Surveys consistently find that approximately 30% of Americans believe in ghosts. Belief in ghosts is an interesting example to me because it exists on its own, unlike other supernatural beliefs which are supported by organized religion (as with the belief that the events in the Bible actually happened) or which have some appeal in the technology community (as with belief in extra-sensory perception or the belief that UFOs are space aliens).
It doesn’t seem that belief in ghosts will be going away any time soon, which on the face of it might seem strange, given that the existence of ghosts violates our current understanding of science, also there’s no good evidence for ghosts–just the usual story with supernatural phenomena of a lot of bad evidence that disintegrates as you look at it too closely. On the other hand, it makes sense to believe in ghosts because the idea is so intuitive: when friends or relatives or pets die, they can remain vivid in our minds–in some way they still feel very alive–so it’s natural to think that this feeling can have some physical manifestation. This seems similar to the way that extra-sensory perception seems like it should be true: at some intuitive level, if seems like if you focus your mind really hard, you should be able to move objects at a distance, perceive things that are far away, etc. And, of course, once you hold a belief or want to hold a belief, it’s not hard to find evidence that is consistent with what you want to be true. So, yeah, ghosts. Again, an interesting example because there’s no organized religion pushing it.
Although belief in ghosts is prevalent, it’s not exactly respectable. There will be the occasional news media feature on ghosts, but it’s more for fun or sociological curiosity than anything else. For example, a quick search led to this Halloween-themed NPR story, “Listen If You Dare: Exploring Our Belief In Ghosts.”
Then there’s extra-sensory perception, which used to be respectable but not anymore. My theory on ESP is that, in the wake of the developments in quantum mechanics in the 1920s and 1930s, it seemed reasonable to believe that “spooky action at a distance” could be occurring in all sorts of ways. Indeed, ESP is not much of a stretch given the discovery of radio waves in the late 1800s. And regular readers of this blog will recall Alan Turing’s statement: “I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming.”
Turing was wrong on that one. Not just erroneously believing in phenomena that, as far as we know, don’t exist, but, more importantly to me, wrong in his assessment of the evidence. Even if it were to somehow turn out that ESP is real, it was an unambiguous error to believe that there was overwhelming evidence for ESP in 1950. In any case, ESP was popular with credentialed scientists from the 1940s through the 1970s (see the second-to-last-paragraph of this post), but decades of debunking had their effect, and now it’s not taken seriously. Even NPR seems to have given up on the topic, after getting burned by running a credulous report in 2011.
Somewhere near ESP, but still vague enough to maintain some academic and news-media credibility, are the more extreme claims regarding mind-body healing.
And then there’s the belief that UFOs are space aliens. We’ve talked before about the role of the elite media in promoting this idea.
I’ve discussed before why I characterize UFO’s-as-space-aliens as a supernatural belief. A good analogy here might be unicorns. We can easily imagine a world in which unicorns are real, just as we can imagine a world in which space aliens are exploring our planet. The problem is that there’s no good evidence for space alien UFOs or unicorns, or is there any good indirect evidence or theories (for example, residues of previous alien spacecraft, or unicorn fossils, or whatever).
Lots of people already believe that UFOs are, or might be, space aliens. No assist from the news media is required here. It’s a belief that’s out there. The role of the elite news media here has not been so much to disseminate the belief but rather to legitimize it. The idea that UFOs are space aliens is as ridiculous now as it’s ever been, if not more so. That doesn’t stop a large percentage of people from believing it.
I thought about all of this after receiving this email from Eric Potash (great name for an environmental scientist, by the way!):
Here’s an essay about UFOs by economist Robin Hanson (linked by Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution) that starts:
IMHO, the strongest evidence so far that (some) UFOs are aliens just dropped… This evidence is of many brief bright glints of sunlight reflecting off of big surfaces in high orbit around Earth, before humans had put anything up there, and correlated in time with both UFO reports and nuclear tests.
