[QUOTE=Mama_Hound]
went to the bathroom to take off my makeup and then later was brushing out my hair. When I looked in the mirror there was the face of an old woman in there!
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Eve]
Yeah, I’ve had that problem myself . . .
[/QUOTE]
Strange, when I look in the mirror, I see an Adonis-like creature with well-chiseled features and hung like a moose. I guess there’s no consistency in the ectoplasmic land of the dearly departed.
There are no ghosts. Stop it.
[QUOTE=Dr. PoopiePants]
Strange, when I look in the mirror, I see an Adonis-like creature with well-chiseled features and hung like a moose. I guess there’s no consistency in the ectoplasmic land of the dearly departed.
[/QUOTE]
I dunno.
If I ever saw this creature of which you speak…I’d be afraid of something whose face hung like a moose’s.
Moose are ug-ly! 
[QUOTE=RealityChuck]
Of course there aren’t ghosts. There also are no martians, unicorns, leprechauns, or hobbits.
[/QUOTE]
**He thrusts his fists against the post, and still insists he sees the ghost. **
Where’s that from, anyway?
I’ve experienced “ghosts”, and I don’t even believe in them. As far as I can tell from controlled studies, there are plenty of non-supernatural explanations for these phenomena.
In addition to some classic “ghost” episodes, I’ve also had hallucinations that seemed pretty convincing, but however subjectively real they were to me, I doubt I could convice anyone that the entire cast of “Soap” sat talking over me on my bed one day (migraine-induced, circa 1979).
[QUOTE=Johnny L.A.]
**He thrusts his fists against the post, and still insists he sees the ghost. **
Where’s that from, anyway?
[/QUOTE]
Stephen King used that tongue twister in ‘IT’.
And no I don’t believe in ghosts.
[QUOTE=Ensign Edison]
Why do you speak at elementary schools about ghosts?
[/QUOTE]
Thank you for the question. It’s part of North Carolina folklore week. It’s a fun question for them though, not a serious debate.
I don’t believe in ghosts, but I know they’re there.
[QUOTE=Mama_Hound]
I certainly believe in spirits no matter what we call them and no matter if they are plant, animal or human.
[/QUOTE]
To complicate matters further, you’ll need to define what you mean by “believe”: it’s a slippery word, and can be spun a number of ways. Just off the top of my head -
I believe in evolution driven by natural selection = “I accept this based on the evidence, but am willing to revise my viewpoint if a better explanation comes along”
I believe that Elmore Leonard is a better writer than Salman Rushdie = “I hold this as purely a personal opinion based on my literary tastes”
I believe that the All Blacks will beat France = “I hold this as a personal opinion based on past evidence of the current form of both teams”
I believe that Moa may still roam the forests of the South Island = “I am willing to entertain the possibility, based on the historical record and the material evidence”
I believe that crystals have healing powers - “I hold this viewpoint based on - nothing in particular…”
To say that you believe in ghosts in any meaningful sense, you’d have to define first what a ghost is, and what category of belief you apply to them: I suspect a combination of the first and the fourth, but it’s hard to be sure. Elementary students tend not to consider the slipperiness of language.
[QUOTE=Q.E.D.]
There is nothing contradictory about these properties. They are well understood and clearly delineated by temperature and pressure. We can tell you exactly when water will change state from solid ice to liquid water to vapor. Ghost manifestation, on the other hand, has never been clearly defined and the forms they are claimed to take are all over the map and apparently willy-nilly with respect to conditions.
[/QUOTE]
Perfectly true, of course. My point, however, was not to prove that water doesn’t exist (or scotch, for that matter!)
My point was that the seeming contradictory observations regarding the nature of ghosts are not, of themselves, proof that ghosts do not exist. Perhaps ghosts are sometimes transparent and incorporeal but under other circumstances they are corporeal and non-transparent, just as H2O is sometimes cold and hard but under different conditions is hot, gaseous and invisible.
Of course I don’t believe any of that for a moment… I’m just saying, is all.
