From: Dread and Fey Champion of Chaos Newsgroups: alt.out-of-body Subject: Increasing/Decreasing the Odds. (two meanings) Date: Sun, 26 Mar 2000 19:30:08 GMT Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy. Lines: 39 Message-ID: <8blofk$qr4$1@nnrp1.deja.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 152.171.93.199 X-Article-Creation-Date: Sun Mar 26 19:30:08 2000 GMT X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; Compaq; DigExt) X-Http-Proxy: 1.1 x21.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 152.171.93.199 X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDaka_praxis Path: chonsp.franklin.ch!pfaff.ethz.ch!news-zh.switch.ch!news-ge.switch.ch!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newsfeed.stanford.edu!newsfeed.berkeley.edu!nntp2.deja.com!nnrp1.deja.com!not-for-mail Xref: chonsp.franklin.ch alt.out-of-body:36399 A month or so back there was a poster who was redirecting people asking for beginning OBE advice to a skeptic's site. Also some of the skeptics merely jumped into such threads and were thier usual selves. Thats thier perogative though some were less than polite. I've just had an amusing thought. It seems to me that thier activity in doing so is counterproductive to thier own goals. It appeared from the start that there were two different legitimate goals in the skeptic's camp. There were less legitimate goals for some but I am not talking about trolling here. Some of the skeptics want evidence of a rather rare sort; that is evidence supporting physical travel while OBE. Others want to eliminate false belief systems. The accuracy of thier targeting in this case remains to be seen. Experiments (or demonstrations in Doc's case)and statistics are the tools that they have chosen to achieve thier goals. It seems to me that for a person to be a legitimate test subject in a scientific experiment they should believe they can produce a testable result pretty much on demand. This is, after all, what the majority of the skeptics are contesting. Since people meeting those "qualifications" are rare, it would appear to be in everyones interests to produce more of them. Interfering with such threads has the potential to reduce the pool of available qualified test subjects available in the future. The skeptics need a large pool in order to increase the accuracy of thier "research" and the OBErs need a large pool becasue they enjoy the activity and are interested in the scientific question as well. Perhaps both camps should be shouting "bring on the OBE newbies". Humor Disclaimer: This thread is not to be viewed as an attack on skeptics in general or any skeptic in particular. The content though seems to be true and contains some irony and humor as well. For the humor impaired please see channel two for the closed captions. -- Jerry Adams AKA: Praxis Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.