I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
I assume you have not met Richard Dawkins. Agnostics are not that bothered either way, plenty of atheists are militantly anti religion.
Plenty of diehard FBPE Remainers do spend virtually all day and night tweeting and fretting about how awful Brexit is
It's news to me, though I don't doubt you, I just don't look for or see such tweets. If you don't like their tweets, don't read them.
We get a lot more posts on here complaining about Remainers than we do Remainers complaining about Brexit.
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
There are only two sane positions on the existence of God
The first is Belief. If you have been awarded the Gift of Faith, you don't refuse it, it is tremendously consoling (and brings serious health benefits, inter alia)
The second is Agnosticism. "I just don't know. I don't have the gift of Faith, so I do not believe, but who am I to say it cannot be?"
Atheism is simply absurd. "I am a semi-hairy bipedal ape on an obscure planet in the suburbs of one galaxy amongst fifty trillion and I get beaten by computers at card games yet I have personally worked out the fundamental truths of the universe and reality and there is no creator, no purpose to the cosmos, nothing, tho wait if a scientist tells me that there are an infinite number of parallel universes yes that's probably true, because, er, we have microwave ovens so the scientists are always right"
Atheism is ridiculous. It is tomfoolery. It is childish.
Aren't most Atheist driven by the frustration that many things in societies have been shaped by religion and continue to accommodate them and that the world would just be a better place if we got rid of all of that (in their opinion) nonsense and stuck to scientific fact based approaches?
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
There are only two sane positions on the existence of God
The first is Belief. If you have been awarded the Gift of Faith, you don't refuse it, it is tremendously consoling (and brings serious health benefits, inter alia)
The second is Agnosticism. "I just don't know. I don't have the gift of Faith, so I do not believe, but who am I to say it cannot be?"
Atheism is simply absurd. "I am a semi-hairy bipedal ape on an obscure planet in the suburbs of one galaxy amongst fifty trillion and I get beaten by computers at card games yet I have personally worked out the fundamental truths of the universe and reality and there is no creator, no purpose to the cosmos, nothing, tho wait if a scientist tells me that there are an infinite number of parallel universes yes that's probably true, because, er, we have microwave ovens so the scientists are always right"
Atheism is ridiculous. It is tomfoolery. It is childish.
Aren't most Atheist driven by the frustration that many things in societies have been shaped by religion and continue to accommodate them and that the world would just be a better place if we got rid of all of that (in their opinion) nonsense and stuck to scientific fact based approaches?
Usually run by them, as they generally consider themselves to be intellectually superior
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
There are only two sane positions on the existence of God
The first is Belief. If you have been awarded the Gift of Faith, you don't refuse it, it is tremendously consoling (and brings serious health benefits, inter alia)
The second is Agnosticism. "I just don't know. I don't have the gift of Faith, so I do not believe, but who am I to say it cannot be?"
Atheism is simply absurd. "I am a semi-hairy bipedal ape on an obscure planet in the suburbs of one galaxy amongst fifty trillion and I get beaten by computers at card games yet I have personally worked out the fundamental truths of the universe and reality and there is no creator, no purpose to the cosmos, nothing, tho wait if a scientist tells me that there are an infinite number of parallel universes yes that's probably true, because, er, we have microwave ovens so the scientists are always right"
Atheism is ridiculous. It is tomfoolery. It is childish.
Aren't most Atheist driven by the frustration that many things in societies have been shaped by religion and continue to accommodate them and that the world would just be a better place if we got rid of all of that (in their opinion) nonsense and stuck to scientific fact based approaches?
Usually run by them, as they generally consider themselves to be intellectually superior
Well yes.
I see it really just another form of political ideologically. It is more than just we think people who are religious believe in something we don't, it is religion negatively affects the world, just as a marxist see capitalism as ruining it for the "people", and thus must be overturned.
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
You need to lay off the drugs
I forgot to add, atheists are boring
In fairness that is one argument I am not personally able to refute.
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
You need to lay off the drugs
I forgot to add, atheists are boring
Can I be agnostic but leaning towards atheist? The universe is amazing, and quite frankly quantum theory scares the shit out of me, as does the sheer size of the universe, and the concept of the Big Bang. But I don’t need to invoke a magic sky fairy to tell me how to live.
There are only two sane positions on the existence of God
The first is Belief. If you have been awarded the Gift of Faith, you don't refuse it, it is tremendously consoling (and brings serious health benefits, inter alia)
The second is Agnosticism. "I just don't know. I don't have the gift of Faith, so I do not believe, but who am I to say it cannot be?"
Atheism is simply absurd. "I am a semi-hairy bipedal ape on an obscure planet in the suburbs of one galaxy amongst fifty trillion and I get beaten by computers at card games yet I have personally worked out the fundamental truths of the universe and reality and there is no creator, no purpose to the cosmos, nothing, tho wait if a scientist tells me that there are an infinite number of parallel universes yes that's probably true, because, er, we have microwave ovens so the scientists are always right"
Atheism is ridiculous. It is tomfoolery. It is childish.
2 possibilities: either couldn't prevent Auschwitz, or could but decided not to. Because, what, if people were shot but not killed and then took 3 days to die, that's OK because they'll get extra rations of sweeties in heaven? Or because Yes, this is a really interesting theological issue which we call the Problem of Pain? Not a problem to me: God either doesn't exist or is a wanker. One or the other.
