I love the chills that run up your spine when someone tells you about an experience that cannot be explained.

With that said, just because it can't be explained doesn't make it true. I believe that our minds will work overtime when other people put suggestions in our minds. I remember when I was a teenager, several of us went to a supposed haunted road with someone who was an expert in the area of spirits and ghosts. There was supposed to be a ghost of a woman with a light who roamed this old road. All of a sudden, someone said they saw a light moving toward us. We all started staring at this light, and sure enough, it was appearing to move closer. I stared and stared, and realized that it was a distant streetlight or other fixed light and that it just looked like it was moving closer because we were concentrating so hard on it. I still laugh all these years later at the expert who said that my spiritual power was so strong that I chased ghosts away, which is why I have never seen or felt a ghost....it seems that I scare the shit out of ghosts. Pretty strong medicine, if you ask me. Or it could be that I will not join in on group hysteria.

So my answer is, an atheist cannot believe in ghost. If there is no afterlife, and there is no soul that lives on after we die, there can be no ghosts. But I still love a good ghost story.

And there was no explanation for them. For instance, dreams that occurred days later. And one day I went to my mother's house and when I went to open the front door, the handle turned and the door opened. It was not my mother because she was asleep on the couch in the Florida room in the back of the house. And the dog did not know how to open the door. But despite these happenings, I am still a diehard atheist.

Like I said, I love a good ghost story. I guess that I can't relate to how it would feel or what I would think if anything supernatural ever happened to me. Nothing has. Not even dreams that came true.

I do remember being told once by a cop about that "sixth sense" that people believe that they have because of how they avoided disaster. This cop told me that we have the ability to see so many things that our conscious brain does not register. But we still see things. Imagine that you pull up to a convenience store and you have this strange feeling of foreboding...for no apparent reason. But what really happened is that "something" wasn't right...like there is another car there, and there is no one in the store where you can see---no clerk at the cash register, no customer. Your instincts have kicked in. Your unconscious mind has gathered all this information and registered it as off. So you get this feeling that something isn't right, but you are not thinking this. You just get the feeling that you should just drive away. The point of the story was that if you feel that way, do drive away. There may be something to it that you are not paying attention to. I took from it that it is not supernatural or clairvoyant, it is just your subconscience....but imagine how the believers would go on and on about god protecting them or how spiritualists will say that they have special powers.

It's science.

But your stories are strange occurences.

My mother had an experience recently where she began falling backward in her room due to being off balance. She said "something" caught her in mid air and swung her around so she gently fell on the bed.

I can explain this away but it certainly is strange.

Rather than jump to the default supernatural explanations.... there are many simpler ones.

Like the door was not latched all the way and your walking on the porch jared it enough to pen the latch... and the nob turned in the process. This and a combination of remembering it inaccurately seem fine explanations to me.

I love a good ghost story too... but because I make period costumes, I prefer the ones with women in hoop skirts and that sorta thing... a good Gothic tale...

How do you explain that the handle turned on its own?

How do you know there's nothing to jar the door? It has a latch doesn't it? Y'know a little metal thing that fits into a hole in the door jam?

Your presence in front of the door might have been enough to change the situation and move the door. Every time the AC comes on in my house, my room door closes. I don't think it's ghosts.

And that little metal thing is attached to the door nob. If you push it the knob will turn (on some doors).

But even if all these things are not part of your scenario, it wasn't a supernatural event.

Y'know... every time one remembers something, what you are remembering is NOT the event, but the last memory you had of the event. Brains are messy and not 100% efficient. Remembering the memory is like what we used to call "Chinese Telephone" (I know, very un-pc). One adds and subtracts and twists details. That's why farther away from the actual even, memories get muddled. Your brain actually "throws out" details it deems unimportant... emphasizes things you like or want to believe. This happens to everyone.

Remain skeptical!

I like that term in this discussion - devil's advocate!

One might retort that an afterlife could be reality without the existence of gods. Why would a god be necessary for the continual existence of one's self-energy (I know - that sounds woohooey!)?

Or, perhaps "ghosts" are not extant energy but atmospheric replaying of events. Of course, I have no idea what the physical mechanism of such replaying of these events would be, but it could be an explanation without the need for a god.

Do we need a specification of what is not believed? A-theism, A-spiritualism, A-woohooism. Does Atheism naturally encompass all of these non-beliefs under one big umbrella of rationalism?

if I were to believe in ghosts and a continuation of my personal energy/being, it would not be a far stretch to just assume that there is also a god. I guess that I am just a non-believer, period. If it cannot be proven or repeatedly shown to be true, I am not going to believe it in. Maybe one day, there will be a way to prove the existence of ghosts, or god, and I will then change my opinion on it. Until then, I am anti-woohooism in all it's forms.

