Why Ghosts are not Real

reply to post by dave420


Ok sugar, I can see you've made your mind-up and I'm not in the business of trying to convert people, so we must each beg to differ on this one.

Having said that either you didn't read all of my post or you misread it ... I actually said that I don't accept my own experiences unless and until all other 'natural' possibilities have been ruled out first.

No red-flags either ... just me being rational and not jumping to the conclusion that ever bump in the dark or passing shadow is a ghost. In fact the only red-flag I get is when people are so closed that they reject even the remotest possibility that something exists unless it can be poked and prodded under laboratory conditions.

No probs ... each to their own I always say, so be well and happy with your chosen beliefs (or lack of).

Woody.

[edit on 28-8-2008 by woodwytch]

reply to post by Lebowski achiever


It is irrational, as it assumes your senses are never, ever fooled. Obviously they are, as you are a human, and all of our sensory systems can be fooled.

Put one hand in a hot bucket of water, and another in a bucket of ice. Keep them there for 30 seconds. Then, put them in a room-temperature bucket of water. According to your logic, you've just created a liquid that is both hot and cold, as that is what your brain will be telling you. That is the essence of your logic, and it is clearly irrational.

Bottom line: your senses are flawed.

reply to post by jpm1602


Did they report it before the tsunami, or did these reports only arise afterwards? If they're only recorded afterwards, or if they don't only hear them before some kind of cataclysmic event, that anecdote is simply that - an anecdote, devoid of evidential substance.

reply to post by woodwytch


Perhaps it would be beneficial if you shared your experience and how you did or did not rule it out.

Originally posted by Sonya610
But you really want to though, huh? Lots of emotion in your post. And yeah, stuff happens that cannot ever be explained by corporal laws.

Edit and animal ghosts do exist. A family ghost story...St. Bernard walking around a Swiss Mountain Cabin...of course they exist.

[edit on 28-8-2008 by Sonya610]

ok I'll bite. where are all the dinosaur ghosts then? and neanderthal ghosts?

reply to post by whatukno


When a candle is extinguished, where does the flame go? That's right - the flame was a chain reaction, able to exist because of the wax, the wick, and initial ignition. Our 'souls' are exactly the same - a chain reaction - only instead of a wick we have a body, and instead of wax we have food. The initial ignition is the continuation of electrochemical energy we receive from our parents, in the form of the haploids (sperm and eggs) that form us. When our bodies are no longer able to support this chain reaction, our "flame" extinguishes. Now, unless you think every extinguished candle flame is somehow walking the earth, you can see how your logic is flawed. The lack of understanding is fertile ground for irrationality. Couple that with the human desire to understand their surroundings, and you've got yourself a ghost/bigfoot/David Icke.

reply to post by dave420
I do know that the senses are flawed. However, experiences are not only down to the senses. To me, there is IRREFUTABLE evidence they exist. But I get that it is only to me. I know that you don't believe me. I know that my friends do not believe me and I accept that. However, the experience I had that convinced me that they exist because senses only had a two bit part in it.

reply to post by Soulstone


For what it's worth... a friend sent me a photo of his daughter and a "ghost dog" sitting beside her. It was very creepy and very difficult to explain with any rational explanation.

reply to post by Sonya610


You might. I, and most other folks, want to learn for the sake of learning, to make ourselves better people. There is nothing egotistical about it.

reply to post by jpm1602


Then apply what you've learned in college to the situation. Do you think you'd get a passing grade in a lab experiment if you assume what happened instead of applying the rigors of logic?

Your senses can, and frequently are, fooled. It happens all the time, to everyone. There is no such thing as a perfect brain and sensory inputs. It simply does not happen. What you are claiming is that you are the proud owner of such a thing. If you accept that your brain is not perfect, then you must accept that you could have been confused about what you saw. It might have been something - a fox/goat/David Icke - but to ascribe supernatural origins to it, with no reason to do so but your own perception, is grossly irrational.

reply to post by Lebowski achiever


Accepting a personal experience as evidence is not rational - thanks for demonstrating my point And if you think something is proof to you, and you only, that again is highly irrational. You seem to be conflating the concepts of proof and experience - they are not the same thing, as the latter happens through an intermediary - our flawed sensory systems, and the former can be measured and repeated at will by any number of people.

