Supernatural Phenomena Quotes

He says you don't often find angels in places like happy homes and rich people's backyard parties. He says that angels flock to places like hospitals and homelss shelters and jails, because those people realize they need help. And do they are able to believe in strange phenomena. Funny how the world is backward. The really comfortable people don't always see much supernaturally, and to the ones who have to struggle, it's, like, breathing in their faces. The first are last... and the last are first.

There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution.

Science is increasingly answering questions that used to be the province of religion. Religion was an early attempt to answer the questions we all ask: why are we here, where did we come from? Long ago, the answer was almost always the same: gods made everything. The world was a scary place, so even people as tough as the Vikings believed in supernatural beings to make sense of natural phenomena like lightning, storms or eclipses. Nowadays, science provides better and more consistent answers, but people will always cling to religion, because it gives comfort, and they do not trust or understand science.

Close analysis of ‘miracles’ have never led to any proof for a supernatural explanation, and, in fact, many have proven to be cheap magic tricks, hallucinations or primitive misunderstandings of natural phenomena.

The primary leaders of the so-called founding fathers of our nation were not Bible-believing Christians; they were deists. Deism was a philosophical belief that was widely accepted by the colonial intelligentsia at the time of the American Revolution. Its major tenets included belief in human reason as a reliable means of solving social and political problems and belief in a supreme deity who created the universe to operate solely by natural laws. The supreme God of the Deists removed himself entirely from the universe after creating it. They believed that he assumed no control over it, exerted no influence on natural phenomena, and gave no supernatural revelation to man. A necessary consequence of these beliefs was a rejection of many doctrines central to the Christian religion. Deists did not believe in the virgin birth, divinity, or resurrection of Jesus, the efficacy of prayer, the miracles of the Bible, or even the divine inspiration of the Bible. These beliefs were forcefully articulated by Thomas Paine in Age of Reason, a book that so outraged his contemporaries that he died rejected and despised by the nation that had once revered him as 'the father of the American Revolution.'... Other important founding fathers who espoused Deism were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, James Madison, and James Monroe. [The Christian Nation Myth, 1999]

A myth is 'a narrative involving supernatural or fancied persons embodying popular ideas or social phenomena.' Women love telling stories . . . the girl-group is a gigantic narrative full of morality tales locked up like charms in a crystallized sound.

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning. There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives. 2. Myth: Prayer works. Studies have now shown that inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of the subject. 3. Myth: Atheists are immoral. There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominantly non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies. 4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with science. In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. We have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion. 5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive death. We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. 6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view. 7. Myth: Believing in God is not a cause of evil. The examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the justification for their evils on humankind are too numerous to mention. 8. Myth: God explains the origins of the universe. All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it is all going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law 'create' or 'build' a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, 'loves' us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? 9. Myth: There's no harm in believing in God. Religious views inform voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight.

When supernatural phenomena do not occur, what is the attitude of the writers of Scripture toward their absence? When there is an absence of the supernatural in the Old Testament, the Scripture writers do not take that as normative for the people of God; rather they take it as a sign of judgment.

An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles—except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand. If

That enormously complex biological interactions are so flawlessly coordinated as to result in such obvious manifestations as human thought or the electrical activity that dries the heartbeat is as exciting to me -- actually more exciting -- than such phenomena were when I was a small boy and thought them divinely (in the supernatural sense) driven.

Psychic and paranormal phenomena will always be a source of controversy, because it is an inconvenient reminder that there is more to our reality than meets the eye.

An interesting contrast between the geology of the present day and that of half a century ago, is presented by the complete emancipation of the modern geologist from the controlling and perverting influence of theology, all-powerful at the earlier date. As the geologist of my young days wrote, he had one eye upon fact, and the other on Genesis; at present, he wisely keeps both eyes on fact, and ignores the pentateuchal mythology altogether. The publication of the 'Principles of Geology' brought upon its illustrious author a period of social ostracism; the instruction given to our children is based upon those principles. Whewell had the courage to attack Lyell's fundamental assumption (which surely is a dictate of common sense) that we ought to exhaust known causes before seeking for the explanation of geological phenomena in causes of which we have no experience.

The various and complex conditions under which Reason and Morality appear are the twists and turns of the frontier between Nature and Supernature. That is why, if you wish, you can always ignore Supernature and treat the phenomena purely from the Natural side;

It is likely that the stage for Satan’s final deception began to be set in the twentieth century with the intense proliferation of aliens and unidentified flying objects (UFO’s) in the media, especially movies and television. My belief is that these demonic phenomena will be part of the final grand deception, perhaps in concert with human intervention. More recently, the rise in popularity of vampirism, ghosts, mediums, witchcraft, and other forms of forbidden supernatural phenomena will serve to prepare a generation saturated in every form of evil for the ultimate Satanic deception to come.

It is human nature to believe that the phenomena we know are the only ones that exist,” Marie wrote, “and whenever some chance discovery extends the limits of our knowledge we are filled with amazement.” She was talking about radioactivity, but she could almost have been talking about the supernatural: “We cannot become accustomed to the idea that we live in a world that is revealed to us only in a restricted portion of its manifestations.

I have always disliked the term 'paranormal’ because it refers to anomalies — ‘abnormal’ phenomena not yet understood by science. It implies that psychic perception is something that exists ‘outside of what is considered normal'...This notion of ‘abnormality’ never sat well with me. I have spent too many years of my life being made to feel defective or ‘outside of normal,’ and I am no longer willing to consider my psychic abilities to be an ‘unfortunate anomaly.

