I am a former skeptic

[Franc28]

I am a former skeptic who has come to this board to debate skeptics about the premises of their position/ideology. I am very interested in hearing what they will have to say.

Of the other board sections, I am also interested in conspiracies (a loaded word if there ever was one) and religion (I'm against organized religion and believe in nothing but the material world).

Earlier, I tried to explain my epistemic position on the issue of personal experience (that personal experience can only be evidence of anything to the experiencer, a sort of middle position between the believer's "personal experience is evidence" and the skeptic's "personal experience is not evidence of anything ever"), but I didn't do a very good job at it.

[Scepcop]

You mean you don't believe that any spiritual dimensions exist? Or that there is no afterlife? Why not? What makes you so sure? Or are you a middle ground agnostic? What about the evidence presented by Eteponge and others in the videos section and specific examples, like Dorothy Allison?

[Franc28]

No, I don't believe in other dimensions, including an afterlife. I have no interest in these areas.

[Scepcop]

What is your position based on though? And why do you believe that?

And what do you make of the evidence presented for spiritual dimensions?

[Franc28]

[Scepcop]

Well don't you ever wonder if you could be wrong? Why are you so sure of your beliefs?

How can you not be interested in the Afterlife? It's one of life's biggest questions and applies to everyone.

[Franc28]

[Scepcop]

[Franc28]

[Scepcop]

Franc,
Just out of curiosity, what if you saw an apparition with your own eyes? What would you make of it? Would it change your belief system? What if you saw something in vivid detail before it happened, and it happened later exactly as you saw? And what if a psychic got an amazing hit about you that was highly specific, or even got one of your deep dark secrets correct, that could NOT have been determined from cold reading?

Would that change your belief system?

Would you deny it or update your belief system to it?

[Franc28]

[Scepcop]

Franc,
With your disbelief in psychic phenomena, how would you explain these amazing hits which could not have been due to fraud, luck or cold reading?

“I went to a Psychic fair in Chicago, all by myself, on the spur of the moment, then looked around and saw a little old man sitting all by himself, a bit away from all others. I walked over to him, asked him how much he charges, and sat down. He did not even ask my birth date or any other question, and began to talk about my children.

He said I had two children, a boy and a girl. I told him that this is not true, that I have two girls. He said that he knows different, which really upset me. He went on saying that the boy died right after his birth, and that my girl had died a few years back in a tragic incident, and that the second girl is not my own girl, but is adopted. He was right, because I had to admit that I no longer thought of my little boy any longer as a son.
( he was born 37 years earlier, prematurely in the 6th month of pregnancy, and had only lived 25 minutes.)

He then told me that I am writing a Novel, and began to outline the story, naming the character in the Novel by name, their roles, and how they related to each other, and the time frame of the story. He was right in the smallest detail, better than I could describe myself, having written it.

He told me that I would be teaching many people, and that people will come to my house to ask for lessons, but it would be out of the State, in the South.
(The South was the last place on earth I would want to live at that time. Neither would I want to leave my job, or my dream house that I had purchased only a short time before. It was months later that my husband was suddenly transferred to Georgia. Here I had an Art exhibition in Atlanta, and people had approached me to teach Art, especially oil painting.)

There were many other events he told me from my childhood, early adulthood, my former marriage, all accurate in every aspect and every little detail. He described the house I was born in, a house I had never again seen in over 46 years, and I had to look on an old photograph to check the details he described, of which I was no longer aware of.
He was correct. He took a pen and wrote my father's name, in my father's handwriting. (The old German script, which is no longer in use, called: Hohe Stolze.)

Now, I don't expect you to believe me, and I don't care one way or another, whatever explanation you come up with for all that, it does not change one tittle.

Just remember one thing: I had never been in Chicago before, other than driving through. Chicago was 45 miles from where I lived, and I knew NO ONE in that city, nor did anyone know that I would be going to Chicago that day, and I had no idea that there was a Psychic Fair to begin with, but rather stumbled on it in one of the Malls.
But most of all, that it was I who chose this particular Psychic among all others.

I had been to other Psychics, at different times, in different States and different countries, all without appointments, and without recommendations by anyone I knew, who had been most accurate in everything they said, three of which described the same Novel I spoke of earlier, one spoke of a book I had written many years earlier, even how many pages the manuscript was, how many chapters, and the general contents of it.”

[Scepcop]

[Franc28]

[Franc28]