There are a lot of technical details about telescopes and then the correlation claim is elaborated:
These glints also seem to have a significant date correlations with nuclear tests and UFO reports. Glints were 45% more likely (p = 0.008) on dates within one day of nuclear tests, and there was a significant (p<.001) correlation between the number of UFOs reported and number of glints on each date.
That reference is currently under review at Nature scientific reports. Thought this nexus of economists, UFOs, p-values and Nature might be of interest to you.
My interest here is not in Hanson’s arguments, which I find absolutely ridiculous–you can follow the link to that post and read the comment thread to see lots of clear arguments explaining the problems with the purported evidence–; rather, I’m interested in the question posed in the title of this post: Which beliefs are considered acceptable and which are not?
A bunch of elite news media people such as Ezra Klein, Nate Silver, and Tyler Cowen, along with elite-media-adjacent people such as Robin Hanson, are into this whole space aliens thing. (Just to be clear on the labeling here, I consider myself to be elite-media-adjacent as well, so I’m certainly not saying that all or even most elite-media-adjacent people are space-aliens-curious.) We’ve reached a point where a pundit can openly talk about believing in space aliens, in the same way they can talk about believing in Jesus or Moses or whatever, but not in the way that they would talk about ghosts.
I’m not saying Hanson wouldn’t talk about ghosts. In his writings, Hanson doesn’t seem to be constrained by what might be socially acceptable, as evidenced by his notorious post about rape. But if he were to start writing about ghosts, I don’t know that Cowen and the others would pick up on it. The space aliens thing, like belief in the Bible, or belief in the Book of Mormon, or whatever, has been successfully carried to respectability in a way that ghosts haven’t, even though lots of people believe in all these things.
Speaking of elite media gullibility, the New York Times is trying to resurrect facilitated communication:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/books/review/woody-brown-upward-bound.html
This post makes me wonder about the meaning of the word “belief.” We usually assume that it means we believe something to be true, but I’m not so sure now. Belief could mean “accept the possibility of” or “don’t reject as false.” The economist in me is looking for some revealed preference evidence. Do people actually act as if they believe ghosts are real? What actions to they take that would indicate that they incur costs because of that belief, and how widespread are such actions? I’m starting to think of the word “believe” in surveys as akin to the words “support” or “approve” in political polling – I find these are often not as clearly defined as suggested by the way such polls are reported. And, when questions simply ask for a scaled response from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” the ambiguous nature of these words becomes exaggerated. In the case of political polls I think there are usually additional questions that narrow the range of what a respondent means when they approve of something, but I’m less confident that the stated belief in ghosts is similarly explored.
Neil van Leeuwen (https://philpeople.org/profiles/neil-van-leeuwen and https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=6AOHu1cAAAAJ&hl=en) together with other researchers in cognitive psychology (e.g., Tania Lombrozo) provide evidence that “believes that” and “thinks that” (for example) are used differently across a variety of languages, English included. The differences are spelled out most fully in his book, _Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity_, (Harvard University Press, 2024) but can also be found in some of his papers (URLs above) and in reviews of the book (e.g., https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/religion-as-make-believe-a-theory-of-belief-imagination-and-group-identity/).
Many who do not see themselves as religious are nonetheless inclined to accept some kind of mind/body dualism. [See, e.g., citations to: Paul Bloom, _Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human_ (Basic Books, 2004).] This may make ‘belief in ghosts’ less surprising.
In a series of five papers 2008-2018, K. Mitch Hodge https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=QGvT9sMAAAAJ&hl=en argued against a common assumption of many cognitive scientists of religion: that religious believers are typically “intuitive Cartesian Substance Dualists” according to whom minds are _non-physical_ entities that survive bodily death. But if Hodge is correct – and my evidence from teaching over 12,000 Bible Belt undergraduates at a STEM-oriented state university during 1987-2022 supports his claim that even typical religious believers do not assume that minds/souls are non-physical – then ghosts would be physical entities according to many.
The ‘signaling’ purpose that survey responses serve – even when the survey results are assuredly anonymous – was also evident in student responses to surveys, clearest when the survey items were closely related to religious doctrines and/or moral judgments. Based on those student responses, I would guess that the commonly remarked greater religiosity of US Protestant women and Blacks *in part* reflects their felt need to signal (including in survey responses) their membership in supportive religious communities.