Every day I am reminded that Ukraine elected a comedian who turned out to be a leader, whilst we elected a leader who...
Well, you can all fill in the rest.
Zelenskyy excuse for his "interesting" financial arrangements were straight out of Boris playbook though....I never organised to offshore all my proceeds of tv shows rights for tax reasons, it was so the shows couldn't be influenced by politics....as believable as I didn't know it was a party.
Should Ukraine be able to make it through all this, it will be interesting what Zelensky could achieve as a leader that he could not (or would not) do beforehand given the politics and vested interests.
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
I can't be arsed to be militant about it, but I don't see that there is an interesting atheist argument to be had. It depends what you mean by God of course, but if your definition is both Omnipotent, and Loves Humanity, then you are fucked, because babies being machinegunned at Auschwitz while their mothers were burned alive. An Omnipotent god who actually gave a fuck would just terminate the experiment there, except that equally awful things have happened since the invention of fire, and he would have stopped it millennia back. So there may be some big ass wanker out there who created the world and stuff, but he is patently an arsehole.
Since Adam ate from the tree of knowledge man has controlled his own destiny. We get judged on how we lived our life after death at the day of judgement but there is always hope for those who commit to Christ
There are only two sane positions on the existence of God
The first is Belief. If you have been awarded the Gift of Faith, you don't refuse it, it is tremendously consoling (and brings serious health benefits, inter alia)
The second is Agnosticism. "I just don't know. I don't have the gift of Faith, so I do not believe, but who am I to say it cannot be?"
Atheism is simply absurd. "I am a semi-hairy bipedal ape on an obscure planet in the suburbs of one galaxy amongst fifty trillion and I get beaten by computers at card games yet I have personally worked out the fundamental truths of the universe and reality and there is no creator, no purpose to the cosmos, nothing, tho wait if a scientist tells me that there are an infinite number of parallel universes yes that's probably true, because, er, we have microwave ovens so the scientists are always right"
Atheism is ridiculous. It is tomfoolery. It is childish.
Aren't most Atheist driven by the frustration that many things in societies have been shaped by religion and continue to accommodate them and that the world would just be a better place if we got rid of all of that (in their opinion) nonsense and stuck to scientific fact based approaches?
Yes
Again militant atheism mirrors FBPE Remoanerism
If only Brexiteers would look at the facts - (of trade, customs agreements, patent law, whatever) - they would see the light and be sensible Remainers. The two sides (at their extremes) shout past each other, arguing on entirely different premises, they have totally different mindscapes
To extend the analogy @williamglenn seems to be the PB Mick West of Brexit, going from absolute skepticism to belief, as Mick West went from believing in UFOs to total disbelief, indeed hatred of the concept
Incidentally I exclude Richard Dawkins from my critique of atheists. He can seem like the classic atheist - who HATES God - but he himself has said he is an agnostic. He cannot know, He is fairly sure there is no God. But he cannot know 100%. So he is actually an agnostic, That is the only respectable position, other than Faith
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
I think there is a certain type of person who just can’t have their beliefs challenged and therefore lash out when that happens. Sad really.
Ps in Rome currently. Leon, you would love it - I’ll leave you to guess why…
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
Every day I am reminded that Ukraine elected a comedian who turned out to be a leader, whilst we elected a leader who...
Well, you can all fill in the rest.
Zelenskyy excuse for his "interesting" financial arrangements were straight out of Boris playbook though....I never organised to offshore all my proceeds of tv shows rights for tax reasons, it was so the shows couldn't be influenced by politics....as believable as I didn't know it was a party.
Should Ukraine be able to make it through all this, it will be interesting what Zelensky could achieve as a leader that he could not (or would not) do beforehand given the politics and vested interests.
On top of his undoubted bravery, he has shown himself to be a skilled political operator e.g. see how he has managed to use the right combinations of praise for historic moments of triumph with guilt tripping for historic bad for all the countries he has wanted help from.
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
There are only two sane positions on the existence of God
The first is Belief. If you have been awarded the Gift of Faith, you don't refuse it, it is tremendously consoling (and brings serious health benefits, inter alia)
The second is Agnosticism. "I just don't know. I don't have the gift of Faith, so I do not believe, but who am I to say it cannot be?"
Atheism is simply absurd. "I am a semi-hairy bipedal ape on an obscure planet in the suburbs of one galaxy amongst fifty trillion and I get beaten by computers at card games yet I have personally worked out the fundamental truths of the universe and reality and there is no creator, no purpose to the cosmos, nothing, tho wait if a scientist tells me that there are an infinite number of parallel universes yes that's probably true, because, er, we have microwave ovens so the scientists are always right"
Atheism is ridiculous. It is tomfoolery. It is childish.
Aren't most Atheist driven by the frustration that many things in societies have been shaped by religion and continue to accommodate them and that the world would just be a better place if we got rid of all of that (in their opinion) nonsense and stuck to scientific fact based approaches?
Usually run by them, as they generally consider themselves to be intellectually superior
Well yes.
I see it really just another form of political ideologically. It is more than just we think people who are religious believe in something we don't, it is religion negatively affects the world, just as a marxist see capitalism as ruining it for the "people", and thus must be overturned.
As an atheist I think religion has led to some great good as well as great harm. If we got rid of it we'd just invent something to fill the same functions. As noted, we already have done so.
