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Please do the same: respectfully disagree. to essentially dismiss and call shite on others perfectly valid experiences/perceptions is highly disrespectful.

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ORIGINAL: Aswad

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ORIGINAL: HeatherMcLeather

One doesn't have to die to know, one only needs to be reasonable and clear headed and base their deductions on common sense and science.

This is where you diverge from factuality: 'common sense'.

In including common sense, your assertion of knowledge becomes identical to an assertion of certainty, a rather absurd position to be in, and one that lends itself to a kind of conflict that is usually unproductive: that in which two parties are certain of their respective beliefs, and hold mutually exclusive beliefs.

Science itself simply leaves the question in the realm of "presently not decidable", meaning there is insufficient evidence on which to base either conclusion. Indeed, the term itself is so poorly defined as to be meaningless in a scientific sense, much as the question of whether we even exist is undecidable, as the relevant data to test a hypothesis about it are simply not available (e.g. we could easily be the Computer Science project of some university student, in a vastly more complex external reality, set up to demonstrate that life can arise in less complex universes by way of simulation; we will do such things ourselves in the near future).

If you simply stick with "the absence of adequate evidence leads me to believe there are no ghosts", you avoid falling into a common trap wherein the absence of proof is taken as proof of absence, which is as erroneous as the conflation of correlation with causality, another common trap. Both are viable in 'common sense', which is a world reduction based on human experiences interpreted with the limitations of human intuitive perceptions, but that constitutes reasonable belief (in the sense of 'understandable', not necessarily in the sense of 'rational'), not knowledge of fact.

Insisting on knowing the unknowable doesn't serve any purpose beyond whatever comfort you derive from the feeling of certainty, and is likely to be constructed as arrogance or worse. Not that I mind arrogance, but the disingenuity I do mind, and the willful ignorance thing is quite distasteful. You've shown a capacity for clearer reasoning. Why limit yourself to anything less than what you're capable of?

Health,
al-Aswad.

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ORIGINAL: HeatherMcLeather

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Please do the same: respectfully disagree. to essentially dismiss and call shite on others perfectly valid experiences/perceptions is highly disrespectful.

For the last time: It is NOT your experiences or perceptions that are being dismissed. It is attributing them to dead people that is. Dead people are dead, they do NOT continue on in this world to interact with the living. I do not know what it is that you and other people have experienced, but I do know what it isn't, and what it isn't, is ghosts.

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As Stella pointed out, some of us are psychic (and pay attention to it)

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ORIGINAL: Moonhead

Maybe because he sees taking this stuff seriously as a slap in the face to everybody who's ever tried to drag us up out of the mud since Prometheus first stole fire from the Gods?

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That's this whole debate in a nutshell, innit? Just because somebody sees something doesn't mean that it's real or was ever there...

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If you are so secure in your beliefs, why is it necessary to belittle people?