Are Ghosts Real? (a poll)

[Morrus]

Similalarly, the failure to claim Randi's prize doesn't imply that all supernatural claims are false.

It doesn’t imply anything. Only a person can imply something. You infer what you want from it.

 

[TheSword]

I mean, do you trust your parents on this, who are presumably 20+ years older than you? Because I would not trust them as a point of principle.

My parents are both very sharp but 30+ years older than us kids (I'm the eldest, they had me at 30) and they don't remember a a number of incidents that happened that all of us remember. None of it supernatural (we seem to be a family profoundly immune to the supernatural by and large) or particularly exciting but a lot of it quite important and frankly memorable-seeming, and in some cases, provable with physical evidence. Like, they'd both forgotten that they put my brother and I on a plane without them when we were 8 and 6 respectively, but I still have the bloody ticket and nice thing that you got back then signed by the pilot (this was obviously in the era when unaccompanied kids were allowed to see the cockpit and stuff).

I'm not saying your ghost story was real, just like, as a general rule, don't get gaslighted by older people not remembering stuff. Also, in my experience, some older people are good at making up reasons something "couldn't have been true", which, on later examination, turn out to themselves be false.

Yeah so there were specific continuity issues with that vivid memory. That I saw the effect on the ceiling of the room for instance, but for the period i remembered I slept on the bottom level of a bunkbed. I stopped sleeping in a single bed when my brother reached about 2. I distinctly remember drinking orange from a glass milk bottle in the fridge but my parents only had milk deliveries (glass bottles) for two years very early on. Yet in the memory I was much older. Basically there was no point around the time that the memory could have been that this could have happened. I’ve basically combined familiar things into a specific story which has now become vivid and real. Or I dreamed vividly about things from the past and what I’m remembering is the dream not the action. I guess the point is, they feel the same.

Yet I can tell that story and until I found out it couldn’t be, I was absolutely convinced it was real.

 

[The Firebird]

It doesn’t imply anything. Only a person can imply something. You infer what you want from it.

Yes...you said "There's a reason there's no proof of this stuff" and then told the Randi story...I read you as making that implication. Did I misread you?

 

[Morrus]

Yes...you said "There's a reason there's no proof of this stuff" and then told the Randi story...I read you as making that implication. Did I misread you?

I would say that that is my inference. Not my implication.

 

[The Firebird]

I would say that that is my inference. Not my implication.

Fair enough. Sorry for my mistake.

 

[Stalker0]

I am always reminded of crop circles when considering "fringe beliefs". For a long time people could not explain crop circles. Experts would come out and say it had to be some weird freezing or unfreezing thing, and of course aliens were assumed". All of that lingered for years....until a group of people on tv went out one night with some planks of wood with ropes tied around them and used them to make a perfect crop circle.

Most of the time things we can't explain are often simple explanations that stem from a failure of imagination. That said, we should continue to investigate supernatural sightings, it would be equally foolish to dismiss thousands of years of human history in which spirit sightings have been noted, but whenever people say "the ONLY explanation is a ghost".... I always get skeptical.

 

[Ryujin]

So do we think the American government has secret files or not on ufos and aliens ?
Now I said no on ghosts but it is funny how almost every culture believes in some kind of spiritual power

UFOs? Yes. Aliens? Questionable. They aren't the same thing.

 

[MoonSong]

And it also applies to claims of UFOs, which are not supernatural but lumped into the same category.

It is not arbitrary. UFO claims are essentially supernatural with science fictioney window dressing. Leaving aside that some sightings that truly defy rational explanation -like the above mentioned army list, and in this case there is a chasm between "I can't explain it rationally" and "aliens", ufo claims are magic with extra steps. Abductions are fundamentally the same as sucubus encounters -and it is possible to track the folklore showing the evolution from one figure into the other-. More damning, the most devout followers describe pseudospiritual if not outright religious experiences.

 

[CleverNickName]

ufo claims are magic with extra steps. Abductions are fundamentally the same as sucubus encounters -and it is possible to track the folklore showing the evolution from one figure into the other

Huh. I had never considered that angle before. There are some interesting parallels between the two.

 

[dragoner]

UFO's, Aliens, Ghosts, etc. wouldn't change a thing for 99% of people if they existed, life would simply go on.