Hinduism and Reincarnation

"Hinduism and Reincarnation" doesn't seem like a very appropriate title for a thread that is all about some alleged miracle with statues causing milk to disappear.Such phenomena are pretty much the same thing as the Catholic claims about statues of Jesus bleeding and the Virgin Mary weeping tears and the like.Maybe they're frauds, maybe there are political or other reasons if so, or maybe they're not frauds, maybe they are truly rationally inexplicable phenomena. But even so, they don't necessarily mean what the pious think they mean.I would argue that if they are not frauds then they are demonic phenomena, and there's a whole theological framework that makes sense of them from this point of view. Edited by Faith, : grammar correction

I see that people came up with rational possible explanations for the disappearance of the milk, and maybe they are right, but in that case it's hard to see the thing as a politically inspired hoax, as it was just people believing the phenomena who fed the milk to the statues, who had no political axes to grind.In any case although the explanations have plausibility I don't see any scientific rigor in the investigation. Exactly how much milk could be expected to be absorbed by a statue, or to stick to it either? How much was "fed" them? How much pooled at the bottom?The problem is that skeptics are no less eager to believe that there is some rational explanation than religious people are to believe in their particular religious explanation, and detailed investigation with genuine lack of bias just doesn't happen on either side of the story.

Yes, this is a common belief . . . er, conviction, but I'm afraid this involves a bit of a self-delusion or at least an insistence on such a limited definition of the term that the sense in which I mean it is swept under the rug.Let me be more specific about how I am using the term. The skeptic is generally A PRIORI dedicated to the principles of rationalism, and rejects all forms of supernaturalism. I certainly found this to be the case before I was a Christian and subscribed to The Skeptical Inquirer.Carl Sagan is rather famous for his dogmatic pronouncements of his rationalistic beliefs . . . convictions, principles, etc. "All there is and all there ever will be" is a pretty dogmatic belief conviction I'd say. In what meaningful sense is this not a belief? I think anglagard just quoted another of Sagan's similar statements, maybe on this very thread. I'll check later.When approaching a claim of the paranormal or supernatural, there is simply no doubt that what I said is true, that "skeptics are . . . eager to believe that there is some rational explanation" and that this could easily predispose them to premature conclusions based on what are really no more than merely plausible rational explanations for any given phenomenon. When I used to read SI I was often more befuddled by the end of an article than I was enlightened by it, because their conclusions, though pronounced with the equivalent of a resounding "QED," were rarely truly conclusive, often little more than imaginative plausibilities rather than good proofs. That being the case I'd say their rationalistic bias was doing the talking rather than the evidence.You may want to object that this isn't a RELIGIOUS belief, perhaps, but I wasn't talking about religious belief as such, merely unfounded belief that can predispose to biased observations.

Well, again, you may be right, but there still seems to me to be too little really conclusive scientific observation to convince me.Perhaps I read too fast and missed some of the details. Was an existing hysteria about the statues exploited by the politicians, or was it supposedly created by the politicians in the first place?I certainly don't doubt that such motives to manipulate could be the case, or that a politician would exploit an existing phenomenon for his own advantage, but for there to be actual planned fraud, it seems to me the manipulators would have had to know in advance that the statues would APPEAR to swallow milk, perhaps even some of the physics or chemistry involved in how that could have occurred. Even the truest believer isn't going to be deceived when buckets of milk start pooling around the statues.And if they were merely exploiting an existing situation, we're back to asking questions about the physics involved in the phenomenon itself. So again, just how MUCH milk could be accounted for by absorption and displacement into the wetness on the surface anyway? Don't you need to know that? I mean this involved a LOT of people feeding milk to these statues.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

OK, sorry, I apparently didn't read carefully enough. I'll take your word for it that it was preplanned and that the statues are well able to absorb a lot of milk. Apparently clearly a fraud.I jumped on the idea of statues exhibiting odd phenomena because such things are so common in Catholicism.Oh believe me, I do not regard these things as miracles in any case, even though I think some may well be demonic phenomena. Demons can't perform miracles, only some pretty limited physical tricks, and such tricks are very common among Hindu gurus, and I believe they are likely the explanation for much of the phenomena of apparitions and weeping statues of Catholicism too.Edited by Faith, : grammar, clarity as usual

Thanks, anglagard. It is surprising after other things that have been said, but I do appreciate it.