God is Natural Law & all that entails.
God is Light. God is the Law of Conservation of Matter & Energy.
& to extrapolate: God is the Unconscious. God is Art.

Ivan Karamazov's Contra argument in The Brothers Karamazov is horseshit. Why?
God never interferes. It's all on our head. Life is our responsibility. It is up to us to use our blessed partially divine gift of the will to understand & respect Natural Law to get anything done. The only deux ex machina that exists emits from your own soul & must be cultivated...by YOU. One must have a proper relationship with Natural Law & not some God that religion defines. Religion, at best, is there only to apply the lash & hopefully (if uncorrupted...it always is though at least somewhat) teach us wisdom & edify us on how to live life as Art.

as Jim Morrison remarked:
you CANNOT petition the Lord with prayer.

As Jackson Pollock said, "Art & Life are One---Inseparable."

one can only influence natural law through buddhahood, shamanism & the like, by reaching a state where one is at One with the One. Most never realize anything until the moment that they die, & even then, probably not much.

read these Davies lyrics:
Big sky looked down on all the people looking up at the big sky.
Everybody pushing one another around
Big sky feels sad when he sees the children scream and cry
But the big sky's too big to let it get him down.

Big sky too big to cry
Big sky too high to see
People like you and me

One day well be free, we won't care, just you see
til that day can be, don't let it get you down
When I feel that the world is too much for me
I think of the big sky, and nothing matters much to me.

Big sky looked down on all the people who think they got problems
They get depressed and they hold their head in their hands and cry.
People lift up their hands and they look up to the big sky
But big sky is too big to sympathize

Big sky's too occupied
Though he would like to try
And he feels bad inside
Big sky's too big to cry

One day well be free, we wont care, just you wait and see
'til that day can be, don't let it get you down.
When I feel that the world is too much for me
I think of the big sky, and nothing matters much to me.

Sorry, to clarify I meant monotheistic. I agree that pantheism could undermine it.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to acousticrock87 again. Just because it can't be explained doesn't mean ghosts don't exist.

atari 2600 has a point; God won't intervene and ressurect someone as a ghost, for whatever reason. There will be the return of Jesus Christ, which the Quran states and the Bible states is true. But otherwise, I sincerely doubt the validity of divine intervention as a reason to explain ghosts.

Oh no, I meant divine intervention in a form other than dead people. And not necessarily heavenly divine, either. As in the angel/demon theory. Demons are very conspicuous in the Bible, and I see nothing to dispute a continuance of this in the form of visions.

I guess I don't see what difference it makes anyway. If there are ghosts, what purpose do they serve, and why should you are I care? They obviously aren't doing much in the way of anything.

They're pretty boring entities anyway, if they are living after death in one form or another, and using that to walk around houses and slam doors, and show up in pictures, what a waste.

Ah yes, the Christian demon or the muslim djinn. From a monotheistic point of view, the most likely explanation of supernatural occurences. It is actually prerequisite in the Islamic religion to believe in the supernatural, as this is related to the fact that we have to believe in the devils and the angels. A more likely explanation for the common ghost sightings are actually residue emotions and thoughts that are overwhelming regarding a certain event or person or place or time. Have you ever walked through a garden you've walked with a loved one before and become completely overwhelmed by emotions? Psychic pollution.

I agree that it's a completely useless and unimportant issue; I really care very little about it. But I think it's interesting. It captivates a lot of people and still no one can come up with a satifactory answer. Kind of like a branch of philosophy.


I've even heard that theory go so far as to claim atmospheric oxidation is the cause, and that occasionally, with the right emotional output, the air can replay certain oxidized recordings. I'm not sure how much I buy into that theory - I think that certain places can evoke sensory illusions, but not necessarily because of past events there. It seems a bit romanticized to me. But it's much better than many explanations.

Atmospheric oxidation? Haha, the mind is a complex and wondrous thing. Diesel, IIRC, sees things every night before he goes to sleep. Emotions, psychological issues, all these things are a major influence on the mind, which is increasingly being misused anyway, and add external psychological factors, I'd say very much that it's all in the mind.

Well, you can allow divine intervention in the event that the "ghost" has a purpose, completes it, and is not seen again.

For example, during the transfiguration, Christ spoke to Moses and Elijah.
Moses and Elijah are not lost souls. They arrived at the mountain with a purpose and they completed it.

Christ's resurrection was of the flesh, he wasn't a ghost.

Now, if a ghost legend surrounds a specific location and isn't a hoax or an illusion, I don't think that it would be God's doing. It would either be a demon or a reoccuring supernatural phenomena that shadows a highly emotional event in human history.

Atari, I wouldn't say that God doesn't intervene. We have free will but I think God helps everyone wanting to accept help in small ways.

