• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • To me “do you believe in ghosts?” and “do you believe in UFOs?” are basically the same question.

    It depends how loaded the word “ghost” (or UFO) is in your mind.

    Do I believe we have an immortal soul, or that consciousness can exist outside of a human or animal brain? Do I believe in angels, demons, spirits and entities etc? Absolutely not.

    But do I believe that people who aren’t lying, and are being 100% genuine, truthfully report seeing things we cannot explain? Yes. Whether it’s pure hallucination of the human mind or something else that is genuinely being witnessed I don’t know and don’t suggest to know.

    As proof that “ghosts” don’t actually need to be anything to do with the dead, I saw my mum at home once as a child, when she wasn’t really there at the time. She’s was wearing clothes she owned, but not what she was wearing that day. She was and still is very much alive. I’ve always remembered that I didn’t make this up, but the memory is too distant and vague at this point for me to put any real trust in it now.

    Maybe I genuinely saw something unexplainable. Or maybe our brain hardware that generates the reality we perceive around us can occasionally vividly generate what isn’t really there. Who knows.





    • The Simpsons: From seeing Season 2 episodes someone had recorded from Sky TV on VHS before it was on terrestrial TV, through to Season 9 when it stopped being good many years later. It was on all the time and we never got bored of it.
    • Red Dwarf: The first TV show I was allowed to stay up “late” for, when it broadcast at 9pm. Felt like I’d entered a new stage in my life watching a late-night comedy show.
    • The X Files: Similar to the above, this was the first serious, “grown-up” TV show I watched, and I was hooked. I thought anything with a paranormal tinge was awesome at that younger age (I guess I still do, although through an admittedly far more sceptical scientific lens these days).