(March 18, 2014 at 7:38 pm)Ivy Wrote: someone following me. If I hear footsteps behind me, I panic. Then again, that might be more of a trauma than a phobia.I figure that some phobias are created that way. Although it can also just be a panic attack triggered by something that ordinarily would make us anxious anyway (such as footsteps).
Funny story: I've mentioned elsewhere how becoming an atheist helped me get over my irrational fear of demons and ghosts (in large part irrational because I've never experienced anything that could even remotely be attributed to the supernatural). This past January we spent the first two weeks in the house I bought in Ohio, and the wooden stairs creak slightly. Not only that, but the sound is delayed slightly as the wood straightens after each step, and the sensation is that you're being closely followed down the steps. I knew what it was the moment I first heard it, but it still took about two or three days before I could walk down the steps without a cold chill creeping up my spine.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
