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Besides your belief that there is no higher power, what are your thoughts on supernatural phenomena? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Lets take a little break from politics and have us a real atheist conversation.

Personally, I'm open to the idea of the existence of supernatural phenomena, and I believe mainstream religions are actually complicated incomplete stories full of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and half-truths.

Basically, I think that these stories are not as simple and straightforward as they seem to be to religious people. I feel like there is a lot more to them. Concluding that all these stories are just made up or came out of nowhere is kind of hard for me.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

People do not understand that visual hallucinations can happen to anyone when they are sober. Our brains are not perfect machines.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-asymmetric-brain/202212/new-research-shows-how-common-hallucinations-really-are

Overall, 84.8 percent of the volunteers that took part in the study reported having experienced some form of anomalous visual experiences in their life. More than a third of them (37.8 percent) reported that they had experienced an actual visual hallucination similar to what a patient with a psychotic disorder may experience. When the scientists analyzed the additional questions of whether an experience would agree with a clinical definition of visual hallucinations, about 17.4 percent of volunteers had experienced a hallucination that met these criteria.

And I'm guessing the other 15.2 either didn't remember or didn't really understand the question.

It's even more a problem with hearing things that aren't there or, far more commonly, just hearing something but misidentifying it. The whole EVP thing that "paranormal investigators" are so fond of is all about hearing a sound and just assuming that sound is a voice because of our flawed brains (and flawed ears).

Humans seem to be wired to be like this. That's why pareidolia is a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

Honestly, 15% sounds like it's right in the range of the number of people who will just lie on surveys - be it purposefully or not -- in order to present a superior version of themselves to a piece of paper.