I finally watched contact on Netflix.....

[maestroanth]

I get the point that they are trying to make: relate the woman's atheist experience to a theist experience which in both cases "no one believes them" since they each can provide no proof for either of them. However, my atheist bias sorta blocks the way for me to appreciate this say vs an 18 year old undecided individual who would I can imagine totally jumping on this.

One way it bugs me is that it promotes a "delusion" on a level of science which kinda scares me. I mean, a lot of super religious people are very mentally fucked up and grasp at straws to support their claims, and this movie just gives them a super sweet pixie straw filled with sugar. It wouldn't bug me except that these delusions really do hurt people in tangible ways!

The second thing is that the woman DID go through a really messed up PHYSICAL experiment if you will, and her rationalizing it with theory of relativity adds a bit more credibility to her case rather than a nutjob (or group of nutjobs) claiming god spoke to them internally out of no where. I especially liked it when she admitted that her hallucinating this is a very well possibility before she went on the emotional rant "but deep down I know I happened!" in order to feed that crazy religious person parallel. I think a real scientist would say something like, "Given what I personally experienced, I believe there is indeed a 10-15% chance I hallucinated it all, but a 85-90% chance it was really a wormwhole and I met aliens."

What are your thoughts my fellow divine atheists?