It depends on how skeptical you are. Atheists can believe in ghosts if they want. But they'd be WRONG!!!! WRONG!!!!

Ghosts ? absolutely NOT , but there is you     

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8l4c2yOM4s

Shout at the ghosts/Devil  ((((( superstition  .....

Mötley Crüe Shout at the Devil 1997 American Music Awards

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BWEJChh69A

Damn straight it's real.

I love Bigfoot research. It's the best of what can go wrong with science. The people researching it want it to be true (hell, I want it to be true), and so there's nothing you can do to dissuade them. But they do come up with some great (and fun!) evidence.

I want to go Bigfoot hunting one day. I think it'd be a great family trip.

Everyone has answered very well, but I figured I'd chime in and agree.  Atheism is literally a non-philosophy.  There are no tenants whatsoever.  Atheism is simply the answer, "NO," to the question, "Do you believe in God?"

I am a rationalist and a materialist, so my position on anything paranormal is "Show me the evidence, and then I'll consider it."  So far, I have seen no convincing evidence, but the beauty of rationalism is that any belief is mutable.  Incidentally, that includes the existence of a god.  So, rationalism doesn't come from atheism, for me.  (And, it's worth noting, as a philosophical argument, it can't.  Strictly speaking, atheism can be derived from rationalism, but the reverse is not true.)

Good and bad are adjectives that really cannot apply to being atheist.  Its not like a good driver or a bad cook...there are not really levels of atheism.

But I think you are a bad person for watching ghosthunters lol

Thanks for the input. I'm a skeptic...I don't believe in ghosts, but I do enjoy watching those types of programs on occasion for some reason. Most Haunted has a parapsychologist that likes to suck the wind out of everyone's sails. I haven't watched these shows in quite some time, but saw an ad for Ghost Hunters and it brought the issue to mind.

Definitely.

As entertainment, all that stuff (UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts, angels, etc) are fantastic fun (pun not originally intended, but whatever). As human psychology, it's also entertaining on a completely different level.

Then there's the whole drinking game of, "Spot the logical fallacy," or, "Spot the misuse of science." I'd stick to beer or wine, though, 'cause if you're doing shots, you'll be three sheets to the wind by the third commercial break. (That's a fairly good rule-of-thumb for those types of shows -- one sheet per commercial.)

I love all that stuff. Chemtrails are my current favorite.

LOL...love it!  

Of course, too much of that and by the end of the program those "logical fallacies" might actually start making sense.

I love anything that has to do with the supernatural. I guess I'm an old-school nerd, in that I like Sci-Fi, fantasy, all that stuff, and from that it follows that aliens, ghost, angels, devils and so forth catch my fancy. But as much as I like all this fantastical stuff, I don't believe in it much.

One of my favortite settings of fictional stories, is the Atlantis-exists-universe (for lack of a better expression). That is, imagine that there are many huge secrets about the nature of human civilisation that has been lost in the mists (or is it midst?) of history, and which is lying out there ready to be discovered.

I saw a program on Discovery once about how there may have been a very advanced human civilisation before known history.

Now, on the face of it, this is a possible scenario: Homo sapiens; for all intents and purposes as capable as modern humans (since we are, biologically the same), have been around for a lot longer than the 6-7000 years that we consider the history of human civilisation. Someone in this program proposed that, we had gone through a long civilised history before this, but that some huge cataclysm destroyed the obvious continuation of progress, effectively "resetting" human progress back to sqaure one. The evidence of this, they said, was that as our current civilisation arose, it was as though they had advanced knowledge in place allready, as though some precursor civilisation had left behind some of their science and tradition, (that is, we weren't completely reset, we were back to square TWO, as it were).

Some "evidence" proposed:

The Sphinx was originally a lion, carved perhaps 10.000 - 12.000 years ago by these people, as "evidenced" by the fact that is has erosion on it's body that resembles rainwater erosion, implying that it was made at a time when the climate in Giza was very different. The human head was carved much later by the people who we know as the ancient Egyptians, as the rest body had been burried by the passage of time, and the lions head had eroded so much that it just looked like a natural rock. That is also why the head is so much smaller than the body, one guy told. (probably not true, this. The archeological evidence was sound in some cases, but the conclution drawn was very bold. But it's a cool story, regardless)

More "evidence":

There is a remarkable corrolation between several ancient buildings and various star-constalations, as though

1. Ancient humans had a remarkable knowledge of atronomy and mathematics (leftover knowledge, it was implied)

and

2. There was a "connecting" civilisation between Egyptians (the pyramids of Giza are aligned with the Belt of Orion), Vietnamese (that temple thing in Cambodia: the Ang something-or-other has some significant constalation-corrolation too) and the Middle Americans (some inca or aztec pyramids have similar stuff).

This connecting civilisation should be the mysterious pre-cursors, which should also be the ones that was the foundation for the Atlantis myth. One guy even proposed that they had lived on modern day Antarctica, which according to him was not an icy wasteland during the last ice age 10.000 to 12.000 years ago. (he had a scientific theory for this. Can't remember the details, but again, the evidence was there, it was the conclution drawn from the evidence that was outlandish).

