An Email About the Paranormal

I received this email and not being an expert on this subject thought I'd listen to the collective wisdom of people who are. What do you think?
I have seen that much of the articles and commentaries in many of the atheist blogs relate to religion as it's practiced in America now. I have a few questions and I hope someone can help me out here.

I am currently a pentecostal from South India (Kerala) but since last year I have been very critical of Christianity. Pentecostal christianity in India is slightly different from the American version. They forbid jewelery, movies, secular songs etc etc (I know there are branches of Christianity in America that practise this too) and there is a lot of 'miracle work', personal prophecy and revelations and steer quite a lot towards personal piety. However, reading the bible and really thinking about it, the whole thing brings forward way too many holes for christianity to be a one stop shop for truth. I have slowly started to move away from christian beliefs and have been inching my way towards atheism. And in most areas I have started to find answers that gives me some clarification.

However there is one aspect that stumps me and I have not been able to find any solid articles regarding it. It's about prophecies. And by prophecies I mean the ability of some pastors to know secrets of a particular person. We have quite a lot of that in India. Predicting the future is nothing big, cause I have read about self fulfilling prophecies and such. But the following has me researching online frantically but not finding anything yet. There's quite a lot of 'supernatural' prophecy phenomenon and miracles (mostly unverified and quite a lot of them involves doctors just doing their job) in South India.

1. I recently had an interesting conversation with my sister and she told me about a pastor who visited her college and revealed things about her that he couldn't possibly have known ever. He did this again with her friends who weren't Christians that turned out to be true. These are things their friends didn't know but he was able to reveal it to the person privately and sort of 'call them to action'. For example, he told a Hindu friend that she has a weak heart and that she should consider surgery. No one except my sister and another friend knew about this. And it seems unlikely that someone else told him about her. (Again, this is what the hindu friend told my sister after the so called consultation, it's not likely again that she should have to lie about it).


2. She again tells me of a couple of students from a college prayer group who meet with a pastor they never knew at a church meeting. The pastor tells them that there is one student in the prayer group who cries out at night. It turns out that a student was going through quite a lot of personal problems and he used to cry at night after prayers. This student accepted christ eventually and was worried about his brothers who weren't saved. He prayed quite a lot and one day saw a vision of a large book and he sees the names of his brothers in the book. The next day he gets a call from his brother and the brother tells him that he accepted Christ last night (the night the student saw that vision). This is what the student told my sister and I have no way of verifying whether he exaggerated or just plain lied.

3. A girl was pondering over questions of God's existence over several months almost tiring herself out. One morning she goes to a church with my sister and friends and the preacher speaks exactly 'what she needed to hear'. After the service, the preacher comes over to the group and suddenly points to her and says 'today's message was directed to you'. No one had told him anything about her.(Incidentally, this pastor's father is thought of as a false prophet by quite a number of people that I know personally)

4. I personally have had prophecies told about me. Most of them were predictions of my future which I could point out as self fulfilling and I could argue against it.

These are unverified but these are testimonies from my sister, who has no reason to lie because she herself is a bit of skeptic, although not as much as me. She does believe the 'holy spirit' reveals things but I definitely can't believe that unless it's verifiable. And there are just too many holes in Christianity to reconcile it with this apparently supernatural phenomenon. I do think this is an area that needs some serious scientific research. If it's being done already please point me to articles regarding this.

Is it the unknown power of the mind? Would anyone at DC know anything in-depth about this? Have you gone through this experience?

Do you think young people are vulnerable enough for people to look into their minds easily?

17 comments:

Trou said...

This problem is similar in nature to Pascal’s wager. One obvious fault of logic is how does one know whether, in betting on god, you are betting on the correct god. Maybe god prefers other religions or none at all.

When you encounter the inexplicable there is a tendency to jump to the conclusion most familiar. I can't explain certain events in my life but just because I have no explanation for them doesn't mean that I should make one up, or assume that someone else knows more than I do. Maybe their explanation is incorrect even if they seem certain.

Learn to live with unanswered questions and doubt. Jumping to conclusions half cocked only leads to having to realize that you were wrong later. Meanwhile, you will have invested a goodly portion of your energy pursuing a dead end.

I had a friend who was a psychic. She was an amazing woman. She lived an interesting life and graduated top of her class when she was in her 60's or early 70's. She had an ability to retain most of what she read and could speak on many topics. She would also consult people when life would get confusing in the manner of a psychic and was accurate on many occasions. She was not a Christian.
She also died having seen a future for herself that featured her living in an art community. It never came to be. So, she was right many times and yet she was wrong in her predictions about herself but how was she able to predict the future at all? I don't know but I'm not going to jump at the chance to speculate and make up something just to have a ready answer for this question.