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
I can't be arsed to be militant about it, but I don't see that there is an interesting atheist argument to be had. It depends what you mean by God of course, but if your definition is both Omnipotent, and Loves Humanity, then you are fucked, because babies being machinegunned at Auschwitz while their mothers were burned alive. An Omnipotent god who actually gave a fuck would just terminate the experiment there, except that equally awful things have happened since the invention of fire, and he would have stopped it millennia back. So there may be some big ass wanker out there who created the world and stuff, but he is patently an arsehole.
Since Adam ate from the tree of knowledge man has controlled his own destiny. We get judged on how we lived our life after death at the day of judgement but there is always hope for those who commit to Christ
I'll save it for the deathbed confessional, Emperor Constantine style. Hopefully doesn't mind people being tardy.
There are only two sane positions on the existence of God
The first is Belief. If you have been awarded the Gift of Faith, you don't refuse it, it is tremendously consoling (and brings serious health benefits, inter alia)
The second is Agnosticism. "I just don't know. I don't have the gift of Faith, so I do not believe, but who am I to say it cannot be?"
Atheism is simply absurd. "I am a semi-hairy bipedal ape on an obscure planet in the suburbs of one galaxy amongst fifty trillion and I get beaten by computers at card games yet I have personally worked out the fundamental truths of the universe and reality and there is no creator, no purpose to the cosmos, nothing, tho wait if a scientist tells me that there are an infinite number of parallel universes yes that's probably true, because, er, we have microwave ovens so the scientists are always right"
Atheism is ridiculous. It is tomfoolery. It is childish.
Aren't most Atheist driven by the frustration that many things in societies have been shaped by religion and continue to accommodate them and that the world would just be a better place if we got rid of all of that (in their opinion) nonsense and stuck to scientific fact based approaches?
Yes
Again militant atheism mirrors FBPE Remoanerism
If only Brexiteers would look at the facts - (of trade, customs agreements, patent law, whatever) - they would see the light and be sensible Remainers. The two sides (at their extremes) shout past each other, arguing on entirely different premises, they have totally different mindscapes
To extend the analogy @williamglenn seems to be the PB Mick West of Brexit, going from absolute skepticism to belief, as Mick West went from believing in UFOs to total disbelief, indeed hatred of the concept
Incidentally I exclude Richard Dawkins from my critique of atheists. He can seem like the classic atheist - who HATES God - but he himself has said he is an agnostic. He cannot know, He is fairly sure there is no God. But he cannot know 100%. So he is actually an agnostic, That is the only respectable position, other than Faith
Er...
"In his February 2002 TED talk entitled "Militant atheism", Dawkins urged all atheists to openly state their position and to fight the incursion of the church into politics and science.[106]"
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
@kle4 - That is roughly my position. Many of the core teachings of religion are really solid morals which our laws have been built upon and that isn't a bad thing at all.
Every day I am reminded that Ukraine elected a comedian who turned out to be a leader, whilst we elected a leader who...
Well, you can all fill in the rest.
Zelenskyy excuse for his "interesting" financial arrangements were straight out of Boris playbook though....I never organised to offshore all my proceeds of tv shows rights for tax reasons, it was so the shows couldn't be influenced by politics....as believable as I didn't know it was a party.
Should Ukraine be able to make it through all this, it will be interesting what Zelensky could achieve as a leader that he could not (or would not) do beforehand given the politics and vested interests.
On top of his undoubted bravery, he has shown himself to be a skilled political operator e.g. see how he has managed to use the right combinations of praise for historic moments of triumph with guilt tripping for historic bad for all the countries he has wanted help from.
Hands up all those who assumed he'd head for safety in the US as soon as the Russians invaded. 🤚
I'm ashamed to say that's the one thing I agreed with Putin on. Thankfully I woefully underestimated Zelenskiy.
There are only two sane positions on the existence of God
The first is Belief. If you have been awarded the Gift of Faith, you don't refuse it, it is tremendously consoling (and brings serious health benefits, inter alia)
The second is Agnosticism. "I just don't know. I don't have the gift of Faith, so I do not believe, but who am I to say it cannot be?"
Atheism is simply absurd. "I am a semi-hairy bipedal ape on an obscure planet in the suburbs of one galaxy amongst fifty trillion and I get beaten by computers at card games yet I have personally worked out the fundamental truths of the universe and reality and there is no creator, no purpose to the cosmos, nothing, tho wait if a scientist tells me that there are an infinite number of parallel universes yes that's probably true, because, er, we have microwave ovens so the scientists are always right"
Atheism is ridiculous. It is tomfoolery. It is childish.
Aren't most Atheist driven by the frustration that many things in societies have been shaped by religion and continue to accommodate them and that the world would just be a better place if we got rid of all of that (in their opinion) nonsense and stuck to scientific fact based approaches?
Yes
Again militant atheism mirrors FBPE Remoanerism
If only Brexiteers would look at the facts - (of trade, customs agreements, patent law, whatever) - they would see the light and be sensible Remainers. The two sides (at their extremes) shout past each other, arguing on entirely different premises, they have totally different mindscapes
To extend the analogy @williamglenn seems to be the PB Mick West of Brexit, going from absolute skepticism to belief, as Mick West went from believing in UFOs to total disbelief, indeed hatred of the concept
Incidentally I exclude Richard Dawkins from my critique of atheists. He can seem like the classic atheist - who HATES God - but he himself has said he is an agnostic. He cannot know, He is fairly sure there is no God. But he cannot know 100%. So he is actually an agnostic, That is the only respectable position, other than Faith
Er...
