The material world is often called the “real” world by strict materialists, who believe anything and everything can be explained away as natural phenomena. In the mind of a strict materialist, a personal experience with ghosts must be explainable as either an optical illusion or figment of the imagination, but never as the disembodied mind or spirit of a dead person, no matter what sort of evidence has been offered.
Strict materialists don’t believe in God, Satan, angels, demons, ghosts, or any other type of supernatural phenomena. I do, but I would never dream of trying to convince a strict materialist that Scott Patterson’s ghost story was true. I wasn’t there.
I wouldn’t even try to convince a strict materialist that my own personal ghost stories are true. Although the experiences documented in my writing constituted empirical evidence of supernatural phenomena collected via the scientific method, they are merely anecdotes to any third parties.
It is rational, and logical to immediately seek a “natural” explanation for an inexplicable…until you run out of possible explanations that don’t defy all logic and reason. All I would say to the strict materialist is this: when you run out of other options to explain some phenomena, leave open the possibility of a supernatural explanation. Don’t completely rule out anything without evidence, or a better explanation.
Even though Jesus implies that ghosts exist in the Bible when he differentiates between the characteristics of a ghost to his resurrected form, the strict materialist will not accept that as legitimate evidence because the supernatural is never considered.
Some Christians even think that what people like me believe are ghosts are actually demons in disguise, which gives them one thing in common with a strict materialist — neither of them believe ghosts really exist. But the strict materialist rejects ghosts and demons.
What a Christian might call demonic possession, the strict materialist refers to as mental illness. People who have experienced near-death and claimed visions of heaven or hell are dismissed by the strict materialist as nothing more than hallucinations produced by chemical reactions in the dying brain. No matter if a very compelling claim of corroborated veridical information allegedly learned during an NDE has been well-documented, the strict materialist typically won’t bother to look at the evidence because it can’t exist unless the strict materialist worldview is false.
Prior to this morning, I had no evidence beyond anecdotes of demonic possession. I only believed that demons were real because of those anecdotes, both inside the Bible and modern accounts from eyewitnesses. I’ve watched a documentary on the true story behind The Exorcist, but I’d never seen any sort of convincing and believable evidence in the form of a video.
Please watch the last video embedded in this article very, very carefully. It’s allegedly a video taken by a surveillance camera in a supermarket, and only a minute long.
At first glance, the tape looks disturbingly real. The man could be having an epileptic seizure, or it could be what the article intended the reader to believe — a case of demonic possession. If he’s acting, it’s really bad acting. Frankly, if the behavior of the man was the only thing in the video that made it interesting, it would be very easy to dismiss. It was the cleverly edited flash of images and red arrows at the very end of the video that caught my attention and held it.
Please pay close attention to the running timestamp at the top of the screen, and the reflections in the cooler door. The timestamp initially creates the impression of legitimacy for the video, but it ultimately becomes problematic for its authenticity, at the very end.
This almost had me fooled. For what purpose could be anyone’s guess.
The acting was bad enough to convince me that the focal character was not an actor — it is theoretically possible that an innocent man was having some sort of epileptic convulsions, and the female shopper could have been an innocent bystander. However, the evidence that the video has been manipulated comes from the running timer. If you watch carefully, when the mans finally falls to the floor and the “spectral” image moves through the glass just before packages of toilet paper fly off the shelf, there is a rather obvious splice in the video at o1:19:22. The clock had been updating at a smooth and continuous pace until that point, but didn’t increment smoothly at the crucial moment, which strongly suggests that the video was doctored. I didn’t actually measure the increment but the 22nd second seemed to last two full seconds. You couldn’t watch the action on the screen and the clock at the same time — you had to watch the clock continuously or the “glitch” in time would not have been noticeable. At most, the timing is only off by one second.
Evil seems to be pervasive in the world. Tomorrow in Los Angeles, to “celebrate” June 6, 2016, Satanists have planned to construct a giant pentagram that encompasses the whole city.
I don’t know why the editor of the video tried to create the false impression that the man was possessed by a demon. It doesn’t seem like your typical harmless prank, or an elaborate stunt for a television show. The motive seems sinister — fool people into believing something is real that can be debunked with a little bit of effort.
I’m a very skeptical person by nature. I don’t like to be fooled, unless I’ve paid someone to entertain me and it’s part of the show. I don’t understand how these people get paid.
What do people get out of trying to fool someone into believing things that aren’t true? Other than wasting about ten minutes of my life, what did the doctored video accomplish? I can understand why Penn and Teller might attempt such a stunt, but not amateurs. Ultimately, I wasn’t fooled.
You shouldn’t be, either. Not if you can help it…
Remain skeptical, but not cynical. First look for the logical and rational, or natural explanation. That should always be the default. Be just as skeptical of information that allegedly supports your existing worldview and feeds your confirmation bias as you would anything that you already don’t believe. Don’t allow yourself to be easily duped. Trust no one except yourself.
But don’t be lazy. Investigate evidentiary claims for yourself, especially if the claims are remarkable.
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