God may not exist. At least not what humans may view as god. But I KNOW UFO's are real! Though I can't offer any proof of what I say. So believe it, or not. Though with TV shows showing people who have supposedly seen all types of unbelievable crap, my guess is that you wouldn't believe. Which is fine with me. But if you had experienced what I did, you would know they exist too.
The next question is that if extraterrestrials are visiting us, why haven't they made themselves openly known to humanity. There are many reasons. But probably the biggest reason is that humans are the types of creatures that will actually pay money to be lied to. Anybody who has seen a collection plate being passed around in a church knows this to be true. But as for the truth, you can barely give that shit away. I know because I wrote a free ebook of my experience. It's called "A UFO LOVE STORY." Apparently, people are vastly more interested in reading about bondage, spanking or some other filthy crap. Learning that there are no easy solutions to the world's problems is something that they don't want to know.
Another reason that UFO people want nothing to do with is because of the highly unethical way that most people have decided to deal with the world's problems. Which is that what happens doesn't really matter. As long as it happens to someone else. Then there is the highly evil approach that many religious people take. Which is to actually look forward to the destruction of the earth! Then they can go and be herded around in heaven by Jesus. Despite all this, for decidedly stupid reasons, I still care about what happens to humanity.
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Thanks for your contribution. To me it seems entirely speculative. That's not to say that it's wholly without merit, and as you correctly point out, the rest of us weren't there. I don't accept it as credible because it doesn't fit with what I think I know of reality. I'd be freakin' ecstatic to meet an ET, and that's why I'd be very skeptical of my own perception that I had. The Biblical historian Bart Ehrman describes one of the methods used to ferret out likely truth in historical claims. It's called the criterion of dissimilarity, and what it means is that any claim that seems to support the claimant's view is to be accorded less credibility than if it had conflicted with their view. In other words, why would they make that up? Qui bono (who benefits)?
One reason I'm so skeptical is that many UFO accounts I've seen have such a psychological flavor. They are so dreamlike, like recollections of abuse transformed into fantastic form. And people are very liable to hallucination, confabulation.
UFO claims are similar to religious claims in that way.
Putting the ufo thing aside, you must be very educated or very misled. Wherever you read about this"critertion of dissimilarity" thing, burn that book! It has no relevance to the problems that plague mankind. There was a more relevant saying that I think was from a person named Sinclair. He basically said that it is nearly impossible to get people to understand something when their livelihood depended on them not understanding it. This also has a relevance to those who are in power. Because those in power will be highly unlikely to get you to understand something important when their livelihood depends on them not doing so.
Well I'm certainly not very educated, so I must be very misled. It had never before occurred to me to follow that line of logic, so please give me a moment to see where it leads... Oh, OK, intuition = good, reason = bad -- got it, but don't buy it.
What you've related from this Sinclair fellow is apt, and it basically reiterates what I related from Ehrman; that is, if the presented evidence supports the presenter's a priori view, it is to be accorded less credence among other data than if it conflicted with that view. The underlying concept is that people tend to see what they want to see, remember what they want to remember, and disregard the rest. I'm not immune to confirmation bias -- nobody is, but we are susceptible to it to greater or lesser degrees. Call it a bullshit meter or subjecting an assertion to the laughter test. Your UFO experience passes neither, at least in my opinion.
Give us something other than your intuitive feeling and we'll have something substantive to discuss. Until then, it's your fantasy.
Oh, OK, intuition = good, reason = bad -- got it, but don't buy it.
It's more like "if you want to be clued into a hidden reality and not deceived by powerful people, believe aliens are visiting us".
And who wants to be deceived by powerful people? Who does not have some resentment at Authorities?
It's a cognitive Goldberg machine. Someone presses a lever at 1) and at spot 18), a belief in UFO's gets installed in your brain.
If you accept the Goldberg machine.
I do tend to react badly to someone who says burn a book especially from someone thinking that they are an author and not someone who has written a stream of nonsense. Books can either inform you of things or inform you what is not the case, using judgement and other sources of information you can decide.
As far as ufo's being from other planets goes, what else could they be. Not only that, but people have been seeing them throughout recorded history. That would put the "man made" thing out of the picture. Though I couldn't say it's impossible that the U.S. is experimenting with such technology. Also, like I told someone else, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, chances are it's a duck. It's too bad that the actual ones that have been seen didn't have "From Another Planet" written on the side of them. Or maybe that they had sails or oars for people to recognize them as ships. But I think the biggest problem people have is that they want nothing to do with us.
UFO's were not really recorded before manned flight and have increased in direct proportion with the number of aircraft.
I think you are pretty damned gullible, Erik.
"As far as UFO's being from other planets, what else could they be?"
They could be many things from tricks of the eye to all things terrestrial. The evidence so far shows that we are all alone here. The only other "evidence" is presented by people wanting to make a buck. Why do they do this? It's because some people have very big imaginations, and there's a dollar to be made. This is also why they write books on these subjects too.
I have seen UFO's but they could be anything. Unidentfied flying object does not mean "space ship." Today we have more things in the sky than ever, but some of this is a trick of the human eye. I saw a program once where camera footage had captured a UFO and almost every "expert" that looked at it said it had to be a flying object. Finally one man looked it all over and claimed that it was an out of focus video camera. He took a video camera similar to the one the footage was on and produced the same results.