Now that I've dealt with the idea "you can't prove there is no God," I'd like to move on to some other things. I mean, since I've dispensed with the notion, it's time to wash our hands of some other nonsense.
A lot of believers that can't get their minds around the idea of Materialism are the types who believe in a whole lot of other nonsense, particularly ghosts. After all, the bible is filled with all kinds of stuff like that, and so are a lot of other religious documents. People who leave Christianity don't want to leave behind a lot of their pet beliefs. You can tell this by the huge numbers of nonreligious paranormal ghost sites on the web. There are more than 40,000,000 of them.
The first problem with any claim like this is incoherency. There is very little that's agreed-upon about the definition of ghosts. All I can piece together is that a ghost is a mysterious representation of something, most often a conscious something. It's kind of like a UFO. It's unidentified, but a lot of reputable people swear they've seen something important.
Answers.com says that a ghost is
The spirit of a dead person, especially one believed to appear in bodily likeness to living persons or to haunt former habitats
The center of spiritual life; the soul.
A demon or spirit.
A returning or haunting memory or image.
A faint, false image, as:
A secondary image on a television or radar screen caused by reflected waves.
A displaced image in a photograph caused by the optical system of the camera.
A false spectral line caused by imperfections in the diffraction grating.
A displaced image in a mirror caused by reflection from the front of the glass.
I think the idea of a faint or false image is the best definition, and one I would certainly agree with. If this were The defintion of ghost, I would have to say, yes, ghosts exist. However, another very common definition is left out, curiously. Curious, since ghost hunters have a favorite instrument they use to detect ghosts. Strangely enough, it has never worked, and they still love to use it . It's called an EMF Detection Meter.
The reason they use the meter is because you seem, a ghost is "an energy." Is it Potential? Kinetic? We don't know. A ghost is just "an energy."
Question? An energy of what? What is this energy coming from, what is it connected to? What's making it? Does a ghost run on regular household current? That would make sense. Is it connected to a potato or lemon? How about the magnetic field? Perhaps ghosts are made of iron? Well, I guess it wouldn't be too hard for these people to believe ghosts run on magnetic field--they believe putting magnets in your shoes will cure cancer.
Or is it what I'm expecting them to say: running on the "human energy field?" The Qi? The problem is, besides the fact that there is no Qi or auras or anything like that is, if the ghost, the "energy" is a soul of the dead person, how is this energy still there? There is no metabolism coming from the dead person , years dispersed, probably.
Perhaps the ghost is coming from the human energy that exists in the household? That I can believe. It takes quite a bit of energy, but the humans in the household, who are presumably still metabolising and using the energy they get from their fuel, can make a ghost. Normal household current, batteries, simple machines, all of those energies can make a lot of things into ghosts. The best way for human energy to make a ghost is at night, when we're tired, just before we go to sleep. You could even make a demon or an alien that way. Those ghosts might not be able to make objects fly through the air, but a good hard toss can.
Thanks for listening, diary.
3 comments:
The critical thinking skills of society are so poor in general, that these people cannot even define was a ghost really IS, other than to give an equally unspecific definition: "its a spirit" or "its energy".
Sorry suckers, but "spirit" is just another word for "ghost" so thats no definition. And energy is measurable and quantifiable, so if a ghost really is energy, how do you quantify or measure it?
If I say that a phone line is powered by energy, you can bet your ass that I can quantify and measure this energy. Can we do the same with ghosts?
Thats the problem with immaterialists. They dont agree with the logic that states "existant things are quantifiable".
Good post, Alleee! You are truly Hellbound! :)
In my life, I have had some things happen to me that I can't explain. If I tried to say that they were hallucinations, I would have to accept that they were coincidental to real events in such a way as to defy the odds. Nor am I prone to these things so that it was bound to happen sooner or later. Still, paranormal is only a euphemism for supernatural and I do not believe that there is anything that is not natural. I will only say that I believe that what happened, happened inside my brain and no where else, and that there might have been a connection that I don't understand to an outside influence that caused it to happen. Existent things are indeed quantifiable, but we don't yet know everything about the universe we occupy. How would you explain a radio to a man in the 14th century? On the other hand, odds do sometimes pay off or they wouldn't be odds.
The good news is that we have access to information now. We have the ability now to check out things that happen that we can't explain, and try to explain them. Some people are much better at explaining things than others. Ghosts don't have to be explained as episodes in the brain, but sometimes they can be. That's what makes ghosts, and of course, monsters so interesting. Exciting things happen to people. The fact is, it would be miraculous if you lived your life without anything happening that was mysterious. It's for all intents and purposes impossible. See the above story on the monster, and read the links about Sleep Paralysis. It's really interesting.
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