OT: Ghost at Disneyland??
- Thread starter mikemarc1
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Don't know about that one. Pretty sure there are. Just because we can't explain it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There may be a God, there may be ghosts, there may be one or the other. There may be neither. But anyone who says absolutely that neither of them exist is just guessing.
Seems it is worth discussion after all. And this point strikes me as no point. First, I have little confidence that that percentage is right. Second, it doesn't matter. This issue is scientific proof, as opposed to believing in made-up stuff because of hedging bets or being socialized into it. So, if you want to discuss a scientist who has provided proof, even just meaningful proof greater than the existence of the Yeti or Zeus, I'm interested. Otherwise, this reads like misdirection that heads down yet another path of supposed proof that isn't proof at all and has no meaningful substance whatsoever.
Are you OK with just leaving it that there is no more proof for a god than there is for Zeus?
That kind of thinking absolves us of our obligation to approach such questions with skepticism and rational thought.
That's not how it works, that's not how any of this work. It's up to the believer to provide proof of its existence, not for the non believers to prove the opposite, otherwise anyone can make up just about anything and demand to be taken seriously because it's often impossible to prove the negative, like in the case of god and ghosts.
I dare you to say that there are no automobiles in the universe that currently run on yams. Because if you do, you're just guessing.
I'm good with leaving it at that (other than the semantic quibbling that Zeus is a god, so we are really agreeing that there is no more proof for one form of god versus another form, or for no god at all).
My point in raising the Pew study was to provide evidence that God exists (in whatever form). My point was to note that a lot of intelligent people who are well versed in the scientific method believe in some form of God or higher power. And a lot don't. So it is hard to point to one set of beliefs and claim that it is an unintelligent belief.
My other point in raising the Pew study is to make my comment about Karma.
Google. I don't recall the exact search query, but something along the lines of cars and yams.
You had me until you slipped in the "no more proof . . . for no god at all." That's backtracking, and falling back on the almost universal inability to prove the non-existence of something as meaningful. Again, if you want to make that argument, you're back accepting that any absurd comment, for which there is no meaningful evidence whatsoever, like the existence of a god or a moon somewhere made of green cheese, should be given some credence because it can't be disproved. So let's leave it at there being as much evidence for Zeus and the Yeti as there is for a god.
Sure there is. But using the word "unintelligent" muddles things because it just gives people an opportunity to be offended and sidetrack things. Lots of very intelligent people across history have believed absurd things. That's an easy list to create. Better and more accurate language is to say that people believe things for which their is no meaningful evidence. That is, they accept fervently that something exists on faith, not evidence. And, in that case, it's very, very easy "to point to one set of beliefs and claim that it is" unsupported by logic and meaningful evidence. The belief in a god is clearly one of them. You can decide whether it indicates intelligence. I don't think it does. My take, once again, is that humans (smart or not so smart) can believe anything. Emotions get in the way.
By the way, why don't you compare the percentage of scientists who don't believe in a god to the percentage of humans overall. What's that tell you?
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“Sometimes I'm scared of being Ozzy Osbourne. But it could have been worse. I could have been Sting.”
Actually I was going with "Ghost in The Machine"..."The Ghost in You"..."Ghosts N Stuff"....and so-on-and-so-forth but "spirits" works too! Bottom line is ghosts are cool. Sometimes.
I would venture a guess (see, just a guess) that the odds of ghosts existing in some form or fashion is very very high, and that of yam-powered autos is very very low - yes, even on Mars. (primarily because there probably aren't currently any yams on Mars - but that's just a guess too)
While I have never experienced anything extraterrestrial, I personally know 3 people who have. So I could close my mind to the idea of ghosts and hold on blindly to my pre-existing notion that they don't exist while at the same time assuming my friends are all deceitful and untrustworthy...or I could actually think about it and cast off my admittedly unscientific belief that ghosts don't exist.
The funny thing is, people who assume ghosts aren't real have no basis for that belief other than... well... they can't exist, right? So therefore they don't. End of story.
Whereas yam powered cars in the deep reaches of space...
well, I don't know anyone who has ever seen one. I've never heard of anyone ever claiming to have seen one, or heard one putter by. I've never seen a yam car repair shop. And there were none in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 despite how weird that got at the end. So yeah, I feel pretty comfortable in my belief that they don't exist.
The funny thing is that a yam powered car is so much more likely than ghosts.
And you're method of evaluation--my friends said it, three of them, and I'd be rude to disbelieve them--is a good example how completely unsupported beliefs are formed. If you hadn't seen the debunking video about Disney, you'd be number 4. Or maybe you still are number 4.
