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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

It's more a purity thing than "do you believe in ghosts." Many cultures, including yours, have beliefs with regards to purity which are not wholly explained by physics. For example, animal fat can be used to make soap. Humans are animals. You would probably feel very unhappy if someone informed you that, unbeknownst to you, your soap had been replaced with soap made out of people. It is not a property of chemistry that your soap remembers being a human, any more than your drinking water remembers being urine last week, but you're very concerned about ex-human soap and not at all concerned about ex-urine drinking water.

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You're definitely right. I think when you try to rationalize it though, the more sophisticated argument is that in the soap example, you're creeped out because you feel like you're using a person as a means and not an end in themselves. It feels like it is disgracing someone you never met, that was physically transformed by cruel inhuman processes, which in turn disgraces yourself.

In the instance of cremation, you are saying goodbye to a person and not using them as a means to an end, it is a form of respect. The individual isn't commodified on a practical level (though the funeral industry has something to say about that).

Given stories like this: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/city-to-drain-reservoir-after-te... (Notice that was the second time in just a few years because of it)

I have a feeling people are only unconcerned about ex-urine water because they are unaware and trying to improve awareness is not likely to help.

It's not amazing people believe in ghosts so much that they believe gravity somehow affects ghosts which blows my mind.

Because the earth is no longer remotely close to where the person died, not around the sun, not in the solar system, and given the universe is constantly expanding, millions of miles from where they died.

So somehow ghosts are both non-corporeal yet affected by gravity.

Every incorporeal thing we know of (photons, neutrinos) is affected by gravity. If you have chosen to believe in incorporeal ghosts, it's not at all strange to assume they would be affected by gravity. It's kind of weird to assume that they wouldn't, actually.

Okay let's put it this way, photons are barely affected by gravity because of their near zero mass.

So you think ghosts have mass? Or rather near zero mass?

Because it takes massive amounts of gravity to affect photons, you won't see the gravity of earth keeping photons in place like say a person.

According to the theory of general relativity, gravity isn't so much a force as it is matter literally changing the definition of a straight line. It would be weird for anything to not be affected by gravity.

There's a neutrino (and maybe a tachyon) that would like to have a word with you.

But anything with near zero mass like a photon pretty much ignores anything but massive amounts of gravity.

What I don't understand is believing in ghosts and not being scared all the time. I think if I ever saw a ghost, that would be it right? I'd be done, I'd be scared all the time after that, because they can go through walls and do whatever. I don't get "casual" belief in these things.

I can respect big foot hunters, they believe in him and thus devote their time to finding him. I can't on the other hand understand some friends of mine who thought, again casually, that there were dinosaurs in Africa. If I thought that I'd be looking for them right now.

I used to have exactly this attitude about ghosts. I don't believe in them, but if I did, they would be this incredibly scary thing and my whole worldview would be different.

Over time, though, I've talked to and read about people who view ghosts much in the same way that they view living people. Mostly benign, but possibly harmful if you piss them off. So people live in homes where they believe that there's a ghost around, but they don't mind. They chat with them, etc.

I come from an evangelical Christian background, so this mindset was really surprising to me.

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