Bedlam

[blood_pardon]

This is a segment from a paper I wrote in Composition 1 about the late Charles Cribb. The paper was split into 5 sections about 5 seperate incidents spanning 4 years. This is a true story.

Summer 2006

For a week now I have been wondering if I have contracted the HIV virus. I look up the symptoms online and I have all of them. Diarrhea, thrush, weight loss, sinus infections, fatigue, nausea. What's worse is my girlfriend has all these symptoms as well. I wonder if Cassie would stay with me if I gave her the dreaded human immuno-virus.

I inhale the marijuana smoke and cough loudly. I pass the joint to Chris who sits next to me on his couch. He etches something onto his drawing pad with a penicil. He takes the weed from my hand and puffs it. A giant cloud of smoke spurts out his nostrils. He leans forward and ashes on the coffee table before passing it back Charles scrambles inside and closes the door behind him. He wears sunglasses, baseball cap backwards, and a blue hooded sweatshirt with the hood up.

"Get out!" Chris yells.

"Let me get a bud." Charles begs sitting Indian style in front of us.

"No! Get out!" Chris shouts slamming his book on the table

"Christopher, let me get a pinch?" He pleads.

Chris says no.

"Christopher," Charles repeats over and over again as Chris shouts at him to leave.

I join in with Chris and start telling Charles to leave. He rounds on me. "Oh no I gave my girl firiend aids," He mocks. "You faggot!"

I sit there in stunned silence. I didn't tell anyone my fear. How did he know I was thinking that?

He just gives me a black toothed grin.

 

[borrofburi]

It's ok writing, but I'm left wondering "what's the point?" Especially after you claimed it's a true story.

 

[blood_pardon]

Its one of my first encounters with the supernatural. There are events before and after this that lead me to believe that Charles Cribb was demon possesed.

 

[Duvelthehobbit666]

Well what can I say?

I would say that you have absolutely no proof that this was a supernatural event. Maybe you told Charles this but you forgot. Had a bit too much to drink. This can happen. Maybe Charles was infected by the HIV virus, gave it to your girlfriend and she gave it to you. Maybe he looked at your browser history and saw that you were researching thinking that you might have it. It would not be that hard to put 1 and 1 together. Maybe you are not telling us the truth and this is some sort of constructed history of your life to present to try and convert us. This would not be the first time a fundamentalist tried to do this. Maybe you dreamed the whole scenario. We cannot tell exactly.

All we know is that this is a personal experience. As many people on this forum can tell you, personal experience means pretty much nothing. We cannot determine of the supernatural exists from this one story which no one can fact check. Sorry but you will need to try a lot harder if you want to convince me that you had genuine contact with the supernatural.

This also is not in the right category I believe. I think it might belong to the religion and irreligion thread or even the pseudoscience thread. If a mod can please do that it would be greatly appreciated.

 

[borrofburi]

Its one of my first encounters with the supernatural. There are events before and after this that lead me to believe that Charles Cribb was demon possesed.

Err... Duvel beat me to most of it, there are so many ways in which you could easily remember this wrong... you self admitted to being on drugs at the time, there are a vast number of ways in which you can forget things (like telling him, both at the time, and now in the future), or you could have accidentally implied things (and not noticed the obvious implication yourself), there are other ways of him obtaining information about your worries (other than you telling him, e.g. your search history), etc. Mostly it sounds like a rather bitchy person that managed to glean some information you didn't expect him to have.

Watch this for a nice little summary of (1) why what you're saying will not convince any of us and (2) why what you're saying probably should not even convince you:

 

[blood_pardon]

Well what can I say?

I would say that you have absolutely no proof that this was a supernatural event. Maybe you told Charles this but you forgot. Had a bit too much to drink. This can happen. Maybe Charles was infected by the HIV virus, gave it to your girlfriend and she gave it to you. Maybe he looked at your browser history and saw that you were researching thinking that you might have it. It would not be that hard to put 1 and 1 together. Maybe you are not telling us the truth and this is some sort of constructed history of your life to present to try and convert us. This would not be the first time a fundamentalist tried to do this. Maybe you dreamed the whole scenario. We cannot tell exactly.