It's interesting how you turn the phrase blind belief around. That's another way that these things catch on. Someone muses up an absurd notion from nowhere and it suddenly becomes a thing to be considered as true, to be disproven, otherwise you've "closed your mind" and exhibited a "blind belief" against it. What's more likely, your friends' eyewitness accounts are mistaken just like so, so many eyewitness accounts have been in the past, or something with no scientific or other supportable basis about an unusual event was really a dead person in some sort of vaporish or other form walking around, moving stuff, making a noise, or some other silliness. Which conclusion is blindly holding on to something? Why should it be a ghost of a dead person rather than, say, some other life form from another planet that is very good at spooky noises, reading our minds and feeding back what we want to hear, just for kicks? Or a counter world, not ghosts, where other beings just like each of us exist and sometimes a hole is punched through to our world, and we see a reflection of it? Or a human being very much alive who lives next door to your friends and can cause your friends to think of things that don't exist? Or an event caused by the folding of time that results in us seeing vague images of the past? Or a person seeing and hearing what they want to hear, or being susceptible to it for some other reason? Or a hallucination? Or someone watching a video of a ghostly image at Disney and deciding that it's a dead person walking around because, you know, why wouldn't a dead person want to do that? Or one of an endless stream of made-up bizarre explanations that similarly have no evidence? It's all silliness, and some of the smartest people can believe it without a shred of evidence just because they want to.
Do you watch the Long Island Medium too?
And you're method of evaluation--my friends said it, three of them, and I'd be rude to disbelieve them--is a good example how completely unsupported beliefs are formed. If you hadn't seen the debunking video about Disney, you'd be number 4. Or maybe you still are number 4.
It's interesting how you turn the phrase blind belief around. That's another way that these things catch on. Someone muses up an absurd notion from nowhere and it suddenly becomes a thing to be considered as true, to be disproven, otherwise you've "closed your mind" and exhibited a "blind belief" against it. What's more likely, your friends' eyewitness accounts are mistaken just like so, so many eyewitness accounts have been in the past, or something with no scientific or other supportable basis about an unusual event was really a dead person in some sort of vaporish or other form walking around, moving stuff, making a noise, or some other silliness. Which conclusion is blindly holding on to something? Why should it be a ghost of a dead person rather than, say, some other life form from another planet that is very good at spooky noises, reading our minds and feeding back what we want to hear, just for kicks? Or a counter world, not ghosts, where other beings just like each of us exist and sometimes a hole is punched through to our world, and we see a reflection of it? Or a human being very much alive who lives next door to your friends and can cause your friends to think of things that don't exist? Or an event caused by the folding of time that results in us seeing vague images of the past? Or a person seeing and hearing what they want to hear, or being susceptible to it for some other reason? Or a hallucination? Or someone watching a video of a ghostly image at Disney and deciding that it's a dead person walking around because, you know, why wouldn't a dead person want to do that? Or one of an endless stream of made-up bizarre explanations that similarly have no evidence? It's all silliness, and some of the smartest people can believe it without a shred of evidence just because they want to.
Do you watch the Long Island Medium too?
Before that time, there were a bunch of stories from other nascent religions about someone dying and soon thereafter rising from the dead because he was a god or the son of god. That may have influenced any potential zombie killer with a rock, who would have been crap out of luck if this one was a real zombie. And, by the way, I'm not closed minded enough to blindly believe that zombies don't exist. I'm pretty sure they do, and I'm using a rock.
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Oh, zombies are totally a real thing. Or can be.
I'm not talking about the "Walking Dead" zombies. It's a great show, but the premise is entirely unrealistic. I'm talking about the "28 Days Later" zombies. That's gonna happen.
Probably the smell. To avoid it, one would've had to stand too far away to reach w/a heavy enough rock to kill a zombie. Good thing God refused to sit Laviano's ancestor and wouldn't let Rettig's ancestor into the game.
I'll say this though. If you know you're going to rise from the dead after being buried for 72 hours, you should be sure to use all new Right Guard Extreme Height Shield which has 96 hour protection.
Your first post I kind of chuckled at, but wasn't 100% sure if you were serious, since, sadly, it was so plausible, given how gullible people are. Your second post, though, looked quite serious, with no indication of it being a joke, so I then assumed your first post was serious, based on that. I think you might need to step back and realize that without some hint that you were joking, you might be taken seriously.
I've had so many times when I thought I was obviously joking on message boards and yet people took me seriously, that I now almost always include a little smiley or other indication that I'm joking. Humor is so much harder to do well without being face to face, since greater than 50% of our communications are non-verbal (I don't quite subscribe to Mehrebian's thesis that 93% of communication is non-verbal in nature).
Willis - you're absolutely killing it in this thread. You also hit the nail on the head with your comment about the percentage of scientists who believe/don't believe in God vs. percentages of the general population. About half of scientists believe in God or some higher deity, while 83% of the general public believe in those. However, the most telling statistic to me, from the Pew survey, is that 41% of scientists do not believe in God or a higher power, while only 4% of the general public in the US do not believe in God or a higher power. Huge difference and for good reasons.