So are you saying that you may believe in ghosts, but not god?

While I love the stories and the chills, my rational mind kicks in during the light of day and has a hard time explaining the physical mechanism required to be a ghost.

But, I have seen things and experienced things. That just makes me human, though. Perfectly imperfect as a measuring device.

When would I be ready to make that claim? Outside of some ghost measuring device (highly unlikely), my personal experience is the only thing that I can rely on. So, if I experienced an apparition in the presence of other skeptics for a long enough period of time to be able to later investigate all natural explanations, and those explanations were all ruled out, then maybe....just maybe...I'd start wondering.

I am an atheist, I had an NDE, I believe there is something after this, but the experience was completely and totally not religious.
Not fond of the word "ghosts", though, prefer spirits or whatever.
I do love a ghost story!

NDE are as interesting as "ghost" stories.

I will state that I do not believe in anything after this life, but I can be swayed by evidence. If I remember correctly, the last theories regarding NDE's is that it is a reaction to the brain shutting down due to lack of oxygen and syapses out of control. But I still like to hear more details about things that I cannot explain away.

In the old days they often used to speak, and reinforce mostly Catholic theological ideas.

Nowadays they're just scary.

Yes, I find that many ghost stories still do reinforce Catholic or fundamentalist christian ideas. I haven't looked into the history of ghosts in cultures other than European/North American. For instance, what does an Indian ghost story look like - or a Japanese story? What are the connections between these stories and their unique cultural experiences?

the national religion is all wrong. Somewhere that would have to be the case........ most places that would have to be the case........

But were I a ghost, I'd bet I'd not be a rule follower. I don't do it too well in the physical realm. Why start in the spirit?

They don't take any shit.

I do believe in ghosts. I do, I do, I do believe in ghosts!

Haha!

Aren't they already vapor?... ectoplasmic vapor?

What rules? I love in, like, movies....

In that sappy tearjerker "Ghost", Patrick Swayze's ghost runs up the stairs and reaches for the doorknob to open it only to find out, alas! he cannot "react" with matter... his hand goes thru the doorknob. But wait! How then did he run up the stairs? Why don't his feet go thru the stairs? How for that matter does he stand on the ground? Why doesn't he go thru the Earth as it hurtles thru space, leaving him behind....?

It's all so "don't think it thru".

what the rules are? I have been mistaken for a lot of things (and some things that are no mistake), but I have never been called a "ghost". I don't know what the rules are, but I bet there are rules. Seems to me that in the movie Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice had to tell the "new" ghost couple all the rules. Too bad I don't remember what they were.

Hmmmm, I think I'd like to listen to The Banana Boat Song now.

I've had a couple otherworldly experiences - they're fun to think about, but I don't take them seriously. We can't be trusted to interpret information when it's at the edge of our senses. Our minds tend to fill in the blanks with the most handy invention - often faces, since our brains are wired from birth to recognize them. Throw in some creepy coincidences, and it's a recipe for a ghost.

As for the more serious question of whether or not atheists eschew all belief in the supernatural - most that I've spoken with are die-hard skeptics as well as atheists, so yes. That said, there's nothing in the word "atheist" that specifically rules out the supernatural - it just rules out the belief in "theos" - deity, as it were. If there were some way to decouple the afterlife from ghosts, it wouldn't seem as irrational for an atheist to believe in ghosts. Wouldn't SEEM as irrational, mind you.

Indeed, sir. Indeed!

That's just it, isn't it? There is absolutely no objective method to examine the claims of the supernatural. Unless, of course, you use one of those ghost boxes that the ghost adventurer guys love to use

In which case, I tend to default, a'la David Hume, to the most commonsense, least miraculous explanation.

A belief in the supernatural doesn't preclude disbelief in the unnatural. Religion posits some entity from outside nature, while a ghost is by definition linked to nature.

To believe in ghosts, I think you have to believe that science has not yet reached the point where it can produce suitable evidence. Simply dismissing everything for lack of evidence means you don't understand the nature of science. We don't (and can't) know everything.

Can't help you with subjective experience. There's no irrefutable evidence either way for ghosts or gods. People who have religious experiences are sure that something happened, but who's to say they didn't interpret an event outside their understanding by cloaking it in their cultural memes?

It's one thing to see a ghost when you know it might appear. It's another thing entirely to see a ghost, where others have seen it, when you don't know anything ahead of time. That's the best evidence for their objective existence.

We are curious creatures, we humans. Someone will examine anything we don't understand. If you learn something, you can count it a successful effort, even if you didn't confirm your original hypothesis.

We are drawn to ghosts because they confirm a possibility that we want desperately to be true, that all religions promise--there is (or can be) another existence after this one.

out of time ...

