I admit there might not be any ghosts in reality.
Can you admit there might be ghosts in reality?
Let’s do an honesty test. Ethics and epistemics are pretty closely linked, interestingly.
Sure, there are tons of words for tons of variations on the theme. The Malay have hantu, Japan has yurei; the Navajo have chindi, the Chinook have skookum; Ireland has faeries, Scotlands has wraiths, Germany has poltergeists; and Persia has pari and sheitan and jinn.
They all have rich folklore around them – which thoughts and actions provoke or defend against them; how they are used to explain things like mental illness or or bad actions or just to fill in gaps; their role in history or myth.
Am I correct to assume you only believe in one of these folklores?
And @HumAnIze am I correct to assume that you are more open to a syncretistic approach, i.e. that all these beliefs suggest the existence of a common something-ghost-like?
I guess you’re right, you did for 100% make your point. You really did it. You made a counterargument beyond any doubt. No one can compete. Such a relief.
Of course, I have already said as much: I am not 100% certain of anything, I may be insane or dreaming or living in a simulation.
And I might be simply mistaken in my beliefs about ghosts through a failure of information or reason. I would love for you to offer some argument or evidence that you think demonstrates that. So far I feel like the strongest arguments made in this thread are along the lines that ‘ghosts’ and ‘existence’ are hard concepts to pin down, so there may be something we would be OK calling a ‘ghost’ that has some quality we would be OK calling ‘existence’. I think people want to make a much stronger claim.
Hi there, nope, l was arguing for commonalities among them. However, the point l was making was:
Ghosts = Jinn
Jinn = the workers of King Solomon
The workers of King Solomon = devils that were able to physically move things.
Devils that can physically move things = poltergeists.
So, even though l can see how ghosts might exist but can’t see how poltergeists (physical movers) can exist, by the above equivalencies, l am bound to also believe in poltergeists.
Moreover, our Prophet did teach us that evil Jinn can take the form of a black dog with light / white spots above its eyes. Similar to the Shuckland of East Anglia.
Regarding Old Shuck, l’ve just realised another cross-cultural commonality:
Ibn ‘Abd Al-Barr reported on the authority of Ibn ‘Abbaas, may Allaah be pleased with, “Dogs are the weakest of the jinn, so when they attend your food, chase them away or feed them, as they have the evil eye.” 3/192
Compare with this from the Wikipedia page on the Shuckland: Black Shuck - Wikipedia
Description: " You may know him at once, should you see him, by his fiery eye; he has but one, and that, like the Cyclops, is in the middle of his head."
I can vouch for ghosts, a while back I was made to realize an incident, that occurred when I was wired by my daughter about her being visited by a ghostly apparition which was concurred by her friend staying with her, quit my job and flew to be with her. I didn’t see or hear anything but got her out of there.
Then stayed around in a hotel long enough to get the deposit on the flat and after a while not hearing from the owner of the place called him and was told that the new tenant died of an apparent heart attack, and prior to that the solid glass top of the coffee table, cracked down the middle. It was in all the papers, and still it made no sense to me as they reluctantly told me that a former t
So before leaving, I asked management about it and the
.they reluctantly told me that a former tenant fell out of the window from the story he was on and strange things occurred there previously as well.
In my mind the phenomenal apprehension of seeable and unseen phenomena, as such correspond to the apprehension of ego, descend as the phenomenal context within which the ego is structured , thereby reduced, especially suddenly without warning, can cause extraordinary events to occur, singularly, or with others, exposing the ego’s fragile construction, barring the reduced confusion and chaos that can ensue as a consequence.
At these critical moments, the unseen aspects of reality can bring forward the ghostly apparitions that/who may suddenly appear out of nowhere, harboring goo
…good or bad intentions.
There is an inexplicable thing that occurred when writing this in 3 parts, the narration simply froze at the point of the cutoff, and would prevent me from editing, so I had to continue anew every time, maybe some technical problem. Sorry.
It sounds a lot like you’re “measur[ing]… log[ging]…compar[ing] examples in a cohort, analy[zing] trends…” So is that kind of thing possible, then? Great.
Dogs and wolves are common descriptions of ghosts and monsters across cultures, but more common in cultures where dogs and wolves are more common. In Asian cultures, but not European, you have weretigers, because tigers are native to Asia but not Europe. In Africa spirits take the shape of hyenas, which don’t appear elsewhere.
This tells us that these reports aren’t objective descriptions of the world, they’re pattern-matching.
Another thing to notice is that they are often animals that pose a danger to humans. If you see a shadow moving through the darkness at the edge of your village, are you better off assuming it’s the most dangerous local predator, or a trick of the eye?
Suppose something suggests that it’s not the most dangerous local predator, because even though it’s moving through the darkness at the edge of your village like the dangerous local predator sometimes does, it’s a bit too big or the wrong shape or you can’t smell it. Are you better off treating it as something dangerous, or dismissing it as a trick of the eye?
Suppose you’re teaching your children about the world and you want them to be safe if they meet something dangerous in the darkness at the edge of the village. Do you want them to stick around to confirm whether it’s the dangerous local predator, or do you want them to run like hell just in case?
These scenarios are also common across cultures. The better explanation than incorporeal beings that adopt the form of local predators just to scare people is that people in every culture pattern-match to real dangers in their lives, they err on the side of seeing danger because false positives are much cheaper than false negatives, and they pass along that cultural wisdom in the scary stories they tell their kids.
