Damn. That was supposed to be a reply to Nic2001 in post #74. My apologies.
Here’s another humble opinion. Please excuse a rambling quality. I’m like that at night…
I think, with no foundation to give it a cite, that a real familiarity with dead bodies decreases the need to believe in ghosts. There is something in a human being, at least there was in me, that changes at about the fifth or maybe the fiftieth dead body you handle. We could ask funeral directors if they’ve felt the same thing. It doesn’t help to see one on TV; you have to handle it. You touch it, you feel the temperature, you smell the smell, and something deep below conscious ratiocination says to you: Oh. Yeah. I get it now. This. That. My flesh. Way of all flesh. Okay. Then ninety percent of the horror-thrill and the interest of ghosts goes away.
I think the belief in ghosts feels good – can feel good even if you know it isn’t real, as witness several intelligent people’s posts in this thread. I think belief in ghosts can also be crippling. But it doesn’t really matter whether such belief feels good or does you harm, because they aren’t there.
CS Lewis once said something that really struck me: how, if you have a corpse and a ghost, both of them are terrifying; but if you unite a corpse and a ghost, you have a living person, which doesn’t strike anyone as terrifying. (It’s in “Miracles” from 1947: here’s a brief quote – “Our feeling about the dead is equally odd. It is idle to say that we dislike corpses because we are afraid of ghosts. You might say with equal truth that we fear ghosts because we dislike corpses … In reality we hate the division. Because the thing ought not to be divided, each of the halves into which it falls by division is detestable.”)
Maybe what we fear is death. Maybe, as complex animals whose rationality is a recent evolutionary acquisition, we can’t quite wrap our minds around our own deaths or the deaths of the ones we love. Maybe part of our way of dealing with it is fear of ghosts and corpses, plus belief in the continuance of personality after death that you would have to have to get ghosts. Doesn’t make ghosts real. Means our brains need to see them as real, to deal. I still grieve at death, but handling the dead for a decade means something deep inside me has gone “Oh – Right. Okay.” I have wrapped my mind around it in some way I can’t give to you. I no longer have to deal, so I don’t see ghosts any more… or need to see them.
With all that said, do you want to hear my ghost story? Sure you do. It comes from way back when I was a surgery intern and had seen very few dead bodies – actually hadn’t stood there and handled any dead ones; nurses took care of that. I had seen some deaths. Dying is a terrifying adrenalin-laden thing for doctors and nurses in an emergency room to witness since you’re supposed to be preventing it. This was a big-city ER where young people died from horrific trauma. Lotta gunshot wounds.
It got unusually quiet in Major Trauma at four-thirty in the morning, and as back then we worked 24 hour shifts and I had gone 21.5 without rest, I was desperate for some sleep. Desperate enough to go in and lay myself down on my back on the first hospital gurney from the door. Within fifteen minutes I had a vision. All the ghosts of the people who had died there in the last twenty-four hours were coming towards me. In a circle with me at the center. Shuffling, taking tiny steps, their eyes full of a strangely blank hostility, their jaws working as if they were masticating very tiny little pieces of food. They didn’t look like they were going to do something particularly friendly when they got to me.
I woke up in a cold sweating terror and leapt off the gurney. Went out and voluntarily did paperwork rather than ever attempt to sleep in Major Trauma again. For years I wondered whether, against all natural inclinations, I really had experienced some sort of perturbing external influence from the dead. Then, as I got used to handling dead people, the need to believe that slowly and quietly went away. I realized it was a hallucination from sleep deprivation. I realized my own guilt at being one of the team that was not able to save them was generating the imagined hostility in their eyes. I realized the whole vision was generated out of my brain and not by an external influence.
Maybe what people like Phanton Dennis’s girlfriend need is a chance to handle dead bodies. Whaddaya say we make it a part of the rite of growing up? Teenage years not complete without a stint handling five to fifty bodies?
Any volunteers?
Damn. I posted this earlier*, but it seems to be gone now. So, apologies to those who have already read it.
