Spirits are Everywhere, not in Heaven or Hell

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Greetings everyone,

I have found your thoughts on the after life interesting; interesting from a fiction writers standpoint. Of course I have my own veiws about God and ghosts but beg you to forgive me for not sharing them. My own beliefs do not however feed the story of my yet to be published book. Articles like the good professer posted by Steven Koke do.

The reason I have taken this time is because there are things I need to understand from a unbiased perspective so that my story has a basis that is not only as interesting your many points of veiw, but also percieveable. In my personal opinion one does not have to believe in something to percieve it. Some call that having an imagination.

In my story I have a young man coming of age who is dealing with the recent loss of his father. The automobile accident took his father also took his ability to play in a sport he excelled at.

Events take place. He ends up moving to a rural town where life in general is much different than what he grew up with. Add to the mix a beautiful young lady who turns out to be the grand daughter of a local hoodoo woman and you can begin to see how his life becomes a chaotic bowl of cosmic stew. Top it off with an object he finds that happens to be personal to the spirit of a murdered young man who was about the same age during his untimely death and the bowl tips over.

Now, the spirit in my story isn't of the creaky board, slamming the door in the night variety. No, this spirit has abilities we only dream of. He takes control over my tortured young mans dreams and uses them to take revenge over the still living participants in his death by projecting himself into the physical world.

Great part is he takes our busy young friend with him on these expeditions. So you get two points of veiw on the moral aspects of killing those in dire need of it.

My ghost, spirit, maybe you can help discern the differnece if there is one, has the ability to read minds, travel, form objects out of thin air, control his unwilling new friend, see and speak to other spirits, walk through walls, fly, and anger his objective sidekick with his sarcastic sense of humor.

In the opinion of those whose comments I've read in here who suggest that spirits exist, is my portrayal of a angry spirit even remotely possible or so far fiction it falls out of the paranormal genre completely and into the realm of fantasy?

Thank you in advance for any helpful bits you be able to offer.

Terra Gazelle

Yes, perhaps PaganPlace did not mind being called Pagan or PP, but Mary Cunningham is quite explicit in preferring to be called by her full name. I have to respect that unless she said otherwise.

Thanks for informing that the word Wicca(Wi-cha) came around the 5th century and from the Anglo-Saxons.

Paganplace

Yes, I may have misundersood you in the other thread. When you say Cambridge, I was thinking Cambridge, England, not Cambridge, Massachusett.

Happy July 4th.

Best regards as always
J

This is a really interesting article, coming from a panelist who is a Catholic. I'm really surprised that more people don't see the similarities between what he says as a Catholic and what has been found in cultures with a shamanic tradition.

The funny thing about shamans that I've gotten to know is that the more active they are with the spirits, the less likely they would be considered 'deluded' by any psychiatrist's standards; in fact, they are the smartest and most insightful people I've ever met.

Any shaman worth their salt would be the first to send a client to a doctor or psychiatrist if they felt it was needed. It's amazing how quickly one can jump to conclusions about something they don't know about.. until they meet a genuine mystic or shaman and experience it for themselves.

Oh, and hi, Terra. I actually hadn't noticed Harris slipped in a reference to Wicca in all the talk of witch hunters' ideas of Satanic stuff.

I have to wonder if some people find reality so *boring* they have to insist other people are 'really' devil-worshippers, when they aren't.

You know, that's the kind of thing I think I'd remember. :)

I should note to J Rhinehart: Typically, schizophrenics are unable to distinguish between the outer world and the inner: (or between thoughts and spirits, for that matter: interestingly enough, tribes with active shamanic traditions seem to have few to no incidences of this, at least as a *problem.*

Mind you, people are often *called* schizophrenic *for* believing in spirits, ...and some of the most tormented actual schizophrenics I've encountered were convinced they were beset by 'devils.'

Probably in large measure because these are the only things our society tends to offer them: "Stop hearing things," and/or "This is evil."

I don't think either exactly constitutes dealing with the matter, well.

Ms Cunningham

I disagree with you,when you say
that we live in a world dominated by science.
If only it was so.
Unfortunately much of the world is stll
dominated by ancient myth and superstition,
which threatens the lives of all of us.
Even as I write,London police have just
discovered a massive car bomb in the middle
of London.
Bet it wasn't put there by a scientist.
As for certainty...nobody is more sure of
anything,than the suicide bomber,who destroys
himself before flying off to Paradise.
Science is not that certain about anything.
That's why scientific thought changes
frequently depending on new knowledge,
and further testing,etc.
Seems to me that religion has stood still
these last thousand years,while knowledge
has explored and discovered and grown
into science.
The awesome magic of our world and the cosmos,
is being revealed by our scientists almost daily,
while Religion concentrates on death,
the supernatural and the joys of an afterlife.

" Jihadist:

Paganplace

Someone must be pretending to be you in another thread then. I've come across people who did that here. Canyon Shearer was one such victims. "

Very strange. When was this? Someone was walking around with the misapprehension I was the same person as Priver, I wonder if that was the same incident.

I have to wonder who the *Hel* would want to *impersonate other people in a theological discussion.* Pretty bewildering, but I suppose I should be flattered if someone thought I deserved some honorary degrees. :)

Unless perhaps I quoted someone and missed putting in quotation marks.

