Supernatural activity: True or false?

Does the supernatural exist? If it did, how would you know? By virtue of it being “super” natural above nature your senses would be unable to detect it.

But let’s face it. “Supernatural” is an excuse for people to believe in things that no sane person would otherwise believe in. Ghosts are often touted as the greatest bit of evidence for the supernatural. As spun-up as people can get on this topic, why is that there isn’t a single, verifiable source of scientific evidence for their existence? I mean, it’s been a couple thousand years now. You’d think we’d have a tape recording of a conversation, or a video, or an image captured on a scientific instrument. What do we get instead? Globs of light on poorly developed film. Yawn.

So what is “supernatural”? Some people suggest that it can mean anything you like, or that it can mean “whatever is personal to you”. It is this post-modernist nonsense that has made it difficult for us mere mortals to have a regular conversation. In short, you get to make up the meaning of the word as you go along. At the end of it all, nothing has been figured out. Cold-blooded rationalists like myself have to sit at the kid’s table while people congratulate each other on having “metaphysical experiences”. Happily for me, the joke’s on them. Most of them probably don’t even know what “metaphysics” means.

I don’t mean to single out ghosts. The battle between science and superstition is littered with the bodies of stupid ideas, so I suppose I could’ve written this little blurb on anything. But ghosts just seem to perfectly capture the silliness of it all. I mean, why do ghosts wear clothes? Am I supposed to believe that, upon passing into the next world, the ghost retains his or her garments, which are similarly projected in the dark hallway/graveyard/foyer/baseme nt/attic they supposedly died in? Why can’t ghosts talk? Why won’t they stand still for a good picture?

If a word can mean anything at all, it means absolutely nothing. If “supernatural” is merely a catch-all for everything that is unexplained or just plain weird, we’ll have to relegate quantum mechanics and the orbit of Mercury to that same class. Now that we’ve got two scientific notions thusly categorized, school’s out. The beer sitting on my desk is just as supernatural. Which means the word “supernatural” is one huge waste of air. Or in this case, a waste of electrons.