Ouija Boards

[Reach]

What do we think about them?

Total BS or something else?

Please post where your argument is coming from (Religon, Experience Ecs)

Edited December 28, 2010 by Reach

[ydoaPs]

They are children's toys. My argument is from that it is a blatant fact.

[Ringer]

If spirits were real and could influence things physically I doubt they would be doing it letter by letter for a bunch of teenagers at a slumber party.

[CaptainPanic]

It's certain that we don't know everything yet. There are some weird phenomena which science can only explain by saying that according to statistics, sometimes the weirdest coincidences will actually happen. Twin telepathy and stuff like that is unproven, but stories persist. It cannot be proven that this is not true... but mainstream media, (and science too) usually dismiss this as coincidence or as a fabrication.

 

But those phenomena that I mean require on 1 assumption... that telepathy is somehow possible.

 

The ouija board assumes that some form of telepathy is possible.

But it also assumes that the dead can still talk, despite being dead. It therefore assumes that a soul can separate from a physical body. It assumes an afterlife. It assumes that the dead can only talk through that board. It assumes that candles and a spooky atmosphere are required for contact.

 

I think that those are a few assumptions too many... and therefore I dismiss the whole thing.

 

Also, the fact that commerceis involved makes it very suspicious.

[tomgwyther]

before the 1970s it was just a childrens' toy, then it got used as a prop in a film (The shining IIRC) to contact the dead. Ever since then it's been thought of as mystical/evil, etc.

Presumably, had they used monopoly or Cludo as a prop in the film; those games would now be thought of a having mystical qualities.

 

The idea that a childrens' toy could harm you via the intervention of evil spirits is just another bit of BS more commonly used to scare the mentally challenged and cattle

[Anura]

I voted BS out of common sence!

[CaptainPanic]

I voted BS out of common sence!

"Common sense" is hardly a scientific reason... it used to be common sense that the earth was flat and that the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars revolved around the earth.

[Marat]

The usual theory which explains the apparently rational operation of Ouija boards in some cases is that the human participants in fact subconsciously push and direct the platen to spell out messages they find to be plausible responses to the questions posed. Since the board is polished and the platen glides easily, it can transmit subconscious impulses efficiently, much as dowsing rods and other supposedly magical instruments which just channel subconscious thinking do.

 

But occasionally strange things happen which are difficult to explain scientifically in that way. For example, sometimes the platen seems to move faster than the human operators can move their hands to keep up with it, but I am not clear whether this is some illusion produced by its ease of motion and the difficulty of detecting conscious contributions to its motion when two people are pushing it simultaneously.

 

Another problem is that occasionally it seems to reveal correct information which is unlikely to have been stored in the subconscious mind of the human participants. For example, once when using a Ouija board with a friend, I asked it, "Who was the person who best understood Kant's philosophy?" jokingly testing whether it could channel Kant and come up with the name of one of his famous interpreters. The Ouija board did laboriously spell out a long German surname which I had never seen before, but which I then wrote down and later looked up in the general name index to Kant's collected works, unpublished notes, lectures, and letters. It turned out to be the name of one of Kant's personal friends and dinner table companions, but someone absolutely unknown to scholarship, since he had never published anything.

 

Now it is not impossible that I had somehow stored that name in my subconscious and could produce it in the course of using the Ouija board, since I had seen every page of that index at one time or another during my student days many years before, but that seems almost as remarkable a feat as if the Ouija board had contacted the spirit world.

[Mr Skeptic]

I don't believe in that sort of thing. Even if there were spirits to answer the questions it seems an unlikely venue for them to do so.

 

However, feel free to test it. Ask questions for which there is only one correct answer, and do so multiple times so that the statistical probability of it happening by chance is less than some threshold (let's say, less than 1 in 10 billion, so that you can't just say you were the lucky person who happened to get it).

[ydoaPs]

I don't believe in that sort of thing. Even if there were spirits to answer the questions it seems an unlikely venue for them to do so.

 

However, feel free to test it. Ask questions for which there is only one correct answer, and do so multiple times so that the statistical probability of it happening by chance is less than some threshold (let's say, less than 1 in 10 billion, so that you can't just say you were the lucky person who happened to get it).

There are numbers on the board, so you can do a simple math test.

 

1)Blindfold(and ear plug) the operators of the game so that the operators cannot subconsciously answer the question themselves.

2)Spin the board several times so that the operators do not know the orientation of the game.

3)Write down a mathematical problem that has a numerical answer.

4)Read the problem out loud as well as laying the written problem near the board so that it is given the information in more than one way to increase the chance of any spirits seeing the problem.

5)Let the spirits answer.

 

Repeat with different math problems. You could also do other basic things such as geography. You don't want to get too complicated in case the spirits aren't very smart.

[Doc. Josh]

I personaly believe it's a hoax nothing more than someones subconscience and superstitions allowing them to openly interpert ther inner most fears and desires. But all in all with the realm of the world who is to know for sure if the deceased are nothing more than spirit's in other dimensions realms somthing of that course. or we are the ones who are deceased and they are real? Or it's your other self in a parallel universe and some how working on a physic level of energy like feed back from amplifier.

[John Cuthber]

I think it's an interesting, if poorly designed, experiment into the way in which the human mind works at the so-called subconscious level.

Are demons in people's heads?

If so, is the ouija board a way to contact them?