Amazing Coincidence, or Miracle?

[Tonus]

I grew up in a Christian home, believing in miracles and that God proves himself in many ways each day. I no longer believe in God, but some of the stories of "miracles" I've heard are just... hard to dismiss.

As I was slowly losing my faith, one of the things I noticed about such stories is that they were always recounted by someone who "heard" about them. And I can still recall a good dozen or two. Basically they are urban legends, stories that always happen to someone else (often two or three times removed) and which are impossible to verify. If you ever read through the Snopes site, you will discover that a lot of people will tell such stories as if they experienced them, even though the story --to the last detail-- has been told numerous times before by many other people.

As was already said, confirmation bias plays a very strong role in how these stories shape our outlook. If they tell us something we want to believe, we are much more likely to accept them critically. Conversely, if they go against what we believe (for example, a person of a different faith telling of a mystical experience with god or angels) we are more likely to find some fault with them, or create our own alternative view (that person was deceived by demons!). As you hear more of these "experiences" from people, they can serve to strengthen a belief system even though they are nothing but hearsay.

If we want to believe in miracles and the supernatural, we can find an endless bunch of "examples" of both. They are particularly effective because they can be layered over with any number of apologetic responses, such as "you can't prove it didn't happen" or "how else do you explain it" or "are you calling my wife's hairdresser's second cousin a LIAR?"