Denis,

The "more primitive" societies were wiser and more knowledgable about the universe than we are, just as shamans are generally wiser than psychiatrists.

The author writes: "A thinking, rational person is hard put to deny evidence of spirits. In my opinion, the reality of such spirits is more proximate than the existence of God. "

I have to ask: what is this guy smoking and where can the rest of us get some? A rhetorical flourish,of course, I don't use drugs, which is probably why I don't see spirits everywhere.

I more primitive societies, guys like this become shamans and prophets, in an advanced society they get a psychiatrist.

We live in an age dominated by science. The academies are full of atheists and certainties, the churches are full of doubt. Secularism reigns. Secular humanism revolves around the worship not of God, but of itself!

Religious fundamentalists would have us go back to the pre-scientific religious age but that is impossible. The spread of technology guarantees it.

But, as Prof. Stevens-Arroyo writes, for most of human history this was not the case. The worldview of the ancients is still partially accessible to us: in the west of Ireland, the highlands of Mexico?, the mountains of Peru? (I know very little about ancient LatAm animism so I'm guessing.) Here one can observe the ease with which these people combine an enchanted, living landscape peopled with 'spirits' with Catholicism. So the conversion to Christianity experienced in pagan Celtic Ireland in AD 450 was repeated in Mexico more than a millenium later! Along with a visitation to the Amerindian Juan Diego from the Virgin Mother: Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Coincidence I guess. GK Chesterton wrote "Coincidences are spiritual puns." But I see the whole thing as pretty spectacular--and irretrievably lost to us in an age which has banished myth, magic and religion.

As for the Sam Harris piece...he should at least do some research...warlock is not a male witch, but the Scottish word for betrayer. It is from the Scottish inquisition, they did a considerable amount of torture in scotland. A slap in the face of any Wiccan.

We do not have an entity such as the Christian devil...that is their belief, not ours.

And why treat us like the Geico Cavemen? Why not use Christian?

YoYo, I might have thought more of the Sam Harris piece, if he had done his homework..and written a better article. As it was it was full of bad information, that caused the satire to be lost.

Jihadist,
I have called PaganPlace-Pagan or PP...what is the big deal?

Anglo Saxons came into Pagan England ..that is where the word Wicca(Wi-cha) came from, around the 5th century...

Yoyo,

How can you be too certain about the religious ones not reading that Sam Harris piece Mr. Mark posted? The delusionals ones, including moi, do read Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as recommended by secular humanists, atheists, agnostics here, there, everywhere, just to reinforce our happy delusions in the face of cold, hard facts:)

Best regards

Mr Mark:

Only the curious will read the Sam Harris piece
you posted (at the top).
The religious will avoid it because it doesn't reinforce their delusion.

Dear Professor,
where the Spirits wil go few billions years
from now, when all form of life in this planet
will end because our moon is moving away from
us and earth will wobble. Our sun will explode
(or implode).Our galaxy will collide with others galaxies.
Is this intelligent design ?

Dear Professor,
where the Spirits wil go few billions years
from now, when all form of life in this planet
will end because our moon is moving away from
us and earth will wobble. Our sun will explode
(or implode).Our galaxy will collide with others galaxies.
Is this intelligent design ?

The only person I know who says he "knows" spirits walk about on the earth & speak sometimes to people is schizophrenic.

Paganplace

Someone must be pretending to be you in another thread then. I've come across people who did that here. Canyon Shearer was one such victims.

Saxons, Celts, Gaels, Italians, Irish they all are Caucasians to me:)

But, I'm learning. There's Irish, there's Scots, there's Welsh etc even in Great Britain. And then there's regionalism in Little England - Merseysiders. Liverpudlians, etc. Phew!

As for my friend Mary Cunningham, call her by her entire full name as she wanted, and not Mary or Ms. Cunningham. Surely you don't want us to call you Pagan or Place instead of Paganplace.

Best regards as always
J

"You're American? May still be Anglo-Saxon though. I can see why Mary Cunningham assumed you to be Saxon, and in my case, to think that you are an Anglo-Saxon (English). You informed us you live in Oxford and Cambridge. So, we made assumptions, the mother of ****ups."

Oxford and Cambridge? Not me. (I may have referred to Cambridge, Massachusetts, at some point) Actually, I've never even *been* overseas in this life. The most of my ancestry are fairly recent Irish immigrants who didn't mix a lot, (and it was actually rather scandalous where it happened, but I know my lineage pretty well.)

Actually, neither Gaels nor Italians counted as 'Anglo-Saxons' (that's why the term arose, as opposed to 'White:' the 'Anglo-Saxons' needed a way to distinguish themselves from 'Catholic' or otherwise 'less-favored' people. Still do, in places, like among the Connecticut WASPs, (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. ) Seems kind of silly, I know. But, FWIW, since it seems Ms Cunningham decided to try disqualifying me by ancestry as opposed to paying attention to the historical corrections above. :)

Paganplace my friend,

You're American? May still be Anglo-Saxon though. I can see why Mary Cunningham assumed you to be Saxon, and in my case, to think that you are an Anglo-Saxon (English). You informed us you live in Oxford and Cambridge. So, we made assumptions, the mother of ****ups.