I think God has little to do with most purported 'spiritual' events that occur in the world now.

Which purported 'spiritual' events do you speak of?

Any one of them. At the risk of sounding cynical, ignorance is a more common thread in religion than spirituality.

As I wrote the other day, we live in time but all time exists within eternity. This shows how the question of "Who created God then?" simply only defines the limit of our perception, which will always see a paradox.

Einstein understood this & that's the reason why he was able to solve many enigmas, & chief amongst those, is that he proved that light was both a wave & a particle at the same time.

It was Einstein's work with relativity that solved the mysteries of the orbits of the planets. In Cartesian times under Newton, there was an imagined order that described the orbits of the planets as perfectly circular & the earth was conceived of as a perfect sphere. Einstein showed how space-time was curved due the attraction of mass to other masses & corrected all the orbits to what they actually are.
Gravitational attraction is what orders the whole universe right down to the subatomic level even. When the energy from the big bang reaches its apex of expansion, the whole universe will collapse right back into eternity once again. And just as the universe expanded more in the nanoseconds in which it began than it has ever since, the big crunch will happen "in a twinkling of an eye."

There's been many a time when the subject of God came up in conversation & what I do, in many cases, is announce, "This is God," & proceed to drop something onto the floor or ground.

Please tell us of your scientific research into the manifestations of unconscious contents. Be sure to provide enough proof to satisfy The Insatiable Randi as well as why your explanation is less hokey than that of 'ghosts are souls that refuse to move on because they have an axe to grind'


Atari the scientist doesn't even need to know anything about a picture in order to discredit it!


And then editing a post to add an insult?
Science, logic, facts, ad hom...whatever it takes

Generally, I've been agreeing with you lately, but your arrogance and hostility on this issue is ridiculous. You don't have all the answers, no matter how much you need to believe that you do.

Sorry, disgruntled one, but it's not my theory. It's the accepted truth among most highly intelligent people. You are the arrogant one that thinks your half-truth has any creedence. I'm trying to offer you a free education. If you sit back & absorb the information, then you might just learn something; that's how I arrived at whatever knowledge I have: by realizing I know nothing & weighing everything. It's a perpetual process.

Ghosts are an abscribing of the unconscious to anthropomorphic forms. Spirits & ghosts & the like crop up as symbols throughout all cultures, just as you wrote. They are archetypes of the human imagination. But, there is nothing under the Sun that is supernatural, however. Absolutely nothing...& there is no "Other". The world is a living organism composed of many systems of interdependent processes. The world is not a man-made machine. Buddhism, for instance, while getting the bulk of their worldview right, ascribes many insightful spiritual truths to physical forms in its principles of reincarnation & it's a misstep & an error. The problem is that people get caught up in the literal which is the hallmark trait of an Old World mentality before modern civilization; sadly, despite all of our progress, most of the world is still in the grip of this damaging entropy. It's a mindset that only has brought fear & injustice into this world & will eventually end this world.

So, hopefully, that helps shed some light upon why this sort of topic subject, in particular, causes me to go on like I do.

stirling, before you ever try to discredit me, you should really sacrifice your time & your ego to want to put in the years to assimilate more information & to determine what is true & what is half-truth. It's a tough road, fellow. Maybe you're not up to it. Alyasa seems to be the only person in this thread that has an understanding.
I don't really mean this, & the insult before was indeed harsh, that I will admit, but sometimes I can't help but feel this way:
the Bush-can-do-no-wrongers, hatemongers, terrorists, paranormal believers, the superstitious in general...all those people should go live with the fucking apes & that way they can actually contribute to some society. They are a lot closer to those simian counterparts than I am evolutionarily. Barring that, they should be sterilized as to not pass along their narrow-minded, thick-headed presumptious genes to future generations & indocrinate their offspring with their same mental ineptitude that shirks their responsibilities as a human being.

Congratulations, someone here managed to bring me down to their level, once again.

To all of the Fucking Territorially Pissing Piss-Ants,

I bid you a good night.

What half-truth are you talking about?
Where did I claim to know what ghosts are?
How does anything I wrote conflict with the theory you've adopted?

If you could think as well as I can, you wouldn't need to use the ad hominems or edit your post (twice) to add one. Of course, you seem to just be trolling now, so I won't even respond to your second edit.

You like the NFL, atari? Hmm.

The NFL rules dude.

I did not comment I just observed.

Sweet

You're a jackass piss-ant.

Sorry, disgruntled one, but it's not my theory. It's the accepted truth among most highly intelligent people. You are the arrogant one that thinks your half-truth has any creedence. I'm trying to offer you a free education. If you sit back & absorb the information, then you might just learn something; that's how I arrived at whatever knowledge I have: by realizing I know nothing & weighing everything. It's a perpetual process.

