I want to believe...

[GrimTuesday]

We all have that one thing that contrary to popular thought, you believe in. For some it is alien visitation, for others it is psychics, and for others magic is as real as the nose on your face. So I'm curious, what sort of things do my fellow Escapists believe in that perhaps only a minority may believe in, or would be met with derision were you to voice your belief in whatever you believe in? Also, how strongly do you believe in whatever this is.

I personally believe that Sasquatch/Bigfoot is real. Yeah, I know there is little to no irrefutable evidence, and there have been too many hoaxes to count, but knowing what I do about the areas which they are said to inhabit, I know that it wouldn't be at all surprising to find a species of large apes living in the forests of the Pacific Northwest and other areas with large amounts of wilderness, such as the Rocky Mountains.

Spoiler: I'm sure this is a real Bigfoot, though the picture is a little grainy

So now its your turn, tell me about what strange things you believe in. Remember, challenging beliefs is ok, being a dick isn't

Spoiler: Also, for that person, because there is always at least one, who will post God

 

[Rawne1980]

Just because it has to be done....


Now on topic....

Ghosts.

Well, most things supernatural I have a small belief in.

 

[tippy2k2]

Baaaaaaah......baaaaaah......I mean...ahem....this isn't going to mean anything to 99% of the website but there's really not much I believe that is contrary to popular belief. Yeah, I'm a sheeple

I believe that Christian Ponder can become a super star quarterback. However, for every five games he shows sparks of greatness, he then has five games where you could stick in the water boy and get the same exact results. He needs to stop running while throwing; I swear for every one that becomes an amazing pass, four of them are either wildly inaccurate or picked off by the defense.

OH! Actually, I do have one more I suppose but it's more of a joke than a real opinion (a joke with a hint of truth maybe?). I believe that Battleship: The Movie might actually be a brilliant anti-military war movie rather than the popcorn trash most people see it

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

I believe in ghosts to a small extent. When I was a kid a door opened and closed in front of me once while I was alone in a 170 year old building. No wind. Alone.

 

[Yabba]

Extra-Terrestrials, visiting earth. I know it seems far fetched, but thinking about the material that supports it, such as marks on peoples bodys.

 

[OneOfTheMichael's]

I guess I can believe in ghosts cause I'm paranoid and need to find a explanation for whatever doesnt make sense.
And bigfoot.... because well..... I am one.

 

[GrimTuesday]

I believe that Christian Ponder can become a super star quarterback. However, for every five games he shows sparks of greatness, he then has five games where you could stick in the water boy and get the same exact results. He needs to stop running while throwing; I swear for every one that becomes an amazing pass, four of them are either wildly inaccurate or picked off by the defense.

You poor, sad, deluded man. I don't know about the water boy, unless that's what the Vikings did against the Packers in the Playoffs.

 

[Doclector]

I believe in ghosts to a small extent. When I was a kid a door opened and closed in front of me once while I was alone in a 170 year old building. No wind. Alone.

I believe in ghosts as well. When I was a teenager, I saw what's commonly known as a "spectral orb". Zipped across the room in front of me, from one wall into another. Don't know what it was up to, but I'd say it looked pretty urgent.

Was quite the shock at the time. I was, at the time, a believer in science. "Always a rational explanation" y'know, that guy. Or at least, that was the kind of person I was growing into, like I said, I was a teenager at the time.

It kinda led to me losing enthusiasm for it. For a little while, you could even say I was against it, but I grew out of that. You can't just throw away all of that, y'know? Still, blew my world wipe open at the time.

I also once slept in a hotel on holiday with my family that, by the morning, we all swore was haunted. Unexplained footsteps, voices from rooms that weren't occupied, and the worst part by far, an unexplainable darkness. Like a living shadow. It had to have been about 11 PM, and suddenly, it got really, really dark. No other lights went off, the one in the hall outside the room was still on, the one in the bathroom still off, the ones outside in the street, still on. No change in light sources, but still, that darkness. a few minutes later, back to normal. At the time I dismissed it as illusion, but in the morning I found everyone else saw the same kind of thing, all of us having trouble sleeping.

