Can anybody help me find a logical explanation for this stuff?

I'm totally converted:

About the New Church
Swedenborgian Theology

The New Church bases its doctrine on the Bible as illuminated by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth century theologian and scientist (read the full biography). This theology is founded on the belief that God used Swedenborg as a vessel through which to spread His teachings to people on earth. During a process of divinely inspired revelations, Swedenborg wrote thirty-five volumes of theological books, referred to as the Writings or Heavenly Doctrines, addressing the mysteries of human life which had previously gone unexplained or been misunderstood.

w w w .newchurch.org/about/swedenborg/
 
Mountweazel said:
I'm totally converted:

About the New Church
Swedenborgian Theology

The New Church bases its doctrine on the Bible as illuminated by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth century theologian and scientist (read the full biography). This theology is founded on the belief that God used Swedenborg as a vessel through which to spread His teachings to people on earth. During a process of divinely inspired revelations, Swedenborg wrote thirty-five volumes of theological books, referred to as the Writings or Heavenly Doctrines, addressing the mysteries of human life which had previously gone unexplained or been misunderstood.

w w w .newchurch.org/about/swedenborg/
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Oh come on, I wasn't trying to push his religion or beliefs:rolleyes: I was going to (and just did) post some strange things done by other people as well. I am not trying to push any specific belief system, I am just pointing out cases where people (with completely different beliefs) seem to demonstrate psychic powers or knowledge that seems hard to explain by science.
 
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Zanders said:
Next is something related to a man named "Wallace Fard Muhammad", the man that started "The Nation of Islam" (which barely has anything to do with Islam and is a racist cult) The information he gives is startlingly accurate for a man like him to know so long ago (unless I am misinformed)
[snip]
The information is not spot on, but some of it is still way closer than anyone should have been able to know at the time, especially somebody like him. Look the man up on wikipedia to get his back story, and also google his name along with "measurements earth water" and such to see more information on his supposed super knowledge.
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Reminds me of this:

w w w .youtube.com/watch?v=Ixfk4LsKWnw
 
Zanders said:
Nope about it not being close or nope to me saying that people couldn't have known that then?
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Nope about the latter.

1930? This is the well into the era of air travel and relativity.

Yes, we knew the diameter and mass of the Earth and the Sun, the approximate size of each of the oceans (which is somewhat arbitrary in any case), the speed of light and sound to quite a good degree of accuracy (considerably more precisely than quoted there). The height given for Mt Everest is off by about 100 feet; I don't have a list of measurements going back to 1930, but that's certainly plausible.

He could have looked this up in any decent encyclopedia of the day.

Shame he didn't give a depth for the Challenger Deep, which was known of at the time but whose measurements were significantly understated until the 1950s.
 
Zanders said:
Nope about it not being close or nope to me saying that people couldn't have known that then?
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the clue is in the height of Mt Everest at 29,141 feet
http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=438&catid=15&subcatid=100
The first survey of Mt. Everest in the 1850s came up with the altitude figure of 29,002 feet based on measurements taken at six sites in the India plains. A second survey made at the turn of the century determined the height of Mt. Everest was 29,141 feet. In the 1954, when Indian surveyors made 12 readings at locations much closer to the mountain, they came with the widely accepted elevation of 29,028 feet (8,848 meters).
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turn of the 19th century information, So three decades old by the time the claim was made
Everest is currently known to be 29,029 ft
;)
 
Zanders said:
That is not actually true. In fact, he never wrote about it himself. It was written about by Immanuel Kant and others after the people that witnessed it were impressed and spread it around. Also, you mis-quoted that last one. Immanuel Kant wrote that he believed his accounts and visions were illusions, except for the fire, of which he could not explain. Please be careful and unbiased when reading this stuff.
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If I recollect properly, in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Kant does indeed say that he can't explain Swedenborg's "clairvoyance" about the fire (it's a long time since I have read it--my PhD is on Kant, but the Dreams is a minor work that doesn't get much attention). I have the book on my shelves, and could look out what he says. But that doesn't make it accurate to say that
"he believed his accounts and visions were illusions, except for the fire", does it?

It's worth remembering too that, although Kant was one of the cleverest people ever to draw breath, he could be (and was) wrong about some things!
 