That's as detailed as I remember this stuff, but I really liked it, and immediatly started to work on the background universe for several novels, roleplaying games and such stuff that I wanted to write. I've had losts of fun fleshing out the details of such a world, including all sorts of references to surruptisious groups throughout history (the Illuminaty, Free Masons, Knights Templar and such) that have known some, or all of the story, and kept it hidden for nefarious reasons.

What I mean is, I loved this show, and found it really fascinating, but the science was clearly sound only when referencing specific things (star-corrolations and water erosion), and very unsound when the conclutions were drawn ("It's all a huge connected conspiracy-like revelation that nobody has ever noticed before!" ).

And when I see something with unsound scientific conclutions I don't believe it to be true. But it is wonderful fodder for the imagination, both for entertainment, and for contemplation about what it really means to be healthily skeptical.

Much like I am a pascifist who loves toyguns, and playing wargames, I am a materialistic atheistic skeptic who loves myth, magic, fantasy, conspiracies and romantic poetry. I think many people here can thoroughly agree that fantastical things are wonderfully fascinating, including some aspects of some religions (just look at the story some of the people here are writing in another thread). They are just not reality.

So true!  Have you ever spent much time walking around and observing the fans at a sci-fi  convention ?  Creepy !

I love Coast to Coast....

It is so out in left field I dont even think it is possible for ANYONE to believe everything on there...if it is a fruitloop idea....they bring in a specialist...

Beatles clones/secret msgs in the songs

Shadowpeople

Chemtrails

Mass prayer to power random number generators...

I love it

HELTER SKETLER

The Beatles - In My Life

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym0x3vTw6yc

I'm sure that a lot of people were annoyed with that quack Jules Verne when he wrote books about humans actually making it to the moon.

The only thing keeping us on this planet is a lack of drive and a horrible lack of imagination in some people.  There is no scientific reason that perpetual human existence in space is not possible.

There is no fallacy in that.

For one, there is no reason why humans have to really travel any great amount of distance any time soon.  It's just getting off Earth.  Not blasting off 1,000 light years away to land on some other planet.  We wouldn't even need to leave our solar system at first and we certainly would not need to settle on another planet.

That would be fine for giggles.  But we don't need to resort to that for the human species to leave Earth forever.  And it's not some future technology unknown to science.  We could do it now if we directed our resources toward that rather than war.

It's a fallacy to imagine we can predict the knowledge we will gain, certainly, or to imagine that the knowledge will prove useful for a specific purpose.

But science is driven by irrationality. Any non-trivial hypothesis starts first as speculation, a shot in the dark, and is irrational until proven or disproven. Take the whole quantum mechanics debate, which has been beaten to death and its corpse sodomized in a couple of other threads. The reason there is a debate is because we don't know what's going on with QM, and everybody has their own pet philosophy based on what might be going on. String theory, RQM, and all the other "theories" are really just speculation. Until we can figure out a way to test these concepts against reality, they don't constitute knowledge (they are more a set of potential knowledge), and so it's irrational to suppose they do.

I think science is like this in general. There is so much we don't know. As we speculate about the potential knowledge that exists in that big blank spaces in our ontology, the spaces that say "here be dragons," our irrational ideas lead to testable hypothesis, which leads to the gradual sketching in, the slow completion of our understanding and knowledge.

I agree that it's irrational to suppose we'll know how to move between the stars in any significant way. There's no way to predict what we'll find in the next decade, or the next hundred years. In the quest for knowledge, when rationality fails, the only thing left is irrationality (again, using QM as a model of this). The irrational concepts must also be filtered and judged through the rational process of the scientific method, and most will prove unworthy in the end, and so the process is rational.

I guess I'm just saying, until we know everything, a certain amount of irrational thought helps drive the process forward.

And that doesn't even take into account the way that irrational thought (such as going to the stars) helps motivate many people into the sciences in the first place.

Addendum:

As I re-read this, I realize that "irrational" is a strong word here. What I'm advocating is semi-rational thought, that is, thinking about the irrational (going to the stars) in a rational way. I believe the attempt of going to the stars will lead to many discoveries, and drive our knowledge forward, whether we accomplish actually going there or not. And so I feel the attempt, the goal, is not completely irrational, even if we don't know whether or not we'll succeed.

That's not much of a rebuttal, I guess. But it's what I have, and how I feel (which is, of course, irrational).

I really thought this bullshit was over with.  There you go, people, making me end a sentence with a preposition.  

Let's see how far H.G. Wells missed the mark.

"Wells's first non-fiction bestseller was Anticipations (1901).  When originally serialised in a magazine it was subtitled, "An Experiment in Prophecy", and is considered his most explicitly futuristic work. Anticipating what the world would be like in the year 2000, the book is interesting both for its hits (trains and cars resulting in the dispersion of population from cities to suburbs; moral restrictions declining as men and women seek greater sexual freedom; the defeat of German militarism, and the existence of a European Union) and its misses (he did not expect successful aircraft before 1950, and averred that "my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocate its crew and founder at sea" ) . "

Looks like most of his misses were underestimating future technology.

I can live with that complaint.

