The Supernatural

[Lee Retalis]

I was sitting and watching TV a few hours ago, and I enjoy watching accounts of people haunted by ghosts that usually appear on the Discovery Channel on saturday mornings.
As the show ended, it occured to me that they always pray, get crosses or whatnot to repel the ghosts.
I was wondering what everyone else thought about ghosts and other such phenomenon.


Do you believe that there are some things that just cannot be explained by science, like ghosts or people with "psychic" abilities/ESP?

If you do, why do you think theists chanting words or showing symbols of "god's protection" seem to repel malevolent spirits in most accounts of supernatural activity?  

[Dread Dionaea]

My boyfriend and I watch that every time it's on! Both of us are athiests and incredibly skeptical about hauntings. Our theory is some kind of group hallucination brought on my stress and hysteria. Rarely is there ever physical proof, just everyone's word that this happened. Often times in those shows something monumental is going on in the people's lives--a move, someone's sick, or in the case of the one we most recently saw the discovery of a "satanic worship" site.
The reason the ghosts go away with religious symbols, I'm betting, is that these people are confident it will work and therefore it does. The situation was all a brief lapse into fear and hysteria and whatever was the thing that they had the most faith in would stop it. Oftentimes if something doesn't stop with the first try I'm betting at least one person in the group hasn't been satisfied and will continue to work the others into a frenzy.
People, for example, ocassionally lie so often they believe it. When someone else backs this lie it will drive them further down into it. I imagine that ocassionally the people are aware that it didn't happen but for one to say it was false would shame the others by association. With some convinced, all backing each other, and some too ashamed to admit falsehood stories are perfected and retold again and again.  

[Death God Hitsugaya]

Weel, I'd have to say that I believe that ghosts aren't real. ESP/Psychic abilities don't seem realistic, but we don't know everything, and I'm pretty sure that there are inactive parts of the brain... You never really know, but I'm not on its side.  

[Sanguvixen]

The way I look at it one cannot refute that energy exists. It is around us, and ever shifting, and ever changing into different forms. It powers our houses. It radiates from the sun. It courses through our bodies. It floats through the air, and even in our homes.

To me energy is supposed to be freeflowing. As long as energy is flowing freely the way it is supposed to you don't have problems. When energy however experiences an unnatural turn, twist, bump, or break, you can end up with some pretty dramatic things.

Tsunamis are created by energy, Thunderstorms are created by energy, as are Hurricanes and Tornados to some extent.

For that matter I think all living things have energy....in some form or another.

I think hauntings and paranormal activity are just the effect...or result in a unnatural disruption in the cycle of energy caused by human beings. It is what happens when you build homes and concentrate energy into homes.

Are these things actually demons? Are they souls? I don't think so.

That is my take on it. As far as people who claim to be attacked or troubled by Demonic entities? Why is there no video? No proof? Nothing?

Even the Ghost Hunters only ever come up with very mild things...nothing anywhere near what "Supposedly goes on in some of these shows"...like the one of the TLC channel...or is it the Discovery Channel?

 

[Sanguvixen]

I've read a lot and watched a lot...and thought a lot.

I'm currently toying around with a Postive Energy and Negative Energy idea that popped up when I was talking to a friend.

He believes that what many people called ghosts and spirits are actually Echos. He thinks that the act of building a home causes an unnatural break in energy.

What happens is that energy(over time) builds up in a home. He says that the energy the builds up is the result of living things living in the home.

He also says that people give off both positive and negative energy. Some people give off more positive and some people give off more negative. Also he says electronics can give off energy too.

According to his idea, the kind of energy that builds up from the interactions between living things in an enclosed environment, and even the death of people within a home/building end up creating a wealth of energy that can manefist itself and mimic what has lived in the home/building.

Energy that manifests becomes an Echo(as he calls it), and wether that echo will interact in a negative way or a positive way depends upon what kind of energy is has manifested from.

So in that way he feels that so called Demon spirits are simply Echos made up of negative energy, and when people go in to try to dispel the echo, the act of bringing in positive energy that they themselves eminate dispel the manifestation and not some "Act of God".

What do you think of his idea?

 

[Dread Dionaea]

Sanguvixen

words words words words

I actually had a theory similar to that for a while. Energy signatures from people, aka ghosts, seem to show up most often in old buildings which are made from more natural materials. Notice also that nobody sees ghosts of primeval man or other non-settled peoples, just the ones surrounded by buildings. Perhaps the multitude of natural elements in an older building can absorb more energy signals and thus create more illusions of hauntings.
I don't think that energy can be defined as "positive" or "negative". That puts a distinctly human spin on it that is very contingent on our perceptions of things. I prefer to think that an energy signature would instead be put off by a surge of adrenaline and emotions such as that in a murder.  

