Najakcharmer
Posts: 2121
Joined: 5/3/2004 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: slaveboyforyou No actually I am 100% sure that vampires don't exist (no matter what pretentious spelling you use for them.) I am 100% sure certain that they do exist. They are known to have fascinating abilities including flight, sonar and anticoagulant saliva, as well as "altruistic" social behavior and complex vocalizations. They are in the order Chiroptera, family Desmodontinae. They do not hybridize with Homo sapiens. And really, they are quite interesting enough without imagining that they do. As to the "modern vampyre community", some decent scholarly looks have actually been taken into it. It's a little early to draw definite conclusions, but what I see is the etiology of something that I would consider clinical and potentially even pathophysiological as opposed to strictly psychological. That does not translate into supernatural; as an example, schizophrenia is in part pathophysiological, and some studies connect it to the commonly reported experience of shamanism in multiple geographically disparate cultures around the world. Whether or not you believe in the spirit world, from a scholarly point of view, shamanism is very definitely an established institution and a genuine experience that is reported very consistently by individuals from completely different cultures. The obvious conclusion is that we are looking at a phenomenon that is very probably hardwired into the human brain in some manner. Like many such conditions that have been retained in the human gene pool, it may not be entirely dysfunctional and may even be eufunctional under some circumstances. In short, my best guess is that many "vampyres" are experiencing a real phenomenon in the sense that they are not simply making up their condition, but that it is clinical rather than supernatural. Some very interesting bits of data are coming out of the latest academic surveys on that community.
< Message edited by Najakcharmer -- 2/26/2008 9:18:14 PM >
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