I really, really, really, really want to believe in ghosts. But to date I have never witnessed anything that makes me want to doubt the physical world as explained by science.
I guess that one of the principal causes of my skepticism (in addition to a deep appreciation of scientific method) is that few ghost sightings seem to happen in broad daylight. I can’t think of any reason why night time is any better for a disembodied spirit to roam the earth than the cold light of day. However, night time can provide a number of alternative explanations, such as low lighting, deep shadows, nocturnal animals, sleep walking, sleep paralysis, and vivid dreams. Of course, then Magiver comes along with a daytime story, but those are truly the exception rather than the rule.
*Come to think of it, that five hour gap is mighty mysterious…
If you can say that you can’t recall a woman that you have known that doesn’t have a “heart-felt belief in the Supernatural” perhaps there is an issue with the women you choose to associate with, or your observations of them. And yes, I am a woman.
Bluntly, I do **not ** believe in the supernatural. This runs the gamut from ghosts, the Invisible Pink Unicorn, or fairies living at the bottom of the garden. For that matter, I also do not believe in an all powerful God. FWIW, over the course of my life and various and sundry women acquaintances, friends and colleagues, I can only think of a small handful who have professed any sort of belief in the “supernatural”.
When it comes to dispelling the “boogies in the dark”, I learned the lesson from horror movies, this is not an arena where *audentes fortuna iuvat * applies. If there really is something going on outside your house at night, phone the police. I can dial 911 all by myself.
Interesting link to the sleep paralysis column. I believe I experience that all too frequently (my paternal grandmother had narcolepsy, and it’s not too far a stretch to think I inherited a little of that), and just about every ghost story related here could be explained by someone experiencing a bout of sleep paralysis as they fall asleep.
My most common one is thinking that there are burglars in our bedroom - I virtually see them in there with us, but when I come fully awake (sometimes after sitting up in my sleep and looking around), of course there is no one there. Lately, I’ve started hallucinating that our cats have come back into the bedroom (we kick them out before falling asleep) and jumped on the bed. I am fairly sure this has started because my cat has a tendency to hide in the bedroom and jump on the bed after we think she’s gone.
Do I believe in ghosts? I am reserving judgement on that, because I don’t have enough information. If I saw or experienced ghostly behaviour at night, I would have a very hard time not chalking it up to my over-active nighttime imagination.
Using sarcasm on someone who has already been told by a Mod to discontinue the discussion? Nice.
Laertes Law states that the first person to quote Hamlet in any discussion of the “supernatural” has automatically forfeited the debate. Shakespeare was a 16th century playwright, and should not be considered the last authority on standards of material evidence or the burden of proof.
“Supernatural” doesn’t have to mean “magic”; it can also mean “something that is not yet part of our understanding of nature”. The human brain is natural but we still have no idea exactly how it works.
I think “supernatural” by definition is stuff that is above nature, and does not have a natural explanation. Supernatural describes things that basically do not behave in the set of rules governed by nature and therefore would be impossible to scientifically evaluate. If we were to capture a ghost and prove it was real, it would no longer be a supernatural phenomena. So supernatural pretty much means it doesn’t exist or it is currently awaiting an explanation by us. Since in the thousands of years of human existance, no solid proof of ghosts has arisen, and given the fallibility of the human mind (it’s true, we’re not perfect), I think it’s safe to say that ghosts probably don’t exist. If one could come up with a hypothesis on how ghosts would behave, what they would be made of, how they would interact with the various natural forces like gravity and electromagnetism, and how the process of becoming a ghost works, then that would be pretty cool. Unfortunately such details are never consistant between ghost stories.
Neither one of those words has any coherent scientific definition and as far as they are practically used, there is no difference. In order to argue a meaningful distinction, you’d have to find some way to sensibly define both words and then show why “magic” and “supernatural” are somehow proveably separate phenomena.
I also think an instinctual fear of darkness probably worked to our ancestors’ favor. Belief in a bogeyman away from the campfire probably increased survival rates.
