For the purposes of this discussion, if you will let me and play along, I’d like to lump together a number of things that people believe in and refer to the pile as “telepathy”.
So…
If Lord YHWH really did harden that ol’ pharaoh’s heart… that’s telepathy.
If Satan exists and tempts people to wicked acts by putting ideas in their heads… that’s telepathy.
If angels and demons can cause you to have certain dreams… that’s telepathy.
If ghosts exist but don’t show up on cameras, just in people’s heads… that’s telepathy.
If the reason you know Jesus is your saviour is because God altered something in your head directly… that’s telepathy.
If somebody gets messages beamed to their head from a far distant alien… that’s telepathy.
If somebody performs telepathy on stage and they aren’t cheating… that’s telepathy!
Please… even if you disagree with this usage… just for THIS discussion, let’s all assume that anybody saying “telepathy” on this page is referring to my loose definition. mmk?
(One thing that I couldn’t fit into this one-size-fits-all concept was the notion of God having “written something on our hearts”… that’s a topic for another discussion, of course, but for now I’m just going to ignore it… I may well make an OP on it in the near future, though.)
So, so…
Under this loose definition… do you believe in telepathy?
I would like to provide my answer to my own question, now, and then we can all have a healthy argument… sorry, I mean, debate…
I do not believe in telepathy because I have not seen sufficient evidence to justify such a belief; it is interesting to consider, though, what evidence might convince me to believe in it… I can see but three possible ways:
1. Information that could not be known to any human at the time it was telepathically revealed that was later verifiable.
2. A setup that I personally created wherein two people are kept separate and I give one of them some information and then go and discover that the other person has learned that information seemingly magically.
3. A sufficient number of people agreeing on what they were being told by a supernatural source
Each of these has their own problems, though, and none of them would in and of themselves convince me… for instance, if half a million people, randomly distributed across the World, shared a specific dream… perhaps it might feature a religious figure… let’s say the Buddha… well… I wouldn’t necessarily jump to believing that the Buddha was real and had appeared to them… I might consider the possibility that somebody had found a way to subliminally influence them.
Anyhow… I guess I might as well include my follow-up question if you are going to answer my question in the affirmative: do you have any evidence that telepathy is real?
Oh… and a follow-up follow-up question if you answered “yes” to believing in telepathy and “no” to having any evidence:
What foolishness is this!?