All we know is that this is a personal experience. As many people on this forum can tell you, personal experience means pretty much nothing. We cannot determine of the supernatural exists from this one story which no one can fact check. Sorry but you will need to try a lot harder if you want to convince me that you had genuine contact with the supernatural.

This also is not in the right category I believe. I think it might belong to the religion and irreligion thread or even the pseudoscience thread. If a mod can please do that it would be greatly appreciated.

Or maybe it happened exaclty as I said? Why have you ruled that out?

Im not going to try any harder to convince you, go ahead and dismiss the story as you have dismissed the gospel.

I dont think ill be back to this forum, stupid arguments are fruitless

 

[ImprobableJoe]

Or you could be lying. I've never seen anything supernatural, but everyone lies.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

I dont think ill be back to this forum, stupid arguments are fruitless

Well, yes... if you present a stupid argument, it is pretty fruitless. Feel free to stick around, and I'm sure your arguments will improve as you defend and refine them.

 

[Duvelthehobbit666]

Or maybe it happened exaclty as I said? Why have you ruled that out?

Im not going to try any harder to convince you, go ahead and dismiss the story as you have dismissed the gospel.

I dont think ill be back to this forum, stupid arguments are fruitless

Great, stops me from telling you a second time why you could be wrong.

 

[Andiferous]

This also is not in the right category I believe. I think it might belong to the religion and irreligion thread or even the pseudoscience thread. If a mod can please do that it would be greatly appreciated.

My apologies, but this is a personal anecdote and there is logic in it being here as well. I'd feel to move it would make me... well... a booger. I'm not the final authority though. That's okay.

I am sorry blood_pardon for the offense. Revealing yourself anywhere on the internet can be difficult and rarely rewarded, as I have long tested and hence discovered.

Please feel welcome to stay.

 

[borrofburi]

I dont think ill be back to this forum, stupid arguments are fruitless

Wait, so you actually thought your random story that you claimed to be true was going to convert us on the spot? You actually are going to have a hissy fit, take your ball, and go home because, what, we didn't believe your story proved the supernatural?

If you're that melodramatic, then the internet in general is not the place for you. If you're that easily upset, then you might want to avoid any place where they allow ideas you don't agree with.

But Andie is correct, feel free to stick around, just know that, sometimes around here, people are going to disagree with you, even point out that what you said is dumb. Ideally we mods will manage to keep personal attacks to a minimum, but it's a very difficult balance between "personal attack" and "you're allowed to say what you want and communicate the ideas you want". For instance Joe's post isn't a personal attack, he's just taking a very direct route: even ignoring all the ways you yourself could be wrong, it's still more likely that you're lying (something he, and people in general, have observed often) than that the supernatural (something that has yet to ever be observed (in well controlled conditions)) actually exists.

 

[lrkun]

This is a segment from a paper I wrote in Composition 1 about the late Charles Cribb. The paper was split into 5 sections about 5 seperate incidents spanning 4 years. This is a true story.

Summer 2006

For a week now I have been wondering if I have contracted the HIV virus. I look up the symptoms online and I have all of them. Diarrhea, thrush, weight loss, sinus infections, fatigue, nausea. What's worse is my girlfriend has all these symptoms as well. I wonder if Cassie would stay with me if I gave her the dreaded human immuno-virus.

I inhale the marijuana smoke and cough loudly. I pass the joint to Chris who sits next to me on his couch. He etches something onto his drawing pad with a penicil. He takes the weed from my hand and puffs it. A giant cloud of smoke spurts out his nostrils. He leans forward and ashes on the coffee table before passing it back Charles scrambles inside and closes the door behind him. He wears sunglasses, baseball cap backwards, and a blue hooded sweatshirt with the hood up.

"Get out!" Chris yells.

"Let me get a bud." Charles begs sitting Indian style in front of us.

"No! Get out!" Chris shouts slamming his book on the table

"Christopher, let me get a pinch?" He pleads.

Chris says no.

"Christopher," Charles repeats over and over again as Chris shouts at him to leave.

I join in with Chris and start telling Charles to leave. He rounds on me. "Oh no I gave my girl firiend aids," He mocks. "You faggot!"

I sit there in stunned silence. I didn't tell anyone my fear. How did he know I was thinking that?