"In his February 2002 TED talk entitled "Militant atheism", Dawkins urged all atheists to openly state their position and to fight the incursion of the church into politics and science.[106]"
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
You need to lay off the drugs
The National Secular Society does
Does what?
Campaigns and meets in halls and waves banners
Twit, there is no comparison between the two. In my entire life I have never come across a meeting or a single banner.
Every day I am reminded that Ukraine elected a comedian who turned out to be a leader, whilst we elected a leader who...
Well, you can all fill in the rest.
Zelenskyy excuse for his "interesting" financial arrangements were straight out of Boris playbook though....I never organised to offshore all my proceeds of tv shows rights for tax reasons, it was so the shows couldn't be influenced by politics....as believable as I didn't know it was a party.
Should Ukraine be able to make it through all this, it will be interesting what Zelensky could achieve as a leader that he could not (or would not) do beforehand given the politics and vested interests.
On top of his undoubted bravery, he has shown himself to be a skilled political operator e.g. see how he has managed to use the right combinations of praise for historic moments of triumph with guilt tripping for historic bad for all the countries he has wanted help from.
Hands up all those who assumed he'd head for safety in the US as soon as the Russians invaded. 🤚
I'm ashamed to say that's the one thing I agreed with Putin on. Thankfully I woefully underestimated Zelenskiy.
Obviously we have no idea how things might have played out differently or could still play out differently. But having a government in exile at the end of the day would be preferable to them all dead.
What we will never know is if despite him turning down the US offer how much of that is propaganda i.e. I wouldn't be surprised (or criticise him) if there was some sort of agreement that should Russia get into Kyiv there were special ops ready to pull out key people.
There are only two sane positions on the existence of God
The first is Belief. If you have been awarded the Gift of Faith, you don't refuse it, it is tremendously consoling (and brings serious health benefits, inter alia)
The second is Agnosticism. "I just don't know. I don't have the gift of Faith, so I do not believe, but who am I to say it cannot be?"
Atheism is simply absurd. "I am a semi-hairy bipedal ape on an obscure planet in the suburbs of one galaxy amongst fifty trillion and I get beaten by computers at card games yet I have personally worked out the fundamental truths of the universe and reality and there is no creator, no purpose to the cosmos, nothing, tho wait if a scientist tells me that there are an infinite number of parallel universes yes that's probably true, because, er, we have microwave ovens so the scientists are always right"
Atheism is ridiculous. It is tomfoolery. It is childish.
Aren't most Atheist driven by the frustration that many things in societies have been shaped by religion and continue to accommodate them and that the world would just be a better place if we got rid of all of that (in their opinion) nonsense and stuck to scientific fact based approaches?
Yes
Again militant atheism mirrors FBPE Remoanerism
If only Brexiteers would look at the facts - (of trade, customs agreements, patent law, whatever) - they would see the light and be sensible Remainers. The two sides (at their extremes) shout past each other, arguing on entirely different premises, they have totally different mindscapes
To extend the analogy @williamglenn seems to be the PB Mick West of Brexit, going from absolute skepticism to belief, as Mick West went from believing in UFOs to total disbelief, indeed hatred of the concept
Incidentally I exclude Richard Dawkins from my critique of atheists. He can seem like the classic atheist - who HATES God - but he himself has said he is an agnostic. He cannot know, He is fairly sure there is no God. But he cannot know 100%. So he is actually an agnostic, That is the only respectable position, other than Faith
Er...
"In his February 2002 TED talk entitled "Militant atheism", Dawkins urged all atheists to openly state their position and to fight the incursion of the church into politics and science.[106]"
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
I can't be arsed to be militant about it, but I don't see that there is an interesting atheist argument to be had. It depends what you mean by God of course, but if your definition is both Omnipotent, and Loves Humanity, then you are fucked, because babies being machinegunned at Auschwitz while their mothers were burned alive. An Omnipotent god who actually gave a fuck would just terminate the experiment there, except that equally awful things have happened since the invention of fire, and he would have stopped it millennia back. So there may be some big ass wanker out there who created the world and stuff, but he is patently an arsehole.
Since Adam ate from the tree of knowledge man has controlled his own destiny. We get judged on how we lived our life after death at the day of judgement but there is always hope for those who commit to Christ
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
I can't be arsed to be militant about it, but I don't see that there is an interesting atheist argument to be had. It depends what you mean by God of course, but if your definition is both Omnipotent, and Loves Humanity, then you are fucked, because babies being machinegunned at Auschwitz while their mothers were burned alive. An Omnipotent god who actually gave a fuck would just terminate the experiment there, except that equally awful things have happened since the invention of fire, and he would have stopped it millennia back. So there may be some big ass wanker out there who created the world and stuff, but he is patently an arsehole.
Since Adam ate from the tree of knowledge man has controlled his own destiny. We get judged on how we lived our life after death at the day of judgement but there is always hope for those who commit to Christ
You are worrying me now HY, referencing Genesis 2.4 onwards. That reads like you are erring on the side of creationism.
I trust I am wrong, otherwise we need a little chat about the birds and the bees.