I'm not discounting other peoples' experiences because I haven't had one - I've had plenty. I just know how flawed brains are.

Knowing without evidence is irrational. It's easy to say personal experiences are proof, but that doesn't make it rational.

reply to post by jpm1602


And I'll show you Harry Potter, which clearly shows Wizards exist.

An anecdote. Ok, fair enough. I'll dig it up. And it was afterwards.
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www.LifeStation.com/Alert-ButtonLife Among the Ghosts of Banda Aceh
Kamboja Street is so close to the sea that the tsunami all but levelled it a year ago. Most of the fishermen's villas, with their red-tiled roofs, fluted columns and verandahs, were shaved off the earth by the great cutthroat razor of water which stood over them, then sliced them from their foundations.
Kamboja Street is so close to the sea that the tsunami all but levelled it a year ago. Most of the fishermen's villas, with their red-tiled roofs, fluted columns and verandahs, were shaved off the earth by the great cutthroat razor of water which stood over them, then sliced them from their foundations.

When, after three months, the Indonesians cleared the waist-high layer of mud, masonry, cars and corpses which covered Lampulo, the district of Banda Aceh where Kamboja Street lies, there was nothing left of many homes except a faint border of sea-chewed brick and the tiling on the ground floor.

A year on, the first replacement house has only just begun to be built, by the American charity Care. Tents still border the street; some residents have put up makeshift wooden dwellings. Electricity has been restored, but running water hasn't, and households drink and wash courtesy of wells and giant yellow water tanks on corners, topped up by Oxfam.

If you hang out on Kamboja Street today, and get to know the people who live there, the weight of the obvious strikes you. Folk grumble mildly about the pace of reconstruction, but the bleakness of missing houses is a distraction from the infinitely greater pain of missing people. The empty spaces where buildings should be are easier to mend than the holes torn through families and hearts by sudden death on a scale seldom experienced by any community.

Kamboja Street begins by the brown, narrow Aceh river, which meets the sea half a mile downstream. The mat of dead bodies and broken fishing boats which choked it after the tsunami is a horrible memory, and working boats line its banks again.

Turn off the embankment road - still unrepaired from where the tsunami took bites out of it - and you're on the street. That's Samsiah's kiosk on the right, and the rebuilt metal repair workshop after it belongs to her too. Grass and weeds now grow over where the houses used to be, and the tarmac road is now a rough track.

You come to a little crossroads. On the left, some householders have pitched their grubby, sagging, once-white UNHCR tents on the left, on the foundations of Yusran's house. Five died there, four of them children. On the right, another tent is pitched where Mali's house stood. At least nine people were killed there, two of them children. After Mali's house, there are a couple of rough outlines of houses in the weeds, as if they were demolished decades ago.

The first one belonged to Mustafa, the mobile fishmonger. He was killed along with most of the rest of his family, including four children.

On the left is Samsiah's house, not the original but a baroque hall of salvaged planks nailed together, like a giant beach hut, on the foundations of the old. Samsiah's neighbour Harunabdullah, a tailor, lost his wife Nuraini, three children and two nephews. His neighbour Khairiah and her son were also killed. Next door to the grassy outline of Khairiah's house is the remnant of Hassan's house - he died before the tsunami, which killed his widow and two children. Next along was Manaf's house. Manaf survived, but his two teenage sons died. On the other side of the road the houses were thinner; there's nothing there now.

And so it goes on, neighbour after neighbour. Next to Manaf, Iskander lost his wife and two children. Opposite, Hasriati died, along with five others. Iskander's neighbour Mukhtar lost both parents; on the other side of the street, Muhammad Johan, a stallholder at the fish market, lost his wife and daughter, while his 67-year-old neighbour, Kamariah, is the sole survivor of her household. She returned from Jakarta to find eight grandchildren, two daughters and two sons-in-law dead. Between Kamariah's house and the home of Lely Abdullah at number 36, close to the end of the street, there used to be 10 dwellings. 26 adults and six children from that little stretch of one street in Banda Aceh have been plucked away forever.

