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Re: I'm just carrying on a conversation. Dreaded Anomaly Send a noteboard - 05/12/2010 07:56:43 PM
Just curious. How could I in theory go about checking whether men walked on the moon? How would I go about proving this to myself or to a skeptic in a manner that would actually verify it happened without relying on someone elses word? I am an agnostic in this. I have to admit that some of the evidence for it looks and sounds pretty dodgy. Fortunately my faith in science doesn't rely on that. If it ever came out it was staged I would just shrug my shoulders. It just isn't that big of a deal if someone did that 40 years ago. But it isn't something that I can duplicate or that anyone else has the spare cash to duplicate.


If you could go to the moon (a big if, but bear with me), there would either be evidence that men walked there, or there wouldn't be. That's what "falsifiable" means: in theory, the assertion that men walked on the moon could be shown to be false, by a lack of physical evidence.

Some people are more sensitive to spiritual things than others. For them it is hard to imagine that other people may lack that extra sense that seems such a natural part of them. They don't understand how someone can not feel the things they do and attribute it to the other person not trying hard enough or blocking themselves from feeling it on purpose. If you were to tell them that their experiences were not duplicatible they might not believe that you had ever tried to actually duplicate the experience because when they experimented it worked for them. It takes awhile to figure out that we are not all made the same and to allow for that in our judgements of each other. Just because one person can do something and the other can't does not make them inferior or mean that they are lying or crazy or whatever.


I do understand what you mean here. An analogy I came up regarding this goes as follows: Imagine two people, one raised on land (living in the open air) and one raised deep under the ocean, surrounded by water. They would both find it uncomfortable, if not intolerable, to switch places. The first one would be disturbed by the increased pressure, while the second one would feel incredibly vulnerable without being immersed in the comforting sea.

Nevertheless, my main objection to religious experiences is not the fact of the experiences themselves. It's the idea that I should accept the experiencer's own religious explanation, when logically simpler ones exist, and the experiencer is not necessarily particularly qualified to come up with an explanation for the experience.

And you are right. It is nice that they have proof now. A whole new world of possibilities has opened up to their view.

:)
Tash


:)
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