[News reporting is never unbiased and very often of dubious quality. How do you get this across to your kids? Why, visit the Friendly Atheist of course...]

A subtitle to this post could be “…and people will argue about anything, especially if it’s not the point.”

This is potentially a much more divisive issue than sex, religion, or politics. I see two unyielding and unforgiving camps developing here. Hopefully we can keep the discourse civil. I personally know of no real conversion stories about making beds. If there are any reported bed-making lapses, then I submit that they were never true bed makers in the first place. On the other hand, there are some who probably make beds without really believing in it.

Oh CNN…. I really miss the Daily Show, since that’s the only lens through which I’ll watch it.

I sincerly hope this was not enlightening in any way possible. Thank you.

Actually I think it was enlightening and the insight was contained in this sentence:

When I talk about the story above, I tell people that once I thought I saw a ghost. It makes for conversation anyway.

Being a human being it is completely understandable that you would say “I thought I saw a ghost once.” That will get you a much more enjoyable conversation than “I was once in an old house in a poor neighborhood and out of the corner of my eye I had a glimpse of a fuzzy white thing.” What would people think of other than a rat? Conversation killer.

It is a sad fact that for most people life is generally dull, uneventful, boring, and paved with a wall-to-wall, day-to-day mundanity. As a result they will jump on anything that offers the “ghost” of a chance for romance, excitement, interest or mystery.

In general the truth is mundane. Whenever the explanation is confirmed and it turns out to be a silverfish or a rat or a weather balloon or a smartass college prank, we’re at least a little disappointed.

We all want life to be interesting and we want to be interesting to other people. Ghosts are interesting, rats are mundane. So many people don’t simply report their perception (fuzzy thing), they report their most interesting interpretation (ghost). They have not been trained to remember the difference between their perception and their interpretation. It takes a practiced discipline to keep them separate, and it is not taught in school.

If you see a guy run out of a bank with a bag and jump into a car, are you seeing a bank robbery? Not necessarily. You are seeing a guy run out of a bank with a bag and jump into a car. The rest is your interpretation, and even if it turns out to be correct, it is very important to not mistake interpretations for perceptions.

Look with your eyes, not your mind. Think with your mind, not your eyes.

I’m not bored. I find the confirmed facts of the world around me to be interesting enough to not have to grasp at the most exciting and also most unlikely interpretations of the parts that are not confirmed. It isn’t boring at all, it’s fascinating.

Darn those ghosts who screw up. They just make more work for the rest of us.