CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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I Would Believe in Ghosts Before I Believed in God

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

this entry brought to you by marilyn manson, "the reflecting god"


I've known a couple people that have said that they don't believe in God, yet still believe in ghosts. They usually follow it up with "I know that's hypocritical, but..." And the truth is, no, I don't find it hypocritical. And when I've told Christians that I'm an atheist but I would sooner believe in ghosts than God, they generally react by saying I'm being against God just to be against God, and that the two contradict one another. It doesn't make sense to believe in ghosts, and therefore an afterlife, and not believe in God.

Firstly, let me say up front: I don't believe in ghosts. I just wouldn't completely rule out the possibility of them existing. There are just too many things about the universe that we don't understand.

But the Christians are right-- it is hypocritical to say that you believe in dead souls wandering around the earth in a purgatory, and therefore there being an afterlife, but don't believe in the Biblical God. I don't believe that at all. I think that's complete nonsense.

...But what's amazing about the idea of "ghosts" is how when people experience the phenomenon, they automatically connect it with souls doomed to walk the earth in purgatory. But why? Nobody has ever been dead and come back to life, so why make the connection? The person who tells you he was haunted by a ghost, and that it's his Aunt Sarah, and that Aunt Sarah can't go to Heaven before she wraps up some unfinished business, is speaking from the exact same place of ignorance as the primitive man a thousand years ago who sees lightning and assumes that it must be Zeus, or lives in a drought and assumes he hasn't sacrificed enough virgins. The idea of ghosts being some sort of soul from our body that hasn't made it to heaven is completely ludicrous.

But quantum physics starts predicting the existence of dimensions. Dimensions are just theories right now and can't be proven, but the science points to the idea that they exist. How do we know what we refer to as ghosts, when they're not obviously triggered by hallucinations and dreams (which they probably are), isn't something trapped between dimensions, not quite here and not quite there? How do we know that they aren't parallel dimensions right next to one another, both identical except that one is years ahead of the other, and they're not simply rubbing up on each other, projecting images that aren't actually there, like a double exposed photograph? What if time isn't merely a straight line, and ghosts are a skip in time, the universe trying to correct a crooked string?

And of course, a believer would ask, of course it could be all of those things, but why couldn't it also be a soul stuck in purgatory, trying to make it to a literal place called Heaven? Who says all of this isn't simply God? But that begs the eternal question-- fine, but where did God come from? If he's an extra dimensional being able to manipulate this dimension while existing in another one, there is a chance that that is true, provided that it evolved that way through means science will eventually be able to explain. But clearly the Biblical idea of an all-seeing, all-knowing creature that has always just been there and is also all-good and all-loving makes absolutely no sense, because there is no explanation to how it came to be, and everything throughout history directly contradicts that.

Thus, ghosts might exist, just not in the way fairy tales have explained them.
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with love from CRS @ 7:33 AM 

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