Do you believe in spirits?

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This would entirely invalid the existence of witnesses as being valid evidence. The whole entire Legal-System by this description is basically a gigantic Pseudo-Science. Anybody being interviewed on the News also becomes subject to being invalid evidence (not that I believe anything that comes out of the news anyway).

That's true. Eyewitness accounts or personal experiences are not reliable evidence. And our flawed legal system (and media) largely isn't science.

^ nicely put. Research done on 'eyewitness accounts' show them to be highly flawed and it is incredulous that such accounts are given such a high status under the Law. I suppose it goes back to a time before brain and cognitive research were carried out and it seemed common sense to accept an eyewitness account. As concrete evidence.I can only imagine the howls of abuse that would be hurled by the uniformed rabble if there was any attempt to reduce eyewitness testimony to the level of circumstantial evidence. Just look at some of the responses here where folk outright reject the evidence from these studies without bothering to look further than the headline.

I believe in spirits, especially whisky and rum.

To the people, so firmly rooted in cause-and-effect, what came before the first abstraction or elemental concept.

If you believe in macro-evolution, as from one kind to another, what came before the first kind.

If you believe in the evolution of matter, as from quanta to molecule, what came before the first singularity, or the order of time.

What came before the first order.

You, too, have some kind of faith, in some thing, manifesting, where no thing was. Or, where did the first thing come from.

The standpoint I'm coming to is that there's really no reason I can see at least to be adamantly against the idea that nonphysical sentience exists or even is around us. Really the two things I think that make the concept unnecessarily controversial is a) politics and b) a lot of people hearing a big game talked and having no particularly convincing experiences themselves. When I say politics, i mean in particular the assumption that people are inherently grabby about this stuff and that grabbiness eclipses any possibility that there's anything credible to be said about such things aside from roundly denouncing their existence.

I don't really have a deep-rooted need for it to be true, just that for at least a handful of experiences I've had (much more far-reaching than saying 'I saw something') the most intellectually tortured explanation at this point would be the attempt to try and frame them all into the context of reductive materialism. Of course when I hadn't had these experiences, when I didn't believe these things to be true, I might have politely listened to another person's story but I almost always would have suspected - unless there was just something really incongruous about the world I lived in - that they were wittingly or unwittingly putting a lot of hyperbole in their story. At this point it's not so much that it's incongruent, just that the idea of nature extending beyond what we usually perceive has been so profoundly superseded by a Judao-Christian narrative that we seem to have a need to put some unusual spin on it to make it fit our preconceptions of what we think should be there - similarly we've both denigrated the possibility based on how we see the bible and we've fetishized what it means to be a person whose had these experiences (ie. the illusion that they're somehow 'better' or can claim to be above someone who hasn't, I don't think it credibly works that way). There are some cases where that could be true, there are a lot where it wouldn't. Part of that as well could be that the kind of person who'd run out and tell everyone in most cases would either be an attention seeker or someone who's a bit excitable in a lot of ways (ie. people you wouldn't tend to believe), other types of people would more likely only share such things in the most hesitant or begrudging manner.

This probably won't have much if any at all sway on the conversation but I still thought it was an interesting article. Of course anyone who believes such things can happen will find the details interesting, those who don't will just consider this man to be either a straight-away snake oil and woo salesman or part of the notorious ends-justify-the-means conspiracy against science and reason:

"As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/postever ... ossession/

As a Roman Catholic, the existence of real spirits for me, is only confined to the Holy Spirit.

No, I believe in God