I understand your intent because the poster putting forth the argument is flawed but I mean C’mon can we not discuss abortion because another poster has one performed?
Mama_Hound,
Since you’re new here, the answers your getting here may be surprising or hard to understand.
I know that when we tell you that your own eyewitness account isn’t enough evidence, it sounds like Chico Marx asking “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” But the fact is that many of us here would not believe in ghosts, even if we had the experience you did. It may seem irrational, foolish, or even crazy that we would trust the expert evaluation of scientific evidence over our own senses, but many of us would.
Why? Well that’s a big question: people learn to make decisions about what sources of information to trust through a lifetime of experience and (hopefully) critical thinking, and not everyone makes the same decisions. But everyone has had the experience of seeing or hearing something we later realized wasn’t there, and many of us here have read extensively about the limitations of human memory and perception and the ways even sane, rational people can be fooled by subtle things.
So when I, for instance, encounter something that runs contrary to what I believe to be the common scientific understanding of how the world works, I won’t just assume that because I saw it, it must be true. I’ll ask myself what evidence supports the normal view of the world, and what would have to be untrue if my experience is true. I’ll ask myself how likely or unlikely it is that those assumtions are untrue. (For example, if I hear the winning lottery numbers and suddenly remember dreaming about those numbers the night before, I’ll consider it extremely unlikely that the laws of probability and causality have been replaced.)
I’ll next consider what other explanations might account for my experience, taking into account what I know about psychology and human perception. In the example just mentioned, I might concider that I am misremembering my dream, or that it is merely a coincidence. I will evaluate how likely or unlikely these possabilties are. (The odds of my dream being a coincidence are, obviously, one divided by the number of possible lottery combinations. In other words, enourmously unlikely. I may feel very, very confident that I am remembering my dream correctly. I may judge that it is very, very unlikely that I am mistaken.)
I will then ask what is the least unlikely possabilty or combination of possabilities. In my example, the non-supernatural possabilities are both extremely unlikely. Either one of them, however, is less unlikely, based on my understanding of how the world works, than the possability that I can predict the future through my dreams. That either one of the non-supernatural explanations is true is far less unlikely than the alternative.
So even if I experienced a very vivid dream in which I clearly remembered predicting the next day’s lottery numbers, I wouldn’t believe that I had psychic powers. Not because I think psychic powers are impossible and nothing could convince me otherwise, but because I’ve thought clearly and rationally about what sorts of things should convince me and what shouldn’t, based on the knowledge and beliefs I already hold.
Most of us here probably think more or less the same way, and most of us here (even the ones who’ve had experiences like yours) haven’t seen anything that makes the existance of ghosts seem like the least unlikely explanation.
Much good sense in this thread. I’m a devout atheist, and renounce any concept of an afterlife, so obviously I don’t believe in ghosts. However, there was this one time… to put the background facts in place, my mother died when I was 11, and was named Elizabeth, known to all and sundry as Betty.
My son was 8, and had fallen asleep in my arms on the sofa. I did my dadly duty, and carried him to bed, and was about to turn off his light, when he sat straight up, and giggled delightedly at a top corner of the room. I could see nothing where his eyes were tracking. “Granny Betty”, he gurgled happily, (and very clearly), “Daddy said I’d never get to know you”. There followed a lot of laughter and giggling from him, as you’d expect from a grandson meeting his granny for the first time (and Mum was a very funny lady). In all this, I could see nothing happening at all. After about 2 minutes, he said “Granny Betty says I have to go to sleep now”, and dozes off.
The point of this story ? He’s admitted he remembers the episode very clearly, and he’s admitted he made the whole thing up, because he’d heard me talking about how I regretted that Mum would never know him. So, he tried to make his daddy happy by using a child’s imagination to meet “Betty”.
[QUOTE=Frank]
Perfectly frankly, most of us here are not elementary students.
[/QUOTE]
I find this little dig funny on so many levels. Well done, Mama_Hound.