I once heard of an experiment with mice and a maze. One group of rodents was in Europe and the other in the States. Once the mice in Europe learned how to solve a maze puzzle the mice in the States would be able to learn it much faster without having contact of any kind. I can't remember the details and would love to hear if anyone recalls this and what conclusions were drawn from it. This would mean, if true, that humans aren’t the only ones who can intuit things and that the Holy Spirit isn’t responsible for it. Have you ever wondered how flocks of birds or schools of fish can move in unison as if they all were all thinking the same thing at the same time? Amazing and unexplained as far as I know but it is probably not attributable to the work of the Spirit.

Rotten Arsenal said...

At the expense of "outing" myself and revealing my seemingly incompatible interests, I will say that I have had a strong interest in the so-called paranormal for most of my life. While most second graders were reading easy reading fiction, I was devouring books about unexplained phenomena. As I got older, I started actively "investigating" supposedly haunted locations and other places where odd things reportedly happened.

Recently, I joined a long established national group of "paranormal investigators." This group, like myself, have some very strict rules and methods for investigation. We're skeptics first and we use science to rule out as much as possible. Whatever can't be explained is simply left in the category of "can't be explained." We can't truthfully make a claim for the paranormal, we can only run out of reasons for normal.

I've had experiences that I can't explain. I know how my brain has rationalized them and it's probably in much the same was that religions have been started... it's simply an occurrence whose explanation is unknown to the person who experienced the phenomena. It might seem incompatible for an atheist to pursue events supposedly tied to "life after death" and other seemingly mythological and magical happenings, but quite frankly, there's a lot about the universe we still don't know.

I have theories about what is happening and they are all grounded in science. While I don't know what happens to our "consciousness" after death (again, I have theories), if it does somehow survive, there is science and laws of energy that are applicable to the universe tat are behind this change.

To me, this area of study represents future discoveries that will either thoroughly debunk these claims of hauntings and psychic abilities or it will prove scientifically that there is some previously unknown interaction and movement of energy that occurs within and outside of the human brain. Either way, we will learn more about the fascinating computer that is stuck in our heads.

So I guess in a nutshell, I find the possibility of what has been called "psychic ability" and "communication with the dead" to be plausible. But much like discovering why the sun appears to move across the sky, we will, in time, find out that our primitive descriptions of what is occurring is not what is happening at all.

Rotten Arsenal said...

Trou: While my theory for the long distance mice involves some possible energy transference communication (like a wireless network for brains) that I can't really figure out how to test with any conclusive results, the birds and fish moving together seems easier.

Granted, most of my scientific knowledge is just stuff I pick up from reading whatever I can get a hold of, but I would think that birds and fish, having evolved into such a collective society, are probably far more in tune with very, very subtle body language. Humans can read body language, often better than they give themselves credit for since it is sometimes picked up without even realizing it, but perhaps the fish and birds can read each other so well and so fast that one gives a signal and the rest of the group can process and react to it faster than we think possible.

Yoo said...

It sounds like a combination of confirmation bias, cold reading, and possibly prior investigation by the "prophets". If she also listed all the times where a specific prophecy missed, the number of fulfilled prophecies might not seem so remarkable given their generality. And they don't seem to be too unlikely to fit any given group or person. Also, some of them could be the listener actively but subconsciously trying to fit a claim to themselves.

They could be genuine psychic claims and predictions, but I think my guess could fit the facts as described. It's possible that more details could falsify my hypothesis, of course.

Evan said...

I agree that it's most likely cold reading.

As a doctor you can definitely do some of that and amaze people, but it's really just knowledge of the broad outlines of a person's life from a few simple details.

I could become unethical and make millions ...

Ty said...

I agree with Yoo. We have a tendency to latch on to the one fulfilled prophecy and forget the many nonsense ones. The secular version of prophets are called psychics here.

Try visiting:

http://www.stopsylviabrowne.com/home/

There are good articles debunking psychics in Skeptics Magazine as well. Some of this information might be found at www.skepticality.com

There are a few people that are just very skilled at "reading" people and fishing the right information from them. Harry Houdini did a fantastic job at exposing mediums and psychics in his day. Psychics will usually give a bunch of fortune like prophecies and only a couple detailed ones that require inside knowledge. That is where their background research comes into play. They only have to have a couple of facts about one person to make the rest of their prophecies to sound like they have an inside scoop. In Christian realms, the generic stuff goes like this.

1. If the person is older, "I sense the Lord telling me that you have a physical condidtion that you need healing from." Now wait for any tells from the person to be more specific, or point out the obvious.

2. If the person is younger, "I feel the Lord telling me that you've been struggling with X in your life. X can be whatever is most likely to fit the young man, and if all else fails, just say lust, because what young man doesn't love to lust?

I sense God telling me that you have an unsaved family member that we need to pray for.