Mary Cunningham

Interesting posts here from you. Much food for thought for me. Personally, I'm glad Prof. Steven-Arroyo is not including me in his list of people to go to hell. I did jocularly questioned his assertions on the militant atheism of Star Trek a few weeks back.

Best regards

Mr Stevens-Arroyo

Why don't you just come out and say it?
There really is a tooth fairy.
I know you're reluctant to say it,because as you said,it wouldn't be politically correct.
But be brave professor,to hell with being politically correct,we are talking fairies here.
Don't need to be scientifically correct either,that's just for clowns who do science.
The main thing is to be supernaturally correct,
and you're a wizard at that.

Oh, and, I should add, calling non-Catholics 'Sassenach' was actually rather a misnomer, as the folks this was originally applied to were more along the lines of Normans, and, later, Scots the English sent back to colonize Ulster and other places, and though what you have is a Scottish name, now, it's actually the actual Saxons who had 'cunning men' and place names suffixed with '-ham.' :)

I'm curious where you derive the 'Saxon' thing from having actually studied my own ancestral culture. (Not that I'm not sure there must be *some* Saxon in there somewhere. Certainly we inherit some through American culture :) )

As for the name thing... Umm... Ok... If you don't want it used you could, like *not post it on the Internet.* :)

Paganplace,

You must be Saxon! The worst daemon for the Irish Celts were your folk, not the Christians...(well, the English were supposed to be Christian, they held the Irish were heathen, Catholics not being Christian).

Celtic folklore is wonderful, but don't rewrite it to suit your own needs (in this case a modern re-write of paganism)....Please

PS No more using my Christian name also. I use your entire name. Do the same for me. Many thanks

I'd say, Yoyo, ...if it really smells like a stale, dead superstition, it probably is.

Fortunately, we still have the wind. And noses. :)

WADE;

Great post.A breath of fresh air blowing across the stale smell of dead superstition.

I like Stevens-Arroyo's mention of Malinowski's idea that it takes a wise spirit to know where to cast a net to catch fish. Jesus, of course, was such a Spirit. The whole idea that the other world is populated with spirits is incontrovertible from biblical standpoint. There are good spirits and evil spirits. We get help from Archangels if we are friends of God. We are sometimes bothered by evil spirits, but never if God doesn't want! Archangels know whom to help! Our Guardian Angels save us from horrible accidents. I was saved in Rome, on via Ardeatina from front collision by a thousand of a second. The accident happened in front of the Shrine of Madonna del Divino Amore, the same Madonna that saved the Nobile expedition in the 30's! Someone manipulated the timing, and I know it was a spirit from God sent by Her! The good spirits are on God's payroll. The bad ones are the ones causing damage, but only if God turns away His face! Our minds cannot penetrate the "other dimensions." At best, by the Grace of God, we know that this world is governed by Divine laws, and the concepts of the mind barely help us understand those laws. But the other worlds do not contain the concepts of space and time and place. Without these human inventions, the other world is very different. God can be Triune, in that world! He governs all space, all place, and all time! He can be at three places at the same time. He does it in this world also, but we do not know how. In Heaven, only the good spirits are welcome; in Hell, only the bad. The Purgatory is still another dimension that is unknown. From dreams we know that there is greyness there, and very small gravity. People can fly like birds, but only above the buildings. They can jump over a Greyhound bus at ease. The planes can land on 100 meter pond of water. The people can be mean and evil, but their meanness and evilness is not deadly to anyone. The concept of fear is thus different, less. All is under the God's spirits' control. You grab a live electric wire, you feel no pain, and you live. You are visited by an Angel when your time is up. You are taken out, to Heaven. There is hope that the Purgatory trial will end, is passing. But the concept of hope is remote and different, altered as fear, and gravity. In short, all is in different dimension!

And, perhaps with irony, what someone observed in satire by substituting Christian rationalizations with terms for 'witchcraft,' ...some of what these say in satire, I say in sincerity:

It's rationalistic arrogance to presume that 'spiritualism' has been standing still in all this time.

I think certain forms of religion *try* to keep us standing still in an early form of trying to rationalize and control spirit, and through it or reason, the world, but that doesn't mean this is the only thing that's been *going on.*

As we find that our science approaches an understanding of the material, we also find where 'rationality' has been *misapplied* to spiritual matters... (say by saying, 'No fish? Can't be we aren't getting along with the fish! Someone must be thinking in theological error or masturbating! Quick! Burn someone, to show we're better than our 'human-sacrificing' ancestors!)

And cast these things off, where they don't function so well, in our own time.

Maybe we're in a process of return to some of the old ways that *did* work, bringing with us those new understandings from this very interesting little interlude in human history. Maybe both reason and spirituality can be better for it.

Maybe, even, it all really fits together in our experience. In many ways that can work.

Furthermore, in terms of one of the 'hobgoblins' of human-consciousness most-despised-by-rationalists, ...the human way of anthropomorphizing things in the world:

(Even spirits who may not be foremost like that)

Well, the fact is, you may call it 'Right' or 'Wrong,' but we can't actually escape the fact that we *do.*

If nothing else, it's very bad for our mental health as a species to pretend that we don't.

