Posted 05 November 2009 - 05:46 AM
first let me start by saying that the title of this was to grab attention as opposed to start trouble. what im asking for is exactly what the topic states though. also if im post something on here, anyone and everyone has a right to agree or disagree with me any way they like, so long as theyre willing to discuss it (nod to stevendel). i would like everyone to know that so far i have taken nothing personally, and i hope none of you have either. i would also like to point out that nothing in this post so far in my opinion has been a waste of time, i've found everything fairly interesting weither i agreed or not.
i would also like to say that if anyone is going to respond to my posts, or in fact talk to people in general, to please treat other peoples believes with some amount of respect. i realize that might sound somewhat hypocritical considering some o fthe things stevendel and i have said back and forth to eachother, but i respect what the guy has to say an dim thankful he took the time to say it. do i agree with everything hes said?no i dont.has it given me something to think about?some nuggets of it have, an di dont think he is the type of skeptic that i spoke of when i posted this thread, i have problems with only a few things hes said(we'll get to that steve!), but i also have a better understanding of his beliefs and why they are so.
for the record i respect everyones beliefs and to me this forum and general is more or less for entertainment value.i do not expect to prove to anyone that ghosts exist, or for anyone to prove to me otherwise. i also dont expect to see anything on here that will change anyones views one way or the other, just potentionally make them think. not that thats bad, but if youre searching here for validation one way or another, waste of time.
to my knowledge there is no SCIENTIFIC evidence to support the existence of ghosts. atleast not hard evidence, if there is can someone please point me in the direction in which i can check that out and not have to pay money haha.id love to see it but i am broooke!
but on the flipside, skeptics: you dont need proof to BELIEVE in something, you need it to prove something.respect that. believers: just because you've gone through something so extreme that it has made you personally believe, or even if youre just naturally open to the notion, respect that not everyone else has had that experience and has seen their share of hoaxes. respect eachothers views. i believe in god, i cant prove that he is real, but i believe it. that doesnt make me wrong because i cant prove it to you, doesnt make me right either. its a personal belief, if you do or do not believe in god, ghosts aliens, mermaids, whatever, just respect that theres another point of view that you can not realistically beat and will be lucky to debate to a stand still.
anyway heres to all of you
STEVENDEL:
your post is very long so let me pick at it haha
"First of all I'd say that the main reason for this is the fact that the paranormal isn't the object of much serious scientific study. Which isn't surprising, as systematic observation hasn't yet yielded any questions that necessitate the assumption of the supernatural. The evidence presented thusfar is very weak and can easily be explained through known mechanism such as (self)-suggestion, misperception, coincidence, memory lapses, dream states, hallucination, jumping to conclusions ('it looks like a human shape, so it is a human shape, so it has to be a ghost'), hoaxing, etc."
with all the problems in the world today, ghosts(real or not) should stay at the bottom of scientists lists haha. i get angry when i hear some of the things scientists pour tons of money into when so much else is going down the drain. my only comeback to this is that not all the evidence is THAT weak, some of it no one has a single clue what it can be, making it not exactly strong, but you also cant lump it into the easily explained categories that you have listed. these examples are the only ones that catch my attention. unless they can be proven as a hoax or otherwise i dont think they should be 100% written off
"This is where we fundamentally differ. None of my alternative claims are more ridiculous than a ghost. Like a ghost, each one is a hypothesis lacking any evidence. Stories about ghosts may be more common than stories about inhabitants of Jupiter playing with our furniture, but just beacuse one story is told more often than another doesn't make it more true (incidentally, here in The Netherlands a popular 'medium' has been active for years who claims she gets her instructions from the inhabitants of Jupiter, and thousands believe her. Does that make it true? Or even a realistic possibility requiring investigation?)"
my first thought would be to have HER checked haha. and i would say its worth thinking about looking into, like as of now i dont want to judge it cause i dont know anything about the lady you know? and youre right, far as i know pixies could exist, and i hope they do haha. maybe rediculous was the wrong word...madeup would be the better word. because i have seen things to show there COULD be ghosts, nothing hard and overly scientific as most on this site would want to see. again i dont count personal encounters in this im talking things iv seen from investigations. its atleast more plausible than pixies.
"But where does your idea of what is migt BE come from? After all, all you see is a 'humanoid shape mass'. A vague shape resembling a human. All you see is this appearance; how can you deduce from that that you may be dealing with a ghost? How do you know it isn't just a random pattern that happens to look vaguely human, something we humans are very much predisposed to recognize? (Why, indeed, would you assume a ghost would appear in a human form? It is after all immaterial, isn't it?)"
some of what i have seen isnt vague at all, its clearly human shaped. and i know our brains work to "connect the dots" if you will, thats why i wont even think about orbs, or smoky wisps or anything like that. and i personally cant say theyre definitely immaterial. that would be to definitely say they exist. you have to admit that if you think people may be wrong in thinking ghosts exist period then they could be wrong as far as how said ghost would "work" so to say. i have no clue as to what their physical limitations could be.do you? and if so how sense there is no hard proof that they exist at all?
