danielsangeo

Braless.

igHOaMOzzUo

Large post incoming! The way I see it, people that believe in God (or other deities) and claim to have a personal experience that "proves" the deity's existence, to be perfectly frank, have a hammer and are looking for a nail, and soon, everything looks like a nail (to stretch the idiom). I'll give an example: Let's say that there is this person with a deeply-seated belief that there's this monster that lives in a dimension next to ours that loves to eat single socks from a pair. This monster penetrates our reality to eat the single sock while you're doing laundry. Silly, right? Yes, I just made it up. Now, let's say that this person does a load of laundry. After carefully placing the laundry in the washer and carefully removing all the laundry at the end of the cycle to make sure nothing is left in the drum, he notices that one sock is missing. To him, this is completely inarguable evidence of the sock-eating monster. After all, the sock is gone! This person, however, is no longer interested in finding out what happened to the sock because, well, the monster ate it. Soon, there's a rank smell coming from the washer. Must be the smell of the waste coming form the monster. Had this person been interested in finding out what happened, this person would've found out that, during the wash cycle, the drum holding the clothes had become off-balance, creating a regular open-and-closed gap between the drum and the shell of the machine. During the wash cycle, the 'missing' sock passed through that gap and fell into the shell of the machine. If this person dismantles the machine, he will find that the socks he fully believed, in his heart-of-hearts, were eaten by the monster, were, in fact, sitting on the ground. The smell that he was smelling was the wet sock(s) becoming mildewed over time and mold growing on them. Now, a bit less outlandish: Some people believe their residence or certain other buildings to be "haunted". They have unexplained (to them) feelings of dread or even physiological effects such as bleeding from the ears. The cause? No, not ghosts (sorry, Drs. Venkman, Stantz, Spengler and Zeddemore). Infrasound. Sound waves below or above the range of human hearing. Due to the rotation of the earth and tectonic plate activity (among other causes of vibration including traffic), pipes and such can resonate at such a frequency that a person cannot possibly consciously hear it but can still be detected by the sensitive organelles in the ears, throwing off the equilibrium and also glitching up the human brain just a bit (like spinning in circles for a bit and then stopping causes one to be dizzy and feel like they're spinning even when they're not). These sonic vibrations have an evolutionary component, as well, being that it's quite handy for survival purposes to be on guard when something like a tiger creates that kind of sound from far away though you can't hear it. This infrasound can ALSO create vibrations in the human eye, creating possible glitches in a person's sight including amorphous shapes at the corner of your sight and when you turn toward it, it's gone. The US military experimented with infrasound to induce panic in people such as the Viet Cong. And it worked. Santa, as well (to go with the upcoming holiday season). Santa Claus is a tidy explanation about how neatly wrapped gifts can appear under the tree while the children are sleeping; a jolly fat man came into their house while everyone is asleep and provided presents because they have been good for the majority of the year. They don't realize the number of children receiving presents on Christmas morning all over the world would induce some pretty extreme physics upon Santa's sleigh because they have nothing to compare it to. They don't realize that it's the parents (and other people) that have shopped for many days, weeks, or even months, to provide for their children at Christmas time. Back on topic, I have never seen any person's "personal experience" to be evidence of anything but vibrating pipes, missing socks, or presents under the tree: Lack of all the evidence leading to incorrect conclusions. If you believe, that's great. Don't claim, however, that you have conclusive evidence when you don't. In the entirety of written human history, not a single piece of evidence has ever been provided for a single supernatural deity. In contrast, the vast preponderance of the evidence shows that deities are created by humans to explain what they feel they can't explain ("God of the gaps"). I have challenged many to provide the evidence they say they had and not a single person has ever been able (and many are quite unwilling) to provide that evidence. I find this to be quite telling.

Pantsless

My attempt?

1647 - European Puritan rulers ban Christmas as a Catholic invention and the "trappings of popery" or the "rags of the Beast", claiming that "merrymaking" was offensive to Jesus and God. Soon after, pro-Christmas rioting broke out in several cities. The real "war on Christmas" had begun and lasted for several weeks and the ban was lifted in 1660.

Banned because

Michael Crichton

Would you prefer the test closer to Christmas?

Samsung Galaxy Exhibit 4G ...I'm trying to decide if I should get a smartphone or not...

*shows up with a fork and bib* I'll help! I need advice about how to spend my one-day off work tomorrow.

6/10 -- Too sad No need.

Perhaps, but it depends on who or what's wearing them.

Well, folks, time to leave this thread. BTG is here.

I didn't take over a small third-world country and become the king of a militaristic army of ferrets...today.

Pizza the Hutt.

~3.14159265/10

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The first x number of posts any new user makes has to be approved by an administrator?

wbVlGESh9Mc

Wanting to go to bed and cannot due to laundry currently going. Blah. /firstworldproblems Also, tracking my AF shirt. If I keep reloading the tracking page, it'll send the package faster, right?

I completely agree. The guy that makes that show should have a website, but for the life of me, I couldn't tell you what it is.

For some reason, I can imagine Dave from Civil Protection singing that song...in full...just to annoy Mike.

San Francisco