With time and evidence, you may have been able to convince me I imagined that spectral orb. But the hotel? I will always think whatever happened there, it wasn't fuckin' normal.

 

[bananafishtoday]

That we're living in a computer simulation of a universe. Not like "Everyone's a program, and I'm the only real sentient/sapient being" solipsism a la Breakfast of Champions, but like "We're all programs." I also don't think it'd be like the Matrix where we're essentially brains in jars, but we're actually programs with no corporeal form in the universe in which our simulation exists.

I mean... the way in which our universe works is eerily similar to good computational practice. We have a minimum temperature (absolute zero.) We have a maximum speed (light in a vacuum.) We have an apparent minimum size (one Planck length/volume.) We have an apparent start date (the Big Bang.) The "randomness" of quantum mechanics could be explained by pseudorandom number generation, and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states we can only know position/momentum to within certain tolerances.

It's not something that affects the way I act. (If it's false, it'd fuck up my life. If it's true, my acting differently wouldn't change anything.) But it's something I can't get out of the back of my mind.

 

[Arakasi]

I have nothing that I believe in that isn't supported by facts and/or logic.
Although I still find that I am in the minority when it comes to not believing in 'free will'.

 

[Asita]

At the risk of echoing Rawne:


More seriously: I tend to take a compatibilist view to 'fate' and 'free will', which - while certainly not unheard of - seems to still be a fairly unpopular view, at least among people I've spoken with. Though it is worth noting that I consider 'fate' and 'free will' to be typically presented in a heavily romanticized form and that their typical definitions have little bearing on reality (hence my hesitance about using those particular terms).

 

[Dr. Cakey]

I believe there's some sort of objective measure of good and evil. Rationally I'm basically certain that's not the case, but emotionally I'm sure there must be.

 

[DrunkOnEstus]

I can't believe anything if it hasn't been repeated in a controlled environment or there's no data to support it. This has pretty much fucked up my life and makes music and poetry incredibly difficult. I can't apply abstract concepts like "fate","destiny", or "the power of love" without feeling either ridiculous or disingenuous. It was a lot different in my adolescence, and I envy those who still look at life and the world with a sense of wonder and eagerness to approach the unknown without looking for irrefutable answers.

 

[Epic Bear Man]

I believe George W. Bush honestly only acted like a complete idiot to justify his actions during his administration. >.>

 

[Extra-Ordinary]

I believe that this world has the capacity to turn itself around, I'm optimistic like that.

 

[Happiness Assassin]

A few years ago I used to believe in Alien visitations, ghosts, the moon landing being a hoax, CIA killing Kennedy, the government planned 9/11, the whole nine yards. In other words, I was completely off my rocker. Then as I got older and I began to have ideas independent from my nutty dad, I decided to try and look at these from a more objective perspective and I found that they were based more on a lack of evidence than anything else. I was taught to see patterns where none existed and to be paranoid of the government. Thank god that is all over.

 

[Dangit2019]

The only supernatural or unverifiable stuff that I believe in is religion. If we can get through this thread without debating, or insulting that, I would be very happy.

Actually, since YouTube threads are getting big today, I'm pretty sure Ray William Johnson made a deal with Satan in exchange for popularity. No doubt in my mind about that.

 

[Defenestra]

I want to believe that I matter. That we matter, really. Humanity as a whole.

I want to believe that I will succeed.

I want to beleive that the better aspects of humanity will triumph.

Well, fuck, I'm depressed now. Thanks, OP.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

I believe that there's only one way things can happen because every end result is directly a product of all the circumstances surrounding it. I came to this conclusion slowly after someone told me about the splitting universe theory, where whenever there's a chance of multiple outcomes, all possible outcomes actually occur in different universes, which split off from the one you're in. The example given was a coin toss, in one universe it comes up heads, and in the other, tails. But when you flip a coin, there's only one way it can land given the ground's texture, force applied by your thumb, angle of impact with the coin, initial orientation, wind strength and direction, weight of the coin, elasticity of the coin and of the ground, etc. Which brings up some interesting questions regarding responsibility that I haven't really thought about in-depth. But I can't prove it any more than one can prove destiny exists.

I'm fairly sceptical in general.