That’s a great point. When it comes to belief, do actions speak louder than words? :) If someone says they believe something, but don’t act on it, do they really believe it?
I think the history of organised religion is quite relevant to this post. When Europeans started colonising the Americas and establishing the United States, many people had lost faith in their Christian churches. I believe the Enlightenment was a major force that promoted this social change. The result was a kind of religious homelessness. Disillusioned people now had a few options:
(1) abandon all religion (which happened only rarely);
(2) Participate in unorganised or partly organised religion. This is essentially the same as organised religion, but without strong organisational structures. I would also include partly organised religions in this category: this was the age of revivals, and I would consider these revival meetings to be a form of organisation. Note, for example, the Deist tendencies of the Founding Fathers.
(3) Mysticism became popular in the latter part of the 18th century. This was another way to distance oneself from organised religion. Psychic phenomena such as ESP, séances, ghosts and demons are strongly associated with this movement. It stood in opposition to both organised and unorganised religion. It offered an alternative way to fulfil the religious itch.
It is noteworthy that these beliefs and trends did not develop in isolation, but were historically counter-movements and counter-counter-movements to organised religion.
Belief in ghosts and demons, in various strengths and forms, has been a feature of popular culture since forever.
“(…) I’m interested in the question posed in the title of this post: Which beliefs are considered acceptable and which are not?”
Quickly reading through the blogpost it seems that you may have answered the question by mentioning that the media talks about certain things and that scientists produced certain ideas. The combination of the two may already provide an answer, and you might connect a third party and aspect to those two: a substantial section of regular people become acquainted with the ideas put forward by scientists and the media and accept them to a degree (if only by actually talking about it, which may increase the chance of exposure to these ideas by others who may actually believe it).
This third party and aspect of the general public can also be found in the blogpost through the mentioning of the belief in ghosts by a substantial section of the public. This acceptance of ghosts existing in a substantial section of the general public is there without the existance of ghosts being talked about or put forward by scientists and the media. From a certain perspective you could maybe also reason that the existance of ghosts is an acceptable belief, but just not from the perspective of a focus on 1) scientists and 2) the mainstream media.
This all may provide an answer to your question: especially beliefs that are put forward by scientists and the media and are accepted (to a certain degree) by a substantial section of the general public are considered to be “acceptable” (at least temporarily). But I think the word “acceptable” in the question may already (implicitly?) emphasize the possible major role of (certain?) scientists and (a section of?) the media in this all and how the word “acceptable” is seen.
We know planets are common, organic molecules exist beyond Earth, life has arisen at least once, and the universe is insanely large. So the idea that life might exist elsewhere doesn’t sound crazy, and that kind of spills over into more speculative ideas like UFOs being alien visitors. Ghosts don’t really have anything like that backing them up. There’s no scientific framework that makes their existence plausible, and they tend to clash pretty directly with what we know about physics and the brain. Even though the evidence for UFOs isn’t great, the conversation is framed in a more science-y way, which makes it feel more acceptable than belief in ghosts.
I would question the accuracy of surveys here. I am not familiar with how to correct for answering items “for giggles”. You can extrapolate this to the difficulty of finding sincere survey takers for polling.
If I am taking a test and someone asks me if ghosts are real, I might just say “Hey, why not?”
If I am asked if ghosts exist in front of an academic symposium, I would almost certainly answer “Hell no”
It’s not that I doubt that 30% of people answer “Yes” to ghosts existing, it’s more a question of what is actually being measured. I would argue there is a sub-population just goofing around, or just being willing to be deviant (dovetailing with your acceptable beliefs argument on an individual level).
That Turing quote is metal though, thank you for that one.
Andrew’s statement,
“Which beliefs are considered acceptable and which are not?”
is indeed fundamental and personally dependent. The wrong beliefs expressed out loud can be injurious to one’s health and employment. As my mother (repeatedly) used to say, “Keep your mouth shut and no one will know how stupid you are.” Where I live, the safest conversation begins and ends with, “Think the rain will hurt the rhubarb?”