Shamanism and things like *hunting* are certainly... interesting. I would say that more important in terms of *success* in such a rationalistically-seemingly-random endeavour isn't so much about 'magically making the kill happen,' but has even more to do with *getting the hunters' (or fishers') *heads out of the way of the instincts and perceptions we can't consciously process but have kept our species and its precursors alive for millions of years.*

No question in my mind about shamanic practice on this: it gets you a lot closer than a book can to the critters. :)

And, well, if Themselves actively think that's a better way for you to eat them, who am I to argue. ;)

Wade,

You wrote:

"Seriously, magic spirits are the difference between catching and not catching a fish? What do the spirits do, stick the hook in the fish's mouth and jump up and down on it to ensure it's seated firmly? Do the fish have their own anti-catching spirits responsible for breaking lines and making bait fall off the hook?"

I've read that Hawaiian Kahuna could summon schools of fish and marine mammals to the shore to be killed for food by the islanders. The same is true of other shamans and their food animals.

Regards.

PaganPlace,

Thanks for your post. Ah, yes, as in poltergeists (living-being caused "problems"). As you recognized, what I wrote was repeating what the old-time mediums thought. But maybe they were right.

Sorry for the double post. The computer crashed and I didn't think the first one had gone through.

Regards.

The first one went through, Norrie; there's a post for you there. (it seems the Net infrastructure is being a bit intermittent in spots in the past couple of days, so patience may be in order if things don't seem to go through.)

Wade and PaganPlace,

"One last, somewhat unrelated, question. Why do spirits spend so much time doing completely lame tricks? According to believers, they're forever opening doors, or tilting pictures, or making stairs creak."

Spirits who do these things haven't yet found a satifying afterlife abode and are still attached to the earth-plane.

They're like children left alone in an empty house for an afternoon with no TV or video games. Basically they're lonely and bored, so they act like children wanting attention. Their tricks are juvenile because they're spiritually juvenile.

The solution, as mediums have known for centuries, is to get the spirits to realize their situation (some may not even be aware that they've died) and encourage them to move on to more satisfying realms and activities, and to grow up.

Well, Norrie, yes, this is a common and often functional perception of *ghosts,* (I should note that there are other kinds of 'Spirits:' English suffers a linguistic *poverty of terms* to describe these things, in fact, what we have are in large measure loan words from other languages or other. )

Not all things people may experience are 'restless human dead,' needing to be told to move on. It's something of a projection of our cultural fears to presume so. Sometimes it's the *living humans* who need the help dealing. :)

Wade & PaganPlace,

"One last, somewhat unrelated, question. Why do spirits spend so much time doing completely lame tricks? According to believers, they're forever opening doors, or tilting pictures, or making stairs creak."

Spirits who do these things haven't yet found their satisfying afterlife abode, and are still too attached to the earth-plane.

They're like children left alone in an empty house for an afternoon with no TV or video games. Basically they're lonely and bored, so they act like children wanting attention. Their tricks are juvenile because they're spiritually juvenile.

The solution, as mediums have known for centuries, is to get the spirits to realize their situation (some may not even be aware that they've died) and encourage them to move on to more satisfying realms and activities, and to grow up.

Oh, and I'll add that ancient Ireland was by no means as chaotic as you may be led to believe. Actually, there was almost an obsession with order, in certain venues: categorization of rights and liberties, how many invasions there were in Ireland, and a whole cosmology based on the divisions of the land in a sacred order, boundaries, castes, and *laws,* which were actually among the first things the Normans stole...

In many ways, especially if you read about the supposed exploits of St. Patrick, the coming of Christianity represented an *upheaval* of order, in so many ways, ...in the language of the 'victors,' he was always smashing and destroying things, breaking tabooes through the supposed might of his God, and killing people who *represented* order...

Some romantics say we've been notorious rebels ever since, particularly when English law proved so damn nonsensical and oppressive. Not cause of a real unruly nature, but cause we had a *bitter breakup* with law. :)

This is all in a context, really, of a changing world where tribal orders were vulnerable to some of the things Rome came up with.

Well, the narrative is somewhat different in reality, Mary, and as a matter of fact, the idea of shapeshifting beings did *not* go away:

As a matter of fact, under Christianity, it became pretty toxic: odd children and disobedient wives would be tortured and killed as 'changelings' (and in the Christian church's views, devils) until quite recently in history.

The idea of human sacrifice in Pagan Ireland is also... dubious at best outside Roman and Church propaganda, at least to the degree certain folks like to say now. (Not that there wasn't a lot of stuff we moderns wouldn't be particularly cool with, don't get me wrong.)

As for an animistic world being 'chaotic and unstable,' (Unlike reality, somehow?)

I think you're reading back your modern sense of discomfort with such things onto people who didn't have these expectations.

But I do agree with Prof. Stevens-Arroyo that "institutionalized religion is also guilty of controlling spirits for control’s sake" although I wouldn't use the word 'guilty' but 'necessary'.

Consider the spread of Christianity amongst the Celtic tribes. The old animistic religion--leaving aside the practice of human sacrifice--was chaotic and highly unstable. Celts believed in "shape-shifting"--ie a spirit could change from a woman to a swan to a woman and back to a swan thereafter becoming a woman only one year in ten. While this might make for good poems and myths it was slightly problematic for the human suitor. Find a good mate only to have her turn into a swan? Who would want that?

