Your experiences aren’t “false,” just misinterpreted, and there are explanations for all of them. You had a dream about your grandma. Nothing inexpicable there. The “footsteps” mean nothing either. Houses make noises.
How does a weightess, immaterial spirit make make footsteps anyway? What’s hitting the floor?
Deciding something must be magic because you can’t readily explain it is unscientific and childish.
Nobody clings to the least plausible explanation. They believe what they believe is plausible, you simply make a subjective judgement in labelling that implausible.
Imagine you are part of some extremely rational Amazonian tribe that has no contact with the modern world, and you see an aeroplane fly overhead. No one else is the tribe saw it. From the POV of that tribe, the most plausible explantion is that it was either some sort of bird or some sort of vision. However having seen it yourself, you know it’s not a bird and you doubt it was a vision, so conjecture about an unseen, unexplainable explanation. At which point the rest of the tribe calls you a woo-woo and disregards anything you have to say.
You aren’t positing something “unexplained” or beyond your experience. You are positing magic. Nothing in your story necessitates abandoning prosaic explanations.
“You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin’ to? You talkin’ to me? Well I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”
Seriously though, was that comment aimed at my post?
But religions will maintain it was a vision, even after they have seen an airplane up close and flown in one. Religions are loath to change their dogma once it is posited, because once they admit some of their explanations are wrong, it casts doubt on the whole house of cards. Science has no problem changing explanations for phenomena in the face of new evidence; “facts” are mutable, but the scientific method is not.
When facts and reason collide, religion abandons reason as heresy; science abandons outmoded facts and preserves reason.
Yes. Nothing in your story defies ordinary, natural explanations. Nothing in your story involves anything outside of normal experience.
No but the statement I was replying to suggested that my belief system might not change even if presented with contradictory information. I said that i haven’t seen any contradictory infomration and I am not sure my beliefs would change even if contradictory information was presented to me.
Its odd, I am pretty rational and change my views based on new information in almost every arena except this one. I’ve been puzzled by the stubbornness of my faith, all based on what could have been a psychotic break from reality 20 years ago,
This is backward. You’re the one who is saying there’s no explanation for your story. Your grandmother died, and you were 7 and you were afraid she’d died in her room. So you imagined she’d died there and saw her ghost. (Why did her ghost clomp off to your room?) Despite what you said about the facial expressions I don’t think what you described is too subtle for a seven-year-old to come up with. Your house settled, and your family found it weird given their mental state at the time. Or else they just ‘remembered’ it later.
Granny must’ve died with her boots on.
That’s right without time or space or material, perhaps God willed the egg of the universe into existence and everything flowed from that. Yeah I know, magic.
I thought i was positing a miracle.
Meh, like I said, the creation myth is not a integral part of my faith. I happen to believe it is one of the stronger arguments in the whole “is there a God” debate (and one of the weakest arguments is the “why bad things happen to good people” and “why does evil prosper”).
So going to medical school is not enough of a basis to make the statement that we don’t know a lot about the human brain? They have to be neurologists and psychiatrists?
So perhaps it isn’t God, perhaps it is extradimensional beings just screwing with the earthlings?
It’s a bit worse then magic, since it’s incoherent. In order to ‘will’ you would need a mind, which would require space + time (two things that this mind would later ‘create’).
I would say that a ‘miracle’ is not necessarily incoherent, whereas what you posited seems to be (at least on the face of it).
Fair enough.
Who do you think knows more about the human brain: a neurologist or a urologist?
Anybody can make a statement. The question is, “does this person know enough to make a meaningful statement?” If you’re going to present the doctors in your family as a cite for the idea that we know almost nothing about the human brain, I’m going to point out that none of them practice any type of medicine related to the brain, so their comment is generally uninformed. I think that’s relevant. I’d never claim we know everything there is to know about the brain but I don’t think someone who has studied the brain extensively and works with the brain would make a statement like that.
Then again we don’t know a lot of things about the human genome, but nobody thinks there are ghosts living in it.
Very soundly put. Skeptics call everything they haven’t personally experienced as false, woo woo, or some other derogatory term as if it could never exist simply because they never seen it. Sometimes they will make-up an imaginary story they label as “what really happened”, then they claim that as scientists they will change their beliefs if the facts change. The facts changed 35 years ago and they are still in denial. Posting about spiritual experiences is falling on dumb ears even though literally millions of people have them every day. Best to let them alone to live in their closed mind world. I have noticed not one ghost story posted here has been debunked, only mauled by the so-called scientists.
Would any amount of evidence or reasoning convince you that you did not have a genuinely supernatural experience?
Darth_Hamsandwich’s story was debunked. Mostly by Darth_Hamsandwich himself.
Maybe that’s also what makes it rain. The evidence is the same. It can’t be ruled out.
I had a dream about my gran, fair enough, that’s how I explained to myself a few years later. I also explained away other experiences that I had at that age as dreams, mistaken memories etc, until I later found out they were actually true. And though my grans ‘dream image’ acted in way I wouldn’t have understood as a child, perhaps my subconscious is smart enough to have picked up on adult emotions.
The footsteps though, and I appreciate you haven’t been to my house, but it’s not that noisy. Never before or since has anyone, let alone two, people heard footsteps here. Given that one of those people is a fundamentalist cynic and sceptic. You may say my parents were emotionally on edge, and that would be true. It’s just odd that their ‘pseudo’ experience tallied with my completely seperate pseudo-experience. I think at that point you have to fall back on mass hysteria or unreliable witnesses. I am not lying and I don’t believe my parents are either, but I know I can’t convince you of that unless you were to experience the same type of event.
See, now you are imbuing my story with facts that aren’t there. I didn’t say that anyone was weightless or immaterial. My gran was fairly hefty and didn’t look wispy or ethereal when I saw her, she looked like an old, sad lady standing in a cupboard looking at her grandson.
I never said it was magic, and I don’t think it is, except in the sense that childbirth is magical. I think it is commonplace, understandable and rational. I simply don’t understand it, yet. If you were to question me about why magnets repel, then I could regurgitate what scientific morsels I have digested, and I’m sure someone truly understands that, but the rest of us just accept it.
Listen, when you cn come back to me and explain what is rational about quantum physics, or what caused the Big Bang, then I’ll readily listen to your expalnation of my personal experiences.
This kind of makes me wonder why you’re in this thread, which is for alternate explanations of ghost stories. Either you expected someone would present an alternate version of your story or you thought you’d convince us that ghosts are real, right? And the second one isn’t very likely. The bottom line is that it’s impossible that your grandmother’s spirit got up and walked - noisily - into your bedroom after she died. And it’s telling that when you had this experience, you told your parents you knew she’d died in your room when that’s not what happened. Aside from the impossibility issue that’s the key to the story as far as I’m concerned. It was your seven-year-old way of dealing with spooky idea that someone had died in your bed. You imagined that if she died in your room, some part of her would hang around waiting for you. So your imagination made it happen.
So in order to maintain your belief that this was a real occurence, you find it reasonable that the dead can assume corporal form?