Re: Trees and stones with powers to throw? | Forum

Resonox wrote:

I really can't continue to cast doubt on your feelings and beliefs without sounding as though I'm denigrating you for them...suffice to say they are your beliefs....and my disbeliefs and I don't think the twain shall meet without ending up as a full scale argument....but I do take your point that someone like me...a self-avowed sceptic...would be as prone to subconciously affecting a tester as much as you might only in a differing direction...it'd be a bit hard to get anyone without feelings on the subject one way or the other to be truly objective. I still won't be convinced unkown, unprovable earth energies exist...if there are rod influencing powers at work they are understandably natural, I know, if I may put words in your mouth(...change and adapt as needed)you'll tell me earth energies are natural too yet you'll say they are not electro-magnetic, sun-spot, gravitational or water-flow affected....So can we say it is God or faeries at work...it is as feasible as any other unprovable reason.

I'd certainly want to avoid an argument with anybody over this. :D To my mind, certain things occur, for whatever reason, and there's no doubt in my mind that they do, not because of belief but because of experience. There's no point arguing about the existence or non-existence of soemthing you know exists from experience. As to what exactly it is, I'm questioning that already and I'm open to other sets of questions, so I need no need for argument there, either.

I'm inclined to be pragmatic about this kind of thing. If something seems to be strongly suggesting it exists, and different people are having similar experiences that appear to be independent, then I'm inclined to say something's happening. It may not be what it's believed to be, or even what it appears to be, but it requires investigation, by whatever means are available. There was a time when currently well-understood phenomena were mysteries. They're understood now because people took an empirical approach to them and found out by experiment what they are - and what they aren't. If you consider the nonsense that was once believed about electricity - that when it occrred as lightning it was the wrath of some god, and so on, then we've definitely moved on quite a lot. But we've done so because we took the phemomenon seriously and didn't tie it to beliefs about gods and so on. Fairly obvious phenomena like electricity occurring as lightning tend to be investigated long before rather subtle phenomena. But I think the subtle phenomena need to be investigated. In this case I'm sure there's some subtle phenomenon happening. I'm not interested in convincing anyone of its existence, but I'm mentioning it here because it could easily be overlooked, especially when a lot of the theories about it are still somewhat vague and fanciful. To my mind, we need careful observation and balanced thought in this area. I can well appreciate why anyone would be sceptical, given some of the weirdos who pontificate about this kind of thing. But I think we need to cautiously investigate to see if one or two of the weirdos might actually have a point.