Paranormal
(Work in progress)
There are a few things which led me to stop believing in the existence of a god, soul and afterlife:
1. Realizing no one was actually communicating with the other side was an important unraveling thread for me when I started to doubt my beliefs. In particular, I believed Sylvia Browne to be a purveyer of spiritual truth. After I found out Sylvia was a complete fraud, I was still open to the possibility of there being other genuine psychics. After reading up on Sylvia, I looked up psychic fraud on youtube. I saw some other tv psychics exposed, using the tricks of the trade: cold reading and information gathering prior to reading. Not that I trusted many tv psychics before, but that did shake my trust in psychics even more. I started watching videos of James Randi's show in which he'd put people making claims to the test. Surprise, surprise,
they all failed. I started taking that James Randi challenge seriously and started to really let it sink in that he offers a valid test for anyone claiming paranormal
ability, and if anyone actually does have such ability, they should take the challenge and win an easy million. So why hasn't anyone gotten the million dollar prize to date?
It's amazing what we ignore when we are so devoted to our cherished beliefs! Now that I no longer had any trust or loyalty towards Sylvia, I could face the obvious
truth. One step closer to being freed from delusion.
2. I gained more of an interest in science, the origins of life, evolution of life, etc. I was realizing how the scientific explanations we have were quite adequate and that a god was really not necessary. I had always accepted scientific explanations however now I was able to see them without god goggles obscuring my perception.
Before science and it's many discoveries brought us explanations of our environment and life on the planet, people invented gods to explain what they didn't understand. However, we now understand what those lights in the sky are and how they work. We know how the planet formed, we have a good idea how life started and have concrete evidence (if not outright proof) that it evolved into all the species we see today by purely natural means. Do we really still need to cling to a god to explain anything? Must we continue to use god to fill in any gaps in our knowledge? This seems foolish seeing as how we have a rich history of eliminating a god explanation from gap after gap. If we have learned anything, it should be that it is futile, pointless, and downright silly to keep using god as a gap filler! This realization of course led to many a night contemplating, with great unease and difficulty I might add, a natural, godless universe. But the more I allowed my imagination to entertain this notion, the easier it became and the more it made sense. And I can honestly say that today I cannot imagine a universe with a god in it, as I can now see with complete clarity that such a thing is so improbable, unnecessary, and untestable as to be absurd.
3. Like all believers I had a distorted idea of what constitutes evidence. Reports of NDEs, ghost sightings and experiences, claims of communicating with the dead. Stories found on the net, in books, on tv, and heard from others. Pictures and video of supposed paranormal activity. All this is incredibly convincing if you don't know any better. I was learning how unreliable people are at accurately judging reality and that many people lie. Human beings are great decievers of themselves and others.
The idea of spirit evolved from the observation of breath and animation of living things. It would be assumed that some other animal was responsible for making life move and breath. For more info on this see Animism
The idea of spirits around us and being able to contact them took off with the Fox sisters in 1848. Despite their fraud being exposed, a whole new trend was started and would go on to influence for generations to come how people would interpret various phenomena.
To really know if something exists, we need to be able to study it scientifically, and while this may sound cynical and annoy the shit out of believers, there really is good reasoning behind this. If it cannot be verified as true, how can we know it's true when we are so prone to error? Homo sapiens are awfully good at telling stories and believing them. And from what we have so far, that's exactly what the belief in gods and ghosts appears to be.
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Misc Points:
People are affected by and function differently from brain damage, showing that if there is a soul, it's lying dormant. People believe we are physically animated by a soul, however it is useless when it comes to our mind and personality. Why then couldn't the rest of our body work by natural processes? And if we can function without a soul, why would we need one at all?
