At a post on Secular Right in the context of the recent apocalyptic predictions by radio broadcaster Harold Camping, Razib muses on the consequences of nerdish supernatural belief on larger society. He mentions how even as a kid he could scarcely identify a spiritual bone in his body:
I never believed in the existence of ghosts or other supernatural agents, but for as long as I can remember I've always wanted to seek them out and prove myself wrong. As early as first grade, I regularly watched Unsolved Mysteries and other shows dealing with the paranormal in a "serious" way, hoping to find that my skepticism was ignorance. I watched the segments about the supernatural with fondness, figuring that if spirits from beyond this world existed, that really meant God could exist, too. And if God really existed, why would I be afraid of anything? What happens to me doesn't matter. It's not in my hands, because I'm lying in the hands of God.
I never found the stories very compelling, however, and was unconvinced by putative evidence for the existence of the supernatural. More tragically, the gruesomely natural segments about murderers breaking into people's houses at night and killing them scared the piss out of me to the extent that I would regularly sneak into my parents' room and sleep on the floor at night when I couldn't get the intro music and the scary images that followed out of my head (they'd throw me out whenever they heard me crawling in, but oddly never seemed angry in the morning if I'd arrived stealthily enough the night before).
Anyway, conversely my thinking was* that if there is no supernatural, there's probably no God, either. And that means someone could come in an axe me for whatever reason and that'd be the end of it. You're born, life sucks, and then you die. If I wasn't vigilant enough, I'd be one of those who'd die a young and painful death.
* I'd say my thinking is still this way, if not for the fact that I'm, uh, not exactly vigilant anymore, playing lots of risky sports, getting myself into some extremely contentious situations when it isn't necessary, and never locking the front door or either garage door. The latter isn't worth chancing when the result of a misplaced key is having to find a non-destructive way in.
I have never really believed in the supernatural. As a small child I knew I was supposed to believe in the supernatural, but I honestly had a hard time taking any of it seriously. I have normal human instincts, like getting “spooked” in the cemetery…but my own personal experience with friends visiting cemeteries at night for fun and laughs as a younger man is that actually opening yourself to the possibility of the supernatural naturally changes how you view “creepy” background events (my friends who believed in ghosts were really easy to scare, it was quite fun!) Most of my friends might assent to the proposition that there probably weren’t ghosts in cemetery X, and that that ghosts may not even exist, but most of them did not dismiss out of hand the very possibility of the existence of ghosts. I did.Since both audacious and epigone are in the name, I won't shy away from comparing myself to Razib here.
I never believed in the existence of ghosts or other supernatural agents, but for as long as I can remember I've always wanted to seek them out and prove myself wrong. As early as first grade, I regularly watched Unsolved Mysteries and other shows dealing with the paranormal in a "serious" way, hoping to find that my skepticism was ignorance. I watched the segments about the supernatural with fondness, figuring that if spirits from beyond this world existed, that really meant God could exist, too. And if God really existed, why would I be afraid of anything? What happens to me doesn't matter. It's not in my hands, because I'm lying in the hands of God.
I never found the stories very compelling, however, and was unconvinced by putative evidence for the existence of the supernatural. More tragically, the gruesomely natural segments about murderers breaking into people's houses at night and killing them scared the piss out of me to the extent that I would regularly sneak into my parents' room and sleep on the floor at night when I couldn't get the intro music and the scary images that followed out of my head (they'd throw me out whenever they heard me crawling in, but oddly never seemed angry in the morning if I'd arrived stealthily enough the night before).
Anyway, conversely my thinking was* that if there is no supernatural, there's probably no God, either. And that means someone could come in an axe me for whatever reason and that'd be the end of it. You're born, life sucks, and then you die. If I wasn't vigilant enough, I'd be one of those who'd die a young and painful death.
* I'd say my thinking is still this way, if not for the fact that I'm, uh, not exactly vigilant anymore, playing lots of risky sports, getting myself into some extremely contentious situations when it isn't necessary, and never locking the front door or either garage door. The latter isn't worth chancing when the result of a misplaced key is having to find a non-destructive way in.
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