If Atheism Is A Religion.....

[Sword of Christ]

Me either. One of the things I noticed over time was that there were no shortages of stories of such experiences with ghosts or demons or angels and so on. Yet I cannot recall any that were first-person. Lots of third and fourth-person accounts of amazing experiences that had happened to a friend-of-a-friend or a distant relative or someone else who you probably wouldn't ever get the chance to speak with directly.

I've read plenty of first hand experience accounts. You could say they were hallucinating it if you want to presuppose material naturalism and consciousness as a secretion of the brain and all that business.

And all of them sound preposterous to anyone who isn't already primed to believe in such things.

Same goes if you're primed to believe that anyone who ever encounters one of these entities is hallucinating because the physical world is all that exists. There would have to be occasions when people hallucinate the being as well, they may well manifest within consciousness rather than physically or that's the most common mode of appearance.

Even the people who told those stories (and clearly believed them) would scoff at any fanciful story about things that they were not primed to accept, such as space aliens or Bigfoot. And even the ones they accepted were conditional; if a person from another denomination or religion spoke of seeing an angel, this was likely to be scoffed at or attributed to demons.

Different religions may interpret the beings differently, though they all believe in good and evil spirits of some form. There is another world out there.

I don't think any of the people relaying (and judging the veracity of) these stories realized just how carefully they were filtering the information in order to confirm their beliefs. Magical creatures that fit into their worldview? Definitely happened as was claimed. Magical creatures that didn't fit? Person must be mistaken, or seeing things, or fooled by the magical creatures that they know exist.

You have to assume what you're assuming to begin with. It could easily be that these things are real in some way, or at least some of them are. A great many people have seen or experienced something very odd and otherworldly over the course of human history and these things are still seen and reported today.