There are only two sane positions on the existence of God
The first is Belief. If you have been awarded the Gift of Faith, you don't refuse it, it is tremendously consoling (and brings serious health benefits, inter alia)
The second is Agnosticism. "I just don't know. I don't have the gift of Faith, so I do not believe, but who am I to say it cannot be?"
Atheism is simply absurd. "I am a semi-hairy bipedal ape on an obscure planet in the suburbs of one galaxy amongst fifty trillion and I get beaten by computers at card games yet I have personally worked out the fundamental truths of the universe and reality and there is no creator, no purpose to the cosmos, nothing, tho wait if a scientist tells me that there are an infinite number of parallel universes yes that's probably true, because, er, we have microwave ovens so the scientists are always right"
Atheism is ridiculous. It is tomfoolery. It is childish.
2 possibilities: either couldn't prevent Auschwitz, or could but decided not to. Because, what, if people were shot but not killed and then took 3 days to die, that's OK because they'll get extra rations of sweeties in heaven? Or because Yes, this is a really interesting theological issue which we call the Problem of Pain? Not a problem to me: God either doesn't exist or is a wanker. One or the other.
One critical flaw in your argument (and hello Ishmael).
You are using human logic to try and work out the meaning of God. Given God is omnipotent and omniscient, it is impossible trying to use human logic to work out their intentions.
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
You need to lay off the drugs
The National Secular Society does
Does what?
Campaigns and meets in halls and waves banners
Twit, there is no comparison between the two. In my entire life I have never come across a meeting or a single banner.
Have you never been to a humanist funeral? Terrible things
I had a militantly atheist cousin (who was a lovely guy, with many friends, but adamant on this point: he was a God-hater)
The funeral was in some dour municipal building and the emotional highpoint was singing a couple of rugby songs, OMG. Depressing, bleak, sad. Way beyond the sadness of a normal funeral. Then his pointless corpse was burned. Bye bye
No. No no no. You NEED religion at the end. You need the fierce belief or even faint possibility that life - your life, your life just gone - has intrinsic meaning, throughout time and space, and conscious life somehow makes the universe possible. Religion is our noblest way of expressing this, for all its flaws
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
I can't be arsed to be militant about it, but I don't see that there is an interesting atheist argument to be had. It depends what you mean by God of course, but if your definition is both Omnipotent, and Loves Humanity, then you are fucked, because babies being machinegunned at Auschwitz while their mothers were burned alive. An Omnipotent god who actually gave a fuck would just terminate the experiment there, except that equally awful things have happened since the invention of fire, and he would have stopped it millennia back. So there may be some big ass wanker out there who created the world and stuff, but he is patently an arsehole.
Since Adam ate from the tree of knowledge man has controlled his own destiny. We get judged on how we lived our life after death at the day of judgement but there is always hope for those who commit to Christ
You are worrying me now HY, quoting Genesis 2.4 onwards. That reads like you are erring on the side of creationism.
I trust I am wrong, otherwise we need a little chat about the birds and the bees.
Been there and done that with @hyufd and in fairness he did have quite a good and imaginative argument which I can't remember now.
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
You need to lay off the drugs
The National Secular Society does
Does what?
Campaigns and meets in halls and waves banners
Twit, there is no comparison between the two. In my entire life I have never come across a meeting or a single banner.
Have you never been to a humanist funeral? Terrible things
I had a militantly atheist cousin (who was a lovely guy, with many friends, but adamant on this point: he was a God-hater)
The funeral was in some dour municipal building and the emotional highpoint was singing a couple of rugby songs, OMG. Depressing, bleak, sad. Way beyond the sadness of a normal funeral. Then his pointless corpse was burned. Bye bye
No. No no no. You NEED religion at the end. You need the fierce belief or even faint possibility that life - your life, your life just gone - has intrinsic meaning, throughout time and space, and conscious life somehow makes the universe possible. Religion is our noblest way of expressing this, for all its flaws
Best (if best is the right word) funeral I have been to, Quakers. Something really nice about people just standing up and telling a story about the person who died.
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
You need to lay off the drugs
The National Secular Society does
Does what?
Campaigns and meets in halls and waves banners
Twit, there is no comparison between the two. In my entire life I have never come across a meeting or a single banner.
Have you never been to a humanist funeral? Terrible things
I had a militantly atheist cousin (who was a lovely guy, with many friends, but adamant on this point: he was a God-hater)
The funeral was in some dour municipal building and the emotional highpoint was singing a couple of rugby songs, OMG. Depressing, bleak, sad. Way beyond the sadness of a normal funeral. Then his pointless corpse was burned. Bye bye
No. No no no. You NEED religion at the end. You need the fierce belief or even faint possibility that life - your life, your life just gone - has intrinsic meaning, throughout time and space, and conscious life somehow makes the universe possible. Religion is our noblest way of expressing this, for all its flaws
I beg to differ. My mum's humanist funeral in February was very moving.
I wrote an 8000 word essay in The Atlantic on how terrible social media is. My friend @wolfejosh just condensed it down to 15 tweets that tell the story and capture the high points. OK, it has its uses...
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
You need to lay off the drugs
The National Secular Society does
Does what?
Campaigns and meets in halls and waves banners
Twit, there is no comparison between the two. In my entire life I have never come across a meeting or a single banner.