Christianity calmed things down a lot (you can hear the ancients saying: "Phew...goodbye to all that! Thank the gods--whoops! Thank God.") The Irish Celts embraced Christianity with born-again fervour, even converted parts of Switzerland. And if you know the Swiss, you would know that it was not an easy sale.

*with nods to Mary,*

The 'Spiritualist Movement' had a great deal to do with a war-traumatized world attempting to cope with spirit, notably the spirits of the dead, in a rationalistically-acceptable way.

Society at large has inherited a lot of its perceptions of what constitutes 'the paranormal' from this, as a matter of fact.

And much of this actually has very much to do with trying to reconcile spiritual experiences *with* the Christian views of the dead being 'supposed' to be in one of two distant places, or, for that matter, the rational-materialist view that the dead are 'supposed' to be *just dead.*

Actually, both these ideas start from a humanocentric presumption that only the experience of human intelligence *counts,* ...and a way of *assuming* that the whole thing is really about 'death' in the first place.

It's alive. :)

Well, Wade I think Prof. Stevens-Arroyo was talking about what academics would call animism or maybe Shintoism, or maybe even the ancient religion of the Navajo nation..

These ancient religions have a respectable history and probably serve as the forerunners of today's Gaia (semi) religion, which holds that the earth and all who live upon it are intertwined--no one entity (especially man!) particularly special. Now a Hindu or a Navajo or even an ancient Celt would not think that view particularly scandalous. But contemporary scientists--like you?--are used to being in control--they are not, just look at today's floods in the North of England--and hence would stand in opposition to Lovelock & Gaia (& Shinto too for that matter)..

What you are talking about is spiritualism although I think because SA used the non-academic term of spirit or spiritworld you took fright.

Well, *interesting thread,* yay. :)

Liked the Swedenborg mention: at least that pulls the heaven/hell idea into something more like consistency: I don't buy the eternal binary idea of 'Those with us are and get 'all good' forever, those outside are and get 'all bad' forever,' ...this is clearly motivated by mundane power-seeking, really.

As for spirits, Wade... I think the fact is that people *do* experience these phenomena, and always have.

Part of the problem our culture has in *dealing* with this is to the extent that the religious and nonreligious both tend to think in a paradigm that 'there is an objectively 'real' world which must be properly 'believed in,' ...both viewpoints are unable to deal with the spirit world constructively *because they place 'belief' as completely overriding the importance of *experience,* ...in the human psyche, if nothing else.

"Rationalists don't deny the fairy world because they have some kind of elitist agenda, Professor. We simply want evidence that it exists. Without any, there's no way to separate true spiritual encounters (if any) from con jobs."

A con job's a con job, whether it involves spirits or not. I don't have to be an expert in finance to know when I'm getting scammed with investment offers, nor take apart a computer to know I'm not getting a good deal on something:

Confidence games involve *credulity,* and illusion involves *misdirection.* The scams begin with the, 'If I see, I will set aside my skepticism,'

And then, the scammer has you.

" Time and time again, objective examination has revealed psychics, spirit readers, mediums, and the like to be frauds. And still we have people like you, consumed with anti-intellectualism, who wave it all away by claiming spirits are uncooperative."

Frauds are frauds. Certainly this is fertile ground in our society for charlatanry and well-meaning self-deception. This doesn't mean the experiences don't occur, or have something to offer us.

Certainly, we are in a position here where if these types were making *repeatable* and disprovable claims, then this *would* be science to us, as so many once-magical things, like, say, writing, have become.

"One last, somewhat unrelated, question. Why do spirits spend so much time doing completely lame tricks? According to believers, they're forever opening doors, or tilting pictures, or making stairs creak."

Oh, actually, I think that's very related, and a very good question: toward an answer, consider this: As human creatures, we have evolved very specific kind of brains and senses with, generally, a perceptual set that is optimized, largely to perceive certain things about our world, and to ignore others, the better to do those things we do to survive.

(In most cultures which deal with the spirit world, you'll find *specialists* who manage these things for the most part for the tribe: this can be a source of benefit to a group, but if everyone saw the world like that, we'd still be hunting, scavenging, and eating roots. :) )

Now... As for bumps in the night, creaks and door slams, and other little 'signs' and phenomena...

What's 'psychologically 'safe'' for ordinary consciousness to perceive... to register as 'real?' Maybe, spirits, what. Walking around, moving things, saying 'hello,' ..like humans.

Doesn't mean that's all there is *to* it, but this does seem to get the attention.

I find it amusing, if silly, that for a long time the two reactions have been to 'try to make it stop through belief,' (either by trying to 'prove it's not happening' or 'assert that God doesn't allow this, and 'banish' the phenomena) or to 'Prove That Spirits Exist In Scientifically-Measurable Ways.'

There's a third way, which preconceptions of the materialist and the overly-credulous alike tend to preclude: Dealing constructively with our experience.

Frankly, even scams can sometimes make people feel like they've done this, ...like they've got their place sorted out in the world by throwing money at it and going through an experience... but a scam is a scam. This is where reason comes in. You don't have to be a mechanic to know that the garage is 'finding' more and more problems and demanding more and more money and the car's not running any better. :)

In large measure the bumps and knocks are supposed to show that a place or spirit *needs attention* somehow... traditionally, it's a sign something is out of balance, and *needs to be set right,* not treated as an amusement park or lab rat.

