This came up on Twitter the other day, but feels too urgently urgent for that transitory medium. So I thought I’d give it an entry of its own here on the blog.
I spend a lot of time scribbling about ghosts and devils and inflatable children and lake monsters. When I’m writing I believe in all of it. How can I not? It’s happening right in front of me, and I’m just taking notes, like a sportswriter with a front row seat at a fight. When I’m writing, to be honest, belief doesn’t even come into it. It’s an act of concentrated dreaming while awake and for the most part, we don’t argue with our dreams, we go with them.
But I got wondering how much of this stuff I could actually buy into, when I’m not playing professional make-believe. More than that: I wanted something concrete, something tangible, some marker of how open-minded/gullible I really am. And thus… the Mulder Score.
To figure out your own personal Mulder Score, work your way down the following list of paranormal possibilities. When you believe in something, you get a Y. When you don’t, you get an N. When you think, “well, maaaaaybe,” you get a % (for 50-50). Go ahead, use the comments thread as a scratch pad to keep track of your results.
• Horoscopes
• Ghosts
• Auras
• Telekensis
• Telepathy
• Fortune-Telling
• Bigfoot
• Nessie
• UFOs
• Souls
For every Y you get 2 points. For every N you get 0. A % is worth 1 point. Add it up, and here’s what it means:
0 – Congratulations, you have less imagination than a turnip; you also have less nutritional value. I’m sure you will enjoy your life, even though you already know it is, in fact, a big meaningless jerkoff.
1 – 4 – You are Velma. If Bigfoot was roaring in your face, you would swipe off his rubber mask, and then shout, “Mr. Petersen!” Also you look both sensible and sort of hot in orange sweaters and pleated skirts.
5 – 8 – You are Scully. Find your Mulder and you find contentment, for at least 7 seasons.
9 – 11 – Skeptic by day, playing with the Ouija board in your pajamas by night. You know that crop circles are complete and utter horseshit… but those Stonehenge guys were up to some serious druid shit.
12 – 17 – You’re Mulder. Find your Scully and NEVER LET HER GO. Or him, if you happen to be a she.
18 – 19 – Ruh-ro… you’re Shaggy. You’re living in a van, subsisting on dog snacks, and sure that THE GHOST OF CAPTAIN CUTLER IS OUT THERE WATCHING YOU RIGHT NOW!!! I’d try and convince you that Nessie can’t possibly be real (there’d have to be 400+ of them in the loch to have a steady breeding population), but you’d think I was just a government agent spreading misinformation. And you’d be right.
20 – Dingdingding! You win the grand prize in today’s contest: it’s a psychic prophylactic, designed to protect your sensitive psyche from telepathic bombardment. No, no, ignore the fact that it looks like a large sheet of tinfoil. It is, in fact, a creation of ADVANCED SCIENCE. Total Area 51 stuff. Just wrap it around your head. Yeah, go on, make a hat out of it. Here. Have some extra sheets. They’ll look great taped into your windows.
Oh, what’d I score? Mm, turns out I’m a bit of a Scully-type. I made a 5. I’m a maybe on ghosts, telepathy, and UFOs, and a yes on souls.
Go ahead, use the comments thread to work out your own score. Gimme the full report. I want to know what kind of weirdos/hardassed skeptics frequent this site.
And be sure to tune in next week, when I’ll teach you how to calculate your Doctor Score.
Jeff..lol. I totally understand.
score=6
I don’t know if there’s life after death b/c, as this scientist I used to live with pointed out, the only thing that what happened to me proves is that there’s life for the first 5 minutes after you stop breathing.
And, since it takes SIX minutes, for actual death to occur, I guess he’s right.
But, when his mom died, he suspended every scientific belief he had – this from a person who’s almost 100% logical minded – to tell me that the swan that followed him all over the place when he went to France, was his mom.
I thought that was astonishing. A person who’s logical almost all the time suddenly having an experience like that and believing it was his mom’s soul inside a swan.
I never said anything to doubt him though, b/c I think it’s more important to support people through their grief than to tell them that something that may have brought them comfort wasn’t really happening.
If that helped him deal with it, who am I to tell him he wasn’t experiencing it. It’s subjective anyway, especially from my viewpoint, since I wasn’t there when it happened.
I just listened to him and let him think what he wanted.
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I got a 2. I went “maybe” on telepathy and UFOs. And I only went “maybe” on UFOs because, as Neil deGrasse Tyson once put it: “When someone tells you they saw a UFO, remind them what the ‘U’ stands for.”
It’s also worth noting that the real world – the one all around us right now, that we can see and test and learn about – is already plenty interesting without believing in any of this stuff. Astronomy is a million times more fun than astrology, Lucy’s more interesting than Bigfoot, and don’t get me freakin’ started on the origins of the universe.
Also, this idea that people who don’t believe in the paranormal are “closed-minded” has always bugged me. Suppose two people see a mysterious light in the sky, and one assumes it must be an alien spacecraft. The second admits that it COULD be aliens, improbable as that seems, but wants to examine and eliminate the more mundane and likely possibilities first. Which of them has a closed mind?