Religion loses out to belief in paranormal

PEOPLE are more likely to believe in ghosts and the paranormal than have faith in an organised religion, a new survey has found.
A research by the Scottish Paranormal organisation of amateur enthusiasts showed that more than two thirds of people surveyed said they believed in the existence of ghosts and supernatural spirits.
This compares to only 55 per cent of the 2000 people questioned who said they had faith in a religion and believed in a god.
On Friday, ghost hunters affiliated to Scottish Paranormal will be gathering in Edinburgh to determine where the city's most haunted areas are.
The team has already carried out investigations in Mary King's Close and the Edinburgh Vaults - two of the city's most notoriously haunted spots.
The Close was inhabited in the 16th and 17th centuries but was abandoned and sealed after an outbreak of plague, leading to chilling claims of paranormal sightings of former inhabitants.
Edinburgh medium Ewan Irvine, a member of the team, said: "It must always be the case that these areas are looked at in an unbiased way with both sceptics and believers coming together to look at these locations."

Lets see what the Bible says about this. I'm going to quote a section from the "Got Questions" website.

Here are some Bible truths that relate to hauntings and visits by the spirits of dead people. There are only a few incidents that deal with the living having contact with a "dead" person.

a) In 1 Samuel 28:7-19, King Saul seeks a woman with a familiar spirit (demon) to inquire of Samuel about what to do. That she actually manages to communicate with the dead shocks her (v. 12) indicating to me that it did not previously happen.

b) In Matthew 17:1-8, Peter, James and John see Moses and Elijah with Jesus for a brief period of time.

c) In Luke 16:19-31 Jesus tells the story of the rich man and Lazarus. In this story we learn of there being two compartments for the dead until the Great White Throne Judgment (Revelation 20:11f.). Also in the story the rich man asks for Lazarus to be sent back to warn the living. Moses says it would do not good because if they will not believe God's written word, they will not believe though one should rise from the dead.

From the above three passages of Scripture, I would conclude that there are compartments in which the spirits of the dead dwell for now and that while there are a few instances in which God allowed interaction between the living and the dead, those situations were very rare and not nearly as common as contact between people and angelic beings. Also Luke 16:27-31 would indicate that no human spirits are allowed to return to visit the living without permission, and if permission is not granted for the purpose of warning people to flee from the wrath to come, it would not be given for trifling reasons.

Read the rest of this information from "Got Questions" here.

In my opionion, hauntings are from the devil and his demons, the sole purpose of which is to get people to focus their attention away from God and Jesus' messages of salvation, and open their minds up to deception and darkness.