Mountweazel said:
Reminds me of this:

w w w .youtube.com/watch?v=Ixfk4LsKWnw
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What is more fun about that is that Mecca was built by pagans for pagan worship. Yay! Paganism is the truth!

w w w.wikiislam.com/wiki/Kaaba
w w w.wikiislam.com/wiki/The_Pagan_Origins_of_Islam
 
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Irish Murdoch said:
It's worth remembering too that, although Kant was one of the cleverest people ever to draw breath, he could be (and was) wrong about some things!
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Indeed, his cleverness was exceeded only by his wrongness. (There's a discussion of The Critique of Pure Reason over in R&P, and one of the main points is that Kant screwed up his entire argument at the very beginning of the book. Anyone who's studied mid-19h century mathematics will spot the error immediately. Of course, Kant had no such opportunity, but he's still wrong.)
 
Related to the earlier post stating that Swedenborg faked the clairvoyance for attention, his works were published anonymously, so that explanation doesn't work.
 
Zanders said:
If he cared about getting fame don't you think that he would have published them under his name?
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Anonymous works?

You mean like the works of the Marquis de Sade kind of "anonymous" where someone didn't put a name on a piece of work but everyone *wink wink* knew exactly who wrote it?

Beats me. He seems more insane than an actual fraud.
 
paximperium said:
Anonymous works?

You mean like the works of the Marquis de Sade kind of "anonymous" where someone didn't put a name on a piece of work but everyone *wink wink* knew exactly who wrote it?

Beats me. He seems more insane than an actual fraud.
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On his sanity.

"Some have asserted that Swedenborg lost his mind, suffering some sort of mental illness or nervous breakdown.[8] While this idea was not uncommon during Swedenborg's own time, it is mitigated by his activity in the Swedish Riddarhuset (The House of the Nobility), the Riksdag (the Swedish parliament), and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In fact, close analysis of the historical facts of his life would appear to establish clearly his sanity.[40] Additionally, the system of thought in his theological writings is remarkably coherent.[41]

But I guess that doesn't really prove his sanity. Also, this wikipedia article seems a little biased on his side.
 
I imagine you're referring to the Transcendental Aesthetic, and Kant's (understandable) ignorance of non-Euclidean geometries. I'm afraid that doesn't throw his whole argument out. It just throws out the claim that there are synthetic a priori truths about the nature of physical space.
 
I've refreshed my memory with Dreams of a Spirit Seer. The story about Swedenborg's allegedly clairvoyant knowledge of the fire is reported at Ak. 2:355-356. It is one of a number of anecdotes. The two that precede it are prefaced by the words "The following stories have no other guarantee than that of common hearsay; the proof provided by such a source is very dubious". Before relating the fire anecdote, however, Kant writes "The third story is such that it must be possible to furnish a complete proof of its truth or falsity". No such proof is attempted, though. Immediately after relating the story, Kant writes:

"The reader will probably ask what on earth can have induced me to engage in such a despicable business as that of spreading fairy-tales abroad, which every rational being would hesitate to listen to with patience."

His answer is that certain types of metaphysical speculation, of the sort with which he started the book, are just as ridiculous, and so there's no reason why the two shouldn't appear in the same volume.

In Kant's telling of the tale, Swedenborg merely says that there is a conflagration in Stockholm, in the Südermalm. No mention is made of his own or his neighbours' houses, so the account given in the OP must be from elsewhere. I do not own the volume of Kant's correspondence (though it is on my Amazon wish list if anyone wants to buy it for me!), so can't check that to see if it comes from him. I also can't check to see what Kant's supposed statement of admiration for Swedenborg amounted to. However, it is generally known that the Swedenborgians try to enlist Kant as some sort of champion of their views, even claiming that he isn't really dismissing Swedenborg in the Dreams. It's possible for them to do this because the tone of a lot of the book is heavily ironic, and therefore ambiguous. But ultimately, they haven't got a leg to stand on when the work is considered as a whole, and (though minor in itself) as an important stepping stone towards Kant's critical philosophy, as set out in the Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgement.
 
So if Kant, writing half a decade later, is the closest to a contemporaneous account we know of, and he doesn't mention anything more detailed than Swedenborg's premonition of a fire in Stockholm, then can we assume all the other details are later embellishments?
 
Jack by the hedge said:
So if Kant, writing half a decade later, is the closest to a contemporaneous account we know of, and he doesn't mention anything more detailed than Swedenborg's premonition of a fire in Stockholm, then can we assume all the other details are later embellishments?
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Or that the whole things wasn't even remotely interesteing for anyone else to bother writing about it.
 
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