I sense the Holy Spirit telling me that God has been intervening with your job. Have you've been having an issue with work or your job. This covers them even if they don't have a job. The prophet can say, "The Lord has something in the works for you." And if they do have job, then there is a high percentage chance that that phrase will still work.

It is so not hard to fish for information to make it sound prophetic, especially if you can get someone to give you a small insider tip.

Good luck!

Bart said...

Im with Yoo on this. Definitely sounds like cold reading. In the US, Sylvia Brown is probably the most popular cold reader, but they are a dime a dozen here.

What is far more interesting are the honest cold readers. These guys are people who do it for entertainment, and then explain at the end that it was a hoax. Look up anything from the illusionist Derren Brown. He is an amazing illusionist, and does some bizare stuff with cold reading that needs to be seen to be believed.

The thing about all these frauds, if you can get them to do a double blind test, they always fail.

Anonymous said...

A quick personal brainstorm on this brought out
the following.
You can be a mentalist, a great salesman and persuasive speaker too, you just need the tools.

There are several default reasoning schemes that people commonly use and seem to come naturally. Some of these are
"Factors of Persuasion" and "Cognitive Bias". They were documented through scientific testing. I wrote a DC article on it and liked to it here ->
Role of Persuasion and Cognitive Bias in your Church
- People like stories and are willing to give the teller of the story the benefit of the doubt about the truth of it.
- People are more likely to believe a story if it comes from someone they like.
- People are more likely to believe a story if it fits with what they already believe or want to believe.
- People overestimate the degree of belief in others.
- People look for confirmation of what they already believe and disregard things that contradict.
- People are more likely to believe a story if it comes from an authority.
- People will come to believe what they hear the more it is repeated to them.
- People are more likely to believe a story if it is believed by the larger group.
- People are more likely to believe a story that is accompanied by symbols or imagery to include music.
- People will change their evidence based viewpoint if it contradicts the viewpoint of the group.
- People are likely to use the precautionary principle as illustrated by Pascals Wager in minimizing risk.
- People fill in the gaps in information naturally. We fill in the missing details in stories, with the blind spot in the eye, movies, music etc.
- People "remember the hits and forget the misses". People are naturally terrible at perceiving and interpreting probabilistic data.
- People are naturally terrible at estimating probability.

look up / google
* stage magicians,
* mentalists,
* cold reading but not cold reading for actors, cold reading for mentalism
* you can get books from amazon on how to be a mentalist (it was fun as a kid),
* penn and teller "bullshit' episode on psychics and mentalists, they do mentalism in thier act in vegas
* James Randi talks about it a lot on his blog,
* podcast "skeptics guide to the universe "
* look up books on "how to be a good salesman"
* look up the book "the art of deception"
* books on how to win any argument
* look up robert cialdini the god father of persuasion science
* look up theories of persuasion
* look up my favorite theory, the elaboration likelihood model
* look up "the skeptics dictionary"

think about the following.
The only first hand information you have didn't seem to impress you. You don't have first hand info about what impressed the others. My guess is that it wouldn't have impressed you if you had been there.

Think about where is the benefit, what is the benefit, and who gets the benefit, then the how (after you read up on it) and the why will take care of itself .

thats all the time I have now.

Anonymous said...

and the thing about "someone in the audience is yada yada"
you can do that too. Statistically you can figure out something common and yell it out one day and be all filled with the spirit too.

"someone in the audience is afraid of losing their job!"

Hit!
thank you jesus!

Ty said...

I just found a fantastic article on this subject that sums it all up perfectly.

http://www.meta-religion.com/Paranormale/Skeptics/deconstructing_the_dead.htm

Unknown said...

It could also be a matter of indirect retelling of the stories in a lot of cases. And as such, without seeing these things ourselves, could be made up. I've always wondered about stories of people seeing spirits and ghosts but I've never seen one myself. Am I somehow lacking? Or are the stories total fabrications?

Inqoinf said...

INQOINF's word of the day; coincidence... its powerful stuff.

1. This trick is called cold reading. They talk in a way so that people reveal details of their lives. Derren Brown has a few videos about this that can be found on Youtube.
2. Saying someone "Cries out" is pretty vague and even if you have just a group of 3-5 people it is highly likely that will mean something to someone in the group. Once someone has admitted they do this he can do more cold reading and get them to admit more details from vague statements. The funny thing about coincidences is that you hear about them. You never hear about the millions of people who don't have visions, etc. The amount of people that have these experiences is exactly what you would expect from coincidence. Also how would you explain the same phenomenon of people from all different religions, coincidence is the only explanation. I've picked up the phone with the intentions of calling a certain person and then, viola, they call. I've been thinking of someone and they call, it's all just coincidence.
3.Again, there were probably a bunch of people in the audience who felt "the message was directed towards them" and there was a high likely hood that whoever he pointed at would be one of them. Even if he pointed at someone who didn't feel that way the likelihood of them saying anything is slim.
4. A great video series to watch is Paul Harrison's "From Belief to Unbelief." He talks about prophecies he received from other people about his life and how they were often confirmed and how he would pray and receive "signs" from god that confirmed he was doing what god wanted him to do. Eventually because many of these things never came true he started figuring out that it was all coincidence and that he was mostly making unrelated events confirm what he wanted them to and it had nothing to do with a god.