I rented a place for a few years where every so often I’d clearly hear a very sad sigh coming from the other room. Made my hair stand on end – it was such a deeply troubled sound. Come to learn the whole family had heard it one time or the other. Always When They Were Alone!!! I like to think it was the spirit of the landord’s long-suffering mother, wondering when he was going to get all those stolen bike parts out of the basement.
I’m sure there was a worldly explaination, but the ghost thing is much more fun.
[QUOTE=Frank]
Perfectly frankly, most of us here are not elementary students.
[/QUOTE]
:::::::::spitballs Frank:::::::::
Mama Hound, you’ve hit on one of the taboo subjects at The Dope. You can discuss ghosts if you want, but you are likely to be told by more than one person that there is no such thing as paranormal events, there can be no paranormal events, and you should quit wasting bandwidth by trying to discuss it. It’s a quirk of The Dope; for a bunch who consider themselves open-minded, critical thinkers, there are some things that they simply will not discuss.
To address an earlier post, I have also heard of a boy who had virtually no brain, but was by all tests a normal boy. If I remember correctly, he had just a lining of grey matter in his skull, but it apparently was enough for higher brain functions.
As for whether or not I believe in ghosts, I’ve had some spooky experiences in my life, but I’m not willing to assume paranormal immediately. I’m not willing to completely throw the idea out, either. There is more in heaven and earth…
[QUOTE=featherlou]
Mama Hound, you’ve hit on one of the taboo subjects at The Dope. You can discuss ghosts if you want, but you are likely to be told by more than one person that there is no such thing as paranormal events, there can be no paranormal events, and you should quit wasting bandwidth by trying to discuss it. It’s a quirk of The Dope; for a bunch who consider themselves open-minded, critical thinkers, there are some things that they simply will not discuss.
[/quote]
This is baloney. First the OP asked whether people believed in ghosts, so complaining when people answer “no” is disingenuous.
Secondly, if you’re going to ask a question like that, you have to define your terms. The OP did not. “Do you believe in ghosts?” is not an empirically meaningful question unless you can define the word “ghost.” Otherwise it’s just a nonsense word and the question cannot really be answered.
Thirdly, people like me are perfectly happy to discuss paranormal claims. Who in this thread has said they aren’t willing to discuss it? That’s nonsense. What you really mean is that many of us are unwilling to entertain the existence of “paranormal” phenomena as a real possibility but there’s nothing “closed-minded” about that, we are wide open to any and all evidence anyone can produce for “ghosts.” The problem is that no one in human history has ever been able to do so.
And I going to have to ask Willy Shakespeare for a cite on his “more things in heaven and earth” assertion.
[QUOTE=Astroboy14]
My point was that the seeming contradictory observations regarding the nature of ghosts are not, of themselves, proof that ghosts do not exist. Perhaps ghosts are sometimes transparent and incorporeal but under other circumstances they are corporeal and non-transparent, just as H2O is sometimes cold and hard but under different conditions is hot, gaseous and invisible.
[/QUOTE]
Under different conditions, not at the same time. Reports of visible ghosts moving through walls are a clear contradiction of the laws of physics.
[QUOTE=featherlou]
Mama Hound, you’ve hit on one of the taboo subjects at The Dope. You can discuss ghosts if you want, but you are likely to be told by more than one person that there is no such thing as paranormal events, there can be no paranormal events, and you should quit wasting bandwidth by trying to discuss it. It’s a quirk of The Dope; for a bunch who consider themselves open-minded, critical thinkers, there are some things that they simply will not discuss..
[/QUOTE]
We will and are. Had you not noticed?
Taboo means forbidden or prohibited; the fact this thread has gone as long as it has proves you wrong.
Open-minded does not mean a state of permanent uncritical belief. It is perfectly permissible for the open-minded on any given topic to decide that the evidence is in and make up one’s mind until further evidence to the contrary appears. Most of us seem to have done so on this one; you haven’t and that’s fine. But accusations of some sort of blindness by the Board on this one topic simply won’t wash.