Call it group psychology, if you like, but when it's dealt with, it should generally *stop.*

"I hope if there really is a fairy kingdom, I'll spend my time there more constructively."

How bout here? See, you learned something already. :)

What if 'proving you exist to scientific satisfaction' isn't the *point* in there?

Now I understand why all the professors in real departments snicker when the names of theology and divinity faculty come up.

Seriously, magic spirits are the difference between catching and not catching a fish? What do the spirits do, stick the hook in the fish's mouth and jump up and down on it to ensure it's seated firmly? Do the fish have their own anti-catching spirits responsible for breaking lines and making bait fall off the hook?

Dude, the world is a complex place. We use concepts like chance when we don't want to or can't go to the expense of exactly modeling a process. The reason you sometimes catch a fish and sometimes miss even when the circumstances are the same is because the circumstances are NEVER exactly the same. Sometimes the fish bites down on the hook and the hook bounces off bone before burying itself deeply in flesh. Sometimes it embeds fully. We use chance to describe and model this processes not because we wish to deny the role of magic fairy souls, but because we generally only care about the result (fish or no fish), not the underlying physics which fully describe the outcome.

Rationalists don't deny the fairy world because they have some kind of elitist agenda, Professor. We simply want evidence that it exists. Without any, there's no way to separate true spiritual encounters (if any) from con jobs. Time and time again, objective examination has revealed psychics, spirit readers, mediums, and the like to be frauds. And still we have people like you, consumed with anti-intellectualism, who wave it all away by claiming spirits are uncooperative.

One last, somewhat unrelated, question. Why do spirits spend so much time doing completely lame tricks? According to believers, they're forever opening doors, or tilting pictures, or making stairs creak.

I hope if there really is a fairy kingdom, I'll spend my time there more constructively.

Ah! Prof. Stevens-Arroyo we cannot change the zeitgiest into which we are born...and it's a scientific age.

Three or four hundred years ago if God spoke to you, you were accorded some gravitas. Today you are still permitted to speak to God (it's called prayer), however, if He speaks to you, you could conceivably be sectioned under the Mental Health Act and confined to hospital!

The ancients--at least the animists amongst them--were comfortable with matter being infused with spirit. The Celts held that certain trees, bushes, streams, ponds were sacred--as late as the early 19th century a Poor Law Inquiry in Britain took testimony from a West of Ireland landlord about the workers on his estate who refused to dig up a certain bush that they held was holy.

But that sacred landscape has been long since gone, those workers probably all died in the Famine (the Irish language died with them) & the scientific worldview reigns. Even in Ireland.

Still...Irish poets like Yeats and Heaney sometimes celebrated the old worldview, so it's not completely gone...some landscape is still enchanted, it's not all gone profane and sterile.

This is a wonderful example of why we should be skeptical when so called experts (i.e. professors) weigh in on issues.

Professor Stevens-Arroyo,

You seem to be saying the same things that Emanuel Swedenborg wrote in the 1700's.

FOLLOWING IS A TERRIFIC SUMMARY OF WHAT SWEDENBORG BROUGHT BACK FROM HIS VISITS TO THE HEAVENS AND HELLS. LOTS TO THINK ABOUT HERE, E.G., THE FACT THAT THE INHABITANTS OF HELL ARE HAPPY THERE AND DON'T WANT TO LEAVE.

Some Thoughts about Hell
Steven Koke

Why would one want to choose hell if heaven is better? If we knew that heaven was better, more preferable, we would choose it. But in Swedenborg's concept, the idea that heaven is better is considered nonsense in hell. Your values in hell are not very intellectual, not very aware, just to start with. Intelligence is down in favor of the rise of the lower motivations which prevent much thought from a higher point of view than yourself.

You get there after death by going through the world of spirits where the goal is to get everyone to think as they feel and feel or love as they think. The individual must not be divided inside, or neither heaven nor hell will be available. That makes sense. Everyone is then likely to experience whatever they would most love to experience. Everyone is happy in either "place." No one is in pain except by contact with the opposite state of mind. There is, in a way, happiness everywhere in heaven and hell, except that some happiness is perverse, and other kinds are more elevated. Everyone becomes what he really, down deep, has wanted to be.

In hell, hellish things are what you would love the most or you wouldn't want to be there and therefore really couldn't be there. You couldn't even find a way to get there. A good person finds heaven attractive, and ways to heaven eventually open up in unexpected places in the world of spirits. An evil person really prefers hell, and only those who want to be there ever get in. Ways then open up. But some spirits from hell were allowed to satisfy their curiosity about heaven, looked around and saw heaven as repulsive. The great architecture of an angel's house was seen only as a pile of bricks and straw. There was nothing to envy. There is nothing objectively beautiful in heaven that could be envied by someone from hell. The visitors from hell felt choked by the energies of love in heaven, couldn't breathe, and finally threw themselves desperately back down into hell, head first. There they revived and felt comfortable. In hell, one looks around and sees his friends as regular fellows, good-looking. Only when some light from heaven penetrates does that disappear. But that is temporary, very unpleasant, and there is always the eventual turn back to normalcy.