Sorry to post your PM, but your box is full and I have to sleep.


I'm not sure what lie you're talking about.
I normally have respect for you, but there's nothing to suck up and admit. I haven't learned anything from you. The fact that you're so insistent that I have something to learn from you is the most egregious display of arrogance I've encountered. Your posts were filled with condescension and insults without logically addressing the topic, and that's typical behavior of a troll. As for the negative "you'll never know anything" rep - that just further proves my point about your arrogance.

But, never mind. It's not my intention to further offend you. I'm not just being an asshole to try to 'get your goat'. I was merely standing up for myself from your barrage of belittling insults - something I rarely bother to do on a message board, as it's not worth the effort and I have little ego to defend.

Anyway, let's just move on.

While you have made a good point about the whole thing(i agree that people see paranormal things where there are simply optical illusions and mind induced visions),i think you should really get a fucking grip about this continious battering of the kids,young people and the like.For fuck's sake Atari 2600 the era of The Beatles and blah blah has gone ages ago.You have very poor knowledge of quite a few types of music but it seems that doesn't stop you from self-proclaiming yourself as the last warrior of some sort of 'rock classicism revival'.It might seem a very interesting thing to you but the reality is something different alltogether.And besides,there are truckloads of ingenious and articulate people in this world.You are simply ONE of them.

surely some degree of ingenuity would be necessary on atari's part if he wanted to join their ranks though?



anyway, if anyone cares, it's because of atari's attitude , as displayed in this thread (and the little shit has the nerve to call me an elitist), not what he said about my opinion of rather ripped that motivates my irritation with him.

Did you have to do all this monsterous nonsense to a Hip Priest thread? Hang your heads in shame, fictional internet people.

Although it has been interesting to see lots of people float around in a sea of inconsistent metaphysics (on both sides) and lots of people using the dreaded ad hominem to somehow garner 'weight' for their arguments.

Atari: Again, as has been said before, the appeal to science, to the rigorous exploration of emprical techniques, has a great deal of value, and has no doubt showed up a great deal of fallacies and inconsistencies in various debates. Please stop appealing to 'lies' as this only seems to appeal to the sort of Universal truths you reject in religion. The scientific universal truth is already fallacious, but the localised truth of science is fine. And your argument loses an awful lot because of the ad hominem; in fact, it would seem it undermines your appeals of being more 'intelligent' and 'well-observed'. If I have to explain that I will be very surprised indeed.

I regret this post already.

Dude, Jesus was on my tortilla. It was god talking to me, I know it.

Just believe.

i dont know, maybe

for two years i lived alone in a dilapidated basement dorm room that used to be a laboratory for a mental hospital.

did the place have its share of stories? naturally.

did i ever experience anything out of the ordinary? not once.

.
.
.
.

so do i believe in ghosts? hell no.

Your reason for not believing in ghosts is that you lived in a creepy place for 2 years and never saw one?

qprogeny: Did anyone else ever claim to experience anything while you were there? If so, were they the kind to believe in things to begin with?

sjind: no, that's only part of it. it's just an affirmation of what is already manifest. as an epistemological rule, we can't affirm the existence of anything for which we have no objective evidence. all reports of "ghosts" up to this point fallaciously take one (not very good) explanation for their experience of a phenomenon to constitute the ONLY possible explanation for that experience. until concrete, scientifically verifiable evidence exists to refute any alternative explanation (aberrent psychological states among those who have such experiences, carefully calculated hoaxes, other material causes such as light waves, some combination of these, etc.), we have no reason to believe such an outlandish claim.

hip priest: i heard some things once or twice -- predictably nothing specific, so i don't remember precisely what. i vaguely remember a planned "ghost tour" of the basement one halloween, but i think i went home that day, not because i thought i would see ghosts (i didn't), but because i like to give out candy to the little tykes and my dorm offered no such opportunities.

All buildings have their own noises created by wind or plumbing - there's always going to be a tendency to interpret such noises differently in a building that has a 'history'. But I wonder...

I should add that the episode I hinted at earlier - the 'ghost sighting' when I was 10 - was in a place in my middle school that was supposed to have a ghost. I had gone to the room (a science lab on the top floor) on my own on an errand and was probably a bit nervous anyway - I was certainly aware of the stories! THere were some noises from the adjoining lab, and I thought I saw a ghost at the door between the two rooms. I'm more than aware of the sub/unconscious possibilities, don't worry...

Au contraire. It is you who are the fictional internet people. I know your games.

Shut up. You're my imaginary person. If you persist in being troublesome 'Lloyd' (if, indeed, that is your real fictional name) I shall merely erase you from my memory. HA! Take that you fictional bastard.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Glice again.