It's A Shame We Have To Fight Christians In Order To Help People

You do what?!?

We conduct paranormal investigations at sites where there is reported odd or unusual activity that people can't explain.

Oh, you're one of them ghost busters!
Well, ahem, we don't really like to be called that cause... 
HEY! Where's your plasma-blaster ekto thingy? hahahahaha

And so the conversation usually goes.  I'm sure all of us who are members of a paranormal investigation team has had more than a few of these.  And so, we mutter our thanks to Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd once again under our breath (thanks Ghost Busters!) and slink away, the ringing of laughter still in our ears.  Actually, these conversations don't really hurt.  They are simply the uninformed utterances of the ignorant, who a few hundred years ago couldn't grasp that the earth was not flat.  Actually, more often than not, don't you find yourself laughing along with these folks?  Because it is funny - the "insaneness" of it all.  Brevity and not taking yourself too seriously are important traits in this line of work.  And so, we laugh with them and go on our merry way.

Not so with another group of folks.  The more stinging conversations come from fellow "Christians" who stand mouth agape that we would do such a thing and wring their hands with a concerned look that communicates that we've sold our souls to Satan.  There was a time in my life when such antics and behavior would stir me to indignation and a passionate response.  No longer.  I've fought the battle against fundamentalists and their closed-mindedness for so long now, that my reaction is more akin to a sigh and a relunctance that I even have to drag up the energy to once again expose their condescension. With these folks there isn't a conversation to be had, as there's not much conversing that goes on.  It's usually just a one-way diatribe in which we are non-participants standing there listening to their lecture about how we are not conforming to the scriptures and that God forbids such things.  Worse yet, they claim that there are no such things as ghosts (disincarnate human spirits), that they are all just demons in disguise and they are fooling us.  They never once stop to consider that we do concern ourselves with "testing the spirits" (1 John 4:6) and that we have ways to go about what we do that can effectively do exactly that.  That's the rub, they assume a priori we are lost and gone astray, without ever once asking us to tell them what we are doing.  Right back to the lack of conversation issue.  That's their whole thing anyway: they aren't interested in conversation, what they want is condemnation.

Fortunately, these type of encounters are actually rare (in my own experience) and come from fundamentalists who are guilty of eisegesis rather than exegesis when it comes to drawing meaning and truth from scripture.  They are reading into the verse or verses what they want it to say, rather than drawing out from it what it is actually saying.  They claim to have such a "high" view of scripture, and yet they don't know how to properly process it.  In reality, what they have such a high view of is not the scriptures, but their own opinions.  I say the encounters are rare because they won't face you very often, what you get from them is a lot of talking behind your back, and so you get their "attack" from a third party.  Ah, fundamentalist guerrillas - you gotta love 'em.

The truth of the matter is, we are Christians who believe in a spiritual world in addition to the material-physical world.  When it comes down to explaining phenomena that is occurring which our scientific instruments (which are considerable) and our five natural senses can't explain - then we have the understanding and confidence to do so.  At N.A.P.S., while we conduct many public investigations into "known" haunted sites - such as recent ones at The Myrtles and King's Tavern - our heart is to do the private home investigations where people are upset, concerned and want to know what is happening to them.  These are the investigations that we (and I do think I speak for the Team) justify all the time, effort, and money spent.  Why?  Because we are helping people.  That's the bottom line.  So, it's a shame, as co-founder Kim Frith recently said, that, "We have to fight Christians in order to help people."  I thank God that such fundamentalist thinking isn't encountered extremely often (but it is out there lurking).  So, we can ignore them as being what they are - irrelevant to the real conversation - and relegated to a side "freak" show.  At the same time I also thank God we live in 2010 and not 1692, because thanks to that mode of thinking, we might be swinging from the end of a rope.