Some background: My boss and I are pretty close - we socialize outside of work and we know some of each others extended families - including his father in law. One of the things we do is play on-line RPGs and one of the guys we play with is a life-long friend of my bosses FIL.

This guy is pretty old and in poor health so online games are one of his outlets.

Now I have posted in the lounge about my father's day gifts from my daughter - she took me out for sushi and on the way home we stopped at the grocery store and she bought me a 12 pack of beer.

In all my beer drinking history I have never bought Yuengling Black and Tans. I've had gallons of regular Yuengling but never the Black And Tan. Old Timer was always talking about how much he loved YB&T - it's about the only thing he drinks (maybe another reason for his poor health) - we had many late night gaming sessions, each of us getting stupider as the night wore on but we were both safely in our homes so it was just all good fun.

It's been several months since we last played any games online though because he had been in poor health and I guess just not up to it.

So my daughter and I are in the beer aisle and for no reason other than I suddenly thought of Old Timer I decided to get the Black and Tans.

I get into work this morning and I found out that my boss wasn't in today because he's with his family - Old Timer had passed away.

Now i know I just saw the B&T on the shelf and thought of Old Timer but man, I bet I could pretty easily spin it the other way way around. Old Timer wants me to carry on the tradition of gaming on Black And Tans.

Here's to you, Old Timer. You were a good guy.

To the Old Timer!

... but I have had experiences that lead me to believe ghosts are real.

From a scientific view, because energy is neither created nor destroyed, the idea of a ghost does make a lot of sense. When a person dies, that energy goes somewhere.

Dr. Michio Kaku in "Physics of the Impossible" leads one to believe the idea of ghosts in another dimension may have scientific standing.

When a person dies, their "energy" is released as heat.

"Ghosts in another dimension" has no scientific standing as it is, at best, speculative.

Yeah right.... maybe in one of the 26 dimensions (or is it 10?) needed for String Theory.... so ghosts are curled up too small to perceive.


or something....

At least that's what magic theory says.

Spooky stuff in relativity bends the brain, and speculative science beats speculative religion in my book.

Mostly, I find the idea of ghosts, Bigfoot, alien visitors, and the like to be fun to speculate over.

Neither special nor general relativity are particularly spooky. I suppose the physical effects of velocity and mass are a bit trippy but spooky?

Quantum mechanics...that's another story. It starts out spooky and only gets more bizarre the more you learn. For example: a positron is indistinguishable from an electron traveling backwards in time, photons are their own antiparticles, there's nothing really prohibiting any given proton in your body from being in your body at the start of this sentence, on the other side of the universe in the middle, and back where it started at the end.

When we die, our bodies stop operating. The heart stops beating, the lungs stop breathing, the blood stops circulating. Our brain activity ceases.

It's a romantic idea to believe that some part of us continues on after we die. Death is a scary thing. When you contemplate the very notion that when you die, you cease to exist, it can be a paralyzing fear for many people. We don't want our lives to end. No one does. Nature dictates that we die...all things die.

We fight against this so much that we're willing to put all reason aside in hopes that some small part of us will continue to exist. We see what we want to see. It's no different than Christians who see the unusual and claim that it's divine.

This hope is so strong that we have willed our minds to see what we want to see. It's understandable that we want some form of afterlife, but it's not realistic.

But.....

How do we explain that ghost cat that my mother and father always see at their house? It always jumps from the floor to the table and then disappears. More than one person has seen it at a time.

Of course we can explain it away, but is there a possibility that we aren't talking about an actual sentient soul but a recreation of events somehow recorded for playback? Is that physically possible?

The underlying question, however, is can an atheist (one who doesn't believe in gods) still believe in extra-natural events? Is atheism necessarily synonymous with rationalism?

If there was no god but ghosts existed, wouldn't those ghosts just be a part of nature that we haven't understood yet?

hidden-natural event?

Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House is probably one of the best of the genre.

I came onto the little gem when I was in the 9th grade and the wonderful Robert Wise directed version of Jackson's novel was released in celluloid, entitled simply The Haunting. One of my friends and I got together and saw it. Leaving the theater I remember riding home on by bike after dark I was scared shitless.

I soon got the novel from the library and gobbled it up -- one of the best reads ever of this genre. The 1963 version of the movie honors Jackson's book. It is a nearly flawless flick.

I highly recommend either of these as a near best of genre ghost story.

N.B., Please avoid, at all costs the insipid, iconic Hollywood remake, Jon de Bont's 1999 version. It turns Jackson's into a cartoon, substituting creepy situations for startling and blood, neither of which happens in the novel nor Wise's 1963 version of the movie.

Best ghost story I ever read and one of the best ghost films ever produced.