This seems to be the conversation that the term “flying spaghetti monster” was invented to facilitate. It allows me to efficiently ask: once you believe in one flying spaghetti monster (God), why wouldn’t you be willing to believe in others (alien spacecraft)? How can one be acceptable and not the other?
I like this. The “once you believe in… why wouldn’t you believe in…” is how I have been thinking about trumpism, particularly trumpism 2.0. If someone believes in flying spaghetti monsters, I do not think it is any stretch for that person to believe anything that djt promises.
There was a discussion on here (a year ago would be my guess) where I commented about the gods of the past and demi-gods and such things. If I remember correctly, I reasoned about these things in relation to the developmental stage of the society and the rold of understanding and being able to control things. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, and I don’t know which post it was on here.
Anyway, something similar can be done here. If one believes in the flying spaghetti monster, perhaps that also includes believing that the flying spaghetti monster only made humans and the earth. So there are no aliens or alien spacecrafts in that sitiation, which is why it might be that people believing in the flying spaghetti monster don’t believe in alien spacecraft.
And from the perspective of my original post a year ago or something like that, my reasoning would be that the believe in alien spacecraft, or in ghosts, might somehow relate to some psychological thing that may have overlap with believing in the flying spaghetti monster or God. My hypothesis would be that people who believe in alien spacecraft or ghosts are less likely to believe in God.
Quote from above: “And from the perspective of my original post a year ago or something like that, my reasoning would be that the believe in alien spacecraft, or in ghosts, might somehow relate to some psychological thing that may have overlap with believing in the flying spaghetti monster or God. My hypothesis would be that people who believe in alien spacecraft or ghosts are less likely to believe in God.”
Did some quick searching and came across a paper by Routledge et al. (2017) titled “We are not alone: The meaning motive, religiosity, and belief in extraterrestrial intelligence”. From the abstract:
“We tested the proposals that paranormal beliefs about extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) are motivated, in part, by the need for meaning and that this existential motive helps explain the inverse relationship between religiosity and ETI beliefs. In Study 1, we experimentally establish that the motive to find meaning in life increases ETI beliefs. In Study 2, we replicate previous research demonstrating that low religiosity is associated with greater ETI beliefs. In Studies 3–4 we tested and found support for a model linking low religiosity to low presence of meaning, high search for meaning, and greater ETI beliefs. In all, our findings offer a motivational account of why people endorse paranormal beliefs about intelligent alien beings observing and influencing the lives of humans.”
Matt: I think there’s a big difference between “God” and “space aliens” in terms of what’s commonly demanded of the proposition. The proponents of “God” generally mean some entity which has many rules and regulations, all sorts of implications for how one is supposed to live one’s life. For “space aliens”, it really doesn’t make any difference. Yes, there’s some exceptions, but in the average case one can just shrug and it doesn’t have any practical effect.
Additionally, it would take many words to formalize this, but I think there’s a big conceptual difference between “There’s a Supreme Being who created the Universe” and “There’s other species in the Universe who are more technically advanced than humanity, and have ships which compare to our ships like supersonic jets are to canoes”.
Andrew: Real “unicorn” fossils do exist! They’re rhinos not horses, but maybe close enough:
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2018/november/the-siberian-unicorn-lived-at-the-same-time-as-modern-humans.html
“The Siberian unicorn lived at the same time as modern humans”
I think the biophysics of a horse with a single long front-facing rapier-style horn isn’t favorable, but of course there’s plenty of animals with two big horns. From the right angle, a two-horned animal can look pretty unicorn-like, see this picture:
https://lazoo.org/explore-your-zoo/our-animals/mammals/desert-bighorn-sheep/
Saying that belief in space aliens or unicorns is supernatural because there isn’t good evidence in support of those beliefs is not tenable. There’s not good evidence that vaccines cause autism either, but that’s not a supernatural belief.
