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Mysteriously relocated objects do not mean paranormal activity

People in search of paranormal beings set up cameras in so-called haunted places in hopes of finding what?

Paranormal beings, I understand, are notably camera-shy.

A story about a haunted opera house in Anson from the Abilene Reporter News Web site caught my attention recently.

Several weeks ago I had driven through Anson but was not aware then of the ghostly goings-on.

One of the investigators reported that her purse was inexplicably moved from where she had put it.

Hah!

Beth Pratt

My purse, billfold, hat, sunglasses, pens and just about any other accessory you might imagine have been mysteriously moving around for years.

All this time, I thought I was absent-minded. Instead, I live and work in haunted buildings. I can buy that.

I still don't believe there are ghosts who do such mischief to distract humans from whatever it is that might go bump in the night. But I am willing to entertain the idea that my laptop computer has a resident demon that curses wherever it will.

I no longer wonder why it was named a cursor. It jumps from paragraph to paragraph with no warning whatsoever. This is the only laptop that I have had with this particular paranormal effect.

Occasionally, an entire paragraph will just disappear. Usually, I can call it back by hitting control z on the keyboard.

So, I can certainly sympathize with anyone under siege by paranormal happenings. But isn't it much better to be assaulted by paranormal occurrences than to be considered abnormal by those who never seem to lose things?

These ideas about mysterious happenings have been with us for a long, long time.

Some things we thought were mysterious turned out not to be once some smart observer figured out what really was happening. At first, these observers tended to get in real hot water when they explained things that went against what society had believed to be the truth.

Today, we have a curious mix of belief and disbelief that is most visible as an issue in classrooms where there is study of science. Belief and disbelief really have no place in the scientific pursuit, other than to recognize our assumptions are as likely to be based on one as the other. We keep confusing the difference between what we are able to observe, what we assume we know and what we believe as a matter of faith.

Some members of the scientific community go absolutely ballistic when their science is not accepted on faith. Isn't that odd?

We are not surprised that religion reacts negatively to some of the explanations advanced as theories by those who are studying such things as origins of matter when they begin with the assumption that all religion is bogus.

Science, if it is true to its purpose, will have answers today that are different from yesterday's science. Thus, its theories must always be held in suspension until proven to be absolute. People get rather attached to their assumptions and forget sometimes that science exists to prove or disprove its observations and deductions.

Religion, on the other hand, deals in absolutes. But religion steps outside its purpose when it attempts to describe the scientific processes of creation based on literary description in sacred scriptures. The Judeo-Christian faiths are not answering questions of science, but questions of meaning. Science can't do that. In looking beyond that which is measurable, science defers to religion. The role of religion for the sciences speaks to boundaries and ethics in how knowledge is to be applied. Science asks, "Can we do it?" Religion asks, "Should we do it?"

If the roles of science and religion are to seek ultimate truth, why the fear and hostility of each toward the other?

When we misplace our purpose in either case, we blame not the paranormal, but our human tendency to love our assumptions more than we love truth.

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