Better reasons to quit Christianity

[Mister Agenda]

Let's put it this way: My wife is the most skeptical and logical person I know. She never talks about the paranormal. Yet, the day she watched a news program about the first teacher to take a ride in to space in the space shuttle, she turned to her mother and said, "Mom, I know she is going to die." That shuttle exploded on take off.

Too bad you and she did not take it serously then. if you had made an effort you might have saved the lives of seven people...or at least have it on record that you tried. Have you heard of the Jeane Dixon effect? It refers to Jeane Dixon's many failed predictions being ignored while her few correct ones made her the world's most famous psychic.

People sometimes get premonitions, a strong feeling about a future event. They are usually wrong, but some of them will occasionally be right. Based on a single incident, there's nothing mysterious about your wife's experience: she had a premonition that turned out to be correct. It's not like the odds of a rocket crashing are a million-to-one. And note that your wife didn't predict THAT. If the teacher had died in a car crash or had a stroke or was shot, you would still take the prediction as fulfilled. The less specific the prediction, the more likely it is to be fulfilled by chance.

If premonitions turned out to be true 25% of the time, I would take them seriously. It isn't nearly that close.

So what does this mean? Was she crazy? No, the proof was in the tragedy. Was she lying? She is actually the most honest person I know (I should know, because I've been married to her for many years). She has a type A personality, and would rather confront someone and die, than tell a lie. So how did she know? I don't know. I just know she did, and I cannot deny the evidence.

How does lying enter into it? You give the impression that you were there at the time, so you would be in a position to know firsthand what your wife said, and the only way she could be lying is if she believed the teacher wouldn't die and said she would anyway. Now if Christa McAuliffe were alive today, you would probably have forgotten the incident by now and certainly wouln't bring it up. No lying or craziness, just a very human tendency to count the hits and ignore the misses.

Does this prove there are ghosts? No. But it does prove to me that there are experiences others have that I have never had that cannot be denied as genuine.

Genuine in the sense that all involved were sincere, or genuine in that it was genuinely paranormal? I have had strange experiences myself, including two 'ghostly ones', but I tend to examine such things closely: one was an accidentally-formed illusion, the other fits the profile of a night terror.

So when someone talks about an experience he has had which seems remarkable to me, and I know that person to be sincere and sane, I hesitate to brush off what he says.

When my aunt tells me not to touch the stove because it's hot, I don't touch it. She is sincere and sane, and I hesitate to brush off what she says...and she is in a position to know if the stove is hot. But if she told me not to touch it because it contained a spirit which would destroy my soul, I would (perhaps cautiously, given her previous reliability) have to verify it for myself, starting by finding out why she believes that. Sincere and sane people can be fooled, misperceive, or have strange beliefs. One hallucination doesn't mean you're insane. People have been investigating these things scientifically--the only reliable tool we have to find out if a phenomena is real or not--for over a hundred years without being able to verify a single case that is what it appeared at first to be.

Next to hearsay, eyewitness testimony is the worst kind: a dozen people at a scene will give you a dozen versions of what happened. We miss things, we misinterpret things, we make mistakes; and we are more likely to do all three when frightened. We're wired to be more likely to attribute agency to events than to think they're random because even though people likely to dismiss a rustle in the grass as the breeze will be right more often than people who are more likely to think it's a dangerous predator, the person who is usually right is still more likely to get eaten, 'cause they only have to be wrong once.

Knowing that people have hallucinations, knowing that people sometimes think they're awake when they're still dreaming, knowing that our eyes can play tricks on us, knowing that other people can play tricks on us, knowing that many times it has been shown that something that at first seemed supernatural turned out to be mundane, knowing that everyone who has tried to prove the reality of paranormal phenomena has failed...is it really that reasonable to accept someone's account of an incident that would be at odds with what we already know about the natural world (like how we can know things) at face value?

Think about the implications. If your wife had stopped McAuliffe from boarding the shuttle: Her prediction would have been wrong (assuming you didn't get one of those twist endings where she falls into a wood chipper or something to fulfill the prophecy, since your wife didn't say how McAuliffe would die). However, there was nothing really your wife could have done, so the information was useless, except as a story to tell later, I suppose. But if her information really came from the future, you and she were affected by something that hadn't happened yet. You seem to think that something like God is needed as a terminus for an otherwise infinite chain of cause-and-effect, but you don't even believe that causes must precede effects because you believe in a case where the effect (the premonition) preceded the cause (the crash). If effects can precede causes, the chain of causality can start that way: an effect that preceded a cause, making an ultimate cause unnecessary.

I'm not going to go down those rabbit holes based on anecdotal evidence.