"There are many ways to do this. I've given several examples in other posts. In general, what you need is repeatability. What you need are independent observations from non-believers. What you need are control conditions (bring believers and non-believers to six different places, one of which has a reputation of being haunted. Make sure nobody knows where they are going or why. And just ask them to record anything unusual they notice.) Evidence gathered in such a way may offer some support for the assumption that MAYBE there is a ghost. Even such evidence, however, doesn't PROVE there is a ghost. For that, you need a theoretically strong (and eventually proven) mechanism that compellingly links such evidence to the spirit of a deceased person and to nothing else. I think that will be very difficult to achieve. But as long as the evidence itself is so weak as it is, we won't need to worry about that much yet."
there has been repeatability, not on science experiment levels that im aware of, but there has been people in the same locations, of countless beliefs in spirits, religion, afterlife, music theory, etc. and many of them have experienced the same unexplained things. im not saying that is proof of a ghost, im saying that is proof that things like this happen. which again brings me to the only problem with anything you've said thus far, which is that things like furniture etc. moving on its own is fiction and does not really happen. its in a situation like that where youre crapping on someones belief system or their word, not on their scientific evidence, where i think you better have BAD_WORD good evidence that said events do not happen.
why serious controlled tests havent happened on some places yet i do not know, but theres definitely enough word of mouth for someone to go in and check many locations. and PLEASE dont come back and say they all expected to see something, its not always the case, some things i have seen happened at a place i had no thoughts about previous and then heard stories about afterwords. to assume everyone sees/experience the same things without a preconceived idea of "what is there" is at least as rediculous as someone immediately thinking some strange noise is a ghost.
"That's the burden of proof issue again. If you say you experienced something out of the ordinary, I will believe that you had that experience. But your subjective experience is not evidence for an objective fact, and you cannot require me to accept it as a fact. If we had to take for a fact everything people say they experienced, we would have to accept a host of religions even though they are mutually exclusive, we (you included) would have to accept orbs and the inhabitants of Jupiter, and our mental hospitals would be full of real Jesuses and Napoleons."
this is where i can say, with all due respect, you give good example of said "crazy skeptic" this post refers to.not because you dont immediately buy into what i say as hard fact, that is totally fine. i dont think every story should be taken as 100% evidence, the majority of what you say is unarguably true. BUT for you to say that things are just fictional because they lack proof is quite narrowminded.you can say they COULD be totally fictional, or even say theyre highly and almost completely unlikely, but to say theyre total works of fiction makes you come off as disrespectful and narrowminded on the subject. again thats with all due respect and im sure that the way you said it wasnt totally the way you meant it(otherwise why would you still be talking to me or admit that ghosts could ultimately be real but you see no proof)
sorry if anything i said here is found to be rude in anyway, not my goal, just have to point out that it cant be said that something isnt real just because you dont believe it.
"You seem to forget that we have very well tested and proven theories of physics that predict with a great measure of certainty that these things don't happen. Furthermore, we have no evidence to the contrary, so no reason to doubt these theories. And while lack of data indeed doesn't equal proof of nonexistence (this is exactly the reason why it is mostly impossible to disprove the existence of something), lack of data certainly doesn't mean that therefore anything goes, that you can just throw in a random theory that upsets lots of other, well-founded and time tested theories and demand it to be taken seriously without evidence to back it up."
if ghosts are indeed real i dont think its fair to assume that physics would apply to ghosts the same way they do to us. again im not asking for anyone to take me seriously, let alone demanding. what im simply stating is that, on a case to case scenario, theres times where physics and studies wield no solid results.making it unknown, could that be a ghost? possibly. but again im stating that theres no way as of now to scientifically prove it, even if we did your controlled 6 building thing, and 1 has a reputation, whose to say one of the others isnt just because there isnt stories, or whose to say you can get a ghost to react a certain way? not to mention, say ti does go all perfect, and the 1 haunted location shows unarguable results, what does that PROVE? nothing at all, and then what do you do to PROVE it, not just back up the suggestive power of it?nothing. even believers in the big bang theory say that the universe as we know it will come to an end, and then at some distant point, another big bang can occur and the physics in this universe could be 500% different than anything we know now. how do we know how physics apply just in distant parts of this universe? with that said, i think its safe to say that scietists could be going about things less than 100% correctly. if you cant admit that theres a chance its been gone about in the wrong way, or simply incompletely, i see no hope in there ever being progress, not to mention proof.
and if i believe, as i do, that scientists are looking at it wrong, me being someone who is nowhere near their level of intellect am gonna have a hell of a time proving anything.
JIMDE:
"If I didn’t know better, I could almost believe this drivel; in my book it gets an A for effort but not much else simply because it’s a subjective opinion with an obvious personal agenda that is inaccurate, misleading and typical of a failed belief system whose followers have proven thus far to be incapable of producing competent results. In other words, it’s a desperate attempt to overlook evidence recognized by esteemed members of the scientific/academic community as credible, unique and paranormal in nature.
"The problem IMO is that now some of these so called skeptics/scientists will have to get off their butts and produce similar results under similar conditions (repeatedly as has been accomplished) or admit failure of a belief system that now has cracks in its armor. Apparently, the easy way out is to deny the existence of anything potentially supernatural rather than face the fact that there is an unknown/undiscovered/undocumented force of nature in the universe that the poindexters can’t comprehend."
tone it down amigo haha. its all about respect here, his points were directed directly at me, and i asked for them (literally). i do appreciate your alternative point of view, and it doesnt hurt that youre backing up the main point of the topic haha. but just remember anyone has a right not to believe, and a right to be ignorant to said EVIDENCE that shows the contrary. i am infact guilty of this and would like to see it, but only for free haha.
but look at what the post says, could you give me any examples of things youve gone through and what skeptics have said that you find crazy? if so i would be interested. if not feel free to debate at your leisure haha, but respectfully.
OMPRDave:
you seem very sensible, thumbs up.
furthermore, feel free to call what i say whatever you want, as long as you are willing to not tattle if i do the same haha. i dont take anything personal, and i hope no one else does either
incidentally, thanks for all the replies, i have a red folder now haha :]
