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Showing posts from November, 2014

The 'Good News' is only good if we buy the 'Bad News'

I use this analogy. A salesman comes to your town and tells you that everyone in this town has a terrible, awful disease which no one knew about until this salesman shows up. Although the salesman can offer no proof of this disease he swears we will all suffer and die from it. However, he says the "good news" is he has the cure, and one can only get the cure from him, but he will save you and you will be eternally grateful to him if you but buy his product. Meaning: Christians tell us that we all have sin and that sin will bring us a terrible awful fate. Nevermind that until they came along, no one ever suspected we had this terrible condition and the Christians can't offer one shred of proof that we have 'sin' or that a terrible fate awaits us. But, the 'good news' aka Gospel is they have the only cure and we can only get it from them - one can only be saved from sin and hell through Christ, not by living a good life or practicing peaceful Buddhism, etc.

My Take on Miraculous Experiences

So, what is my bias in the way I think about these experiences? I do believe that in all likelihood, the supernatural doesn't exist. I believe the natural world/cosmos is all there is. So, my bias is each and every one of these experiences probably have a natural explanation. I have read thousand of these experiences (premonitions, fulfilled prophecies, answered prayers, near-death experiences, astral projections, Voodoo curses, ghost encounters, feeling touched by dead relatives, divining rod, ESP, alien sightings, etc), and I have never encountered an experience for which I could not come up with at least one idea of how it may have happened naturally using nothing more than known processes such as: confirmation bias, illusory correlations, faulty memory reconstructions, hallucinations, etc. The problem is these events don't happen under careful, skeptical scientific observation. Every time scientists have made careful observations, the supernatural thing that supposedly can&