Do you believe in ghost?

[StregaModerator]

Sigh.  He’s dead, Simon.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

If there is an afterlife there are at least 100,000,000,000 people floating around “up there”.  I have ordered a vacuum cleaner to be switched on beside my deathbed just in case……..

Do I get to keep my tattoos in the next life? Any theologian willing to answer this profound question? Anyone know what Ultracrepidarianism means?

[_Robert_Participant]

I’m no expert, and I don’t know exactly what a chart is supposed to tell us.

@simon: Your “chart” is based only on  your date and time of birth and location. That is all.  If you were born in the next room while Hitler’s mother was also in labor,  you would have the same exact chart as him. Analytical huh…you sure?

 

 

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

Luckily I was born a Capricorn so I don’t believe in astrology. How anyone could think that a constellation of stars that is about 240,000,000,000,000 miles away could influence my life is, like me, totally off the charts.

[onyangomakagutuParticipant]

@reg, I think the reason I have no charts is because I, too, am a Capricorn.

Simon can I meet your astrologists, I want to be dealt what will kill me so I know to avoid it

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

@robert – “If you were born in the next room while Hitler’s mother was also in labor, you would have the same exact chart as him.”

– presumably, you would.  But you would have different genes and a different family history.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

“Ghosts predictably showing up in the same place and behaving in a similar way, regardless of who is observing them, preferably with them doing incredible things which are impossible to explain.”

– that’s what the people on this tape are doing: providing a number of witness statements claiming to verify an actual recording, talking about things that happened reliably most weeks.

[Viki PliarhouParticipant]

I suggest you find out what exactkt the word ‘ghost’ means and then think your question over, especially that you are asking THAT on an ATHEISTS’ site. ‘Ghosts’ don’t exist. Nothing supernatural exists.

[_Robert_Participant]

– presumably, you would. But you would have different genes and a different family history

You would. Period. Which is why it’s bullshit. Different genes and a different family history matter not to an astrologist……

 

[StregaModerator]

I found it fascinating that belief in the paranormal can be linked with schizophrenia, but only in males.  There’s a summary here

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8173547

• This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by  Strega.

[Reg the Fronkey FarmerModerator]

I see dead people.

[daughterofkarlParticipant]

I’m aware that I am something of a rarity among atheists, in that while I hold no belief in a creator deity, and never really have, I am rather agnostic when it comes to the notion of ghosts, or to be more precise, a state of being after death.  I don’t know if there is a state of being after death, but I am not nearly as certain that there is not as I am that there are no gods.   The reason for that is pretty simple:  I cannot relate a single time in my life when I felt that I had experienced the presence of a god.  I can, however, tell a good “ghost” story–many of them, in fact.  Not sure why those sorts of things have happened to me so often, given the rather hard streak of rationality in my  nature, but there you have it.  While I know that anecdotal evidence is pretty useless in terms of empiricism and scientific proof, neither can I completely ignore my own experiences–the evidence of my own eyes and ears–or write them off as easily as I would like.   There are experiences that I have had that I simply have not been able to explain to my own satisfaction as having been hallucinatory, or optical/auditory illusions, or just mistaken perception.   Were it not for those things, and given that I have never had any reason to believe in deity, I would likely have long since dispensed with the notion of Cartesian duality or any sort of existence after death at all.  I have always had a problem with the whole notion of “soul”–of some disembodied vapor that animates my flesh and lives on without it.  That just never seemed very likely to me.  My great, great grandfather, who was an atheist, once wrote: “Show me mind without body, or body without mind.  You cannot.”  (He was writing in the late 1800’s, but that always seemed to make sense to me all the same.)  It makes just as much sense to me to think that the things we experience as “supernatural” might simply be, as I think another poster alluded to, the brief whispers of some other space/time line in some other multiverse which, for some reason, is bleeding over into this one.  But the theoretical physics that would make that even possible are really beyond my grasp.

So.  Do I believe in ghosts? Eh, not really.  But, hey, let me tell you about this one time….  🙂

[DavisModerator]

re:daughter of karl

You are not a rarity. The majority of atheists hold some kind of spiritual or hocus pocus beliefs (the majority of atheists come from Eastern Asia (China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam). And despite years of secularism or even the chinese cultural revolution…belief in ancestor spirits and other kinds of fluff-talk is very real. Amongst western-European atheists…lacking a belief in God does not assume a lack of belief in cosmic phenomena like karma or universal consciousness. It may be the case that vocal atheists in English speaking countries seem to have a very skeptical critical secular humanist way of thinking…we really should stop the arrogance of assuming the rest of the atheist world is the same. It is not.

So no…you are certainly not a rarity in your way of thinking. Us radical skeptics pro-secularism pro-science pro-human-developemnt pro-human-rights no-ghosts no-hocus-pocus are the rarity. A considerably small fraction of atheists in fact.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by  Davis.
• This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by  Davis.

[daughterofkarlParticipant]

Hey, Davis.

Well, that’s good to know.  It still surprises me sometimes how much attitudes have changed over time.  I came out to myself as an atheist about 25 years ago, now.  But, in the part of the country where I lived and worked, one learned very quickly not to speak about one’s atheism openly in most social situations.  It’s only been in the last 10 years or so that I have had opportunity to interact with other atheists, and most of that contact has been through my involvement with a debate site called Atheistic Forum that was based in Europe.  It was really freeing to have a place to openly acknowledge and debate my beliefs.  I spent several years there, eventually becoming a Mod on the site.  Among my peers there–many of them Danes, most of them European men–I certainly was a rarity.  Most of my friends there skewed much more to the–what did you call it? –“radical skeptics pro-secularism pro-science pro-human-development pro-human-rights no-ghosts no-hocus-pocus” frame of mind! 🙂

I still miss that site.  Broke my heart when we lost our server.  I think you would have done very well there, Davis!

Cheers!   DOK

[Viki PliarhouParticipant]

to the one who said s/he sees dead people, my advice is that you read neurology about hallucinations. in short you don’t SEE dead people, you THINK that you see them.  what brain does is the subject of neurology. google CAUSES OF HALLUCINATIONS.

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