Debate: Do Ghosts Exist?

By Glenn and Jake

Much like the neanderthals, modern man believes that when you die your soul eternally hovers around the Earth looking for a task to fulfill in order to pass over to the other side.  Yet, there are still a handful of people that are skeptical toward their existence.  Are they correct or are they the biggest suckers who have ever lived?  This debate might answer that question, but you are more likely to enjoy a Robin Williams stand-up routine.


Glenn:  Ghosts are real, though they are not mentioned directly in “The Bible.”  I will hold off on my haunting personal stories about ghosts until later in the debate.  For now, let’s look at the objective evidence.  Since we evolved directly from chimpanzees, millions of people have both been born and then later killed by the policies of the Republican Party.  If we assume that only a small percentage of them (Mormons, Audioslave purists, child molesters) went to hell that means the rest would have gone to heaven.  But heaven isn’t that big.  Therefore I believe that some of the people who die stick around as ghosts, whether to haunt their enemies or watch kindly over their family members while they masturbate, cook dinner or make ignorant statements in front of a television camera.  In a recent Fox News/SEIU public opinion poll over 63% of respondents agreed that ghosts were real and that President Obama’s grandmother’s ghost was born in Kenya.


Jake: Glenn immediately is trying to rile me up by teasing a point for later.  Nice try.  I’m as unshakable as a two ton snow globe.  Ghosts do not exist!  If they did, then movies like “Ghost Dad” and “The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” would be documentaries instead of brilliant works of fictional storytelling.  Sure, we all want our dead girlfriends hanging out with us forever, asking us to explain the endings of every movie, but that is not possible.  We must settle with finding new girlfriends who are easily distracted while watching feature films.  When a loved one--or a hated one, for that matter--passes away, all we can do is mourn them.  They are gone forever.  They do not float about looking for a Christmas-doubting elderly gentleman to haunt and convince them of Christmas’ merits.  If you do see an apparition, you are most likely seeing a being from a different dimension.


Glenn:  As I sit here in an empty conference room, I can feel at least 3-4 ghosts sitting at the table with me.  Perhaps they used to work in this building or their corpses are buried underneath the house where I was born, like Carol Anne in Poltergeist.  Jake brings up ghost movies to defend his point, but in reality they do much more to bolster mine.  How could human beings even come up with the idea of ghosts if they were not real?  Ghost Dad is fictional, but it was based on a real event of someone having a ghost dad.  I sometimes wish I had a ghost dad.  The idea that people just die and that’s all is so sad to me.  I’d much rather believe my pet hamster died and continues to run around my room at night and chew on my dresser while I’m trying to sleep. Not to mention all of the professional wrestlers who have been murdered by Lex Luger or Chris Benoit - why shouldn’t they be allowed to roam ECW arena for the rest of their lives?


Jake:  Look, I’m not saying that Chris Benoit should not wander around the ECW arena wearing a bra and carrying a copy of “The Bible,” but it just is not happening.  I wish it were.  I wish Chris Benoit would have murdered me.  He didn’t and will not, because he is now dead.  Movies are a good starting point for debates, because many of our readers have seen at least five movies in their lifetimes--one of which is undoubtedly “Ghost Dad.”  I happen to also find it sad when people die.  I cried recently when Gaddafi died, but he is not going to roam the Earth forever as a spirit, sadly.  I have never seen a ghost.  I have seen some different dimensional beings, but they were not scary.  They merely wanted to compare the difference between our “The Jetsons” and their “The Flintstones,” which are numerous, to say the least.  I asked these beings if they had ghosts where they came from, about the “Saved by the Bell” character Tori and what cheese tastes like in their dimension--all of the real pressing issues--but I will save their answer to these trying questions for my last point, much like Glenn saved his ghost story for his.


Glenn:  Here is my story.  I was once walking through a cemetery late at night when I heard a loud, bellowing laugh.  I turned and saw a headstone for John Candy, the famous comedian.  This was the day after he had died!  Now, I don’t know if that laugh for sure was John Candy but I think it was.  He followed me around for the next year, doing a lot of the jokes from “Planes Trains and Automobiles” in addition to some of his earlier work on “SCTV.”  By the second month the novelty had worn off and I asked him to leave me alone but he wouldn’t.  That was when I first got really angry at ghosts.  I suppose Jake would have you believe that John Candy never died and is hidden in a bunker somewhere out in the Southwest.  To which I say: hogwash!  In a world where the gap between the rich and poor grows bigger every day and in a world where crystals have failed to heal Steve Jobs’s cancer, ghosts are the only thing we know we can rely on.  The ghost of Steve Jobs watches over me right now as I type on this Apple IIGs computer.  Thank you for inventing this computer Steve and did you have garlic for dinner?


Jake:  If I was going to believe in ghosts--and I am not--the only one I would even consider putting faith behind is that of John Candy.  Glenn knows this and is using it to try and lure me into a trap.  Sorry, bro.  Not even an anecdotal story about the ghost of America’s favorite fat funny man (sorry, Chris Farley’s corpse) can make me believe in ghosts.  Ghosts are no more real than a funny Rob Schneider film or justice through the death penalty.  Like Obus, a friend of mine from another dimension, once said, “I know not of this substance you refer to as cheese or this “Saved by the Bell” character Tori, but I do know that in neither of our dimensions ghosts exist.”  It is very odd how fitting that quote is to this debate.  It’s almost like I made it up, much like Glenn made up his anecdote about John Candy and I made up that I cried when Gaddafi passed away.  Still, regardless of the swirling vortex of lies this debate is filled with, I can promise you that one thing is true: ghosts do not exist.