Bells:
Is he gullible? About some things, yes, but I put it more down to a desire for wanting more to exist out there, a want for the intangible.
Note that the conversation moved on, following MR's initial comments about his mother. MR reverted to running his usual generic line about how eyewitness reports should always be taken at face value because, essentially, "you had to be there" and if you weren't you have no right to question anything and no need to look for any further evidence.
MR regularly runs that argument in discussions about UFO sightings and his other woo hobby topics (e.g. Bigfoot sightings, ghost sightings).
The idea that whatever an eyewitness has to say must reflect the reality of the situation they are reporting on is naive, and MR is well aware of that. Nevertheless, he trots out this argument on a regular basis.
If he
really believes that eyewitnesses are infallible - which is essentially the position he insists upon - then he is gullible in the extreme. But I don't think he really believes that at all, these days. A few years ago, when he was younger and even more naive, he might have had an excuse. These days, I think he just does it to be a troll, because nobody (at least, nobody with MR's ability to write a coherent paragraph of text) could be so stupid as to have something carefully explained to them many times in some detail and yet never absorb the salient points.
But perhaps we should refrain from dismissing a very strong and personal experience that he has had after suffering a major loss in his life. An experience that brought him comfort and peace in his knowledge and belief that his mother has moved on.
I did not dismiss it. I was very clear in post #2.
Sure, MR had a strong personal experience that brought him comfort. But that was a sort of side-point in his opening post . In the opening post, MR was trying to argue (from the existence of numerous anecdotes) that life after death happens and that ghosts or spirits or what have you are real things in the world.
I don't want to deny
your personal experiences any more than I wanted to deny MR's personal experience. I certainly do not want to deny that either of you had the experiences you had. It will come as no surprise to you, however, that I am not convinced that your experiences necessarily involved any person, being or entity separate from yourself. I'm sure you can fill in the blanks regarding the sort of evidence that I'd need to start believing in ghosts or spirits of any kind. Also, you will have a hard time convincing me that a person who has just lost a loved one is in any kind of "normal" mental state. The human mind, in states of high emotional arousal, can do all kinds of strange things.
None of this is intended to subtract any
meaning or comfort that you both took away from your experiences. You, Bells, say you do not believe in an afterlife, which I assume means that you do not believe in actual spirits or ghosts. I'm sure you have your own explanations for what you experienced. They are, in all likelihood, the same as my explanations.
Do I believe in the afterlife after that? No.
In terms of what MR was trying to do with this thread, that really says it all. What MR wants is for all of us to believe in the afterlife, like he (says he) does.
Were my experiences real? Yes, they were to me and it was to my husband as well. Just as the nurse who came into that hospital room could smell something in his room and thought I'd sprayed something in there.
Yes, but "real" is a word that leaves a lot of room for interpretation in this context. Did you and your husband
really have personal experiences of seeing your father after he had died? Undoubtedly. Was what you saw
really a ghostly apparition? I doubt it, and I think you do too.
It's hard to explain, it's hard to justify or explain scientifically. But they were real.
For me, it's
not that hard to come up with a plausible scientific explanation. I'm not saying I can prove anything, of course.
What MR experienced is real to him, just as my experiences are real to me. So perhaps we shouldn't call people who experience this "gullible" because they cannot produce evidence.
With personal experiences, gullibility doesn't enter the equation. People experience what they experience. Gullibility becomes relevant when we consider whether we should just take somebody else's account of
their experience (or, often, of some third party's alleged experience) as conclusive evidence of facts about the physical world, especially in situations where the alleged facts are not well supported by more objective forms of evidence. And, as usual, we ought to keep the maxim in mind that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
There is no evidence to this. Until you experience it, it's actually hard to explain. Is it our imagination and grief? Is it our brain's way of helping us deal with the trauma or losing a loved one? Probably yes. But it's still a very real and vivid experience.
Absolutely.
He's not gullible for having experienced it and believed it, nor is he gullible for believing what others have experienced with this.
That's not primarily what he's asserting here, though. He is asserting the existence of an actual spirit world. He's not actually interested in exploring why people have certain experiences. For him, there is only one explanation - or, at least, only one that he repeatedly pushes on this forum.
Just makes me understand that they experienced something that was very real to them and respect their grief.
I don't accept that we shouldn't be able to discuss whether a ghost was real, just because the person who reported seeing the ghost was grieving a loved one.
Context is all important. You shared a personal story here, but your aim was not to offer it as evidence of an afterlife or the existence of ghosts. MR, on the other hand, apparently offered his story because he thought that two anecdotes would be better than one in making a case for an afterlife. The majority of his opening post, you will see, concentrated on a hearsay anecdote, as most of what MR posts tends to do. And then, not long after posting that, MR only really wanted to talk about the alleged generic reliability of eyewitness testimony, as he so often does.