[Serious] Is the Past Real?

[Aegon]

Personally, I ponder the nature of time often and yet I really don't have a firm position. My symathies lie with presentism because I feel the past is truly gone and to the extent it exists it is in presents ghosts. Then as time goes on those ghosts fade while the set of possible paths that could have led to this moment increases. Then I think, certainly there is the way things actually happened so in some sense the past exists in some immutable way...from a god's eye view so to speak...regardless of whether from an objective reality (i.e. there are past objects) or an Akashic record.

Anyways, I was just curious what others thought about time.

Apologies if this idea was already said because I'm not going to read through 9 pages, but this is relative, no? For us the past has to exist. The present moment is a cumulation of past moments. If everything that ever happens is cause and effect, the present effect must have had prior cause. The prior cause happened prior to the present moment, thus it happened in the past. The past is real.

Now, what I just said is based off of our homo sapien understanding of linear time. It's my understanding that relativity has already shown that there is no distinction between past and future, and all time is happening at once. So in that way I'm not entirely sure the past is "real."