Is anyone out there terrified of demons/devils IRL?

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I'm very easily scared. I do believe rather in bad and good spirits than in the typical demon/angel pattern. Hm.. I'm a religious person, I think, due to my daily prayers in particular to my guardian angel (I strongly believe in guardian angels).

However, in my younger years (around 8-12) I used to view a lot of horror movies. But this kind of "inspiration" is really not a good thing for someone with a tantivy imagination like me.

Sometimes I couldn't sleep the whole night because of the shadows around me. In my mind they all were monsters.

Even today when I'm alone in a house I get really really scared.

Some of these things comes from a strange tradition in my blood-line. My grandmother and my mother were people who claims to actually able to SEE and/or HEAR ghosts or ghostlike beings.

My mother were able to leave her body while asleep and to journey with her spirit. She was famous of that (she died in 1998) She could remember EVERYTHING she had seen while in her astral body.

One day she told me she had seen the trees nearby of our house in a strange lifeless condition (although the trees were very healthy and there were nothing to worry about).Later this year our renter decides to fell the trees.

I believe my mother were sometimes able to see future things. My grandma were a known psychic sort of human (although only known for that by her relatives for shge never spoke to strangers of her abilities).

I'm sometimes experience a strange condition where I am half asleep and half awake. In this state of mind my body is paralysed and I swear I can hear whispers of beings I cannot see or feel. These voices always try to scare me in which they are always succesfull. This mostly only happen if I sleep alone. It's really scaring and I have to admit that I maybe inherited some of the strange abilities of my mother (fortunatly limited to these half dreams).

I really don't blame anyone who calls me crazy now (but please do not name me a liar because I'm not).

These days I have such a dream once a year (and that's okay I guess).
 

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Gadodel said:


Hmmm....

"I'm your Boogie Man, Boogie Man; turn me on!"

I don't know, I am kind of afraid of Disco....KC of The SunShine Band most certainly could be a Greater Fiend...

:)

I take it you haven't heard the Rob Zombie remix of this song? :D
 

RangerWickett said:
I was over at my ex-girlfriend's house, and I insisted on staying and sleeping in her room so she could calm my shattered nerves.

[Ted Kennedy Voice]And, uh, did that work?[/Ted Kennedy Voice]

;)
 

Teflon Billy said:
I'm not, and I think being afraid of "demons" is a sign of a weak mind.

Sorry if that digs at religion, but I don't believe in the boogeyman.


Ditto that. Besides, like someone in another post said, flesh and blood humans walking around out there are often a lot more scary then any folk tale demons your mind can create.

I play D&D because these things are amusing to me. I like to dream that somewhere there is a place where monsters and unicorns and elves all live ; but until someone shows me that place , I will take it as fiction. Interesting and entertaining fiction.
 

I'm sorry if I offend anyone, but I tend to fall along the same idea as the rest who think that the belief in demons is rather silly.

Sometimes, however, if I am waken up suddenly, I will have a mass amount of fear towards something that seems supernatural to me, but then realize that I am not dreaming, & realize that those things do not exist outside of dreams.
 

Umbran said:


:) Do you recognize the inherent illogic in that statement? In order to not respect dogmatism where it isn't warranted, you must know when it isn't warranted. In order to know that, you implicitly must have an idea of 'how many people have to claim an experience for it to be a "sane" experience', which you say you don't have.

Untrue. I only have to know when an answer cannot be empirically, scientifically verified. At this time, such answers are not possible for the questions I posed. In such circumstances, dogmatically delivered answers are unrespectable.

wolfen
 

Djeta Thernadier said:
I like to dream that somewhere there is a place where monsters and unicorns and elves all live ; but until someone shows me that place , I will take it as fiction. Interesting and entertaining fiction.

This is an example of how social programming works. You start with an experience -- a dream. People tell you "Ah, it means nothing" and you believe it.

Point being, how do you know that you are not showing yourself (in dreams) all kinds of things that you are simply unwilling to accept in your waking life? Perhaps someone (you) IS showing you something and you don't respect the experiences enough to believe it.

