even believe it. But if this is a true story, it seems more like kind of a programing of a computer program. The program works perfectly but there is a command that turns it off on a certain date. Are we like programs in a matrix?

Better yet, can we program ourselves?

There is story of a woman who went insane after her fiancée died just before their wedding. She could not get beyond that day she was in and every morning she woke up it was the day before she was told of his death. She was waiting for him to come to her. She lived to be 80 years old, but the story was that she never grew old. She still looked 20. That's unbelievable. Don't know if I believe it.

But scientist have grown skin in laboratories and under the right conditions it lives on and on and reproduces skin cells, never getting old.

They have not discovered why people age. Of course we wear out from not taking care of ourselves. But if we lived in ideal conditions, ate the right things, drank the right water, lived in a pure environment, and expected to never age, I think we could live for thousands of years.

Sure they have-- there's still lots more work to be done, but the short version of why we age is because of replication errors when the DNA in our cells is transcribed during cellular reproduction. That's why clones don't live long longer lives than their donors-- the clone is a copy of a pre-existing defect.

And there's a lot more to sentient human life than simple skin cells. If you research HeLa cells, those seemingly immortal cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks of which scientists have cultured some 20 tons of over the last 60 years, you'll find that the same thing that makes these cancer cells immortal is the same mechanism in reverse that causes aging. Designer rats can be bred with the cellular mechanism that causes very premature aging by suppressing telomerase activation.

So, it's not like scientists are in the dark about what causes aging.


-Kerry O.

They are somewhat 'in the dark' or they would have found a cure for it. Maybe they have, but they are afraid to release it because no one would grow old and die and the world would be overpopulated with seniors.

Of course if people did not grow old, they could work a lot longer and contribute to the growth of the economy. You can retire when you are 900 but no earlier.....

If you've ever read the conversations with God series, it's mentioned that apparently we really never were meant to die. So there may indeed be some truth to what you say here.

Well, I suppose we could always throw modern science under the bus, go back to living in caves, worship the sun, and teach everyone to be psychics. That way they'd know when they were going to die and how. It would sure make retirement and estate planning a lot easier.

Maybe the Cappuchean monks were on to something when they posted an inscription reading "As you are now, we once were. As we are now, you will someday become' above their bone crypt?


-Kerry O.

Sorry, I don't get the connection between my post and your answer about throwing modern science under the bus. Why would we want to do that?

Your previous post seemed like an indictment of science's alleged unreliability to produce instant, all-encompassing answers to tough problems and/or its inferiority to those 'powers of the mind'.

Maybe I take science a little bit more seriously than most because so much of my career depends on it, and it quite literally saved my life and made it worth living again.

Further, IMHO science has caught and convicted more dangerous criminals than ESP ever has. Using the same logic you used in that previous post, couldn't it be said that if psychics are so effective, there'd be no crime because criminals would know they'd always get caught and that the police would never be 'in the dark' as you said science was on the topic of aging?

-Kerry O.

Quoted for truth. Extremely understated truth.

But I was not even talking about criminals being caught and convicted using ESP. I also did not say anything about any science being inferior to "powers of the mind."

In no way was I discounting or putting down "science." Why do you jump to such conclusions and assume so much? Why not simply read what I write?

Science is apparently still "in the dark" on the topic of aging or else they would have found a cure for it by now.

But what does that have to do with psychics catching criminals? I was not even talking about that.

I would never suggest that we should "throw modern science under the bus, go back to living in caves, worship the sun, and teach everyone to be psychics." That is just you being defensive.

I was just marveling about the powers and mysteries of the mind. There is so much we do not know. Science should not scoff at things they don't understand about consciousness or psychics. Instead, they should look into it very seriously.

So maybe people who believe in the paranormal should not set the bar higher for science than they set it for the paranormal. You just acknowledeges that 'there is so much we don't know'. Maybe believers in the paranormal need to stop scoffing at science via double standards of proof and results. (Check the back posts for the LOL emoticons).

I'd wager that science knows a LOT more about aging and can back it up with evidence than believers in the paranoral/supernatural can for their cause. Just because science cannot yet confer immortality doesn't mean that it's 'in the dark' about aging.

Conversely, the paranormal always seems to grow best in the dark-- like mushrooms-- away from the bright light shed on it by the skeptics.

I posted some scientific facts about aging. Will you do the same with some subject about the supernatural/paranormal?


-Kerry O.