[The MoUsY spell-checker]

Bladed Alchemist

Weel, I'd have to say that I believe that ghosts aren't real. ESP/Psychic abilities don't seem realistic, but we don't know everything, and I'm pretty sure that there are inactive parts of the brain... You never really know, but I'm not on its side.

I remember this from a few different books that I've read: it's true that we don't use all of our brains at once - if the whole brain was active at once, it would use so much energy that our bodies wouldn't be able to cope with it. However, the brain can grow depending on what it does. Functions that are more commonly used tend to have more brain capacity devoted to them.  

[Nergalitos]

Huh...That was very enlightening Sangu, thank you.

I do like this theory. Very well thought out and proves some good points of Supernatural  

[Xiporah]

I face an internal debacle over this subject. To me, Atheism and ghosts and spirits do not jive.

Yet, Ghosts are one of my top four phobias. Those ghost TV shows like TAPS freak me out to where I have to sleep with the lights on. Movies can really freak me out too, but not nearly as often because I know for a fact that it's a work of fiction.

On my birthday this year, my friends and I were in Gettysberg, PA. They wanted to go exploring the battlefields at night and go ghost hunting. I told them to have fun and that I would be in the hotel room.

So for me, I can't quite find my standing on ghosts and similar phenomenon.

 

[Sanguvixen]

Aufstandkind

Sanguvixen

words words words words

I actually had a theory similar to that for a while. Energy signatures from people, aka ghosts, seem to show up most often in old buildings which are made from more natural materials. Notice also that nobody sees ghosts of primeval man or other non-settled peoples, just the ones surrounded by buildings. Perhaps the multitude of natural elements in an older building can absorb more energy signals and thus create more illusions of hauntings.
I don't think that energy can be defined as "positive" or "negative". That puts a distinctly human spin on it that is very contingent on our perceptions of things. I prefer to think that an energy signature would instead be put off by a surge of adrenaline and emotions such as that in a murder.

Some of places where the GhostHunters Aka TAPS find good stuff are older buildings where people have died.

I can admit that things do happen than cannot be explained away by logic or science.

I mean...things shouldn't just fall off from the top of surfaces right? Than why did my four glass scented things just fall off the top of my TV? They used to do that at night. I used to have 4 glass things that gave off scents and I would put them on top of my TV. Every night I could sit there and watch as one after another would fall off as though someone was smacking them from behind.

I did a little expirement. I waited till night. The results?

The TV On, Off, and Unplugged all resulted in the same...how do I put it? Outcome? The result with all three were those glass things falling off one after another in the same way.

A friend came over and wanted to see it, so I unplugged the TV, and put the glass things on, and he got to witness the same thing I was seeing. He thought it creepy.

To point out something: Notice the use of the word "fall" or "fell". Others might go with the word "Flying" but that is to imply something dramatically flinging far across a room and that gives the wrong idea of what happened. The things would simply move and fall, as though a hand came up behind it and pushed it. When it happens one after another...that does catch your eye.

FYI: It only happened for a few months and then it stopped.

I tried to debunk it when it was happening. It wasn't vibrations of the TV, and those things were too heavy to be knocked off by the air vent, or a draft from the window.

The way you look at it my experience is just a story with no proof beyond my memory. Things falling off of surfaces with no logical explanition constitutes as a paranormal event. It something that is "Above normal".

Once or twice a week you still hear the ceiling creaking, and it sounds like footsteps. No one lives upstairs, and the cats don't go in the rooms because they are locked. I've learned to ignore that sound.

Let us say a religious, and tight knit family comes into a home like this. They see things get knocked off a TV a couple of times, and they hear footsteps in rooms where there are no people, and they get a little edgy. This individual (or group of individuals) may have demanding jobs, and they come home stressed out and spent. Being on edge they begin to think they see things. They think they see shadows moving, and eventually because of stress, and a being put on edge they enter a hysteria where they think everything odd is a paranormal event. They claim that things are "Flying across the room" and that "TV's are just turning all by themselves."

In time they become fearful that there is a "Demon presence" and maybe they will themselves into believing one is there. It is very possible to will yourself into believing that something that never happened did happen, and that lies are actually true. I thing that is often the case is so called "Hauntings".

The next thing you know a family driven by hysteria is now on TV going on and on about thier fight for thier lives and home, when the only real paranormal things that happened were a TV and System turning on by itself, and a few air fresheners falling over and over again off of a TV.

All the Priest does when summone by the family is manage to calm the nerves of the family by preforming a "Special Ceremony"...and now that the hysteria dies down nothing odd happens to the family.

