Things that go bump in the night ... for atheists

[HelenaMT]

I am not insulting your intelligence, I am saying people vividly experience things like alien abductions as well as ghost sightings. This casts severe doubt on all such claims. If you believe in natural explanations of abduction stories, why not of ghost stories as well.

The major difference between ghost stories (or, really, any stories involving non-physical-seeming phenomena) and abduction stories is that stories of abduction are supposed to be physical -aliens, space ships, technology-these are all things of solid matter. You’d expect there to be physical corroboration of a sort you wouldn’t with a psychic-seeming experience.

So, although ghost sightings, psychic phenomena, NEDs, and religious experiences may be hard to verify physically, they are harder to dismiss for people that have had them solely on the grounds that they leave no physical evidence of their occurrence. Alien visitations, abductions, etc. are held to a different level of proof, even by believers in other phenomena, because they fall within the world of solid matter, which we can easily verify with photos and physical remains.

I do agree, however, that for those who have never had any experiences with weird psychic stuff, it is easily lumped in with all other beliefs for which there is no physical evidence.

 

[4Horsemen]

Supernatural experiences can come from God, the devil or our own psyche. St. Teresa of Avila experienced visions from God and the devil. She said that those coming from Satan gave her a feeling of pride, whereas those coming from God brought a feeling of humility.
Read some of the lives of the saints. So many of them had supernatural experiences. St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi is considered the ecstatic saint. It seems she was in the air more than on the ground. Another saint familiar with levitation is St. Martin of Tours. St. Joan of Arc heard the voices of some of her favorite saints to take up the cause of France. Of course, there’s the apparitions at Fatima, Lourdes, La Salette, Guadalupe and other famous shrines. Would atheists consider these visions mass hallucination?
Except that there were atheists who were converted after experiencing the miracle at Fatima on October 13, 1917.

 

[inocente]

I’m not an atheist but here’s a cautionary tale about this kind of thing.

Every so often we hear of people who escaped a plane crash because they had a premonition and took a different flight, or they had a sudden feeling that grandma died, phoned home, and sure enough grandma had died.

Perhaps there’s something in all that.

But how many people have premonitions that don’t turn out to be true? If only 0.1% of the 7 billion people on the planet have these spooky feelings each day, and only 0.1% of them turn out to be true, that makes 7,000 people a day that have “true” premonitions, the ones we might hear about. But that leaves almost 7 million a day with completely wrong premonitions, which get passed over because they’re embarrassing and not nearly so interesting.

moral = be very careful when weighing evidence

Plus, can’t believe it, statistics is useful for something after all.

 

[stenlis]

For the atheists here … I claim to have had my father turn up in my room the night he died. He started with an apology, we argued and conversed, and at the end (probably only about two or three minutes in total), he gave this terrifying scream and disappeared.

So far I haven’t heard anything quite the same from anybody else, but I suspect there are a few people around for whom the story would not sound strange.

Anyway I found a nursing site which has a section related to “ghost” stories. The link is below.

allnurses.com/general-nursing-discussion/whats-your-best-108202-page3.html

Here’s a sample -

"We had a patient, chronic CHFer, always on the call button, hated being on fluid restrictions. you know the type: the nurses have to take turns during the shift answering the call button so the primary can actually do other work.

And this was a frequent flier cause he was very chronic, very borderline, and the hospital was the only place he wouldn’t fluid overload.

I work 7p-7a. He died about 8pm. Oh the look on his face, like, “how could you let me die!” - Like it was our fault.

Anyway, family came and gone by 9pm, funeral home gone at 930pm.

About 10pm, the call button starts going off. I was there - call button going off every 5 minutes.

One of the nurses was a very spiritual girl. At about 2am, after like 4 HOURS OF THIS, nurse Mary snaps, ‘Enough!’

She walks down to the room, and, practically screams into the empty room, “Mr X, you have died. You can’t be in here bothering us anymore. Move along. In the name of Jesus, I’m exorcising you from this plane of existence. Go to the light and be happy!”

And I kid you not, the call button stopped going off then and there.

~faith,
Timothy. "

I’m not sure whether this has been already brought up but it’s not that atheists don’t believe in ghosts (some do, some don’t), they just don’t believe in god(s).

 

[AntiTheist]

I’m not sure whether this has been already brought up but it’s not that atheists don’t believe in ghosts (some do, some don’t), they just don’t believe in god(s).

Right. Even if these ghost stories are all perfectly recalled by the eye-witnesses and happened as reported, they would be – at best – evidence that it’s possible to survive death, at least temporarily.

It wouldn’t be evidence that gods exist or that there’s some kind of permanent afterlife, even.

 

[Zatzat]

Delusion, imagination, false memory or confusion. But no supernatural event in either story.

 

[aperture]

slate.com/id/2254054/

^ This is the first in a series of articles that examines the work of memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus. General verdict from her work: it’s very possible to make people truly believe things that didn’t actually happen to them did, or to change the circumstances or details of things that happened to them. In other words, individual memory isn’t very trustworthy, which is something that makes these sort of things rather unconvincing.

 

[4Horsemen]

slate.com/id/2254054/

^ This is the first in a series of articles that examines the work of memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus. General verdict from her work: it’s very possible to make people truly believe things that didn’t actually happen to them did, or to change the circumstances or details of things that happened to them. In other words, individual memory isn’t very trustworthy, which is something that makes these sort of things rather unconvincing.

What about the miracle at Fatima, Portugal of October 13, 1917 when the sun appeared to spin around and zoomed downward zig-zagging? Even atheists admitted seeing this. At least 10,000 people witnessed this event and some miles away on their farms. This supernatural experience has been approved by the Church.

Also, when Lucia (oldest seer) was in a convent, she saw from her window a huge display of lights in the sky. She knew this was the sign foretold by Our Lady that the time of punishment had come (war is a punishment for sin), just days before the outbreak of World War II. Our Lady had said that WWI would end, but an even greater one would begin if people didn’t repent. Google some websites, including:

tanbooks.com/doct/fatima_plan.htm

 

[Michael_Francis]

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