The Atheist That Hates - Your last response was interesting, just because of the implications when you switch out “ghosts” for something with a religious theme. Miracles, for example. Your response can easily be used to support belief in “acts of god “stories of miracles transcend all cultures and areas of the world, all times and places, and all types of people. It is something that has existed in some form as far back as human history goes. Even if 99.9% of them can be explained as tricks of the mind, optical illusions, naturally occurring events, whatever it may be, there is still a small portion that we can not simply write off and dismiss and that should be considered. In the end, if the information is know, the explanation may be simpler than we ever imagined but until we have that, I’ll remain curious but skeptical myself.” You seem inconsistent in your thinking.

1st August 2011

Question with 6 notes

sleepysleepypretty asked: Your last response was interesting, just because of the implications when you switch out "ghosts" for something with a religious theme. Miracles, for example. Your response can easily be used to support belief in "acts of god

"stories of miracles transcend all cultures and areas of the world, all times and places, and all types of people. It is something that has existed in some form as far back as human history goes. Even if 99.9% of them can be explained as tricks of the mind, optical illusions, naturally occurring events, whatever it may be, there is still a small portion that we can not simply write off and dismiss and that should be considered. In the end, if the information is know, the explanation may be simpler than we ever imagined but until we have that, I’ll remain curious but skeptical myself."

You seem inconsistent in your thinking.

Well, a couple of things about that. First I would take a bit of issue with the idea that miracles are as prevalent as ghost stories. I don’t think miracle stories are anywhere near the level of ghost stories in how common they appear. Regardless, who said that I am not just as curious about things that people consider to be miracles? Just because I think anything declared as a miracle does have a logical explanation doesn’t mean I’m not curious about what it is. There is also no reason that anything declared as a miracle automatically has to imply God.

Personally I have always had a great curiosity about the Miracle of the Sun. In short roughly 40,000 or so people witnessed the sun dancing around in the sky and crashing into the earth. Many people were frightened and say that even after being rained on just minutes earlier after the event they were completely dry. Should we simply write this off as a simultaneous shared delusion by 40,000 people in one remote area at the same time? Or should we accept that the sun really did dance around in the sky and crash into the earth but was only able to be seen in Fatima, Portugal? Both sound a bit ridiculous.

Obviously there is an explanation but chances are we will never be able to know for that particular event what happened. I’m not saying either of the explanations I provided are correct, and I honestly have no idea what a good explanation would be. I remain curious, but am of course skeptical that the sun danced and crashed into the earth. I also have a good reason to doubt writing off 40,000 people as simply mistaken for what they saw. Basically I keep ghost stories at the same level as miracle stores, interesting to hear but without any form of solid proof, no reason to solidly believe such a thing but no reason not to remain curious to what the real answer is.

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