If there is something to the whole UFO phenomenon, my guess is that it won’t turn out to be space aliens — ironically, for a reason that Robin Hanson himself has championed, the “grabby aliens” argument: that if technological, space-faring civilizations were at all common, one of them would have colonized the galaxy long ago and we wouldn’t be here. It makes the prior probability very, very low.
What do you think of this? Which beliefs are considered acceptable, and which are not?
I think the answer is evidentialism, as stated by Feldman and Conee in their 1985 paper: the doxastic attitude (belief, disbelief, or suspension of judgment) that a person is justified in having is the one that fits the person’s evidence. An alternative is reliabilism, as stated by Goldman in his 1979 paper: the justificational status of a belief is a function of the reliability of the process or processes that cause it, where (as a first approximation) reliability consists in the tendency of a process to produce beliefs that are true rather than false. Or perhaps the correct view is a fusion of the two, as later proposed by Goldman.
For example, I think a child’s belief in Santa is epistemically justified, both through evidentialism and reliabilism. What evidence does the child have that Santa is real? Testimony from adults, sightings of Santa in media and in person, presents under the tree on Christmas morning, and so on. The child has little evidence that Santa does not exist. The total evidence the child possesses indicates that Santa is real.
What about this belief from a reliabilist perspective? First, let’s define the belief-forming process: if my parent says it is true, then it is true. Most parents teach their children things that are true, such as that the sky is blue or that the stove can be hot. In the child’s experience, the relative frequency of their parent being right is high. So the child forms the belief that Santa exists through a process that generally produces true beliefs.
What about adults believing in Santa? The adult’s evidence is very different from the child’s. They wrap the presents and write Santa’s name on them, they know that media depictions of Santa are meant to be fictional, and they understand that it would be physically impossible for Santa to deliver presents or live at the North Pole without our knowledge. Their total evidence indicates that Santa does not exist.
So what can we conclude? From an evidentialist perspective, it is important to consider the total evidence someone possesses before judging the epistemic justification of their belief. It can be very complicated to analyze the meaning of evidence, so perhaps people can rationally disagree about the truth of a proposition given the same evidence. This is known as permissivism, the view that multiple doxastic attitudes may be justified toward a given proposition for a particular body of evidence. Uniqueness, by contrast, is the view that only one doxastic attitude is justified given the evidence. I think permissivism is correct, although there is still considerable debate on this issue and on theories of justification more generally.
Ultimately, it is difficult to tell whether someone’s belief is justified, but we can look to their evidence and the reliability of their belief-forming mechanism to make a judgment about the acceptability of their belief.
I think something’s missing in this discussion: hermeneutics, by which I mean the significance of ideas derived from their position within a network of other ideas — a “hermeneutic framework”. The mantra I walk around with is that there’s always a hermeneutic layer. You can’t understand claims, conceptions etc. piecemeal, or at least not fully.
That doesn’t mean you can produce the appropriate framework off the top of your head. In the end it’s an empirical issue, although one not very amenable to quantification: what complex of ideas do the relevant people operate from? The treatment of hermeneutics in the humanities is sometimes rather cavelier, IMO.
There’s a lot of literary evidence about how the belief in ghosts is slotted into a wider network of conceptions that includes persistence of the past, the concept of a soul, guilt and responsibility as objective forces implanted from outside/above, and so on. The UFO/space alien thing needs similar study. What gaps exist in the mental frameworks of believers in these things that such beliefs help fill? With what other beliefs are these beliefs consistent?
Hermeneutics is slippery but necessary. (As you can imagine, I find the treatment of piecemeal responses in the interpretation of opinion polling frustrating as well.)
What is the definition of “acceptable”? Is the believe in ghosts more or less acceptable than the belief in reincarnation? Is the believe in the Book of Mormon really more acceptable? Who decides whether is it acceptable to believe in tariffs or rent control or that biological sex is binary and/or that biological sex is not binary?
Anon:
1. When I say, “acceptable,” it’s always with respect to some context. I’d say a belief X is acceptable in context Y if you can express it there without embarrassment. Is it a good thing that belief in ghosts and unicorns is marginalized in the elite media, but beliefs that UFOs are space aliens or beliefs in the literal truths of religious scriptures is acceptable in the elite media? I don’t know what’s a good thing here; I just think it’s interesting that some supernatural or supernatural-like beliefs are acceptable and some aren’t, and that these change over time.