Seriously watch some youtube videos with James Randi, Derren Brown, and others like Dateline debunking Benny Hinn, etc. You will see how their tricks work and why god is not involved.

Anonymous said...

a movie loosly based on James Randi's debunking of faith healer peter popov is call Leap of Faith with steve martin.

See if you can get a copy somewhere.

Anonymous said...

Thanks all. I just didn't have time to research into this.

Rotten Arsenal said...

Everybody wants to believe something... for every person that wants to believe, there's someone out there willing to take advantage of that desire for their own personal benefit.

IdahoEv said...

Yes, this sounds like a clear example of cold reading. To give a *specific* explanation to the writer of the letter, consider question #2.

The writes states that the preacher said to the entire prayer group that someone in the group "cries out at night". If the group is 10 to 20 people, there is a very high chance that someone in the group cries at night sometimes. So the pastor just says that as a random guess, and when someone says "oh, that's me!" everyone is impressed. If nobody reacted, he would just quickly move on to the next subject and nobody would remember the "failure".

In #3, the preacher is able to tell the girl "this message was for you" because he almost certainly noticed her expressions and reaction during his sermon. By her own admission, it was what she needed to hear, so this was probably quite obvious in her body language and expressions. So, saying something about that afterwards doesn't require any supernatural skill.

The other examples given aren't detailed enough for the explanation to be obvious, but I guarantee you it is some combination of lucky guessing, capitalizing on the obvious, and confirmation bias among the audience.

Edwardtbabinski said...

I was "baptized in the holy spirit" and can still "speak in tongues" and read a lot of books published by Logos, the charismatic book publisher prominent in the 1970s, early 1980s. One such book was "The Satan Seller" about the story of a supposed ex-Satanic priest named Mike Warnke, whose stories in that book were later called into question after some Christian journalists started checking them out. See their investigative articles & book, "Selling Satan." Another book published by LOGOS was about the Pentecostal revival in Indonesia titled, Like a Mighty Wind, with stories about people being raised from the dead and whole villages walking across water miraculously like Jesus to reach dry land during a flood. Such stories were later called into question even by Pentecostals.

The examples you are give are not difficult to question. For instance there's many cases of people imagining a horoscope or "cold reading" from a psychic is "all about them." In fact the Amazing Randi did an experiment involving a room full of people who were asked to give precise information about their birth date and time, and then told that the information was being fed into a computer that would tell them all about themselves based on the exact position of the start at the minute they were born. A majority of participants read the resulting horoscope which was a few pages long and said it was "dead on," and then Randi asked everyone to pass their individual horoscope reading to the person on their left, and everyone saw that the entire room had been given the SAME horoscope. But people's mind picked out the things in it that applied most to them, and ignored the parts that didn't really apply to them.

All superstition involves remembering only the "hits" and ignoring the torrent of "misses."

A similar experiment was carried out by Chris Angel recently on his cable TV program. He is an illusionist/magician from Las Vegas. He took people out of a line at random and offered to tell their fortunes one at a time inside a little fortune telling booth using Tarot Cards. He seemed to shuffle the deck and asked the person to close their eyes before he picked the first card out of the deck and interpreted it using his psychic ability (he has none). While their eyes were briefly shut he quietly placed some cards atop the recently shuffled deck, and those cards were all in the same order for each person, and they all had some fortune on them that Chris simply read aloud to the person, repeating the same fortune for each person. And all the people were amazed at the "accuracy" of their fortunes. But it was all the same fortune for them all.

As for someone believing a "sermon was speaking to them," that's exactly how sermons work, they are meant to speak to people. Perhaps the minister came over the group with that particular girl and saw something in her demeanor, or overheard something that made him believe that girl had reacted strongly to the sermon, and so he told her, "That sermon was for you!" You have to remember such a minister is in the job of reaching people and notices when a person has been reached to some extent by something, and his job includes tightening the screws further at the first sign of reactions from the crowd or from individuals.

As for a recently converted brother being concerned for his sibling's salvation, that is what one would expect. Was he also concerned about the salvations of others besides his brothers? Probably, so if anyone he knew or was concerned about got "saved" he would take than as a miracle as well, and probably could recall an earlier time he'd prayed for them and their salvation. And were all of his siblings saved? You only mention one brother getting saved, what about the fellow's other brother?

My own online testimony can be googled:

"If It Wasn't For Agnosticism I Wouldn't Know WHAT to Believe"