My time spent in a “Christian Life School” has not only cemented my atheism, but has also reinforced my unbelief in things that I used to find mostly unbelievable but somehow amusing and worthy of interest. I now find myself watching shows about ghosts, bigfoot, and UFOs with a jaw-dropping incredulity that just furthers my sense of alienation from the rest of society. It seems most people put faith in silly religions, search in dark places for ghosts, monsters, demons, aliens, refusing to pickup pennies if they are tails up, and all kinds of ridiculousness. Where is the sanity in any of this?
In the interest of Halloween, I thought this could be incorporated into an amusing and possibly enlightening topic. I see a lot of these belief systems as otherwise rational people trying to assign some sort of pattern to things that have no pattern. Christians don’t believe in coincidence, of course, and many people who believe in alien visitations or leprechauns think religious people are fools.
It fascinates me to realize that people fall prey to a penchant for attempting to make sense out of our environment by assigning illusions of causation for inexplicable events. This may seem harmless, but beliefs are difficult to overcome, especially when one assigns the role of an agent (i.e. god) in situations that truly have no agent. It then becomes natural to designate de facto falsehoods based on an original “belief” that has no real evidence supporting it to begin with. If you believe in ghosts, and you hear a strange noise, or catch something out of the corner of your eye, you are more likely to believe that a ghost is responsible. People who believe in god do not look for things that will disconfirm their original belief, because they have made sense of things that make no sense by believing in something that has worked for them by their own confirmation bias. They will continually seek confirmation and ignore opposing evidence.
In writing this, I even begin to wonder if writing in this particular forum is simply my own confirmation bias! (I am preaching to the choir, so to speak). But I have spent 8 months in an intensive Bible school, have attended church, and discussed religious matters with Christian friends throughout my life (which mostly consists of a lot of nodding and smiling on my part). Embarrassingly, I have made 5 or 6 “altar calls” and have been “saved” as many times (apparently, none of them stuck). I have been studying this phenomenon of belief and have opened myself to opposing viewpoints, and I still see religion and other strange paranormal beliefs to be simply constructs of the human mind, and nothing more.
I have digressed here, but I am wondering if anyone’s skepticism toward religion has filtered to skepticism in other supernatural areas. For those that were once believers, did the opening of your eyes transfer to other weird things? Has anyone compartmentalized belief in some weirdness, but scoff at the belief in other weirdness?
In the interest of Halloween, I thought this could be incorporated into an amusing and possibly enlightening topic. I see a lot of these belief systems as otherwise rational people trying to assign some sort of pattern to things that have no pattern. Christians don’t believe in coincidence, of course, and many people who believe in alien visitations or leprechauns think religious people are fools.
It fascinates me to realize that people fall prey to a penchant for attempting to make sense out of our environment by assigning illusions of causation for inexplicable events. This may seem harmless, but beliefs are difficult to overcome, especially when one assigns the role of an agent (i.e. god) in situations that truly have no agent. It then becomes natural to designate de facto falsehoods based on an original “belief” that has no real evidence supporting it to begin with. If you believe in ghosts, and you hear a strange noise, or catch something out of the corner of your eye, you are more likely to believe that a ghost is responsible. People who believe in god do not look for things that will disconfirm their original belief, because they have made sense of things that make no sense by believing in something that has worked for them by their own confirmation bias. They will continually seek confirmation and ignore opposing evidence.
In writing this, I even begin to wonder if writing in this particular forum is simply my own confirmation bias! (I am preaching to the choir, so to speak). But I have spent 8 months in an intensive Bible school, have attended church, and discussed religious matters with Christian friends throughout my life (which mostly consists of a lot of nodding and smiling on my part). Embarrassingly, I have made 5 or 6 “altar calls” and have been “saved” as many times (apparently, none of them stuck). I have been studying this phenomenon of belief and have opened myself to opposing viewpoints, and I still see religion and other strange paranormal beliefs to be simply constructs of the human mind, and nothing more.
I have digressed here, but I am wondering if anyone’s skepticism toward religion has filtered to skepticism in other supernatural areas. For those that were once believers, did the opening of your eyes transfer to other weird things? Has anyone compartmentalized belief in some weirdness, but scoff at the belief in other weirdness?
