The Exorcism of Emily Rose

Of course this is highly probable. But this statement is also the equivelent of saying "God does not roll dice."

Mystery of a riddle? Overrrkillllll.

He doesn't. God sticks to the slots. He's a wuss like that.

Blasphemy!

Ah.

Well, yes, of course, then.

I cannot honestly tell you anything about my love for my mother. I can tell you that I loved her, and that she knew this in her last moments of life, and that she loved me, and I knew this. But I can't provide you any functional, definitive proof of this. And if I provide you with personal testimony about why I feel I love my mom, I can tell you that it will differ significantly from, say, my best friend's love for his mom. He's treated her a lot differently than I have my mother, but he professes to share the same love for her that I felt for my mother. I guess he gets a similar warm fuzzy feeling. *shrugs*

I never said I have a love for twinkies. As such, I cannot reasonably comment on how powerful it may be in relation to someone's love of their mother. But aside from perhaps intensity, how do the two versions of love differ "vastly"? To ask the question again, can you tell me what characterizes these two loves beyond warm fuzziness? If one person says, "I love my mom,", and a second person says, "I love my twinkies," and a third person says, "I love my girlfriend," and a fourth person says, "I love my dog," are the only differences the targets of the love? The intensities of the love? Does there then exist a quantifiable amount of love? Can we measure it?

Does this mean then that love has the same meaning and significance for every individual that claims to experience it? That is to say, is a desire to help someone else a consistent quality of love in every individual who experiences it?

Well, no it really doesn't. I can say why we use our feet and legs to kick soccer balls. It doesn't explain how we evolved legs. The end result of a karate kick to someone's chin is not an explanation of legs, but rather a convenient and sometimes useful application.

Which in turn are given some level of significance from various mental inputs. Inputs which are as varied as the individual. I can get behind that. So, since they are specific chemical reactions, can you provide a universally accurate reason for why people fall in love with specific other people? Why a person can love one person he dates and not another? When does love "activate" chemically? When does it fail to "activate?" And why? If science can explain Love, rather than say what the end effects are, please feel free to quantify it.

I've experienced love on a couple of occassions (well, I think it's love, going with the "you just know it, balls to bones" explanation used in the Matrix), and it's neither helped nor hampered my reproductive abilities. In the love that I have experienced, it is safe to say reproduction has been the farthest thing from my mind. I don't need love to reproduce, do I? It doesn't help reproduction, does it? If I screw someone I don't love, will I be able to forget the condoms since I don't love the person? What about gay people who love their partners? Love won't be a factor in their ability to reproduce with same sex partners by any stretch of imagination. Why do they feel it, if it is, as you say, bred in depending on successful ability to reproduce?

You say it's "because that's how evolution works." Okay...so do dogs love their people? Do cats? Do dogs love their sexual doggie partners? What about rabbits? They are very successful at reproducing their numbers. Do they love? Do they need love to be successful at parenting?

Come on.

Does science really explain love or any other emotion? Does it quantify emotion? To call it a chemical reaction quantifies it no more than it would quantify an electrolytic reaction. The flow of ions from one element to another. Adding an acid to a base is a chemical reaction too. That says nothing of what love or emotion truly is. When I digest food, that's a chemical reaction. When my stomach sends info to my brain to provide me with a feeling of fullness, that is a mental input related to a chemical reaction. But that is not love.

Science may at some point fully explain love. It may also fully explain why physical law breaks down at the heart of a singularity (saying "that's just how gravity works is insufficient). It may explain how the force of gravity is transmitted between particles of matter. The fact that it doesn't in no way invalidates science, nor does it invalidate the existence of those things (as yet) poorly understood by science.

To be clear, I'm not saying science is incapable of explaining love, or any of these things (possibly to include ghosts, goblins and demons and such). Rather, that science has not yet explained these things, including love. We don't have all the data. In many cases, we have no conventional, effective means of gathering that data. In other cases, we have no means of even recognizing that data yet. There are things like Gamma Ray Bursters and X-ray jets thousands of light years long that we had no idea existed until we had the ability to perceive them. Sometimes, theory does not bear itself out, no matter how hard we look for it, as in the case of the search for dark matter.

I'm not saying the process of science is flawed by any means. Quite the opposite. I...I love science in fact. The flaws come from humans. The flaws come from our assumptions about the universe; the assumption that "can't explain" and "don't explain" are the same; the assumption that we currently have all the data we'll ever need to analyze the contents of the universe. That's just hubris.

Sorry for the length of the post. Snarkiness was not intended, and I apologize for it if it is perceived.

Yeah, I thought Demonguy (not his member name) would be all over this post. But he is strangely absent

Well, Rosalyn, I reckon we'll simply have to agree to disagree at this point. I don't see that calling a love a chemical reaction explains what it is definitively. I don't think evolutionary development explains it, because many creatures evolve successfully without it, and many animals exist and have existed in the past that nuture and care for their young only to turn on them and try to kill them once they're mature.

If there are different forms of love, and if even animals can experience love on a different level; if love differs from human to human, and from relationship to relationship, that says pretty clearly to me that there are no consistent qualities or qualifiers for love, or what constitutes love.

We simply disagree.

But I ask, assuming either of us had the inclination to care beyond mere discussion, if I were to tell you I loved my mother, how would you go about proving it? If you were a love doctor, how would you confirm or refute my emotions? The available evidence does not adhere to consistent qualifications.

Well it is a movie of course, and Hollywood has to make things less true and more "interesting"
Well it is a big debate with many if demons really are real or not.
I believe in the super natural though, but as to go in one's body and take over it and what not. I dunno.
The movie does look good, but you can't expect it to stay true to the real events.

I'm truly interested in there being something more to the world than what we see.

However i've never seen anything to prove that to myself.

As a child i used to have dreams which demon type characters in.. well just very evil people really. Eitherway when i used to wake up i could still see them in the dark taunting me, wanting me to go back to sleep.

I put it down to an overactive imagination.

I was really hoping to see that explosion again. This one is still funny... but not quite the same.

Perhaps
robosagogo's issue with the movie was the over-reliance on a supernatural solution for a natural occurence, which may have led to this girl's death in real life. Perhaps if she'd received more intensive medical attention and care, she would have found the help she'd needed.

I don't think he was so much pointing out it was a movie based on a bogus interpretation of events, but rather outrage after reading the true story upon which it was based.

wtf?

it's funny all this conversation about delusions and such, because when my boyfriend and i saw the trailer we were like "wow, that's what it's like to be schizophrenic"

she could have very well been a very very mentally disturbed individual. it happens. my old therapist treated a couple schizophrenics, and they told him about things like clowns following them around telling them they're gonna die. and he said that most of the time during their sessions they stared with a look of horror on their faces at a spot above his right shoulder. these are rare cases i think though, most cases of schizophrenia that i've read about are patients who just hear voices a lot. and what sucks is even with medication, the hallucinations and voices are just numbed a little, but they never go away.

as far as seeing ghosts and demons, i believe that there may be spirits walking around, and some might be bad spirits. i watched this show where this family kept seeing ghosts, and then they found out that they were somewhat psychic and picked up on things that normal people didn't.

maybe i don't believe in ghosts, but rather energy. like good and bad energy waves that just kind of linger around places. who knows.

all i know is that i'm seeing this movie on Saturday with my boyfriend, just because we love any scary movie, anytime.

I have too.

Some of us have dated them.

sure it can see