The things that make heaven beautiful, and hell ugly, are not objective, observable by everybody, because they aren't material, like a beautiful diamond that everybody would see the same way. They are values made sensually beautiful only to those who have them inside, states of mind. An angel is beautiful because of his or her values, not beautiful to just anybody. Consequently, a person of a hellish state of mind would not be attracted to heaven.

Hell got a horrible reputation from orthodox teaching, which made it a place of torture, not a state of the heart. Anyone would want out of an oppressive place and would think in any private moment that there has to be something a lot better than this place, but God punishes, so we are left there forever against our will. I think a lot of that idea of an objective ugliness and unpleasantness inflicted on us while we are extremely unwilling to stay and can only think of better things while inside, still remains as a kind of background coloring to the idea of hell and will then raise questions about its validity. Nobody should enjoy hell, and we should all want out.

Swedenborg very early disposes of the idea that in talking about heaven and hell, we are talking about places. As states of the heart, they only look like places--something that the Pope caught up with recently (what a brilliant guy!). Hell's people do enjoy hell. They love it. They love to fight and make war on the other group or town, not too unlike people who are addicted to computer war games, or to assault weapons, and dream of some juicy military action, not to mention the real gangs and warlords on the planet who are in a position to do it for kicks. They are actually visiting hell already, trying to recreate it around them here. After death the competition for dominance in hell is fierce; rape, destruction, and the victories, are satisfying, and you can keep at it for a long, long time. There's nothing unpleasant or non-addictive about it.

Nobody dies there. There are no casualties. The "dead" lie stunned for awhile but then revive and gather themselves for the next stimulating episode. We'll get you the next time around. This is habit-forming. It's an endless round of violence and energy, though it does nothing for anyone but feed fantasies. Also, eternity is a state, not just endless time. It is the experience of timelessness. This is one of the harder to understand ideas. In the spiritual world, there is no time, only duration of state, and in complete enjoyment of one's life, time is meaningless, life seems timeless. But that's probably not right for this discussion. It's one of the more difficult things. Deep involvement would only let an eternity slip by unnoticed. Hence the eternity of the hells. It's not a sentence, it's a condition of the self.

So the big question is, How would anyone, once in hell and of such a character, ever want to leave? There is no alternative better place in view; hell really looks good. Now and then some (usually new, it seems) spirits from hell get to look at heaven, but that's a crock, and there's no inclination to go find one. There are no activities that don't have a fierce dedication to them, like a violent or seductive game that one constantly wants to replay. You are totally involved. You may be tortured by a rival in hell, but your response is just to get back at who did it--double. That's sweet.

Stephen Koke’s ties are to the San Francisco Swedenborgian Church. His thoughts on hell were the response to an on-line discussion, at SwedenborgNews, about the validity of the idea of hell.

Is this sarcasm?

Sam Harris had a column at HuffPost/Dawkins this week that provides a perfect counter to this column:

In Defense of Witchcraft
by Sam Harris
Reposted from:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/in-defense-of-witchcraft_b_53865.html

Imagine that the year is 1507, and life is difficult. Crops fail, good people suffer instantaneous and horrifying turns of bad luck, and even the children of royalty regularly die before they have taken their first steps. As it turns out, everyone understands the cause of these calamities: it is witchcraft. Not all witchcraft is at fault, of course -- there are "white" witches who use their powers to heal -- but there is no question that some witches have formed an alliance with the Devil. Happily, the Church has produced many learned and energetic men who are equal to this challenge, and each year hundreds of women are put to death for casting spells upon their innocent neighbors.

Imagine being among the tiny percentage of people -- the 5 percent, or 10 percent at most -- who think that a belief in witchcraft is nothing more than a malignant fantasy. Imagine writing a book arguing that magic spells do no real work in the world, that the confessions of bad witches are delusional or coerced, that the claims of good witches are self-serving and unempirical. You argue further that a belief in magic offers false hope of benefits that are best sought elsewhere, like from scientific medicine, and lays the ground for false accusations of imaginary crimes, leading to the misery and death of innocent people. If your name is Sam Harris, you may produce two fatuous volumes entitled The End of Magic and Letter to a Wiccan Nation. Daniel Dennett would then grapple helplessly with the origins of sorcery in his aptly named, Breaking the Spell. Richard Dawkins -- whose bias against witches, warlocks, and even alchemists has long been known -- will follow these books with an arrogant screed entitled, The Witch Delusion. And finally Christopher Hitchens will deliver a poisonous eructation at book-length in The Devil is Not Great.

