Have you ever seen a ghost

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I dont want people to be deferred from posting anything because someone might try to call them anti-intellectual, stupid or anything else like that. If someone's had an experience they shouldnt feel the need to prove anything.

I am not accusing anybody of stupidity but I cannot see how denying my belief in ghosts could be offensive. The amount of anger that seems to be generated when I merely express my doubts in the possibility or my speculations as to what the ghost phenomena might be is rather surprising. I wonder why some of the posters have such a heavy emotional investment in establishing their reality. There is something very interesting psychologically going on.

^^No offense man, but I suppose people dont respond all too well with constant sarcasm or opposition. It just makes a a person seem like they want to argue instead of discuss. But I understand what you are saying.

Last edited by merr on 31 May 2008, 2:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Quite a while ago I saw a kind of gnomish figure at the foot of my bed when I awoke. It disappeared when I was fully awake but I am fully aware that my mind plays tricks when I am half asleep and I had no impulse to tell people I had seen a demon or something else. I know the tricks my mind plays.

how clear was the figure?

How does one say? I do quite a lot of graphic work and know the visual mind can construct all sorts of images from a single input. It seemed real enough when I saw it but I know only too well that reality is a matter of perception and decision. I do not consider it real anymore.

well society right now (particularly american society) has been shifting lately towards protecting opinions as if they're fact. i think a lot of that influence comes from news corp and fox news and their way of presenting their shows and blurring the line between opinions and fact and many people are simply confusing their opinion with fact and treating it as such. to which, i quote daniel moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not his own facts.” which fox news is actively combating that piece of wisdom.


if you want to check out another skeptic, check out the james randi educational foundation.

miracle healers of the religious walk of life should check out his million dollar prize. prove yourself to do supernatural work through god and you could get a million dollars. which, i'd hope, such a person would give to charity or to a church or something (assuming they can actually show supernatural abilities).


also check out factcheck.org a great site for sifting through the garbage on both sides.

One of the reasons I am so skeptical is that I am familiar with Randi and other work in the paranormal area. For some reason many people are terribly anxious to believe in the paranormal. Sir Conan Doyle amongst others permitted himself to be conned for a long time. It's despicable that scam artists take advantage of desperate people for criminal reasons.

Define the term Ghost for me Sand...

A Ghost is a soul without a body. What is a Soul? It is the essence of self. Your sarcastic replies are a clear indication that you
are not the slightest bit serious about what you are saying and you'd rather have fun stroking your ego and making others look naive and foolish. You have NOT presented a reason why such things cannot and do not exist. Hell, I can claim that my mind is playing tricks on me right now and that Im actually scuba diving in the puget sound right now. Does that make it true?
But like Merr said, the reason for the hostility Is the response you get when you use sarcasm in objective discussion.
So I dont think? What is thinking??

It is, isn't it?

prove to me that a ghost isn't simply a 3 dimensional shadow of a 4 dimensional being.

So, why can you assume a spirit without a body? I can't. But perhaps you're so scared of dying and dissolving back to the nothing you were before you were born that any alternative is preferable.

Is that so? How and when was this done? I am not asserting that they do exist but I Am calling into question your exagerated confidence that they dont. I'd like to know form you Sands:

-What is Intelligence?

-What is Thinking?

-Where does the "self" come from? What part of the brain is the seat of the self?

-What is everything made of? In light that there are elementary particules which behave differently then how and why is this so?

Such a thing wouldnt be a Ghost then.

What makes YOU so certain that consciousness, and even information itself, violates the conservation principle?

I had one unexplained experience 17 years ago, in a shared house.

What I remember is how the five of us living there heard footsteps quite clearly crossing the floor above our heads when noone was there. There was something about objects disappearing, and a door in the attic which we checked to make sure no one was/could be climbing into the house from next door or something. We became fairly seriously convinced that there was something "restless" on the topmost floor of the house, and became panicky on dark evenings sometimes.

I only remember the footsteps clearly; it was definitely odd; I heard them pass from one side of the room to the other, and there really was noone up there.

About something slightly related, I was thinking about people who believe they have had previous lives, and it occurred to me that if homeopathy works for any reason other than the placebo effect there could be something in "past lives".

Homeopathy is based on believing that a mineral, plant, or other sustance once dissolved in water, then diluted down to the point that not even one molecule of the substance remains in a certain volume( can't remember how much) , will have a powerful effect, ( the more dilute the more powerful) on someone who swallows a pill made using this water.

The theory is that the water "remembers" the substance. And it suddenly occurred to me that if this were so, and seeing as humans are made up of a lot of recycled water, perhaps people really can remember past dilutions? !