Monday, November 13, 2006

Richard Carrier: Exopsychologist, PhET

In the past I’ve been known to level some rather harsh remarks about Richard Carrier. But permit me to take this occasion to offer him a public apology.

Although I hold his mastery of Pauline exegesis in low esteem, I can now see that I have grossly underestimated the staggering breadth of his scholarship. Forsooth, the sheer scope of his intellectual attainments is truly out of this world:

“Of course, ‘God performed a miracle’ is even less plausible than ‘Space aliens healed Jesus,’ because we do have credible evidence to believe that there could be space aliens with the means and the motive to heal Jesus.”

http://www.columbia.edu/~rcc20/TheftFAQ.html

Imagine being privy to the inner motives of the little green men!

I do wonder, though, about the precise source of his credible evidence. Does Columbia offer a degree program in exopsychology?

Or is this something that Richard (may I call your Richard?) picked up first-hand?—assuming that he doesn’t wear his tinfoil cap in the shower.

Perhaps Richard is an alien abductee. Is that what accounts for his uncanny command of this rather elusive discipline?

I do wish that he would expand on his extraterrestrial insights. For example, what is the correct school of alien psychology?

Is it Adlerian exopsychology? Behavioral exopsychology? Folk exopsychology? Freudian exopsychology? Jungian exopsychology? Or Pavlovian exopsychology?

In case the SETI program should someday succeed, I think that Richard has a solemn duty to the human race to prepare us for first contact by offering a televised course in comparative alien/earthling psychology.

2 comments:

  1. Good call!!!

    That is what I call a RIDICULOUS idea/belief.

    What a nut!!!

    Now, let's talk about the credible evidence for talking plants, snakes, and donkeys. Maybe we could also examine the "true" stories of the Tower of Babel and women that transform into table condiments.

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  2. yep...kinda lol... but because there is no such discipline today... and titles make one feel pompous... but let's say one day Seti gets their message... Now think of another thing. Our language, the grammar, the synthax, everything that has something to do with it, refects a part of our species. How we percive reality, how we influence it, etc. Now, on a deeper, more personal level, I live in Romania, you live elsewhere, if I said something to you, like... "ramai cu bine"... you'd be able to "decode" it using a dictionary, it means "farawell"... well, the message seti's waiting for doesn't have dictionary support + the interpretation of messages betwen us humans has to transcede cultural, regional, psychologycal, etc barriers...not to speak of communication between any alien civilisation and ours. Imagine that you're standing before a piece of paper with some kind of message written on it. Now you have to really understand it. You have to forget anything that you've ever learned and experienced, and take it one step at a time, the pourpuss beeing reaching the same logical pattern that was used to write it... by a fracking alien. That's where exopsychology would step in a offer invaluable help...that's if it's ever to be officially created.

    I'm not an alien freak, but there's so much talk of "what if we get the message?"...that people seemed to have forgotten to think past that, and figure ways to actually have a strategy if the seti program succedes...hey, if the rest of the world recognises English as an international language, it doesn't mean that aliens will learn it too, lol.

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