Paxton Hotel Fire
Does anyone know where I can see the picture of Pam that the little boy Luje used to be? I know she's black and died in the hotel fire in Chicago.
shareWho cares? This is complete nonsense, and this sort of stuff was debunked long ago. Get a grip on reality.
It is better to be kind than to be clever or good looking. -- Derek
I'm rather curious about what your take on reality is? My sons both have certain gifts and while we are not religious or particularly spiritual, I can tell you that having my sons both tell me very specific things of things they could not ever know about my parents, does make you wonder. Such as my 16yr old being able to tell me specific things about the days after my mother's death when she died in 1990 and he was born in 1998. He said to me one day "Mom, you know why you and Auntie never found that purple ring? No one looked in grandma's truck. You guys only looked in the field, the road and the side of the road but it was in her truck" So I said "How do you know this?" and he said "Grandma said so. She also said that when grandpa was calling you by her name, she was at the end of his bed waiting for him" My dad passed 14mo after my mom. Her's was a single vehicle accident and the "purple" ring was an Amethyst that she always wore. My father's death was from CHF and the day before he died, I visited the hospital and he kept calling me by my mom's name and telling me to sit down and I kept saying "Dad, it's me, not mom. Mom is not here" and he would say "Sit down Ronda, just sit down." Now neither story was ever mentioned to my son and he was 6 when he told this to me. So who's to say whose right in their view of reality?
shareWhy do you ask OP? Do you think you might know the Pam they are talking about? I am sure if you search you could find the picture. I found this stuff interesting..who is to say this isn't real..we have NO idea what is and isn't. I really enjoy this show. My 3 year has seen a little girl named Mary in her bedroom on 3 different occasions . it is very intense..and very real.
shareGo back to your sad little life and let the adults talk for awhile junior.
shareThe only thing this series proves is that superstitious people, like you, have an almost unlimited capacity for self-delusion. I'm probably a lot older than you, junior, and almost certainly a lot more intelligent.
It is better to be kind than to be clever or good looking. -- Derek
If you were truly as intelligent as you think yourself to be, then you'd know that it's simply not possible for you to know all there is about anything. You have no clue whether these stories are fiction, fact, or some blend of the two. All you know is that you cannot explain it. So, rather than just admit that what is neither tangible nor explainable is true... you tighten the box around you and say it's all fake.
I'm curious to know your expertise on many subjects now, as you seem to know so much.
This stuff has been debunked over and over again. If you're not willing to follow the scientific method, then it's pointless to argue with you. As Carl Sagan said in Cosmos, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." The trouble is that you can offer no proof, just opinion. People like you make an assumption about the truth of something, and then simply believe it rather than trying to offer some sort of scientific method or proof. The burden is not on me to disprove anything. It's on you to prove something with scientific rigor.
People make stuff up all the time, sometimes because they have an ulterior motive. And that includes people who post to these message forums. Unless they can offer proof in a scientifically controlled way, they are just wasting our time. As for the poster who spoke about the ring and her children, there are a lot of non-supernatural explanations for the result, including the children obtaining information the poster didn't know they could obtain. This is how "psychics" impress people with so-called cold readings.
This sort of junk reminds me of the TV show "Ghost Hunters," which is about as credible as "professional" wrestling. They even slipped up so that the camera caught the "ghost" running in sneakers. What a joke.
Now I'm done wasting my time with you.
It is better to be kind than to be clever or good looking. -- Derek
As Carl Sagan said in "The Demon-Haunted World,"
“Perhaps one percent of the time, someone who has an idea that smells, feels, and looks indistinguishable from the usual run of pseudoscience will turn out to be right. Maybe some undiscovered reptile left over from the Cretaceous period will indeed be found in Loch Ness or the Congo Republic; or we will find artifacts of an advanced, non-human species elsewhere in the Solar System. At the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study:
(1) that by thought alone humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computers;
(2) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation;
(3) that people under mild sensory deprivation can receive thoughts or images “projected” at them.
I pick these claims not because I think they’re likely to be valid (I don’t), but as examples of contentions that might be true. The last three have at least some, although still dubious, experimental support. Of course, I could be wrong.”
I don't consider myself "above" anyone, so I don't consider myself to be "wasting my time" with anyone unless I'm insulted. When people can discuss things in a friendly, calm, rational manner, I'm happy to debate. I believe that if there are enough facts to refute something, insults aren't necessary. And this is coming from a skeptic.
