I am a weak atheist but i heard some stories about ghosts that keeps me thinking.
I heard these stories from my father and grandfather who experienced it.
before i was born my family used to dig in the garden behind our house searching for gold. While digging they start seeing rocks thrown at them but dont know from where
and in other days a man who came to help them was thrown up in air then down.
i dont think these are lies.
so how do you explain these things
thnx
Posted: July 21st 2010
Eric_PK
It’s simple:
- People make things up
- People embellish
- People lie
- Our brains confuse us
The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry has done a lot of work in this area. You can find good stuff on their website, and their magazine “Skeptical Inquirer” is quite good.
Posted: July 22nd 2010
Steve Zara www
There is no limit to extent to which the brain can be fooled and deluded. The philosopher David Hume noted centuries ago that all stories of the supernatural are second hand – have YOU seen a man thrown in the air? have YOU had rocks thrown at you? Hume also noted that we should go for the more likely explanation – there really are these phenomena, or people are fooled. Which is more likely?
Try watching this illusion – it’s quite shocking. First time through, just try and follow who is throwing and catching the baseball.
Then, watch it a second time!
Posted: July 22nd 2010
Mike the Infidel www
Family folklore.
Posted: July 22nd 2010
logicel
Oral history is embellished. Nobody is actively lying. It is more creative and fun to pad up a story, so the ones listening to it will pop open their eyes and get enthralled. Everyone loves an audience. And the stories get more and more embellished as they get passed on from generation to generation. I was instructed on this aspect when I would tape oral histories of the elder citizens of the small Oregon town where I worked as an assistant director to the local historical society. We tried very hard to get an oral history account from the person who experienced whatever the event was than someone who is just passing the information on second-hand.
Shannon’s Information theory covers this base, of how noise gets into the communication system the longer it is in existence. Or if you want to get an idea of how the embellishment of oral history works without getting technical, check out this Monty Python video. Another comedian, Jon Lovitz, takes this talent of ours’ for embellishing a story a step further, right into outright fabrication to fit his wishful thinking with his skits of “Yeah, that’s the ticket”.
In my family, Civil War stories were passed on from generation to generation and they are, how can I say, quite colorful with loads of magical thinking thrown in for good measure! The embellishing of a story, that may very well have started with a fact, for example, that an itinerant preacher by the name of Jesus died, but then got so contorted that a religion was born from it, is how religions often get started and then entrenched in our minds. And so do family histories which get a kind of sacred air around them. This is what us humans can do easily, and we do it all the time. There is nothing special about this aspect. What is special is that we have devised a method to not get fooled by our emergent properties, our minds and emotions. It is called science. There is no scientific evidence to back up ghosts.
If regular education equipped all of us with a baloney detection kit, you would not even be asking this question. It is never too late to get such a kit.
Posted: July 21st 2010