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Are spirits, creepy encounters, ghosts, seances, ouija boards etc proof of afterlife

Gerry Rio

What do you think? Arent ghosts proof that there's something after all this?

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nozzferrahhtoo

Gerry Rio wrote: »

What do you think? Arent ghosts proof that there's something after all this?

They sure would be if they themselves existed. Which you have not show. As for your thread of anecdotes, I am afraid they are quite useless to us.

I invite you to watch this video here and pay special attention to the "moving lampshade" story in it. Once you understand the issue with the story, you will understand the issue with the thread of anecdotes you link to.

smash

Even reading the thread title made my IQ drop.

kneemos

FortySeven wrote: »

We do. People just don't like having only this life so they have invented many different versions of another.

The argument that we don't really know is a desperate, last refuse of the believer usually. We have 2 generations before this stuff dies the death it's due. Religion and paranormal activity are in death throes thanks to education and the loss of religious control of the populous.

Any scientists gave up years ago. There is just NO evidence. Not a little, zero. In scientific terms this is debunked as an idea completely.

It's depressing. That's why people fight the rationality of it. Better to live the dream and go to God, yet these believers go to their grave scared. Why? I think it is because after a lifetime of trying to contact their God they got no response and the hope is just that.

True belief would have us queuing to get into heaven. Instead we fight till we drop. People know this stuff isn't real. They are just in denial.

The weak personalities and intellectual abilities of those who do blindly believe this stuff speak volumes more than any research ever done on the matter.

Not a popular view to label people liars, weak and stupid but that's my own belief in the matter. Harsh, but I'm yet to see evidence otherwise and we've had centuries to study it.

No idea if ghosts are real or not,but you can make up a rational explanation for anything.
It's not right to say there isn't any evidence,loads of people claim to have seem them.No harm to have an open mind.

c_man

Are ghosts, spirits etc proof of afterlife?

No. I've seen a few "ghosts" over the years but after a bit of investigation they always turned out to be nothing more than alien conducted experiments on my brain.

Kev W

kneemos wrote: »

No idea if ghosts are real or not,but you can make up a rational explanation for anything.
It's not right to say there isn't any evidence,loads of people claim to have seem them.No harm to have an open mind.

A claim is not evidence.

As they say, it's good to have an open mind but not so open that our brains fall out.

FortySeven

kneemos wrote: »

No idea if ghosts are real or not,but you can make up a rational explanation for anything.
It's not right to say there isn't any evidence,loads of people claim to have seem them.No harm to have an open mind.

This is not credible evidence. People lie. I think everyone knows that because everyone does it. We all lie.
We also hallucinate, mistake or just imagine.

nozzferrahhtoo

kneemos wrote: »

No idea if ghosts are real or not,but you can make up a rational explanation for anything.
It's not right to say there isn't any evidence,loads of people claim to have seem them.No harm to have an open mind.

And you can make up an irrational explanation for anything too. And alas it seems we humans prefer that to the rational one.

I think you risk misrepresenting the meaning of "open minded". Not thinking there are things like ghosts and reincarnation is not being "Close minded". Being open minded is willing to accept the evidence for something when it appears, even if you do not like the conclusion or do not want it to be true.

Close minded is the opposite. Not being willing to accept the truth of a substantiated claim.

I could not BE any more open minded on the subject of gods, ghosts and the after life. Or in things like astrology and homeopathy. I am not in any way emotionally or intellectually invested in these things not being true.

But until such evidence comes, and it has not been coming, then how open minded I am is simply irrelevant. To plagiarize the phrase that was already quoted by another user above, the only way at this time for me to think there are ghosts is to be SO open minded my brain falls out.

Alas, as the video I already linked to suggests, people seem to think "open minded" means "Agreeing with me" or "Being willing to accept anything as true for no good reason at all".

eviltimeban

FortySeven wrote: »

We should respect peoples 'rights' to belief. No expectation to respect the belief itself.

I personally find it all disturbing. Belief without evidence. Faith. Etc.

Not much respect for the right to logic from the other side.

Yes, like faith is something we should buy into. Why? "Just because?"

I like the space-time rift theory. There's probably a quantum explanation for all that stuff. I feel a bigger breakthrough than discovering an after life / life on other planets etc will be a greater understanding of quantum physics and mechanics, space-time, wormholes, etc.

Also to that poster who could "feel" the stones and the sun - it was a dream. Realistic, but a dream. OR - a leak from a memory formed in a parallel universe.

Skoop

Azalea wrote: »

Agreed, but can it be said for definite that those do not exist, fact?

We don't know.