He just gives me a black toothed grin.

May I make a suggestion?

Be complete in what you wish to share. If it contains A-C don't exclude C. If you wish to say this is so, you have to state it in a complete manner. Giving us the facts without making a connection will confuse your reader. I'm sure you can do it.

 

[Anachronous Rex]

Here's a personal story of mine:

Back when I was in high school there was a fellow student whom I found quite irritating. Let's call him 'Ben.' Ben would often follow me around despite my insistence that he not do so, I informed him on many occasions that I found his company displeasurable but to no avail.

Not wanting to make any appeal to formal authorities, and being something of a sadistic asshole at the time, I decided to do something about it. I went to an on-line video-game which I knew he played, created a profile, and (after an prolonged and exhaustive effort to win Ben's trust), managed to pry some personal information out of him... actually, quite a lot.

My original plan was to blackmail him into leaving me alone, but the call of vengeance was strong, and ultimately I ended up surprising him with a small portion of what I had learned in front of a half-dozen or so of our piers.

To my knowledge he never caught-on to my ruse, and continued to feed information to my on-line persona for some time afterwards.



Now admittedly Ben was a chump, but where he in your shoes how would he explain my knowledge of his private affairs?

So you see, as a demon-possessed villain myself, I am somewhat skeptical.

 

[blood_pardon]

Here is another incident:

2005

Its black when Jake Davis and I pull into the driveway of the white two story house on
Highland Street. We knock and Chris Freeman answers. He is Charles' brother.

When I walk in through the front door I see Charles in the corner on the left from the door.
He wears a blue hoody with the hood up, sunglasses, and jeans stained black with ash. He smokes a cigarette with fervency. It seems as if he doesn't even pause to breath.

Gene walks around the corner with his hands in the air twisting his fingers in an odd way. "Hey Jake what's up man? You gotta buck?"

When Gene Allen was seventeen he was struck by a car and his skull bounced off a curb. Charles was seventeen and was ran over at an intersection. Both have been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Gene is basically harmless, he just sits and flips wildly through the Bible without reading it. Charles is the dangerous one.

Chris leads us upstairs to his room. There is a bed, couch, and coffee table. There is a gold dot picture of a lion on the wall. He has a leather rocking chair with speakers built in that sets low to the
ground right in front of his 32 inch. There is a black Xbox laying on the floor wires from it and the
controller snaking every which way.

I move a skateboard to sit on the couch. Something bangs downstairs. There is a pause
and another loud bang, followed by another pause, then another bang. Chris swears and gets up
and hustles out of the room, I hear him yell. I follow him downstairs.

I see Charles standing in the middle of the floor. He slams a dark stone against the ceiling
causing white powder to rain down. I notice a large hole where he had hit repeatedly, causing the
plaster to break loose. Over and over again he slams the rock against the ceiling, catching it as it falls
and throwing it back up. All the while Chris is yelling at Charles.

He finally yells back, "You can't tell me what to do Christopher!"

Hours later we go back downstairs and get some pizza from the fridge. Charles strides up to us. "Hey
did yall want to see a magic trick?"

No one says anything. Charles seems to convulse he thrusts out his chest, his arms are
twisted awkwardly. He is still in that odd posture. Hands at his side and wrists bent up. He laughs, I
examine his face it looks like he is having the time of his life. Its as if he is expiriencing pleasure from
striking this odd pose. Suddenly, the radio in the corner crackles and the volume turns up. ACDC "Highway to Hell" plays. There is another crackles and it blares. Charles' body relaxes and the
volume returns to where it was.

"Howd you do that?" I ask and he busts out into a fit of laughter. He walks over to his corner and sits
Indian style smoking a cigarette like a mad man.

"How'd you do that?" I persist standing near him, but he just laughs even harder.

 

[Pennies for Thoughts]

My psychic prediction is that even if we take the responses from the first anecdote and paste them in after the second, our only reward will be a third anecdote.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

I'm going to use my psychic powers to predict...


...wait for it...

Supposed anecdotes from years ago don't mean a thing to us. Posting more of them is just bad form at best.

 

[Prolescum]

I too have a tale. It stands on the shoulders of giants. Well, it's pretty tall...