2. I put tariffs and rent control in a different category: these are policies with complicated effects. It’s a separate–and also interesting–question, of what policies are considered worthy of serious discussion and what policies are not. That can change very quickly. I don’t think anyone was seriously suggesting the U.S. start a war with Iran, and then it happened, so now it’s under discussion. For another example, if rent control or the mortgage tax deduction didn’t exist, maybe people wouldn’t propose them as policies. But they both exist, so that puts them on the table automatically.
3. Labeling sex as “binary” is definitional; it’s not in itself a question of fact or of policy. And indeed there is lots of public discussion about related policies, from same-sex marriage onward. But I wouldn’t say that someone can believe or not believe that sex is binary in the way that someone can believe or not believe in unicorns. It’s like someone saying they believe that health care is a human right or believing that human life begins at conception. These are definitions that are proxies for policy and value judgments.
I’m not sure what counts as “elite media” but is it really possible to talk there about the Garden of Eden being in Kansas without being at least a little embarrassed?
Anon:
I agree that the elite media don’t give the Mormon texts the same deference as the Jewish and Christian texts, but I think they’re moving in that direction.
Andrew –
Your framing of people who are “into the space aliens thing” ends up flattening a wide range of positions. It puts together someone who sensationalistically elevates crappy evidence, with someone who thinks the evidence is weak but perhaps uncertain, with someone who is fully committed to an extraterrestrial narrative into the same sociological category.
This suggests that people who are reasoning in probabilistic terms—Klein, Silver, Cowen, even if they’re almost certainly wrong, look epistemically identical to people like Rogan or Carlson, whose approach to evidence is of a completely different character.
There’s a meaningful distinction between “this is almost certainly wrong” and “anyone who acknowledges residual uncertainty belongs to the same epistemic type as the true believers.” Once everything is folded into that single category, it becomes harder to talk about and critique the different reasoning norms actually in play.
To the extent that Klein or Cowen get treated as equivalent to Rogan, it paradoxically makes it harder to criticize Rogan’s evidentiary standards, because the distinctions that matter for that critique are lost. That blurring of categories is exactly what a Rogan himself does—collapsing careful probabilistic reasoning into the same bucket as his own style of speculation—and it weakens, rather than strengthens, our ability to critique the ubiquitous “misinformation” industry .
Joshua:
I’m not saying that Klein and Cowen are equivalent to Rogan; I’m just saying that the rules have shifted so that they can talk about UFOs as space aliens in the news media without being ridiculed. A large proportion of people in the U.S. believe there’s a good chance that UFOs might be space aliens; in the past, they mostly wouldn’t have had space in the elite media to talk about it. Again, consider the comparison to ghosts. I’m sure that lots of smart, accomplished journalists and college professors think there’s a good chance that ghosts are real, but we’re not hearing about it. Or, to go back a few decades, there used to be a lot more in the elite media about ESP, but by and large the consensus now is that ESP is a joke. We do get lots of mind-body healing, though: as we’ve discussed on this blog, these supernatural-adjacent ideas have been promoted by elite media sources including science podcasters who are college professors.
Again, I’m not saying any of this is good or bad: I mean, sure, I have my own opinions on all these things, and I do believe that it’s bad to present fringe ideas without questioning them. But the issue of what gets considered legit and what does not, that’s the question I’m talking about here. Rogan is different in that he also promotes ideas such as moon-landing conspiracies that have not reached acceptance in the elite media, along with various bad ideas that also appear elsewhere. Rogan’s an entertainer, kind of like that old TV show, The X Files.
Andrew: UFOs/space aliens is sometimes tied to various legitimate news stories about the government releasing results of its investigations into the issue. Even if the result is “We investigated, and found no evidence of space aliens”, that still drives stories of why they investigated, and why Republicans think space aliens are causing crime in cities (joke! – I think). There isn’t much similar for ghosts, and ESP died down in terms of such material over the decades.