Have you never been to a humanist funeral? Terrible things
I had a militantly atheist cousin (who was a lovely guy, with many friends, but adamant on this point: he was a God-hater)
The funeral was in some dour municipal building and the emotional highpoint was singing a couple of rugby songs, OMG. Depressing, bleak, sad. Way beyond the sadness of a normal funeral. Then his pointless corpse was burned. Bye bye
No. No no no. You NEED religion at the end. You need the fierce belief or even faint possibility that life - your life, your life just gone - has intrinsic meaning, throughout time and space, and conscious life somehow makes the universe possible. Religion is our noblest way of expressing this, for all its flaws
Best (if best is the right word) funeral I have been to, Quakers. Something really nice about people just standing up and telling a story about the person who died.
The Quakers are admirable in multiple ways. Their worship surely inspired the spontaneous confessions at the heart of Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous
And, by the by, AA/NA which are explicitly religious ("the higher power") remain the only proven way of quitting drugs and drink and staying clean. They exploit the God Module in the human brain so as to cure us. We are wired for Faith, might as well enjoy the benefits
And on that positive note, may God keep you well, PB, and goodnight to all, the heathen and the saved alike
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
You need to lay off the drugs
The National Secular Society does
Does what?
Campaigns and meets in halls and waves banners
Twit, there is no comparison between the two. In my entire life I have never come across a meeting or a single banner.
Have you never been to a humanist funeral? Terrible things
I had a militantly atheist cousin (who was a lovely guy, with many friends, but adamant on this point: he was a God-hater)
The funeral was in some dour municipal building and the emotional highpoint was singing a couple of rugby songs, OMG. Depressing, bleak, sad. Way beyond the sadness of a normal funeral. Then his pointless corpse was burned. Bye bye
No. No no no. You NEED religion at the end. You need the fierce belief or even faint possibility that life - your life, your life just gone - has intrinsic meaning, throughout time and space, and conscious life somehow makes the universe possible. Religion is our noblest way of expressing this, for all its flaws
I beg to differ. My mum's humanist funeral in February was very moving.
I agree. My father in law's funeral was fantastic, mainly due to the fact that all his children, with the exception of my wife, are professional actors or talented amateurs and they put on a cracking moving do.
I have left my body to a medical students, but as Leon has pointed out I am boring.
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
You need to lay off the drugs
The National Secular Society does
Does what?
Campaigns and meets in halls and waves banners
Twit, there is no comparison between the two. In my entire life I have never come across a meeting or a single banner.
Have you never been to a humanist funeral? Terrible things
I had a militantly atheist cousin (who was a lovely guy, with many friends, but adamant on this point: he was a God-hater)
The funeral was in some dour municipal building and the emotional highpoint was singing a couple of rugby songs, OMG. Depressing, bleak, sad. Way beyond the sadness of a normal funeral. Then his pointless corpse was burned. Bye bye
No. No no no. You NEED religion at the end. You need the fierce belief or even faint possibility that life - your life, your life just gone - has intrinsic meaning, throughout time and space, and conscious life somehow makes the universe possible. Religion is our noblest way of expressing this, for all its flaws
I have been to two humanist funerals, neither were depressing, in fact they were quite uplifting celebrations reminiscing the life of the deceased. On the other hand I have been to both dour and uplifting faith based services.
Is there absolutely anything that is counter to your focus that shouldn't be condemned as heresy? For example, the opposites to your views on Brexit, Conservatism, reactionary social policy, religion...
Have you never been to a humanist funeral? Terrible things
I had a militantly atheist cousin (who was a lovely guy, with many friends, but adamant on this point: he was a God-hater)
The funeral was in some dour municipal building and the emotional highpoint was singing a couple of rugby songs, OMG. Depressing, bleak, sad. Way beyond the sadness of a normal funeral. Then his pointless corpse was burned. Bye bye
No. No no no. You NEED religion at the end. You need the fierce belief or even faint possibility that life - your life, your life just gone - has intrinsic meaning, throughout time and space, and conscious life somehow makes the universe possible. Religion is our noblest way of expressing this, for all its flaws
This sounds like an echo of the Johnson/Starmer comparison - do we want an amoral PM who makes us laugh or a serious fellow who might solve some problems? I ave an elderly relative close to death who is very religious, and views it with quiet enthusiasm - it'll be great to see his parents and friends again, he feels. I'm glad for him, but it does feel like living in a fairy tale, though I'd never say that to him.
By the way, a friend gave her husband a humanist funeral, with a thoughtful, compassionate woman acting as the equivalent of a priest. It was a touching affair and she got a lot out of it. With the right people, anything can be made genuine and moving.
I had a boozy picnic with friends in Green Park yesterday
People who would not normally EVER discuss UFOs calmly debated whether the UAPs in all the footage and evidence of the last four years are: alien drones, actual aliens, a mass hallucination etc
It is going mainstream
I doubt that'll help the debate.
It might, inasmuch as a lot of people now feel emboldened to discuss the subject, without the fear of being labelled a lunatic
A senior Turkish culture guy I met when I was in eastern Turkey, two weeks ago, told me HIS UFO story. As a 12 year old he saw a huge spacecraft hovering over his house. "Definitely not of human origin"
The story is not exceptional, the fact he felt able to chat about it, and wanted to talk about it - unprompted - WAS notable.