It was a young street, loud with children, with most of the houses built in the last couple of decades. Lely, a 46-year-old fisherman, watched the families grow around him. He moved to Kamboja Street in 1980, finished his house in 1992 after two years' work, and became rich enough to own four motorbikes.

"Before the tsunami, people were out on the street all day and all night, sitting and chatting," he said. "That's what I liked about it. There were always children's birthday parties, and when somebody got married they invited a local singer for the party. There were all sorts of pedlars. Especially selling toys for children, every day, every hour. The bicycle noodle guy used to come five times a day and at night all the houses would turn on a light at the front. It was so busy before, with the fishmongers coming and going, the motorbikes, the cars. It's silent now."

Lely said he didn't believe in ghosts, but he doesn't like to stay in the house in the evenings. He goes down to the fishing port and sits in the coffee shop till it's time to sleep. His wife Saudah and one of his sons died in the tsunami. His neighbour on his left is his brother Hasyiny; his sister in law and two daughters were killed. Behind Lely's house, at number 41, his sister Ainal Mardiah, her husband and four of their children died.

Lely's two surviving daughters, Naula Astuti and Nurwardiah, and his 18-year-old engineering student son Darman live with their ailing great aunt in a room in temporary barracks an hour away by motorbike. Lely desperately wants to bring the remnants of the family back to Kamboja but can't until he puts a roof on the house he has partly rebuilt with his own funds. He's run out of money and isn't sure whether or when Care will help. The US megacharity is ploughing huge resources into the area but there are are so many organisational layers between Care and individuals that even after the Guardian organised a meeting between senior officials and Lely, he wasn't much the wiser.



[edit on 8/28/2008 by jpm1602]

No mystery, many people on their death bed see their animals. Dogs, cats, etc...

Less animal ghosts because, as I see it, they are closer to the true essence of God. Instinct/nature is God. Humans are in pergatory(sp).

Animals find nirvana naturally. They do not question the obvious.

reply to post by woodwytch


"they reject even the remotest possibility that something exists unless it can be poked and prodded under laboratory conditions" - that's not what I'm doing. I accept that ghosts could exist, but until someone gets to prod and poke them in lab conditions, I won't believe they do. Accepting that something *could* happen, and that something *has* happened, are obviously very different.

There are too many personal experiences, phenomena's, and unexplainable happenings that are recorded and witnessed every year to say that "something" strange isn't going on. I have had my own personal experiences that turned me into a believer, and millions of other people have as well.

Ghosts are what our human mind has created so that we have a way to classify and categorize what is happening logically. However, I believe that there are many different types of paranormal activities happening all around us, not all of them are what you may think of as a ghost. Think logically for a second, it wasn't that long ago that we first discovered microwaves or UV light. Is is that impossible that there is still more types of energy that we cannot record and measure?

There can never be proof that these paranormal experiences are actually disembodied souls, but hopefully one day there will be proof that there is some type of force or energy that is manipulating the world around us and causing the "paranormal".

When you experience something get thrown across an empty room you will also believe.

reply to post by jamie83


I'm sure it was creepy! I've seen all kinds of creepy-ass photos - I love looking at them. However, and I say this with all due respect, photos are not evidence of ghosts, only evidence that a certain image has been captured on the print you are looking at. That's it. That is not enough to allow one to instantly conjure explanations, for that is not rational.

reply to post by samureyed


Don't get me wrong I totally agree with you. Something strange is going on. I just don't see how it proves life after death.

reply to post by jpm1602



Wow. Seriously, when you quote propoganda learn how to edit out the ads. It will make the message seem much more human.


[edit on 28-8-2008 by Sonya610]

reply to post by Sonya610


Umm, people on their death-beds are experiencing their brains giving up the ghost (no pun intended). They are about as untrustworthy as experiences get. Would you expect a dying TV to give you the best picture? Or a dying car to provide the best performance? Or a mouldy loaf to make the best toast?

The rest of your post doesn't warrant a reply, other then "hehehe ok, if you say so".