> space aliens are causing crime in cities
Made me think of an old lecture by Michael Crichton titled “Aliens Cause Global Warming”. The starting point was precisely how SETI was considered acceptable back in the day even though “SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion.”
Andrew –
I get that you’re not drawing an equivalence, and I agree it’s interesting to think about why UFOs have become discussable in elite media while ghosts or ESP haven’t.
My point was narrower. I’m just flagging a semantic issue: the terminology of “people who are into the space‑aliens thing” reads to me as (unintentionally) collapsing important distinctions between very different reasoning styles. I think that in public discourse those distinctions matter, because they help us to separate probabilistic or hedged reasoning from the much looser evidentiary standards in the clickbait from Rogan, Carlson, etc.
“Belief in ghosts is an interesting example to me because it exists on its own, unlike other supernatural beliefs which are supported by organized religion (as with the belief that the events in the Bible actually happened)…”
Not so fast! If Buddhism is an organized religion, then ghosts are very much an active part of it.
See Peter Jackson’s Capitalism Magic Thailand: Modernity with Enchantment https://www.google.co.th/books/edition/Capitalism_Magic_Thailand/TJNfEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
In fact, as Jackson points out, belief in the supernatural is not merely widespread in Thailand but flourishes across Southeast Asia—from the spirit houses of urban Bangkok to the ancestor worship of rural Vietnam and the animistic rituals of Indonesia’s Dayak communities. This vibrant persistence challenges Western assumptions of modernity.
When all is said and done, faith in Weberian-style, post-Enlightenment rationality is dwarfed by a stark reality: the vast majority of the world’s population, over 80% in many global surveys, including Pew Research data from 2023, rejects it in favor of pre-rational worldviews. These range from animism and shamanism in indigenous traditions to folk religions blending ghosts, spirits, karma, and divine intervention, offering meaning and agency in ways pure rationalism often cannot.
Quote from above: “Not so fast! If Buddhism is an organized religion, then ghosts are very much an active part of it”
Interesting to me in light of what I wrote somewhere here about demi-gods and a single God and the possible role of understanding and control I wrote in the comment section of an earlier post a year ago or something like that. That in combination with the paper I linked to somewhere here that confirmed my hypothesis that people who believe in alien spacecraft or ghosts are less likely to believe in God. It would seem fitting to me from that perspective that an organized religion with no single God, or less emphasis on a single God, might be more likely to incorporate or include or allow for ghosts. I don’t know much about Buddhism, but I checked wikipedia and it looks a lot like there is no single God in Buddhism and there are many deities. In my very basic idea that may be in line with the gist of it: demi-gods or the several deities are different from a one single God idea, which may related to development and factors of control and understanding.
The more developed the gods or deities in a society in a way, the more personal, human, and related to certain aspects of life that can be individually controlled or understood they might be. It is perhaps no surprise from this all that the wikipedia page mentions that: “A Buddha is a being who is fully awakened and has fully comprehended the Four Noble Truths.”. And another wikipedia page about the Four Novle Truths mentions that: “Symbolically, they represent the awakening and liberation of the Buddha, and of the potential for his followers to reach the same liberation and freedom that he did.”. Perhaps this is a sign of a sort of focus on personal and individual developement which may be reflected in the many deities related to many separete things that involve understanding and control.
I recently thought about something that may also be in line with this. That is the basic idea that a single God in organized religion seems to reward and punish and has a plan for people, which may be in contrast with the more “spiritual” and less connected to a single God-idea that one is on earth to learn or perhaps one even chose the circumstances of ones life to specifically learn something. This may also reflect a movement from less control and understanding to more control and understanding. In the first case one is dependent on the single God who acts like a parent figure of sorts, and in the latter case one is individually more developed and mature and responsible for things. In some cases even to the extreme reflected in some spiritual ideas that one actually “chose” certain circumstances in ones life to learn things.
There must be some people who have wrote about things like this?!
