???????? Monsters, Ghosts and Gods: Why We Believehttp://www.livescience.com/culture/08081…
Monsters are everywhere these days, and belief in them is as strong as ever. What’s harder to believe is why so many people buy into hazy evidence, shady schemes and downright false reports that perpetuate myths that often have just one ultimate truth: They put money in the pockets of their purveyors.
The bottom line, according to several interviews with people who study these things: People want to believe, and most simply can’t help it.
“Many people quite simply just want to believe,” said Brian Cronk, a professor of psychology at Missouri Western State University. “The human brain is always trying to determine why things happen, and when the reason is not clear, we tend to make up some pretty bizarre explanations.”
The gods must be crazy
Since people have been people, experts figure, they have believed in the supernatural, from gods to ghosts and now every sort of monster in between.
“While it is difficult to know for certain, the tendency to believe in the paranormal appears to be there from the beginning,” explained Christopher Bader, a Baylor sociologist and colleague of Mencken. “What changes is the content of the paranormal. For example, very few people believe in faeries and elves these days. But as belief in faeries faded, other beliefs, such as belief in UFOs, emerged to take their place.”
Figuring out why people are this way is a little trickier.
“It is an artifact of our brain’s desire to find cause and effect,” Cronk, the psychology professor, said in an email interview. “That ability to predict the future is what makes humans ’smart’ but it also has side effects like superstitions [and] belief in the paranormal.”
“Humans first started believing in the supernatural because they were trying to understand things they couldn’t explain,” says Benjamin Radford, a book author, paranormal investigator and managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. “It’s basically the same process as mythology: At one point people didn’t understand why the sun rose and set each day, so they suggested that a chariot pulled the sun across the heavens.”
Before modern scientific explanations of germ theory, explained Radford, who writes the “Bad Science” column for LiveScience, people didn’t understand how diseases could travel from one person to another. “They didn’t understand why a child was stillborn, or why a drought occurred, so they came to believe that such events had supernatural causes,” he said.
“All societies have invoked the supernatural to explain things beyond their control and understanding, especially good and bad events,” Radford said. “In many places — even today — people believe that disasters or bad luck is caused by witches or curses.”
Which raises the bigger question: With science having answered so many questions in the past couple centuries, why do paranormal beliefs remain so strong?
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Humans are so smart that we have expansive imaginations but too stupid to tell the difference between something in our minds and something in reality.
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???????? The Superstitious Pigeonhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15PNrk94…
???????? The problem with anecdoteshttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPqerbz8K…
???????? Anecdotes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotes
???????? Open-mindedness http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaq…
???????? Skewed views of sciencehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-h9XntsSE…
???????? LiveScience Topics: Cults, Religion, Paranormalhttp://www.livescience.com/topic/cults-r…
???????? Evidencehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence
Evidence in its broadest sense includes everything that is used to determine or demonstrate the truth of an assertion. Giving or procuring evidence is the process of using those things that are either a) presumed to be true, or b) were themselves proven via evidence, to demonstrate an assertion’s truth. Evidence is the currency by which one fulfills the burden of proof.
???????? Why Evidence for the Paranormal Doesn’t Improvehttp://www.livescience.com/strangenews/0…
It seems that every month or two some new piece of evidence surfaces that promises to shed light on an unexplained mystery: A miraculous healing story here, a Borneo river monster photo there. Yet like the proverbial carrot before the donkey, final evidence is always in sight but never obtained.
???????? I have ‘evidence’ of the existence of Unicorns…http://www.adultswim.com/video/?episodeI…
(And that’s what I used to make these sandwiches!)
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1. You can’t prove that something doesn’t exist, that’s illogical.
2. Therefore, the burden of proof/evidence is on the believers in god.
3. There is no proof/evidence of god.
4. You can decide for yourself which one of these you believe:
a) There is no evidence of god existing , but we cannot prove that he doesn’t exist so we must place him on the “we don’t know list”, Since we cannot prove that fairies and dragons aren’t real either, we must also place them on the “We don’t know list”. Anything that I make up off the top of my head must also be placed on this list simply because you cannot prove that it doesn’t exist. Therefore there is no such thing as non-existence.
b) Fairies, dragons, unicorns, UFOs, Santa, etc. are regarded as non-existent because there is no indisputable evidence of their existence. God should be labeled non-existent for the very same reason.
You decide which is more logical.
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EVERY link provided is a direct source of evidence for my opinion. The Guidelines of Yahoo! Answers specifically says that you are REQUIRED to cite your sources. Citing sources also does NOT mean a misuse of the question/answer format. I am merely following the Guidelines by providing links to support my opinion. Please READ THE Guidelines… http://answers.yahoo.com/info/community_…
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Yes, considering that some people have encountered ghosts which date back to centuries before. The idea of ghosts is within all cultures for as long as you can date back. Some cultures worship them, believing that they’re their ancestors, and have for thousands of years. I’m pretty sure that if I die and begin to haunt my home, I’ll be able to enjoy doing that for many, many years.