What sort of criticism would these misguided authors likely encounter? In the following essay, I present excerpts from actual reviews of recent atheist bestsellers, replacing terms like "religion," "God," and "atheist" with terms like "witchcraft," "the Devil," and "skeptic." Observe how much intellectual progress we have made in the last five hundred years:

"[None of these authors] takes time to consider contemporary [witchcraft] in the light of some of its most sophisticated and heroic practitioners.... Moreover, none of them ever put their weak, confused, and unplumbed ideas about [the Devil] under scrutiny. Their natural habit of mind is anthropomorphic. They tend to think of [the Devil] as if He were a human being, bound to human limitations... [These] authors pride themselves on how science advances in understanding over time, and also on how moral thinking becomes in some ways deeper and more demanding. They do not give any attention to the ways in which [magical] understanding also grows, develops, and evolves... It hardly dawns upon them that [witches and warlocks] have been, from the very beginning, in constant--and mutually enriching--dialogue with [skeptics]... The path of modern science was made straight and smooth by deep convictions that every stray element in the world of human experience--from the number of hairs on one's head to the lonely lily in the meadow--is thoroughly known to [the Devil and his familiars] and, therefore, lies within a field of intelligibility, mutual connection, and multiple logics. All these odd and angular levels of reality, given arduous, disciplined, and cooperative effort, are in principle penetrable by the human mind... [Skepticism] cannot be true, because it is self-contradictory. Moreover, this self-contradiction is willful, and its latent purpose is pathetically transparent. [Skeptics] want all the comforts of the rationality that emanates from rational [sorcery], but without personal indebtedness to [the supernatural]. That is why they allow themselves to be rationalists only part of the way down. The alternative makes them very nervous." --Michael Novak, National Review

"What's really bothersome is the suggestion that [witches] rarely question themselves while [skeptics] ask all the hard questions.... The [great warlock] Michael Novak's book "Belief and Unbelief" is a classic in self-interrogation. "How does one know that one's belief is truly in [Beelzebub]," he asks at one point, "not merely in some habitual emotion or pattern of response?" The problem with the neo-[skeptics] is that they seem as dogmatic as the dogmatists they condemn... But as Novak argued--in one of the best critiques of neo-[skepticism]--in the March 19 issue of National Review, "Questions have been the heart and soul of [conjuring] and [divination] for millennia."
--E.J. Dionne, The Washington Post

"The danger is that the aggression and hostility to [magic] in all its forms... deters engagement with the really interesting questions that have emerged recently in the science/[necromancy] debate. The durability and near universality of [witchcraft] is one of the most enduring conundrums of evolutionary thinking... Does [spell-casting] still have an important role in human wellbeing? ... If [sorcery] declines, what gaps does it leave in the functioning of individuals and social groups?... I suspect the New [Skeptics] are in danger of a spectacular failure. With little understanding and even less sympathy of why people increasingly use [the evil eye] in political contexts, they've missed the proverbial elephant in the room. These increasingly hysterical books may boost the pension... but one suspects that they are going to do very little to challenge the appeal of a phenomenon they loathe too much to understand."
--Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian

"If [magic], by definition, exceeds human measure, the demand that the existence of [the Great Horned One] be proven makes no sense because the machinery of proof, whatever it was, could not extend itself far enough to apprehend him. Proving the existence of [the Devil] would be possible only if [he]... were the kind of object that could be brought into view by a very large telescope or an incredibly powerful microscope. [The Devil], however--again if there is a [Devil]--is not in the world; the world is in him; and therefore there is no perspective, however technologically sophisticated, from which he could be spied. As that which encompasses everything, he cannot be discerned by anything or anyone because there is no possibility of achieving the requisite distance from his presence that discerning him would require. The criticism made by [skeptics] that the existence of [Satan] cannot be demonstrated is no criticism at all; for a [Devil] whose existence could be demonstrated wouldn't be a [Devil]; he would just be another object in the field of human vision. This does not mean that my arguments constitute a proof of the truth of [witchcraft]; for if I were to claim that I would be making the [skeptics'] mistake from the other direction. Nor are they arguments in which I have a personal investment. Their purpose and function is simply to show how the [skeptics'] arguments miss their mark and, indeed, could not possibly hit it."
--Stanley Fish, The New York Times

"Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on [witchcraft]. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional [skeptic] we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of [conjuring and divination] that would make a first-year [sorcerer's apprentice] wince...Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and [witchcraft] are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates [witchcraft] from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake... while [belief in magic], rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it... Because the universe is [the Devil's], it shares in his life, which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is true of human beings: [the Devil] is not an obstacle to our autonomy and enjoyment but, as [Aleister Crowley] argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfillment. Indeed, friendship is the word [Crowley] uses to characterise the relation between [the Devil] and humanity...The mainstream [witchcraft] I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no [sorcery], anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate [occult] views, he insists, are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism...Such is Dawkins's unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from [the belief in magic], a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false."
--Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books

First, no rational thinking person would take an argument from popularity for anything other than what it is: a logical fallacy.

Second, Homo Sapien Sapien is predominantly the same across cultural and geographic boundaries. You ignore the possibility that this sameness you describe is a function of the sameness of the physical world that purportedly perceives the so-called spirit world.

Third, In a feeble effort to argue the spirit world into existence, believers are reduced to suspect categories like "souls" and the like to describe what is more easily explained as chance and coincidence.

Wow, this goes way beyond the question.

Dear Prof.

Welcome back! Your piece reminds me of the story about the encounter of an old Irish woman with a supercilious English (well, he'd have to be English, wouldn't he?) visitor. When she mentioned she'd seen the little people, he smugly asked her what language they spoke. She looked at him sharpish and told him not to be daft.

" What language should they speak? They speak Irish, of course."

Yeats wrote about faeries and the spirits of the Irish landscape, from his early "To Ireland in the Coming Time" to "Under Ben Bulben". I love both of those poems--well, I love most of Yeats. (I'd be daft not to.)

Best,
Mary C.