Just a thought -- I don't pretend to know the answer to the question.


wolfen
 

Originally posted by wolfen:
Untrue. I only have to know when an answer cannot be empirically, scientifically verified. At this time, such answers are not possible for the questions I posed. In such circumstances, dogmatically delivered answers are unrespectable.

I think you may be misunderstanding the stance of science towards the supernatural. Most scientists will tell you that currently, there is no convincing data to suggest that spiritual or supernatural phenomena occur- therefore we must conclude that such things do not exist until such time as further evidence is presented. This isn't dogmatic, its common sense.

To put this in another light- consider the following example. 100 years ago, if someone had said that all matter is composed of tiny men with ropes that hold objects together, there would be no way to disprove this assertion. However with the advent of electron microscopes, we know that matter is composed of atoms and electron orbital interations. To assume the existance of little men holding together matter after this point is sheer lunacy.

My point is that things that would have been considered magic or supernatural just 100 years ago can now be proven scientifically, with more accuracy and less complexity than the assumption of ghosts, demons, spirits, magic, etc. Put another way, the supernatural has always been the way humanity explains the unexplained until such time more concrete evidence is available. Most scientists are open to the fact that there might be things/phenomena popularly termed "ghosts" or "spirits", but without any proof such things do exist (and I mean real physical proof, not anecdotal or eyewitness accounts- human perception is not reliable), it is unacceptable for science to comment on or believe in such things. Its not a dogmatic assertion, its just common sense.
 
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wolfen said:
Untrue. I only have to know when an answer cannot be empirically, scientifically verified. At this time, such answers are not possible for the questions I posed.

Oh? How many scientists and mental health professionals did you discuss it with before you came to that conclusion? Need I mention that flat out rejection of dogmatic responses is, in and of itself, a dogmatic response? :)

Sometimes science cannot answer a question because it is beyond current science. Sometimes, science cannot answer a question because it's not the question you think it is. Let's look at some of your questions.

How many people does it take for the "simple answer" to be "They actually talked to a dead person" ? What is the critical mass necessary to validate scientifically discomforting phenomena?

If you want a single number as an answer, you are going to be disappointed, because that's not how science works. YOu think you're asking something simple, but in fact, the matter of what constitutes scientific proof is complex. Science does not have solid rules on this, nor should it. The answer is, "It depends upon the phenomenon and how the data is acquired".

When the data is comprised solely of subjective human experiences, we can extend that to, "The critical mass is quite high." While science sometimes cannot prove or disprove the veracity of a particular report, it can and has proven that human beings are remarkably poor observers, especially when the phenomenon evokes emotional responses.

how many people have to claim an experience for it to be a "sane" experience?

This is a particularly troublesome question. In ther vernacular it seems to have clear meaning, but to a sicentist is doesn't. You use quotes on "sane", which immediately tells us that the definition of that word is in doubt. If the word is not well-defined, of course it is not possible for science, or anyone else, to answer it.

Just to show how poor the use of the word is - last I checked, sanity was a state of mind. Experiences don't have minds. A person may be sane or insane, but an experience cannot be.

All of which is a bit moot, though. A quick e-mail exchange with a couple of psych friends yields to me that within the profession the term "sane" isn't commonly used anymore. The human mind is currently seen as being too complex for such an overly-general descriptor. So, the question winds up being a bit odd - ask a scientist how many people have to have an experience before it's considered "sane", when the scientist doesn't find "sane" to be a particularly valid scientific description?

How many people do we send to a sleep clinic before we accept that there may not be a disorder or dysfunction at work?

See above. The fact that the X-Files did an episode of it does not mean that a particularly large number of people have actually reported such things.

If you ask me how quickly an object will fall, I can dogmatically do a calculation and tell you to within the margin of error available to pretty much any measurement tools available to mankind. You say you have a ehadache, and I dogmatically reply with an aspirin, and the headache will usually go away. Sometimes dogma works!
 

Teflon Billy said:
I'm not, and I think being afraid of "demons" is a sign of a weak mind.

I believe that not being afraid of demons (and, on a larger scale, not acknowledging man's spiritual nature) is a sign of a weak mind. So we're even.
 

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