I much prefer the more balanced, if still skeptical, tone of this Scientific American article: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/2013/11/02/ian-stevensons-case-for-the-afterlife-are-we-skeptics-really-just-cynics/
Re: Sagan's musings, it's now been nearly 20 years since his book was first published, and there is still no convincing evidence for any of those three examples' being true.
Jesse Bering's SciAm blog is a superficial, non-rigorous opinion piece that just reports hearsay anecdotal information relatively uncritically without doing much, if any, real digging to get at the truth. Let's look at the reincarnation stuff in some depth, the way the SciAm blogger failed to do. Here's some additional information that he conveniently didn't mention about Stevenson, who was a professor of psychiatry at one of the nation's most notorious party schools:
Critics, particularly the philosophers C.T.K. Chari (1909–1993) and Paul Edwards (1923–2004), raised a number of issues, including that the children or parents interviewed by Stevenson had deceived him, that he had asked them leading questions, that he had often worked through translators who believed what the interviewees were saying, and that his conclusions were undermined by confirmation bias, where cases not supportive of his hypothesis were not presented as counting against it. Leonard Angel, a philosopher of religion, told The New York Times that Stevenson did not follow proper standards. "But you do have to look carefully to see it; that's why he's been very persuasive to many people."
The major problem with Stevenson’s work is that the methods he used to investigate alleged cases of reincarnation are inadequate to rule out simple, imaginative storytelling on the part of the children claiming to be reincarnations of dead individuals. In the seemingly most impressive cases Stevenson has reported, the children claiming to be reincarnated knew friends and relatives of the dead individual. The children’s knowledge of facts about these individuals is, then, somewhat less than conclusive evidence for reincarnation.
David Barker, an associate of Stevenson, discovered that in the famous reincarnation case of the child Rakesh Gaur, the information the child knew had been acquired through normal means. Barker, who worked with Satwant Pasricha in the investigation of 59 alleged reincarnation cases, "could not find a single case in which there was convincing evidence of the presence of paranormal process."
The linguist Sarah Thomason has commented on an analysis by Stevenson on a lady known as "TE" who claimed to be able to speak Swedish, learned in a past life. According to Thomason "Stevenson is... unsophisticated about language" and TE’s Swedish is as unconvincing as the other cases she examined. Thomason concluded "the linguistic evidence is too weak to provide support for the claims of xenoglossy." The psychologist David Lester has written Stevenson's subjects made grammatical mistakes, mispronounced words and did not show a wide vocabulary of words in foreign language; thus cannot be considered evidence for xenoglossy.
Champe Ransom, a lawyer Stevenson hired as an assistant in the 1970s, wrote an unpublished report about Stevenson's work, which is cited by Edwards in his Immortality (1992) and Reincarnation (1996). According to Ransom, Stevenson asked the children leading questions, filled in gaps in the narrative, did not spend enough time interviewing them, and left too long a period between the claimed recall and the interview; it was often years after the first mention of a recall that Stevenson learned about it. In only eleven of the 1,111 cases Ransom looked at had there been no contact between the families of the deceased and of the child before the interview; in addition, according to Ransom, seven of those eleven cases were seriously flawed. He also wrote that there were problems with the way Stevenson presented the cases, in that he would report his witnesses' conclusions, rather than the data upon which the conclusions rested. Weaknesses in cases would be reported in a separate part of his books, rather than during the discussion of the cases themselves. Ransom concluded that it all amounted to anecdotal evidence of the weakest kind.
By the way, in the 1960s, Stevenson set a combination lock using a secret word or phrase, and placed it in a filing cabinet in the department, telling his colleagues he would try to pass the code to them after his death. Emily Williams Kelly told The New York Times: "Presumably, if someone had a vivid dream about him, in which there seemed to be a word or a phrase that kept being repeated—I don't quite know how it would work—if it seemed promising enough, we would try to open it using the combination suggested." The Times reported that, as of February 2007, the lock remains unopened.
It is better to be kind than to be clever or good looking. -- Derek
(2) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation
a) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life
Correct.
b) which upon checking turn out to be accurate
Correct.
c) and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation
Wrong! The explanation may prove to be paranormal but not necessarily have to be reincarnation!
As "junior" rather impolitely says...get a grip! share