Just in time for Halloween and from the “you just can’t make this stuff up” department we have this tale of hilarity. Rob Gutro is a Deputy News Chief in the office of Public Affairs at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. He writes a number of science stories, like this one on hurricanes or this one on the Gulf Oil spill. But, he also talks to ghosts. I’d like to ask him to ask the dead these questions: “Is climate change dead too? Is heaven green? Does hell use a coal powered furnace or is it nuclear or solar driven?” Inquiring minds want to know.
NASA worker brings a scientific eye to his hobby: Talking to the dead
Medium and NASA Meteorologist Rob Gutro tries to communicate with a possible ghost beneath a bookstore in Baltimore.» LAUNCH VIDEO PLAYER
By J. Freedom duLac Washington Post Staff Writer
Rob Gutro was driving to the wake of a co-worker’s stepfather when a ghost began to speak.
“I kept hearing the name Cindy Lou,” Gutro recalled. “I had no idea what that meant.” But he knew this: Once again, somebody who’d died had something to say.
By day, Gutro is a meteorologist who works as deputy news chief at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, communicating the nation’s scientific work to the public.
By night (and whenever else the entities get in touch), he talks to the dead.
“I have an ability to communicate with and understand ghosts and spirits,” Gutro said.
During his off-hours, away from NASA’s advanced technology, Gutro actively seeks encounters of another kind by traveling to haunted houses and other historic sites where spirits might be found.
Sometimes, he said, entities seek him out. So it was, on the way to the wake this summer, that the disembodied voice in the car asked Gutro to deliver messages to his grieving friend and NASA colleague, Cynthia O’Carroll.
Gutro obliged, pulling her aside at the ceremony and saying he’d been hearing the name Cindy Lou. “I believe your dad has come to me,” he told O’Carroll.
She cried.
“My dad used to call me Cindy Lou,” O’Carroll said later. “But the thing that really touched me and made me cry was when Rob said, ‘Your dad said thank you for taking care of your mom.’ Just the way he said it sounded like the way Dad would have said it.”
Gutro is quick to acknowledge that some NASA scientists – and plenty of non-scientists too – approach his work with considerable skepticism. “Some people do think that mediums are crazy,” Gutro said. He shrugged.
There’s no scientific consensus on ghosts and spirits; the word paranormal, after all, means something beyond scientific explanation. But Gutro, who used to work as a forecaster for the Weather Channel’s radio division, insisted that the science behind his experiences with entities is sound.
Read the entire story here
h/t to WUWT reader “Bob”
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Richard Wright:
I clearly do not mean that I derive with enough confidence to argue by it the ethical sense from the fact that everyone expresses it- alone. The fact that the basic goal of ethics is universally acknowledged only gives me confidence in my own internal experience, as the rest of my experience has borne out the induction that I am of the same essential mental structure as all folks called sane.
When I note the lack of a SENSE for deity’s presence- not a logical construct implying deity’s presence, importantly- in my mind, that is in my very self, I could look to popular opinion to see whether such a SENSE might be in others. Then, of course, I could only at best say it is a reasonable conjecture that such a thing is, as I experience it not. However, when I do look at the world, I see that the basic fact of deity’s existence is utterly and wildly different among believers. (polytheism, animism, monotheism) So, religious belief does not even have anything going for it to imply internal sense at back of it, though internal logical processes may result (I contend flawed-ly) in religious faith.
I have experienced religious faith personally and as explained above examined it in popular opinion. I from these two things find only the strongest evidence that all the internal experience responsible for religious faith is only emotion and the reasoning faculties. I induce therefrom that religious faith is worked out the same way opinions about engineering and ethics are- by rational means- and that it is only a popular opinion.
Best,
Mark
David Hoffer:
I assert an instinctual sense to ‘do good’ in all sane people. This is not to say that it overpowers or even tends to overpower instinctual hungers and emotions which drive people to do things ethically wrong.
This sense may be ignored just as what is seen with the eyes may be ignored- but it does not then mean that sight is an unreal sense if it may be ignored. That a chasm is up ahead may be seen but ignored, such as when one acts to gain the greater pleasure/avoidance of pain of driving one’s blue Mustang convertible off that cliff.
David Hoffer:
You know what? Strike my mustang-off-the-cliff example. It is logically fallacious, and I apologize for putting it forth. That was foolish of me.
When one drives off the cliff, it is not that one is acting contrary to what sight tells one- that there is a chasm there. When one drives off the cliff, one is acting in accordance with the sense of sight. When one kills despite the ethical sense, one is by definition not acting in accordance with that sense. A sight-analogy for the triumph of ethical wrong must be different from the one I gave.
Say, then, that one walks off a cliff, and has no desire to do so and wants to not fall even, but walks so quite on purpose. One sees the ledge. One bounds right on over it. The mind has received the fact that there is an- unwanted- fall ahead through the sense of sight. But, the mind also puts forth the reason to overwhelm the following of this sense (remember, remaining in accordance with sight would be to not bound off as one does not at all want to fall) in that its rational faculties are incorrectly applied to convince one that when one bounds off that cliff God will make it so that one can fly.
The self supplies the reason for ignoring the sense of sight, but the sense was always there. It was just ignored because of whatever the religious belief in flying did for the individual.
My apologies for this inelegant metaphor going on so long!
Best,
Mark
If intellect were the basis of doing good, then the smartest people would also be the most moral. This is the fallacy of the movement that says all of our problems can be solved through education. The heart of man is wicked and education just allows him to invent new ways of doing evil, it does not change the heart. I’ll take the kindness of the simpleton over that of the intellectually elite any day!
But there is a more fundamental question that has yet to be answered from naturalism: how to we know what is good and what is evil? How can we even countenance the idea that there is good and evil? What makes one thing good and another bad? How does the almighty intellect determine this when it supposedly evolved via natural selection which has no concept of good and evil? And this also presumes that all cultures around the world agree as to what is good and evil. I would strongly disagree with that.