I think my dead friend Austin is in my room

I see your point.. but in relation to the average mind a person who sees ghosts needs counciling.. if they are going to be rid of their visions (whether or not they are real to the person in question).

Counciling is used to help people fit in with average life.. and if ghosts are a problem for a people then counciling might be a good thing for them.

Also, i fully understand your point about lack of evidence for them not existing... but this brings us to the point where we have no evidence of them existing and no evidence of them not existing.. so belief in them is not needed.

As with agnosticism... there is a lack of evidence for God and vice versa... so in the agnostics mind they are not believing anything until they have evidence.

Athiesm from wikipedia: "When defined more broadly, atheism is the absence of belief in deities,[3] alternatively called nontheism."

Agnosticism holds the athiest absense of belief in a God... but goes a step further by not outruling the possiblity completely. So agnostic people do not believe in a God for lack of evidence, but would do if some everidence came along.

The same goes for ghosts. Like you said, there is no evidence for and no against... which should lead to an absence of belief in ghosts.

 

you cant say that there are no such thing a spirits, it has been proven scientificaly. have you ever studied the paranormal? There have been court cases where the judge has made houses "haunted by law" and that the owners MUST tell the ppl that are looking at the house that it IS IN FACT haunted. This happened during a case where a family bought a haunted house and took it to court.

 

Consider Stambovky v Ackley, a NY case decided in 1991. The Stambovsky's decided to buy this big old house in upstate NY and made an offer and paid their deposit. To their surprise, they later found out that the house was infected with Poltergeists, which apparently had been a well known fact to those in the area. This fact, of course, was not disclosed to them prior to the contract. So, they sued to get out of the contract, claiming that the Ackleys had a duty to disclose this information.

The trial court did not agree, but on appeal the Court of Appeals did, and they were allowed to back out of the contract because, "As a matter of law, the House is Haunted".


you may have heard of this house,,,,,, it was very cheap to purchase, despite how large it was..... it was in fact, the Amityville house.

 

You can't beat experience, experience is more than reading something online. Spirits and souls exist, whether you think so or not does not matter. What is, is.

 

exactly. thankyou~

 

This is the fallacy of negative proof: you cannot prove a negative, you cannot prove that something does not exist. That's why the burden of proof is on those making positive claims - without evidence it is absurd to claim to have knowledge of something. We cannot say that ghosts do not exist just as we cannot say that the tooth fairy or infinite space turtles don't exist. I'm not going to believe in any of them until I'm presented with empirical evidence. Meanwhile known psychological phenomena adequately explain the data we do have...

 

If this is so, then we have nothing to measure knowledge with. Everything believed in exists eh? So theres an Allah, a God, ghosts, father christmas and god knows what else...

It is true that you can't beat experience.. it is true that things exist subjectivly within peoples minds.. but when interacting with other people common ground is needed. Experience of some things is set in stone as knowledge i.e. we know the union jack is red white and blue. Knowledge is something that we can all experience and agree with. In the minds of people ghosts may be real but as collective knowledge they are not.... science cannot prove that ghosts are real... you don't need a degree in science to realise that material doesn't appear out of nothing and arrange itself into the shapes of people.

The fact that the only recorded evidence of ghosts is dark ambigious photo graphs with face like shapes in them, weird sound recordings and shakey videos shows that ghost 'hunting' is just something pursued by people with too much imagination. It's not a coincidence that ghosts can never be seen on command.. or filmed in good light with a steady camera... there just isn't any hard evidence of ghosts existing. Why not actualy get some quality footage of a ghost to show people that they do exist? Why has this never been done? Why bother pursueing something that has so little evidence of even existing? Why is science not interested in doing tests on ghosts? Why aren't there multi-million pound organisations set up to find out information about the afterlife and paranormal activity? Because there isn't any kind of reliable evidence for them to be interested in it!

 

Nope, you took my post out of context. I never said anything about "god" or "allah" or even ghosts. I do not believe in religion.

I am purly talking about the spirit, the soul. You cannot gauge the "afterlife". Humans still have a very, very, VERY, limited understanding of the nature of life and the universe. To use science to conclude that there is nothing after life is just illogical.

 

true, but to disprove visible ghosts it is not

 

was you trippin'

 

Once again you're coming smack up against the fallacy of negative proof, rather a key idea to understand. You cannot use scientific methods to prove what isn't, only what is. Given this, the only sensible way to proceed is from a position of agnosticism towards things we cannot reliably say are so. That's not to say we cannot make judgements about the likelihood of such things based on what we do know. We do not know everything, very far from it, but that does not mean we know nothing. We know enough to say that it seems incredibly unlikely that consciousness can survive the physical death of the brain in the way intuitively assumed in traditional concepts of disembodied souls, and suchlike. We also know plenty about the evolution of such probably mistaken intuitive assumptions...