I’m stunned by when I see it. A person, quite normal by any other standard becomes a raving lunatic when their pet ideas regarding the paranormal are threatened. No sooner than someone asks an innocent question like ‘“could your experience(s) have been anything besides an alien spacecraft?” A perfectly normal question anyone with a reasonable grasp of reality might agree.
But no! To many who have experienced the paranormal, this question is thought to be an attack, a deeply personal one too. This can be surmised by the level of counter attacking resorted to by some abductees. Some (most from my experiences) immediately jump on the person who asks the question. They are branded “debunker, skeptic” or the ever popular “skeptibunky.” These are bigoted epithets, no different than calling a Chinese person a “chink,” a Jewish person a kike or a black person a “nigger.”
Rod Brock put’s it this way.. on his blog
There’s a word the ufologically “faithful” use to “demonize” their skeptical opponents. Various lengthy attempts have been made on certain UFO lists to “objectively” define this particular word. These attempts have been little more than hot air; in practice, anyone who dissents against the views of one of the faithful, regardless of the quality of his/her argument, will be conveniently labeled with this term. It’s an old propagand trick, a standard in rhetorical argument. Within ufological circles, it’s the kiss of death, leveled with all the venom of more extreme pejoratives, such as “asshole,” “scum,” “vermin,” etc.
The word is “debunker.”
On the other side, some skeptics delight in calling people who experience paranormal phenomena “woos,”“believers,” or a few other choice phrases.
It seems that, to “one of the faithful,” the level of insult to a label such as “woo” is far more and above the level of insult than words like “idiot”“debunker” could ever be to someone more skeptically bent. I say this only after long experience which segues me into the double standards part.
I’ve noted a singular double standard between the way paranormal experiencers behave vs. their expectations of how skeptics are supposed to behave. Skeptics, according to some are people with a very profound and personal ax to grind. They relish the status quo, heartlessly and vociferously harassing the poor experencer, calling them all kinds of vile and regrettable names in a cowardly attempt to hide their own ignorance. Skeptics are sub-humans, even the slightest criticism is reason to take offense. They should never be permitted to speak, if they do they are to be driven out, punished and ridiculed. If you happen to be a skeptic and want an example of this, go to any one of thousands of open mail groups and pose an innocent question or two. (I know a couple of good ones if anyone wants to get with me privately.)
On the other hand, at places like JREF (the James Randi Educational Foundation ,) people having other than skeptical viewpoints are welcomed so long as they can keep to minimal standards of net courtesy. Very few experencer can and the list is littered with users who have either gotten banned for bad behavior or left because they could not handle a vigorous debate. And you will get a debate there, that’s what the JREF is all about.
I’¢m not saying that every experencer I run into is like this.I’ve had long conversations with people who sincerely believed that aliens abducted them. We have had very interesting and (I think) productive conversations that never devolved into personal slights or ad hominem.
How is this possible? Simple (I think.) The people I’m referring to reframed from flaming at first blush. They sought understanding, not battle, communication, not conflict. They truly wanted to understand my point of view and I theirs. They didn’t try to force feed me their religion or their belief system. We both came away better from the exchange.
In so the power of hypocrisy and double standards are deceiving. They are not a very good ways to influence people, they are terrible ways to get people to listen to you. they serves an incompetent masters, ones who cannot find a good counter argument. Crackpots use these tools. Double standards serve people who cannot reconcile their strongly defended beliefs to even look at the other side of opinion. Fighting seems to be their only alternative. Insult their only tools of persuasion.
Is it any wonder that the world turns away from them, brands them or ignores them? Any wonder at all?
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While I would agree that some go overboard with their branding of people who are of a more skeptical nature, there is a good reason for this in some cases. I would say 98% of time people who post not so agreeable messages on ufo groups are not skeptics, they are just trolling. Also, the word debunker is much over used, my understanding of the true meaning is someone who has evidence that proves something wrong. It is very rare for people to have facts to disprove something they were not there to witness.
As for myself and my few paranormal experiences, I don’t mind someone asking if it could have been something else, but realize that I have spent years and years considering all possibilities and to me it is still something of an unexplainable nature and I have probably already consider any idea someone would have. One of the things that bothers me is that people think I haven’t considered any rational explanation, when I have spent years trying to come up with one and none of them fit.
People who have strange experiences do take things personally, more than they should perhaps, but it is almost impossible to fully explain them to someone who didn’t experience them and this is frustrating enough without having people not believe you or think you are crazy. Even people who ask a simple questions can put that paranoid thought in your head, that they don’t believe you or think you are crazy, because most people know that such stories do sound crazy. I would imagine that is why many don’t come forward with such stories or only tell them to very close friends and family. Most of my stories I have only told to close friends and family for exactly that reason. I don’t want to have to spend the time and energy to explain to people who are skeptical. It is just too much work.
I agree with you up to a point Lesley, but when you say skeptical don’t you really mean “closed minded? Closed minded people are by their nature fixed on one or more ideas and nothing on this Earth could make their thinking more flexible. Closed minded people are on both sides of the fence too, in fact I’d venture that there are more closed minded people who believe in the ETH than otherwise.
I take your point about people taking their experiences personally, we all do that. I once related a UFO sighting on JREF, a firm believer of the ETH started debunking me! It was very surreal because I had never debunked her nor even commented on what this person experienced herself and yet, because my web page annoyed her she decided to inform me about what I had actually seen– to punish me or something.
What’s really strange is I don’t normally comment on what people experience or any personal stuff, I comment on what they actually say and don’t try to speculate on who or what they are (there are a couple of exceptions, people who espouse hatred like Holocaust revisionists, religious bigots or racists for example.)
So far as rationality and suchlike. Belief is not a rational process. Many experiences are not rational in retrospect and Fortian experiences are by their very nature out of the ordinary. UFO experiences have a certain set of common denominators and one is the level of strangeness or absurdity. So even if a person is a trained observer, sober and alert the visions (for lack of a better word) will probably not fit too well within accepted norms (that’™s why we call them paranormal.) For example a friend of mine saw a flying object which consisted of a red light and some trailing white lights one December night. She thought “hmm, must be Santa” and went back to whatever she was doing. It was not until the next day that she realized how crazy that was.