Almost everyone I work with is a highly educated chemical engineer, chemist, biologist, MD, etc., and in my experience well less than half of them believe in God or a higher power. As you've noted and I happen to agree with, fundamentally, there really is no difference in believing in God vs. believing in ghosts, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or the Tooth Fairy - there's not one scintilla of credible evidence for any of these beliefs and every attempt to provide proof of their existence has fallen woefully short. People mostly believe in God because of social pressure - it's really, really hard to resist that much brainwashing from the time one is an infant until at least puberty.
In 1974, as a 12-year old, it was a pretty big deal for me to declare to my parents and pastor that I was an atheist and didn't want to continue with religious instruction - eventually, I agreed to be confirmed to placate them, but they agreed I could decide on my own whether to continue going to church after that. I felt so liberated that I never went back. And I know our son greatly appreciated not being subjected to religious instruction growing up - not surprisingly, he's an atheist, although he may go down a path similar to @LevaosLectures, as he's majoring in medieval history at RU and is fascinated with the role of the Church during that period and has become pretty well versed in the Bible.
A survey of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in May and June 2009, finds that members of this group are, on the whole, much less religious than the general public.1 Indeed, the survey shows that scientists are roughly half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher power. According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. By contrast, 95% of Americans believe in some form of deity or higher power, according to a survey of the general public conducted by the Pew Research Center in July 2006. Specifically, more than eight-in-ten Americans (83%) say they believe in God and 12% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. Finally, the poll of scientists finds that four-in-ten scientists (41%) say they do not believe in God or a higher power, while the poll of the public finds that only 4% of Americans share this view.
http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/
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Don't know about that one. Pretty sure there are. Just because we can't explain it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There may be a God, there may be ghosts, there may be one or the other. There may be neither. But anyone who says absolutely that neither of them exist is just guessing.
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You may believe that there is intelligent extra terrestrial life out there in the universe. If so, you are probably relying on the maths supporting such a concept. But it is purely conjecture.
So, so many people all over the world, throughout history, believe. How is that possible if there is no god? I really don't get the point of trying to convince believers that they are wrong.
Don't know about that one. Pretty sure there are. Just because we can't explain it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There may be a God, there may be ghosts, there may be one or the other. There may be neither. But anyone who says absolutely that neither of them exist is just guessing.
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I believe the message to which you responded showed rational thought. You seem to have an "obligation" to be skeptical and if such an obligation makes sense, why isn't that message showing skepticism toward the idea that people can KNOW that ghosts, god or ET does NOT exist?
You may believe that there is intelligent extra terrestrial life out there in the universe. If so, you are probably relying on the maths supporting such a concept. But it is purely conjecture.
So, so many people all over the world, throughout history, believe. How is that possible if there is no god? I really don't get the point of trying to convince believers that they are wrong.
I'm talking more about ghosts/UFOs/conspiracy theories than God when I speak of abandoning our rational skepticism. I don't find anything irrational about believing in God, at least not on the level of those other things. People who find ghost sightings convincing really have abandoned reason.
It is the nature of our species. We are curious animals. We yearn to know life's biggest mysteries. When the answers to these mysteries are unattainable, we invent answers that we like. This story has played itself out over and over and over again throughout our history from lightning bolts, to tsunamis, to physical and mental illness, and yes, to what happens when we die?
As the scientific method has unlocked these mysteries, we've consistently learned one thing: The supernatural answer has ALWAYS been WRONG.
Another idea that gets tossed around is there may have been something built into the human brain by natural selection which was once useful and which now manifests itself under religion, but which wasn't religion when it first arose, and when it was useful. Similar to how moths fly into candle flames. This behavior has been programmed into the moth's genes by natural selection, and for good reason. It has helped the moth navigate for millions of years in a world without candles.
Finally, religion is selling a pretty damn good product. You get eternal life and pleasure, and justice for those who have wronged you. No evidence required. Just believe. And people want to believe. Makes it a pretty easy sell. Are you seriously surprised religion is popular?
Walking Dead is great fun, but it's a cartoon. The Rage Virus in 28 Days Later at least has a bit of plausibility (there are tons of internet discussions devoted to debating that) and for my money was much scarier. Loved that movie.
And while it was clearly campy, I also loved Zombieland, which had an awesome cast, including a brilliant small role by Bill Murray as himself. My son's a zombie movie nut, so I get to see bits and pieces (pun intended) of zombie movies he watches when he's home.
Zombieland is awesome - I'm kinda looking forward to the sequel. But yes, in general, the scenarios which describe "fast zombies" as opposed to "slow zombies" are more plausible. Makes the Zed Alpha that much more challenging, when it comes. Firearms will be more important than edge weapons.
Z-Nation is pretty funny, and it has several different kinds of zombies. The Blasters are my favorite.
