Pretending

I stumbled on this video yesterday. It's about a woman who one day, when she was 27, started seeing spirits. It happened in a very dramatic fashion, with a murder victim that appeared in front of her and would not leave her alone until she went to the police.

I know a lot of people will just breeze right by this as another spiritualist/fake nutcase. But I listened all the way through and saw something different. I saw someone helping police to solve a nasty murder.

My wife is moving to a new place of work. She works at a local community college and, due to construction, they have been moving her office around. It's new location is an old Victorian farm house which was on the land before the college was built. She was telling me a few days ago about how her and her boss watched as a heavy clip and papers slid across her bosses desk and onto the floor, for no apparent reason. They say that the house is haunted. And they say it with a straight face.

But, everybody knows ghosts aren't real, right? That's what everyone says. That's what every textbook will tell you. That's what every scientist will tell you, "There's no credible evidence." Ghost stories are just fantasy to scare children and the weak minded. That's. What. Everyone. Knows.

I am really beginning to appreciate just how weird our society is. What we have is a situation where we are all expected to ignore what's right in front of our own eyes because it somehow became "educated" and "reasonable" to say that it doesn't exist. As a result, we have a society split in three parts, part one sees the supernatural as part of their daily lives, part two, materialists, dogmatically insists that it doesn't exist, and part three, which is by far the largest, largely agrees with part one but keeps it's mouth shut to avoid the wrath of part two. How in the world did we get here, and how did the materialists get all the power?

The long answer is, well, long, but I think I can sum it up like this: As far as science is concerned,  "supernatural" equals "superstition" (with overtones of religious dogma) which is what science has been fighting against since it began. But why, you might ask, don't we just treat the paranormal just as something we don't understand yet? Why aren't important scientists studying this stuff instead of dismissing it out of hand? The answer to that lies at the intersection of arrogance and ego.

Science has been looking down it's nose at the paranormal for over a century. Many people have built their reputation and living around debunking the paranormal, which means there's way too much money and ego on the line to back down now.

So, for the time being, we are stuck with pretending.