I can stretch it but you can see how such small things somehow evolve into a "Spine tingling struggle for your soul and faith..." right?

I can't claim to have ever witnessed something that looks like a "Ghost or a Spirit". What I have seen are things fall off one after another and couldn't find a logical explanation even though I tried.

I've been awoken by my own TV and PS2 when both(which were unplugged when I went to bed) mysteriously turn on, and the character starts exploring the area, and walks into a cutscene that is less than pleasent.

*My door was still locked and the Paper Failsafe that would tell me if someone had unlocked it was still unripped.
*When I went to bed the things were all unplugged.
*Other than me only my mother and step-father were home and they were sleeping.
*There was no controller in the controller slot.

Those two things are strange. That doesn't make me stop and think "Oh wow! There must be a God after all! My home is haunting by Demons! They don't like my air fresheners, and apparently like to play PS2 and Xenosaga too!

 

[Dread Dionaea]

Yeah, my parents' house is "haunted" too. I used to be incredibly staunch in my defense of ghostly activity because of the stuff that went down. Frankly a lot of it was just too bizarre to deal with at the time. It gave me a life-long phobia of things that are human that don't look human...say, something with unusually elongated limbs or too wide of a mouth that on first glance looks like a person. I thought I saw that, and that wasn't able to be written off with energy. I would attribute it to my own hallucinations but after I told my mom she started seeing it too. That's why I think it's group hysteria.
She called in some people to bless the house with holy water, actually. It didn't really do anything and I'm betting it's because I didn't think it would. When I started leaving the home more and eventually moved out it ceased completely. The source of the panic was gone so it was gone, too.
I'm not saying you're crazy, but I'm betting the stuff in your home started with something banal and when it was noticed and thought about too often it expanded into other things. Since you seem to put a lot of stock into energy, maybe it has something to do with "psychic" human controlling of our environment. Like, one person nudges it into effect and when another comes in on the scene they do it too just a little more.
Frankly I have no idea what I'm talking about when I'm theorising so take it as you will. I'm not interested in psychic phenomena really anymore. I used to be very into it but I completely lost motivation to be when I discovered entomology razz And when my ex-girlfriend started claiming her apartment was haunted because of the Egyptian gods' talking to her. But, that's another story.  

[Sanguvixen]

Nergalitos

Huh...That was very enlightening Sangu, thank you.

I do like this theory. Very well thought out and proves some good points of Supernatural

Your welcome.

That friend moved since then but I still toy around with his idea. The more research I do, the more his theory makes sense. Or at least the Echo part of it.

There are still parts of it that make me a little iffy, because who is to say that there is no positive and negative about it, and that should his theory hold grounds, that the manifestation is simply reacting to your brain, or even just mimicking those who have lived there and died there?

So maybe an Echo is just your brain's reaction to certain stimili in the air. Much like how a person who is hypersensitive to electromagnetic energy(which is given off by electronics and I might be useing the wrong term) can have hallucinations and feelings of dread when exposed to the energy in excess.

Maybe an Echo is simply imprinting itself upon what has lived there. TAPS caught a violent attack upon one of thier researchers on tape when they went to Ireland. This member was knocked really bad, and it scared him to the point where he almost started crying, and he had to lay on the ground where he fell for several moments because his chest hurt badly. They were trying to provoke a so called "Elemental". The building has a very bloody and violent history. One of thier Camera Men was also caught on tape being inexplicable attacked and that was in and old prison.

To me it is not a question of wether or not the Supernatural or Paranormal exists...it is a question of what is it? If things are moving on thier own, than what is causing?

Is the voice behind an EVP just doctored up by dishonest reasearches, the disembodied voice of a dead person, or an echo/imprint of someone who once lived there?

I take a certain approach when dealing with these kind of ideas. It goes like this:

If you are dealing with something that might or might not exist, the way to try to understand if it is real or not it to think of it in a stance that is real and work backwards.

For example...You meet a person online. You can't see that person, and you have no way of knowing if the pictures he/she shows you are actually that person. So you assume that the person is real even though you cannot see them. You can interact with them though some mediums.

The ability to Interact is a plus when dealing with something that may or may not exist. It lends to the idea of the thing in question being real.

The next step is....Ok, so what do you do that allows you to prove within a reasonable doubt that the person you assume is real, is actually real? What can you do? Anything? Well in the case of the online person you can use the medium called the E-net, choose a place to meet, and actually go out there to meet them.

If you go meet them in a location, and they are actually what you saw in the pictures than case closed. That person is real.

