There’s always a convenient excuse. After hundreds of years of convenient excuses about why there’s no evidence of ghosts, perhaps it’s time to accept… there’s no evidence of ghosts. It’s like the guy who has an excuse for being late to work every day. In the end, you have to accept it’s the guy.
I agree completely, but I can also appreciate how hard that might be for some people to accept. Knowledge can be taught and learned because it's based on fact and evidence...you can demonstrate something and repeat it, and everyone learns something new. Belief is different, it's a deep conviction that is formed and accepted without evidence, so it can be very hard (or impossible) to convince people otherwise. "But I know I saw something, what else could it be if it wasn't a ghost?!"
And if the belief has absolutely no impact on anyone but the believer, there's no need to try to convince them otherwise.
Yes. I realize last night that a good companion question would be “How important is your answer to you?” For me, it’s not very important at all. The world is full of things that I personally have no explanation for, and even that the experts have no explanation for, yet. I have confidence that many of them will turn out to make sense within our existing models of reality, and that some will make sense as part of a sensible extension of those models. Some will remain mysterious. But I worry very little about it, far less than I worry about, say, misdiagnosis of chronic illness and racism and sexism affecting diagnosis and treatment.
Sure, but all ghosts would have to be invisible/unphotographable for this to be the issue, plus they'd have to make no recordable noise and have no discernible effect on things around it (so no poltergeists).
Listening to static instead of reading tea leaves. Same nonsense.
And if they're a phenomenon that is only perceptible mentally, in some way, we would likely need much different tools than we have today, to detect them. Detecting the changes in a subject's brain wouldn't be sufficient proof. Different people might perceive the effects in different ways, with no outward physical manifestation of the source (whatever that would be).
That is correct. I am saying that all ghosts are unphotographable.
Including the James Randi Educational Foundation.
Like "mediums" and "psychics" who use people's grief to bilk them out of their money. It's all reading newspapers for headlines and obituaries along with cold reading.