It can't be said for definite that anything doesn't exist. That doesn't mean you've to shrug your shoulders and say "I guess it's 50/50 so" whenever anyone makes any kind of claim about anything at all. It's perfectly fine for people to say "Yeah, prove it or I'm calling bollix" if I tell them I can juggle jumbo jets, or that there's a goblin that lives under my bed,or that once some bodies brain stops working and is eaten apart piece by piece by bacteria their spirit energy lives on and puts feathers on people's cars and nudges photos off walls, but never ever ever ever, not a single time, when it can be proven it happened, ever ever, in the history of Man kind, not once, ever.

Duggy747

The history of the ouija board and the fact that these days it's trademarked by Hasbro (Monopoly, GI Joe, Transformers.............Parker Brothers owned ouija before them), along also with the well-documented and noted ideomotor effect that should give you a clue towards the validity of it's "paranormal" abilities.

StewartGriffin

FortySeven wrote: »

We have 2 generations before this stuff dies the death it's due. Religion and paranormal activity are in death throes thanks to education and the loss of religious control of the populous.

Don't agree on this. I think it's an inherent part of human nature to want to believe in a supernatural element to our world. Not exactly sure why that is, but it's certainly there. We have evolved through intellectually enlightened societies before in our history but always slipped back.

If Christianity dies there's no reason to doubt that something else will come along to take its place. I'd say it's a definite. As a species we're not really getting smarter. If the structures of society were torn down tomorrow and technological advances put back three hundred years, people would revert to behave the same way they behaved at that time.

Azalea

Not a believer in the standard religious notion of a higher power myself - and if it exists it ain't loving.

But it's true that we don't know what's outside of this dimension - from me that's not desperate last ditch straw clutching from a believer, as I'm not really a believer.

It's just stating a fact - we can't be entirely sure as we don't know. I don't think it seems that implausible at all.

ScumLord

Azalea wrote: »

But it's true that we don't know what's outside of this dimension

What's other dimensions got to do with ghosts? Are we now saying that on top of this universe being here just for us the other dimensions are there as an after party venue for dead humans.

Knasher

Gerry Rio wrote: »

By your previous logic they're all liars or gullible.

Or they could be neither, these may be things the absolutely experienced, and that anybody upon hearing their story might jump to the same supernatural conclusion that they did. The problem is that people simply aren't reliable at collecting evidence, hence why we invented scientific methods, to help compensate for our own imperfections.

To give an example I remember a great story about a family all living together and the whole family started reporting weird things happening, hearing sounds and voices, feeling beds shake, seeing figures, and so on, even arguably physical evidence in the house as plants started to die. Now if it was a single person seeing this, you might dismiss it easily, but this was an entire family, all reporting the same thing. Now you might dismiss this as the family lying, but lets say they were telling the truth for now, but I don't think it would be fair to call them gullible, after all the entire family is experiencing it, and especially if you are somebody who accepts the existence of the supernatural, then it is very understandable if you call this an instance of it.

Luckily a friend of theirs visits and suggests that the problem might be all caused by a broken furnace, leaking carbon monoxide into the house and slowing poisoning them causing hallucinations and delusions. And sure enough, they fix the furnace and the ghosts disappear, the family were neither liars or gullible, they were symptomatic. But you have to wonder, if the friend never visited, would the family eventually have been so traumatised by the "haunted" house, would they eventually have moved out, believing they were fleeing ghosts, and would this have been an example of "evidence" of the existence of ghosts. If you had read the previous paragraph, and not this one, would you have thought carbon monoxide poisoning, or supernatural?

kowloon

I've seen a ghost hunter programme where they used an EM detector to find the ghosts. Ghosts are known to hang around sockets and wiring.

seamus

Quite incredible that cameras are now so ubiquitous that major unforeseen events like bombings and natural disasters are captured as they happen, yet when it comes to the supernatural we're still asked to rely on the "proof" in grainy still photos from the early 1900s or shaky low-res video from the late 1900s.

More than a billion HD video cameras have been carried around 24 hours a day over the last five years and yet nobody has managed to capture even a single clear frame of something supernatural.

FortySeven

kowloon wrote: »

I've seen a ghost hunter programme where they used an EM detector to find the ghosts. Ghosts are known to hang around sockets and wiring.

You forgot the sarcastic tags. Surely?

Knasher

Gerry Rio wrote: »

There are over 3 thousand posts in that "Creepy" thread.

3 thousand!

So lets say half those posts are replies and not stories, that leaves 1,500 claims of encounters.

So there are 1500 things we can't explain. Lets split them into two groups, unexplained things with natural causes but without enough data to know what this actual natural cause is, and unexplained things with supernatural causes. Now I'm going to assume that you wouldn't claim that 100% of these are of the supernatural variety, so the question is where do you draw that line, or how do you draw that line, these two categories are fundamentally indistinguishable. But I think it is fair to say that your argument would be that this number must be greater than zero, that at least some of these stories must have supernatural causes.