Moving on....Look at the Paranormal in the same way. Assume it is real. How do you go about trying to interact with it? You provoke it in area you think it is residing in. You can attempt to ask it questions and play back the tape later on. TAPS provoked the so called Elemental in Ireland and it interacted by pushing the member forcefully to the ground.

Ok...that was caught on tape. So yeah....you can to some extent interact with the so called Paranormal. That is a little credibility there. So how do you go about trying to prove without a reasonable doubt that the Paranormal exists? What can you do?

You can go and seek out places that are thought to be haunted, you can attempt to catch EVP's, and you can try to catch things on Camera. TAPS looks at thier cases Scientifically and goes out to places to debunk hauntings which is why I respect them. To me while you don't really have 100% crediblity....there is a large case that swings towards the Paranormal being real.

Most of thier cases are debunked. If you go looking for reasons that stuff happens other than Paranormal you're going to be able to debunk a lot of stuff. If you go in looking for spirits, every odd thing that can happen can be turned around labed "Paranormal Activity."

Moving on. Let take the idea of a God in that way. First assume he is real. Second how do interact? Um....there's a problem there. You cannot interact and there are no mediums through which to try. That goes against the idea of a god existing. Next how do you go about trying to prove that God is real? There goes another snag. Really you can only supposedly see him only after you die.

In the first and second step you have major snags. That means that there is a high likelyhood that God isn't real.

Online person can be real if you look at it my way.

Paranormal can be made a strong case in the same way.

The idea of a God...completely debunked even in the first step.

 

[Sanguvixen]

Aufstandkind

Yeah, my parents' house is "haunted" too. I used to be incredibly staunch in my defense of ghostly activity because of the stuff that went down. Frankly a lot of it was just too bizarre to deal with at the time. It gave me a life-long phobia of things that are human that don't look human...say, something with unusually elongated limbs or too wide of a mouth that on first glance looks like a person. I thought I saw that, and that wasn't able to be written off with energy. I would attribute it to my own hallucinations but after I told my mom she started seeing it too. That's why I think it's group hysteria.
She called in some people to bless the house with holy water, actually. It didn't really do anything and I'm betting it's because I didn't think it would. When I started leaving the home more and eventually moved out it ceased completely. The source of the panic was gone so it was gone, too.
I'm not saying you're crazy, but I'm betting the stuff in your home started with something banal and when it was noticed and thought about too often it expanded into other things. Since you seem to put a lot of stock into energy, maybe it has something to do with "psychic" human controlling of our environment. Like, one person nudges it into effect and when another comes in on the scene they do it too just a little more.
Frankly I have no idea what I'm talking about when I'm theorising so take it as you will. I'm not interested in psychic phenomena really anymore. I used to be very into it but I completely lost motivation to be when I discovered entomology razz And when my ex-girlfriend started claiming her apartment was haunted because of the Egyptian gods' talking to her. But, that's another story.

I think when you become a religous person you become more...easily victimized by group Hysteria, and that is why so many "Religious Families" are around that try to claim they were haunted by demonic entities.

If you try to stop and think about things logically it can make more sense. It may be cruel to say so but in many instances logic is driven out of the mind of the religion. My own brother is a living example of that.

I didn't tell my friend the whole story when he came over. I simply told him that things in my room have fallen off the TV. He came it, and it happened. I think he's athiest too but I'm not really certain.

When something actually falls in a way that those things fell...it makes you wonder.

I still have that TV, and other than that thing with the Game System turning on and those air freshener's falling off nothing else has happened. Then again I really didn't think too much on it.

I apologize for the huge posts....I happen to be strong on the topic of Paranormal, Dragonlogy, Paleontology, and Cyptozoology.

 

[Dread Dionaea]

I used to be interested in all of those, too. Cryptozoology is the only one I still care about. It's the one that shows promise to yeild more actual understanding. Considering how deep and unexplored the oceans are, as well as caves, it's easy to imagine those in particular hiding things we haven't yet discovered. I think a lot of it is very over-mythologically explained. I'd be more interested in discussing cryptozoology if every person I encountered discussing it didn't take the unusual aspects and turn them into fantasy.
I read a lot of ghost and other horror stories and they scare the crap out of me even so. Somethingawful.com forums have seasonal ghost story threads where everyone on the huge (but largely active) forums will tell tales of what happened to them. It still scares me even now, but in an exciting way. My boyfriend doesn't like me reading them because I jump at shadows for weeks, haha.
It's more of a "this is a fun story" hobby than something I take seriously. Some of these stories are quite good though. http://ghostgoons.com/archives/ has some of the stories. They just redesigned but used to have a .rar file with all of them. I imagine you read this one like a forum, I don't know. These are all allededly experianced by a forum of uniformly literate people who have partaken in all walks of life. Despite SA being a humor forum I tend to take the members seriously when it's not obviously joking. These are good people who will offer the shirts off their backs for another member.  