Hi there, the forum software doesn’t seem to log replies as replies but l’m assuming that was a reply to myself.
You make a good point that Asia’s were-beasts are tigers, Arabia’s and Europe’s are dogs. Moreover, in Arabia, when Islam was taking over the pagan regions, they would destroy pagan temples and sometimes a demon would emerge in the form of a screaming black lady (this is the now-famous “Diva scream” of the music industry, note that Diva is the Indian term for a spirit).
To re-consolidate my position l’d say:
- The Jinn will take the easiest route to mimicry, with the least accuracy required i.e. no need to go into huge detail with facial features.
- This is usually a very black or very white thing, e.g. a black dog, a black silhouette human (as my psychotic housemate began seeing, l eventually had to move house at great personal expense because of her being nutty as monkeypoo), a tablecloth type ghost with two holes for eyes or maybe l got that from the Pacman computer game but l do hear reports of pale ghosts.
- Nature spirits and indeed humans too, sometimes resemble the fauna of their natural enviironment. So my point is: maybe the spirits prefer to choose local forms. I think l alluded to this earlier but l’ll say it again: we don’t know the true form of Jinns - our Prophet taught us that if anybody says he’s seen a Jinn in its true form, he has lied. Perhaps it’s because they inhabit different planes therefore are above or below the physical. If velocity were a person, he would have no clue if you told him about distance, he’d think you were mad. Distance is the area under his curve and thus beyond his comprehension. That said, Jinn usually mimic forms around them. So that completely answers your question. I don’t know what is worse - when they mimic a real creature, or make something up themselves - l’ve seen the latter and believe me it’s not nice, l can’t describe it as it was only a dream and l don’t discuss bad dreams. Now that l mention it, l did also once see a pigeon, not black, just normal, and it was like no pigeon l ever encountered, it was in my backyard staring down at me and l felt genuinely terrified, l didn’t take my eyes off it. I think it eventually left. This was shortly after my mother passed away, so a number of mean things occurred when l lost her protection e.g. an electrical fire in a mains socket happening approx. 40cm from my head whilst asleep, causing the smell of almonds to fill the room, likely cyanide from some reaction with inert nitrogen perhaps, under the influence of very high voltage perhaps? Or maybe something from the burning plastic that had begun smoking. Then that damn pigeon. Heh.
Ghosts exist.
That’s my argument.
Sometimes they get stuck here.
I’ve known people who made soul contracts with others when they were dying to show themselves as many things after they die.
I know a man who asked his sister to show herself as a butterfly.
Never happened.
She wasn’t trapped here
…but I know many stories one of them personal when I was left bereft ( my paw a in a pow Russian camp, my maw in an kgb euivolant kgb ((a o)) camp getting debriefed (((tortured) caprivity, where my beloved Komondor would growl if anyone near me tried to strangle me like the last time…
So yes, dogs, whereas in Asia ( me wife from there) they eat them strewn on a stick appetizers for those so indulged, so me my my balancing that redemptive effort …
But now literally out for the weekend , in Lost Wages, (LV ) for non gamers, so watching ‘Lost Weekend’ to recoup memory till Monday sharp.
Another impersonal when or after marrying said butterfly, she told me of a woman who loved her husband really and he said he will come and visit her, after he died, and he sat in the foot of her bed night after night warning her not to dare ever to re-marry
By the way, we aren’t beng racist when we refer to eyewitness reports of a Jinn taking the form of a screaming black woman with messy hair emerging when a few pagan temples were destroyed in isolated incidents. It didn’t happen as a rule, and the underlying scheme is, l believe, that Jinn go for very black or very white forms, because l feel they cannot go into huge detail when creating a face in imitation of something already existing. It is not racist.
Recall that the seeds of our Prophet’s lineage were planted when Lady Hajar (may Allah be pleased with her), the black slave of our Prophet Abraham (peace be upon him), gave birth to his firstborn, Isma’il (peace be upon him), and they were sent to the region around Makkah, and in her desperation to find water for her and her baby, Allah revealed the Zamzam spring to Lady Hajar, and to this day we regard the Well of Zamzam as Holy.
l’ll look out for your reply if you have any, but then I must leave the forum due to commitments
Yeah.
The thing about that being Muslim.
It’s too much drama for my taste
I have a universe to work on.
I’m not god. I’m not a prophet.
I’m just really old.
I’m actually an atheist.
In Islam I’m marked for death
I’ll add to this.
My commandment (not that you should take it serious even though it works)
Put women in charge.
I’m willing to take the blow to expose to everyone.
They tricked me. I’m not going to let that happen again.
The men will be charged for being complicit.
I want people to see how this world works.
Can you evolve?
You haven’t seen nothing yet until you yourself after being haunted are hunted. Hope it won’t happen to either of us.
Meno. I’ve been both. For some bizarre reason I survived.
Being hunted and haunted.
That could change tonight. Being hunted and haunted.
I’ve been dealing with this for decades.
It’s arrogant to say they can’t do it to you at anytime, anywhere.
So I made the smart choice.
Let all spirits be in charge of me.
In another thread you said women are retarded. This is an interesting pair of positions to take.
Men are retarded for acting out because of sex.
So I just think to myself…. Just give it to the women.
I don’t see a difference in terms of this species surviving
Also flannel.
I’m using reverse psychology to intervene.
Power doesn’t work.
I can only do so much.
I’m dead serious about putting the women in charge.
They want it, they can have it.
I’ll be their slave. I made myself a slave of everyone.
The women will learn a lot by being the masters of all men.