The Time Machine was more fantasy than Sci Fi.  It was also written in 1895.

The point I'm making is that of course the Earth is not "Just" a rock.  Nor am I mentioning anything about leaving our solar system in the foreseeable future.

Nor do we need to worry about any "oxygen revolution".  We can make oxygen quite easily from the elements in this solar system.  No reason to "hold our breath" and dive for another planet with oxygen on it.

There is no reason to think that humans would ever want to live on this planet indefinitely.

And please don't start with the old "There are starving people..." crap.  There will always be starving people.  The big problem with feeding those people is that the longer you keep them alive the more babies they make that you have to feed as well.  We can sit around and just hand food to humans for millenia and go nowhere and do nothing.  Obviously humanity is still making progress that has nothing to do with feeding those poor, starving souls.  The internet was created with money that could have fed starving children in Africa.  WWII was paid for with money that could have fed starving children in Indonesia.  The Apollo missions were paid for with money that could have fed starving children in (you name the location).

Let's all just sit around and whine about how hard it is and all of our little problems that will always be here or let's get off our asses and do something.

You focus on the problems.  I focus on the solutions.

Watcher hands Zeus a cookie.

It wasn't pointed at you.

I'm baffled by the rest of your response because it doesn't address my position at all.

Firstly, I agree with you Hampy, for the most part. You are a very observant poster, as usual.

But, to the above quote: it depends on what we are discussing.

Here, we oftentimes discuss things of an abstract nature. Things like hopes and fears for the future for example.

If someone asks me: "How do I solve the very real, and very present problem of unemployment in country X?"

and I answer: "Well, why do they have to work? In Iain M. Banks' "Culture" novels we see clearly that nobody has to work, and yet everyone is happy and safe, because their amazing technology solves all their problems. All we have to do is develop the same kinds of technology, and everything will be hunky-dory."

If I answer like that, I am contributing absolutely nothing to the discussion, and moreover, I'm being a complete idiot.

But if someone asks me: "How can we possibly be good and kind, and how can we have any hope for the future, if we can't put our faith in religion X, but only in human kind and there own accomplishments?"

and I answer: "Well in Iain M. Banks' "Culture" novels people get along just fine. Better than fine actually, they have an almost utopian society, and while they are only fictional characters, they are believable characters. They are the products of a real human being's imagination, someone who is as good at observing human nature as you and I, perhaps better even, and when I read it I get hope for the future.

Not because I believe it will happen the way it's described in the books (indeed the utopian "culture" of Banks' books are not humans from earth at all, so it wouldn't happen exactly the way it is in the books, because it is not a vision of  the future of Earthling humans), but because I observe believable mechanisms of how people can act towards eachother under different circumstances. They are believable to me, not because I "buy" some unknown scientific proposition by Banks, but because I too am an observer of human nature, as is everyone, and it is readily apparent to me when I read these books, that technological advancement can better the lives of humans, and, by extention, better their behavior towards eachother."

That if a reasonable enough argument I think. It doesn't stand well on it's own, but it is okay to appeal to some outlandish Sci-Fi concogtion, if you are not advacating that it is the solution to a given problem, but rather advocating that humans it is reasonable to assume that humans can act differently (and sometimes smarter, kinder, more morally et.c.) under varying circumstances, and appealing to Sci-Fi for that (along with any other kind of fiction) is perfectly reasonable to me.

but then again, I am a humanities student, and not a Scientist, and I am drawn to Sci-Fi for the same reason I am drawn to Fantasy: the colourfulness of the human imagination, and the human stories at the center of any good novel, regardless of its genre. I don't care about the potential for prophetic observations in Sci-Fi (I read Space Opera after all, not dry, Hard Sci-Fi).

I'll end this on what I suppose is the closest thing I've got to a motto:

"There is no such thing as "the future". Tomorrow doesn't exist until it comes around, and by then it is today, and nolonger the future. The present is all we have. deal with it."

No appeals to future discoveries are necessary to get humans into a permanent establishment off of Earth.

Therefore no fallacy.

Yeah.  A super egalitarian society.  Just like the one that put men on the moon.

Such entertaining fiction to imagine a human walking on the moon isn't it?  Great movie.

On one hand we are talking about sending a group of people to colonize a new planet, on the other we are talking about solving our current problems of global warming, food shortage and pollution as well as the ever increasing human population and the destruction of this planet in the loing run? One can be addressed currently the other is still in the halls of science fiction (you know the lack of proper speed to go to another planet outside of our solar system suitable for habitation for a large scale human popluation, the ability to deal with dangers of interstellar travel such as radiation, fuel shortage and there really isn't an interstellar garage for space ships somewhere out there if something breaks down, because we know our technology never breaks down). So I agree with Hamby on this one, we should focus on helping the now, but at the same time, it doesn't hurt to imagine the future (and having those dreamers attempt to make it possible, at a slower pace than trying to solve our current problems with practical possiblities) however our current technology cannot and will not get us to colonize another planet anytime in the near future.

Ah. We are definitely in agreement.

I believe I was arguing a point you were not making, concerning the role of irrationality in science. Sorry about that.