Posted by:
kimball
(
)
Date: February 16, 2012 12:17PM
First off I'll say that as far TBMs go, my mom is the best type. Although influenced by apologetics and anecdotes, she has been very accepting of me leaving of the church and is one of the only mormons who has actually been willing to discuss and investigate the details of why. Every now and then the stuff I teach her makes her freak out, but she always comes back after she has found her center again. She's never judgmental, etc...
So I was talking with her the other day, and she said that my aunt thinks her daughter (who is maybe 7?) is a sort of medium.
Background - my aunt (married-in) is from Peru, and while very mormon, has retained a lot of the tribal mysticism from where she grew up. Very voodoo-ish things, like curses are very real to her, and she claims to have seen them in action in the tiny village where she grew up. She goes down to visit every now and then, often for a funeral or something, and has found scary and demonic things in the houses of the deceased. One relative was undoubtedly possesed and suffered from psychotically evil episodes, and after her death they found items designed to conjure evil spirits in her house. You get the idea - scary. My aunt, however, is a professional designer who lives in suburban america.
now her daughter - my cousin - has always been a whacky kid. She loves spongebob, and acts exactly like the character do - very schizophrenic. A little bit of that is okay for a kid, but she takes it to an extreme, and in my observation has demonstrated very little awareness of the people around her, even for a child of that age. It's been a few years since I've seen her, so she's probably grown up some since. But you get the idea - not a reliable source for level-headed honesty in my opinion.
Or am I mistaken? Could it be that I am the one without an accurate view of the world around me, and this girl is more in touch with reality?...
My mom told me that after my grandpa had died, my little cousin was in his house playing, like the grandkids often still do. The family still uses the house for various things, so this is not unusual. When my aunt told her that she shouldn't play with a particular item that had belonged to my grandpa, this girl said "grandma said I could." My aunt told her solemnly that grandpa had passed away a long time ago, but my cousin apparently insisted. My aunt asked her where grandma was and she pointed at the couch. Grandpa was there as well.
My mom went on to mention that our grandma had passed away before my cousin was even born, and yet she was describing grandma as saying things that were very in-character to her personality. How could she possibly know about grandma in this kind of depth? Grandpa was also acting in-character. Apparently my aunt had had a lot of discussion with my cousin.
I could feel the tingles in my spine trying to seize my spinal column from all directions, but the skeptic in me wasn't going to give up that easily. I quickly analyzed everything that I knew and began my responses.
"She's about seven-years-old, right? Well I remember being seven fairly clearly, and have some memories as far back as when I was two. Thus we should be able to get a pretty good description of this event for the rest of her life, right?"
My mom immediately got the deer-in-the-headlight look, so I thought for a few more seconds to make sure that everything I was about to say was going to come out rational, and not accusatory.
"Did she give a physical description of grandma?" My mom didn't think so. "That would be important," I said, "especially if she hasn't seen many or any pictures. It would lend a lot of credibility to her story."
"What's interesting," said my mom, "is that she got her personality right. Even if she had seen pictures, she still wouldn't have had any way to possibly know her personality."
"Of course I would need all the details about that," I said, "to make sure that my aunt's assessment isn't subject to confirmation bias. She is a very supersticious person."
"I don't know if I would call it supersticious," said my mom. "There's a difference between supersticion and faith."
I then clarified "by supersticious I mean willing to believe in supernatural things in the absence of any verifiable reason to believe they are true. Maybe faith is the same thing, maybe not, but that's the definition I'm working with."
My mom nodded her understanding. I continued.
"Children tend to glean a lot from their parents while developing. A child born to a supersticious parent has a much higher probability of reporting supernatural things than a child born to realist parents, and their supersticious parent would have a much higher probability of believing and encouraging such claims."
My mom responded "you uncle (the girl's father and aunt's wife) has been plagued by evil spirits himself too, as you know."
"Well, everyone has their own demons."
"Yes, but his took the shape of a great ball of evil."
I was aware of the story. "And has this ball of evil continued into his adulthood?"
My mom wasn't sure.
"If it has, has even ever seen a specialist about it, to see if it's something conjured in his own mind or not?"
"No, he hasn't."
"Well that's a big sign that he's supersticious as well," I said. "If he wasn't, he'd explore all the possible explanations of his experience. As it is, he is content to accept only the explanation that his experience was supernatural and independent of his own mind. This shows that both my cousin's parents are supersticious, and reinforces my theory. Have they taken her to see a specialist about her experience?"
"No."
"Then how do they know that it wasn't in her mind? Their course of action would dramatically depend on whether her experience was supernatural or psychological. They seem to have already ruled out psychological without giving it a fair chance."
"But you can't prove some things," my mom said.
"You can quantify anything that has a real-world effect. There's a magician named James Randi who has offered a one-million dollar prize to anyone who can verify any kind of supernatural ability under laboratory conditions."
"But if, like in Peru, someone gets cursed and they get sick. How do you demonstrate under laboratory conditions that their sickness didn't come from the curse?"
"Easy," I said. "Take ten healthy people and curse them. Then take ten healthy people and don't curse them."
"And see what happens," said my mom, "I get it."
"Yes, but make sure that they're in controlled circumstances so that group A is not exposed to anything different than group B. You have to be very careful with that control, especially to prevent fraud. If you can demonstrate that all of group A got sick and group B didn't, and that they were not physically exposed to anything that might physically get them sick that group B isn't, that's all it takes to win a million dollars. And yet nobody has done it yet."
My mom seemed to grudgingly agree. I could see that she was getting kind of downhearted about the things that I was pointing out, so I tried to show a little more compassion. I'm not sure if I succeeded.
"Human beings have a great need to attach deep meaning to their experiences. It's part of how we cope with difficult or confusing experiences. However, this tendency also makes us stubborn, and not willing to entertain alternate explanations for these experiences. We are afraid that if we explain them away we will lose the meaning along with the experience. This meaning is very important to us and makes up a large portion of who we are, so we are often afraid to lose it, even if it means continuing to have the difficult and confusing experiences.
My mom had nothing more to say, and neither did I. I did feel kind of bad afterwards as if, by explaining about meaning, I was stripping her of the meaning she had built up for her own life. However, as she has always been interested and desirous to understand me on every level, I was satisfied that she had come to this new level of understanding.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/16/2012 03:26PM by kimball.