I once new a guy who was magical. Like all people who delve into magic, he had blackened teeth, scraggly hair, took drugs and was a bit of an all round schitzo. When he smokes cigarettes (which he can obviously afford to chain smoke, being a fully employed wacko), he let the ash fall onto his trousers then rubbed it in to make them a bit dirtier, because we all know that those types are unclean. I was sickened, but didn't let it show.

He was such a cliche that he couldn't be made up. Anyway, I was round at a friend's house who conveniently lived with a collection of weirdos that include this warlock. We'll call him Pete because he is the colour of compost. He's not mulatto or anything, just dirty. I don't mind the blacks.
Anyway, being a weirdo, Pete did some weird things that are entirely plausible, like making the effort to put a hole in the ceiling with some handheld obsidian and correctly guessing that my cancer has AIDS. Probably so his magic can attempt to infiltrate my soul. I could feel his voodoo getting closer, but fortunately, an image of Jesus dressed up like He-Man fighting for all that is good springs to my mind and I'm relieved.

No one does anything about Pete because it turns out he was just a caricature, a facsimile of my fears and entirely imagined, but I am protected by the shield of Christ so even if he were real I still wouldn't have to bother taking my concerns to the appropriate government department.

The moral of this tale is that God created the universe and you will burn in hellfire for eternity if you don't repent of your sins and embrace the love of Jesus Christ, blessings be upon him.

If you think this is a pile of nonsense, I might get a bit teary and threaten to go elsewhere. If you dismiss me, you dismiss God, your God.

 

[Anachronous Rex]

Its black when Jake Davis and I pull into the driveway of the white two story house on
Highland Street. We knock and Chris Freeman answers. He is Charles' brother.

Do you actually write like this? Because it doesn't seem like your voice at all.

Now lets be serious. Nothing you've presented is at all compelling. At no time does there not seem to be at least a half-dozen, probably more, plausible alternate explanations that do not involve the supernatural.

Compare this to my 10 years experience in Okinawan Ryukyu Kempo Karate: I've seen people do things that seem - even to my skeptical mind - best explainable by a mystical energy force called chi (which I do not believe in.) I've seen people alter their physical properties by apparent force of will. I've seen people 'sense' attacks that they could not have perceived. I've seen Sensei seriously screw people up and then fix them, I've even seen an exhausted, blind, diabetic take down two grown men effortlessly as though he knew exactly where they were and what they were doing. I know a guy who can knock people over without touching them (I also happen to know how the trick is done, but suppose I did not.) I learned how to hallucinate intentionally. I've even learned more they my fair share of Dim Mak (some call them, "death strikes," but most of don't kill.)

I could have very easily bought into the whole thing completely, and felt very justified in doing so.

Instead the experience has made me more skeptical. Most of these phenomena are otherwise explainable. Dim Mak , for instance, effects nerves and other bodily systems, and its highest practitioners will not only admit this, but encourage you to learn more about it (something the religious never seem to do), hallucinations can be accomplished by overstimulating any of several areas of the brain. Indeed, its actually put a great deal of religious mumbo-jumbo in perspective... I know now how Christian 'healers' cause people to fall to the ground at their lightest touch to the forehead, I know this because we do the same (and Akido practitioners are famous for it.) I know the degree to which mental state determines our reality. etc. etc.

I don't begrudge you for your experience, but do think you should think about it.


That is, of course, assuming you're not merely a troll.

 

[Andiferous]

Well, accusing other members of being trolls is very bad form. It tends to get out of hand too. Eventually everyone calls everyone a troll for every disagreement, no? Also note that Blood_Pardon has 32 posts.

 

[lrkun]

It can be observed that bloody_pardon's aim is to show testimonial evidence. Such will be used to convince us to see his point of view. I say give him a chance. It will satiate his hunger for expression, and we in turn can criticize it, comment on it, or produce a better alternative.

Bloody_pardon,

You have to realize that testimonial evidence is not that substantial. It is biased, because a person's memory and perception is flawed. You may of course give us your story and example. I urge you to do so. However, when we criticize it, have an open mind. You in turn might learn something from the experience. I apologise for our behavior and maybe you will have a better perspective of how an atheist may think and how different we all think as compared to you.

-l.r.