Did you catch the recent series with Craig Charles? Supposedly the greatest evidence for UFOs/UAPs. Lots of rehashed old cases (Rendlesham etc) plus the same UAP footage over and over again. In the era of mass camera phones you have to ask why the evidence isn’t getting any better. I used to imagine what we’d have if only people had cameras. Now they do, and we aren’t getting any pictures. Some of the stuff on the series was laughably poor. The lights over a US city that were military flares, exactly as I’ve seen all the time on Salisbury plain. A supposed welsh crash site where a bonkers women found some damaged trees which looked exactly the kind of damage you get from heavy forestry work. It’s all so weak. No doubt there are some sightings that so far have defied explanation. But that doesn’t need to invoke alien tech, or diamens from another dimension or whatever.
I have no idea why anyone would look at iPhone footage from an anonymous citizen when there’s verified military footage and telemetry with attributed eye witness testimony from multiple reputable sources. Or listen to a Welsh woman’s anecdote about some tree damage, when a few weeks ago the ex head of the French security services said it was an open secret among the nuclear nations that they regularly track super sonic underwater objects on the sub sea tracking systems that none of them officially admit to operating.
Ex head? The classic. No doubt he has a book, or is doing the paid interview rounds. I’ve seen the verified military footage. Not that impressed to be honest. Is that it? The point about iPhone footage is the coverage. That and ring doorbells, cctv etc. We are recording the planet, yet the evidence is if anything getting weaker. We dont agree on this. I think you are pretty convinced, whereas I am totally unconvinced. That’s the joy of pb.
Why ex US PRESIDENTS tho? eg Obama?
He has no need for publicity or money, his books already sell bazillions, his place in history is secure; if anything, his suddenly sober admission on US TV that "there is stuff we cannot explain" made him look quirky and unreliable. So why say it? He had nothing to gain and quite a lot to lose
Yet he said it
No idea in his case. Shits and giggles maybe. I’m reminded of senator John Glennon on Frasier, talking about seeing things in space. Obviously fictional fun within the show. I’m also sure that there are things that haven’t been explained to date. The trouble I have is the leap from the evidence to the touted explainations. Like Rimmer, it always seems to be aliens.
No, sorry, "shits and giggles" is not a good explanation. This is where the Entirely Skeptical case collapses. Too many senior Americans have come out and said Truly Weird Stuff, in the last few years
This certainly does not mean we are being buzzed by Martians. It does mean there is a puzzle which has not been solved
Or, as others have suggested, there is a spin from the armed forces about this designed to increase defence spending.
Yes, that is certainly possible
Although, after Ukraine, it would seem a rather byzantine and laborious way to get more money when all they have to do is point and say Look, Ukraine, and the entire western world will double its defence expenditure in a week
This kind of stuff is decades old. People see something weird in the sky. A few days later they have a symptom and add A to B and make alien propulsion systems. I’ll admit, I’m a colosal skeptic. But like Mulder I want to believe. I’ve grown up on Fortean stuff. I’ve dreamed of seeing a ghost, an ABC, a UFO (as was). I’m 49 and so far nothing. I’ve seen barn owls silently ghosting by, that my aunt saw as the ghost of an old lady. I saw an ABC in the field next to our house, that turned out to be a normal black cat. I’ve seen flares on the plain that others describe as UFOs and known exactly what they are. I’ve seen the emergence of camera phones and to some extent it’s killing the Fortean world. The old classic mysteries are getting slowly debunked. I still believe, but it’s getting harder.
It's noticeable that the chief video Debunker on social media is Mick West, a Brit, who used to be a convinced Ufologist. A believer. Now he spends his entire life debunking UFO videos, always with politeness, often quite effectively, sometimes unconvincingly. And yet there is the sense that he has some personal vendetta against the concept. Like UFOs have Let Him Down too many times, so he will never ever ever believe, not again. He'd probably debunk a video taken by himself of them landing on his patio and doing his wife up the Bakerloo Line with a probe the size of Kamchatka
It reminds me of Orwell's description of atheists "they don't just not believe in God, they actively hate God, and want you to know it"
They are the mirror image of the UFO true believers who believe EVERYTHING, and anyone with doubts is a conspiratorial heretic or a Man in Black sent to erase our memories
I wonder if this is a feature not a bug of the human brain, when it comes to seriously important belief systems: you get Total Believers and Total Skeptics, and both are beyond persuasion, yet they can suddenly switch to the opposite position, like the magnetic polarity of a planet abruptly inverting
I don't know where you get this atheists hate god from. As I don't believe in him I don't have any emotional thoughts about him at all and I have yet to meet an atheist who does. God never crops up unless a religious person brings it up. You appear to be imposing your personality traits onto those you disagree with. It is the same with Brexit. Just because you are angry about it you assume us remainers are spending day and night fretting. We aren't.
So in a nut shell I don't believe in God and I am a remainer, but I only discuss either here and only if someone else brings it up and I am not angry about either unlike your good self.
A friend of ours is a militant Atheist and very well educated (well known Grammar School + Oxford). Try pointing out there are serious questions about the Atheist argument - and I get it, everyone has their own opinions - he flies into a rage. I find that totally illogical.
Exactly
You see precisely the same dichotomy with the "lab leak hypothesis". Or indeed Brexit, FFS
There are people who cannot entertain the idea it came from a lab, and just discussing it makes them weirdly angry and hateful. Like extreme Remoaners
So I suggest this is a flaw in the human brain when it comes to really important beliefs, and belief systems, and nothing to do with the validity or otherwise of the belief in question.