Take the Ancient Greeks. They believed that the workings of everything above & below the surface of the Earth were the results of actions of Zeus, Apollo, and the other gods & goddesses who resided atop Mount Olympus. If that’s not using the supernatural to explain what what we now know as the workings of nature, I don’t know what is.
Take the Ancient Greeks. They believed that the workings of everything above & below the surface of the Earth were the results of actions of Zeus, Apollo, and the other gods & goddesses who resided atop Mount Olympus. If that’s not using the supernatural to explain what what we now know as the workings of nature, I don’t know what is.
Supernatural (bolding mine):
That seems to violate or go beyond natural forces. I posit that as we learn more and more about the world around us, what the number of things that seem to violate or go beyond natural forces becomes smaller.
Who’s to say that what is considered “supernatural” today won’t have a specific natural explanation in 100 years? 1000? Ever?
[Moderator Underoos On]Second(and last) warning: take the debate elsewhere.[/Moderator Underoos On]
Yeah, next time, the underoos are off! No, wait, that doesn’t sound right…
Shut u-up? Why certainly! You don’t think I’m the type that would keep on blabbin’? Some people never know when to stop. When I’m told to shut up, I shut up…
The ghost of Bugs Bunny! :eek:
I don’t. But some of the stories are great fun to read.
I believe certain things. I also don’t believe certain things. If anyone can prove me wrong, I say, I say, PROVE, than that would be cool. Until then, I have my own beliefes and disbeliefes.
Those words don’t look to be spelled right, but what do I care? Besides, it just might annoy someone, which would also be cool.
My house is oldish. It has certain properties and problems. At night, I can sometimes hear creaks and pops. No doubt due to temperature and humidty changes. Sometimes, this one certain spot in my attic POPs. Like perhaps an expansion/contraction event in the old beams. Scares the hell out of me every time it happens. However, let me be reading or watching a tale of the unusual… and Day-amn, that POP is disconcerting. The mind is a wonderful place.
Speaking of the mind …
I was about 23 or 24, living o my own. Got real sick. Went to stay at Mom and Dad’s for a bit, being a lazy ass young man and all. Actually, I felt like crap, wanted the comfort of home and my old room. Well, I got so bad my parents took me to the hospital later. But before that happened, I suffered a very high fever. So high that my doctor later really let me know, if you know what I mean, that I wasn’t doing myself any favors by not going to see him earlier. Anyways, while under the fever, I watched the entire song and dance spectacular of An American In Paris. There was no TV in the room. AND … there was this deranged rabbit that would sit at the foot of my bed and bother me. He did a bunch of Don Rickles type jokes at my expense, being a right total asshole about it too. It was when I started yelling at him that my parents decided perhaps my illness needed more than chicken soup and a hot towell.
My point? No point. I just like telling that story.
Do I believe in ghosts? No. I don’t believe in gods either.
On the other hand, there are a lot of things we can’t currently explain satisfactorily. Undoubtedly most of them are the product of our minds alone. In fact, as we learn more about how the mind works we are finding out more about how things like night terrors and ecstatic experiences are produced. My default position is to take a very skeptical approach to unexplained phenomena. I think the same way that Lute Skywatcher does; that while something may be unexplained and unexplainable now, it may be easily explained, described, and predicted sometime in the future.
With the information we have at our disposal right now though, some of the “reasonable” explanations for weird phenomena are often more convoluted, unlikely, and unbelievable than a supernatural explanation. A guy with an invisibility machine is no more reasonable under our current understanding of physics than postulating a spiritual imprint or temporary overlap of a parallel dimension as a reason for an event. In other words, all are equally impossible.
My problem with extreme skeptics is that they want to explain away odd occurrences just as badly as some people want to believe in the occult. Preconceptions work both ways. If you say that people have their biases confirmed because they believe in the occult, then you logically also have to assume that people who believe there are no unexplainable phenomena are also prone to find confirmation of their biases. That doesn’t mean that such hard-core skeptics are wrong (in fact, I have pretty much the same point of view as most) but it does mean that such people are not subjecting themselves to the same scrutiny they level at others.