[Foetus In Fetu]

Sanguvixen

The way I look at it one cannot refute that energy exists.

In a scientific sense, no, but in science 'energy' has a very rigid definition that you haven't used for the rest of your posts, which makes this point moot.

Sanguvixen

To me energy is supposed to be freeflowing. As long as energy is flowing freely the way it is supposed to you don't have problems. When energy however experiences an unnatural turn, twist, bump, or break, you can end up with some pretty dramatic things.

Seriously, what are you talking about?

Sanguvixen

What do you think of his idea?

No offense, but I think it's ad hoc, extraneous and indulgent.

Aufstandkind

Energy signatures

Such as?

Aufstandkind

Notice also that nobody sees ghosts of primeval man or other non-settled peoples, just the ones surrounded by buildings.

Assuming that people see 'ghosts' at all. It's more than likely that the reason people never see, say, neanderthals is psychological than because neanderthalian ghosts are any more non-existant than other ghosts.

The MoUsY spell-checker

Bladed Alchemist

Weel, I'd have to say that I believe that ghosts aren't real. ESP/Psychic abilities don't seem realistic, but we don't know everything, and I'm pretty sure that there are inactive parts of the brain... You never really know, but I'm not on its side.

I remember this from a few different books that I've read: it's true that we don't use all of our brains at once - if the whole brain was active at once, it would use so much energy that our bodies wouldn't be able to cope with it. However, the brain can grow depending on what it does. Functions that are more commonly used tend to have more brain capacity devoted to them.

I think you're kind of touching on the 10% myth. We do use the whole of our brain, but not all at once, and that's not even because it would "use so much energy that our bodies wouldn't be able to cope with it". Just one effect of having all of your neurones firing at the same time would be that all of your muscles would be spasming, since all of the nerves connected to them would be sending, sometimes conflicting, signals.

The brain works on a kind of binary system where each neurone can either be 'on' or 'off', with different combinations having different effects. At any one time only a portion of the brain will be "in use", but it is all allocated, and it is all used.

Sanguvixen

I can admit that things do happen than cannot be explained away by logic or science.

Yet people keep trying to explain them away in ways that at least sound logical or scientific. Hence, pseudoscience. The fact is that there are 'scientific' explanations; people just either don't know, or don't want to accept them.

Sanguvixen

The way you look at it my experience is just a story with no proof beyond my memory.

Which is why I don't even have to try to refute or explain it. Fact is, those glass things could just as easily have fallen off as a result of a number of forces that you weren't even aware of. Call it temporal and/or spatial summation of forces, call it ghosts. Either way, I doubt you measured air movement in your room in any scientific way or did any calculations regarding the forces on your ornaments; so you haven't discounted any other explanations, you've just assumed that the only possible explanation is 'supernatural'.

Sanguvixen

To me it is not a question of wether or not the Supernatural or Paranormal exists...it is a question of what is it?

To me, until there is reliable, empirical evidence that really cannot be explained by the current scientific system, it will always be a question of whether or not the 'supernatural' exists. You can't start explaining something until you know for sure that it's actually there.

Sanguvixen

If you go in looking for spirits, every odd thing that can happen can be turned around labed "Paranormal Activity."

Yes. It's very deus ex machina.

It's possible that there are entities, such as God or 'ghosts', that exist outside of science and cannot be detected or measured scientifically. (Just for the record, if there is reliable evidence of something, it falls into the scientific domain). However, these things are completely a matter of faith and, in my opinion, if your reason for being an atheist is that there is no proof that there is a God and yet you buy into the supernatural, you're a hypocrite. If you have some other reason for not believing in [a] [G/g]od, the former is not applicable to you.

The fact is that the 'supernatural' is completely undocumented in any empirical way. Many, if not all, situations claimed to be supernatural are just as easily and much more plausibly explained by the current body of scientific knowledge. That makes 'supernatural' explanations unnecessary, ad hoc and a violation of Occam's razor.

Finally, the words 'supernatural' and 'paranormal', 'ghost' and 'psychic', like 'god' are just buzzwords that are thrown around. If their meanings are even at all agreed-upon, they're very broad, which introduces a large element of subjectivity. I know I used the phrase deus ex machina earlier, and I'm sure the irony won't be lost on you; because the 'supernatural' has such a broad and subjective definition, it can be used to "explain" anything. It could manifest itself in any way, at any time: anything could be given a 'supernatural' explanation.