At either end of the spectrum there are the Faithful who ALWAYS believe, and then there are the anti-Faithful who will NEVER believe - and the latter can be just as foam flecked, ranty and embarrassingly passionate as the boggle-eyed believers
On all these subjects you are imagining there are hoards of loonies on the other side of the argument because you want them to be there because you are so angry yourself.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
The independant Bank of England has responsibility for UK inflation.
Inflation is not entirely responsive to being controlled of course. But if government were to borrow more to help pay people's bills then the B of E might fell the need to increaseinterest rates more than they would otherwise, to cap inflation..
Yes, I had it some years ago, and get occasional recurrences. I was greatly helped in the first attack by the Epley manoevre. Being helped by it is quite diagnostic, as there are other causes of vertigo.
Comments
We get a lot more posts on here complaining about Remainers than we do Remainers complaining about Brexit.
Take your latest fantasy. Religious people are protesting their beliefs all the time and I have no problem with that but it is bonkers to say atheists do like wise. We don't meet up on Sundays in our halls or march through the streets with banners or try and convert Christians. Nope we spend 99.9% of the time not even thinking about it.
You need to lay off the drugs
I see it really just another form of political ideologically. It is more than just we think people who are religious believe in something we don't, it is religion negatively affects the world, just as a marxist see capitalism as ruining it for the "people", and thus must be overturned.
Again militant atheism mirrors FBPE Remoanerism
If only Brexiteers would look at the facts - (of trade, customs agreements, patent law, whatever) - they would see the light and be sensible Remainers. The two sides (at their extremes) shout past each other, arguing on entirely different premises, they have totally different mindscapes
To extend the analogy @williamglenn seems to be the PB Mick West of Brexit, going from absolute skepticism to belief, as Mick West went from believing in UFOs to total disbelief, indeed hatred of the concept
Incidentally I exclude Richard Dawkins from my critique of atheists. He can seem like the classic atheist - who HATES God - but he himself has said he is an agnostic. He cannot know, He is fairly sure there is no God. But he cannot know 100%. So he is actually an agnostic, That is the only respectable position, other than Faith
Ps in Rome currently. Leon, you would love it - I’ll leave you to guess why…
"In his February 2002 TED talk entitled "Militant atheism", Dawkins urged all atheists to openly state their position and to fight the incursion of the church into politics and science.[106]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins#Criticism_of_religion
I'm ashamed to say that's the one thing I agreed with Putin on. Thankfully I woefully underestimated Zelenskiy.
"Outspoken atheist' Dawkins admits he is agnostic"
https://www.theweek.co.uk/religion/religion/45552/outspoken-atheist-dawkins-admits-he-agnostic
What we will never know is if despite him turning down the US offer how much of that is propaganda i.e. I wouldn't be surprised (or criticise him) if there was some sort of agreement that should Russia get into Kyiv there were special ops ready to pull out key people.
https://twitter.com/osinttechnical/status/1515818122036621321?s=21&t=euUUf3ZqcjOAWCg84siZEQ
https://twitter.com/Euan_MacDonald/status/1515622100207292419?s=20&t=oWahXUjnLC5SZNUtEDDXnQ
I trust I am wrong, otherwise we need a little chat about the birds and the bees.
You are using human logic to try and work out the meaning of God. Given God is omnipotent and omniscient, it is impossible trying to use human logic to work out their intentions.
I had a militantly atheist cousin (who was a lovely guy, with many friends, but adamant on this point: he was a God-hater)
The funeral was in some dour municipal building and the emotional highpoint was singing a couple of rugby songs, OMG. Depressing, bleak, sad. Way beyond the sadness of a normal funeral. Then his pointless corpse was burned. Bye bye
No. No no no. You NEED religion at the end. You need the fierce belief or even faint possibility that life - your life, your life just gone - has intrinsic meaning, throughout time and space, and conscious life somehow makes the universe possible. Religion is our noblest way of expressing this, for all its flaws
just condensed it down to 15 tweets that tell the story and capture the high points. OK, it has its uses...
https://twitter.com/JonHaidt/status/1515819631759564802?s=20&t=OSEO93QiI9W0u68HuFo8SA
And, by the by, AA/NA which are explicitly religious ("the higher power") remain the only proven way of quitting drugs and drink and staying clean. They exploit the God Module in the human brain so as to cure us. We are wired for Faith, might as well enjoy the benefits
And on that positive note, may God keep you well, PB, and goodnight to all, the heathen and the saved alike
It looks like two fires must have started simultaneously, too. Quite a coincidence.
I have left my body to a medical students, but as Leon has pointed out I am boring.
Is there absolutely anything that is counter to your focus that shouldn't be condemned as heresy? For example, the opposites to your views on Brexit, Conservatism, reactionary social policy, religion...
By the way, a friend gave her husband a humanist funeral, with a thoughtful, compassionate woman acting as the equivalent of a priest. It was a touching affair and she got a lot out of it. With the right people, anything can be made genuine and moving.
Inflation is not entirely responsive to being controlled of course. But if government were to borrow more to help pay people's bills then the B of E might fell the need to increaseinterest rates more than they would otherwise, to cap inflation..
Sorry PB!
Unlike Putin, on seeing that image.....