The “nuts and bolts” ufo idea seems to be out of fashion, rather its more along the lines of Jacques Vallee’s thought. Ie, ufos, ghosts, fae, demons, interactions during dmt-induced (and other) visions, etc are all related phenomena meant to somehow guide or control the course of human development.
The remaining are various classified government projects and associated disinformation campaigns.
I am reminded of Scott Alexander’s review of parapsychology: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Control-Group-Is-Out-Of-Control
I still don’t know what to think of it. If anything it gave me a deep sense of unease about peer review and the way we determine what science is.
*”Belief in ghosts is an interesting example to me because it exists on its own, unlike other supernatural beliefs which are supported by organized religion (as with the belief that the events in the Bible actually happened)”*
Belief in ghosts – belief that deceased ancestors stay around in some form and potentially communicate or interfere, in good or bad ways, with the world of the living and require some form of attention or care – is very old, probably the oldest form of religious belief. I think historians of religion assume that ancestor cults were very common and predate theist religions everywhere.
Christians, and the followers of monotheistic religions in general, reject the belief in ghosts as a superstition. They have replaced the ancestor cults with a different narrative based on heaven and hell, whereas some other religions believe in reincarnation. Even many nonreligious people believe that the soul lives on after death in some form. All these beliefs are not based on any evidence and not supported by any kind of rational argument. It’s easy to interpret them as a way of coping invented by a species conscious of its own mortality.
I think the question raised by Andrew isn’t difficult to answer. The belief in ghosts, or ancestor cults, isn’t any more reasonable than the belief in heaven and hell, in Christ’s resurrection or in reincarnation. But our culture considers it less acceptable and more irrational than the others precisely because organized religion has fought for centuries against ancestor cults as ideological competitors, denigrated them and often suppressed them violently. They have survived in our culture only in horror stories and in connection with customs like Halloween (an example of how Christianity appropriated and redefined older ancestor cults but couldn’t quite eradicate them).
Btw the Bible does recount ghost appearances. In 1 Sam 28, the deceased prophet Samuel is summoned by a necromancer and foretells Saul’s death. The Bible also recalls how the Judaist religion officially condemned necromancing and rooted its (suspected) practitioners out.
Maryse Condés 1984 novel Segu recounts how Islamic and later French conquerors try to root out animist ancestor cults in West Africa. (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9gou_(roman))
” isn’t any more reasonable”
Meant to write *unreasonable*
Btw what I describe above for amcestor cults vs belief in heaven and hell is analogous to the way in which politheism is considered backwards and irrational in our culture whereas monotheism is totally respectable and widely embraced even by scientists. Both beliefs are supported by no evidence. One might argue that monotheism is preferable due to Occam’s razor. But really we prefer it because polytheism was eradicated with fire and sword in our culture.
Piglet:
Yes, when I wrote “supported by organized religion,” I was talking about the modern U.S. context. Mormonism and, earlier, Protestant fundamentalism and, still earlier, Roman Catholicism, are interesting examples here because in the past they were considered by the U.S. mainstream to be dangerous religions with ridiculous and objectionable doctrines, but now they’ve been folded into the mainstream themselves and it’s generally considered inappropriate to criticize them.
Andrew, I didn’t say anything about Mormonism, fundamentalism, or Roman Catholicism. What are you trying to tell me?
(Sorry if this was double posted having technical issues)
Piglet:
You wrote, “our culture considers it less acceptable and more irrational than the others precisely because organized religion has fought for centuries.” I do think that’s part of it. My purpose of bringing up Mormonism, Protestant fundamentalism, and Roman Catholicism was to note that what’s particularly relevant is not just organized religion, but which organized religions are considered acceptable by society’s leaders.
Andrew, my point was the role of history. Which religious views are dominant in a given society, or at least are considered respectable, is a result of history and might be quite contingent. We think ancestor cults and polytheism are backwards because our culture was for centuries dominated by a religion that denigrated and actively fought and suppressed such views. It might have turned out differently.
And this cultural imprint remains potent even among those of us who have turned away from this religion and retains authority even in mostly secular societies.
Piglet,
Yes, I agree completely.