The problem is that there is absolutely no reason for anybody to assume it is greater than zero. What you can say is that it has never happened that something went from inexplicable to explained and ended up having belonged to the supernatural category. It has simply never happened, otherwise it would be proof of the supernatural, and this entire debate would be closed. So far 100% of things that we can positively classify into one of those categories, has ended up belonging to the natural causes category. So who knows where that line actually should lie between those categories, but so far all the evidence points to 0% supernatural.

Duggy747

seamus wrote: »

More than a billion HD video cameras have been carried around 24 hours a day over the last five years and yet nobody has managed to capture even a single clear frame of something supernatural.

Oh don't worry about that, people still misinterpret simple things on photos like lens flares to be proof of angels here and here

Then's there photoshop and Kirlian photography.......

kneemos

Knasher wrote: »

So there are 1500 things we can't explain. Lets split them into two groups, unexplained things with natural causes but without enough data to know what this actual natural cause is, and unexplained things with supernatural causes. Now I'm going to assume that you wouldn't claim that 100% of these are of the supernatural variety, so the question is where do you draw that line, or how do you draw that line, these two categories are fundamentally indistinguishable. But I think it is fair to say that your argument would be that this number must be greater than zero, that at least some of these stories must have supernatural causes.

The problem is that there is absolutely no reason for anybody to assume it is greater than zero. What you can say is that it has never happened that something went from inexplicable to explained and ended up having belonged to the supernatural category. It has simply never happened, otherwise it would be proof of the supernatural, and this entire debate would be closed. So far 100% of things that we can positively classify into one of those categories, has ended up belonging to the natural causes category. So who knows where that line actually should lie between those categories, but so far all the evidence points to 0% supernatural.

Surely something inexplicable not being explained is proof.

Knasher

kneemos wrote: »

Surely something inexplicable not being explained is proof.

No, of course not. There has been plenty of things in the past that were inexpiable at the time, and that were taken as proof of something supernatural. Only later somebody comes along and offers a natural explanation, followed by the evidence proving it is correct. Why would you automatically assume that the current inexplicable things would be any different?

If something doesn't have an explanation, why exactly would you assume that it must have a supernatural explanation?

kneemos

Knasher wrote: »

No, of course not. There has been plenty of things in the past that were inexpiable at the time, and that were taken as proof of something supernatural. Only later somebody comes along and offers a natural explanation, followed by the evidence proving it is correct. Why would you automatically assume that the current inexplicable things would be any different?

If something doesn't have an explanation, why exactly would you assume that it must have a supernatural explanation?

Nothing can ever be supernatural in that case,we just have to wait for the explanation.

Kev W

kneemos wrote: »

Nothing can ever be supernatural in that case,we just have to wait for the explanation.

Not so. The explanation could be something supernatural. But so far it never has been.

kneemos

Kev W wrote: »

Not so. The explanation could be something supernatural. But so far it never has been.

Has everything inexplicable been explained?

Kev W

kneemos wrote: »

Has everything inexplicable been explained?

Nothing inexplicable has been explained. Once something is explained it is no longer inexplicable.

Magico Gonzalez

Knasher wrote: »

So there are 1500 things we can't explain. Lets split them into two groups, unexplained things with natural causes but without enough data to know what this actual natural cause is, and unexplained things with supernatural causes. Now I'm going to assume that you wouldn't claim that 100% of these are of the supernatural variety, so the question is where do you draw that line, or how do you draw that line, these two categories are fundamentally indistinguishable. But I think it is fair to say that your argument would be that this number must be greater than zero, that at least some of these stories must have supernatural causes.

The problem is that there is absolutely no reason for anybody to assume it is greater than zero. What you can say is that it has never happened that something went from inexplicable to explained and ended up having belonged to the supernatural category. It has simply never happened, otherwise it would be proof of the supernatural, and this entire debate would be closed. So far 100% of things that we can positively classify into one of those categories, has ended up belonging to the natural causes category. So who knows where that line actually should lie between those categories, but so far all the evidence points to 0% supernatural.

The vast majority seem to be sleep paralysis related, a well documented phenomena.

ScumLord

kneemos wrote: »

Has everything inexplicable been explained?

No, but to date every inexplicable thing that has been explained has had a logical and scientific explanation. So far, to date nothing has been explained and proven to be supernatural. And there's no reason to believe that will ever change.

While science won't let us say for certain that there's no such thing as the supernatural, the overwhelming body of evidence clearly points in that direction. There's more than enough evidence for me to make a personal judgement, and I can confidently say it's all rubbish.

kneemos

Kev W wrote: »

Nothing inexplicable has been explained. Once something is explained it is no longer inexplicable.

So the inexplicable must be proof of an afterlife.

Knasher

kneemos wrote: »

So the inexplicable must be proof of an afterlife.

Why?

Kev W

kneemos wrote: »

So the inexplicable must be proof of an afterlife.

Hogwash.

You might as well claim the inexplicable is proof of wizards.