All the things that we value—justice, equality, free speech, human rights—are actually concepts churned out of imagination, just like ideas such as God, heaven, hell, rebirth and immortality. We may classify these ideas as secular or religious, rational or supernatural, value one over the other, but they are essentially creations of humans, by humans, for humans. They are artificial constructions, not natural phenomena. They have no independent existence outside humans.

Pantheism is atheistic towards the gods of all traditional religions. It does not believe in any separate creator, or in a personal judging God. Many pantheists of a physicalist bent agree with atheists that all phenomena are a part of nature. They do not believe there are any supernatural beings or spirit realms, and that if any currently unexplained phenomena such as extra-sensory perception should eventually be established as real, they will operate through natural physical forces.

Even working within the laws of physics, researchers with an anti-God bias often make blind leaps of faith to escape any evidence of God’s involvement in the universe. For centuries Christians were criticized for their God-of-the-gaps arguments. Sometimes that criticism was deserved. Christians tended to use gaps in understanding or data to build a case for God’s miraculous intervention. Then, when scientific discoveries uncovered a natural explanation for the “divine phenomenon,” ridicule was heaped not only on those proposing the divine explanation but also on belief in God’s existence. In the twenty-first century we see the reverse of the God-of-the-gaps arguments. Nontheists, confronted with problems when ample research leads to no natural explanations and instead points to the supernatural, utterly reject the possibility of the supernatural and insist on a natural explanation even if it means resorting to absurdity. For example, steady state models were supported by an imagined force of physics for which there was not one shred of observational or experimental evidence. The oscillating universe model depended on an imagined bounce mechanism for which there was likewise not one shred of observational or experimental evidence. Similar appeals to imagined forces and phenomena have been the basis for all the cosmological models proposed to avoid the big bang implications about God (see chs. 8 and 9). The disproof of these models and the ongoing appeal by nontheists to more and more bizarre unknowns and unknowables seem to reflect the growing strength of the case for theism (see chs. 8, 9, 13, and 16).

Recently, a professor at Penn State told my son Joshua's class that during a trip to Africa, he had a mysterious encounter with a witch doctor of a tribe. He watched with horror as this witch doctor put a man into a trance and made the man put his face into burning coals and move them around with his nose on the ground. The man received no burns and wasn't even aware of the sensation of burning his flesh. The professor, being a committed naturalist, had no way to understand this obviously satanic phenomena. His scientific model didn't include any supernatural cause, whether it be godly or satanic. He admitted this fact to the class. He said that he saw what happened yet he did not believe it, because he couldn't fit it into what he called his scientific model . . . If their presuppositions rule out the supernatural, that is that! There is no more.

If we’re not careful, the automation of mental labor, by changing the nature and focus of intellectual endeavor, may end up eroding one of the foundations of culture itself: our desire to understand the world. Predictive algorithms may be supernaturally skilled at discovering correlations, but they’re indifferent to the underlying causes of traits and phenomena. Yet it’s the deciphering of causation—the meticulous untangling of how and why things work the way they do—that extends the reach of human understanding and ultimately gives meaning to our search for knowledge. If we come to see automated calculations of probability as sufficient for our professional and social purposes, we risk losing or at least weakening our desire and motivation to seek explanations, to venture down the circuitous paths that lead toward wisdom and wonder. Why bother, if a computer can spit out “the answer” in a millisecond or two?

You can stop talking to yourself... But you can only do so by talking to yourself. Counting your breaths or reciting a mantra. ... Talking is just recording what you are thinking. It's not the thing itself. When I'm talking to you some separate part of my mind is composing what I'm about to say. But it's not yet in the form of words. So what is it in the form of?... Aside from raising the spectre of an infinite regress--as in who is whispering to the whisperer--it raises the question of a language of thought. Part of the general puzzle of how we get from the mind to the world. A hundred billion synaptic events clicking away in the dark like blind ladies at their knitting. Mental illness differs from physical illness in that the subject of mental illness is always and solely information. Information. Yes. We're here on a need-to-know basis. There is no machinery in evolution for informing us of the existence of phenomena that do not affect our survival. What is here that we dont know we dont know about. Would that be the supernatural? I think it would just be the whereof. The whereof. The whereof one cannot speak. Wittgenstein. Very good. You're going to run out of breadcrumbs.

Only when it comes to explaining psychic phenomena of a minimal degree of clarity are we driven to assume that archetypes must have a nonpsychic aspect. Grounds for such a conclusion are supplied by the phenomena of synchronicity, which are associated with the activity of unconscious operators and have hitherto been regarded, or repudiated, as 'telepathy' etc. Scepticism should, however, be levelled only at incorrect theories and not at facts which exist in their own right. No unbiased observer can deny them. Resistance to the recognition of such facts rests principally on the repugnance people feel for an allegedly supernatural faculty tacked on to the psyche, like 'clairvoyance'. The very diverse and confusing aspects of these phenomena are, so far as I can see at present, completely explicable on the assumption of psychically relative space-time continuum. As soon as the psychic content crosses the threshold of consciousness, the synchronistic marginal phenomena disappear, time and space resume their accustomed sway, and consciousness is once more isolated in its subjectivity. We have here one of those instances which can best be understood in terms of the physicist's idea of 'complementarity'. When an unconscious content passes over into consciousness its synchronistic manifestation ceases; conversely, synchronistic phenomena can be evoked by putting the subject into an unconscious state (trance).

If we’re not careful, the automation of mental labor, by changing the nature and focus of intellectual endeavor, may end up eroding one of the foundations of culture itself: our desire to understand the world. Predictive algorithms may be supernaturally skilled at discovering correlations, but they’re indifferent to the underlying causes of traits and phenomena. Yet it’s the deciphering of causation—the meticulous untangling of how and why things work the way they do—that extends the reach of human understanding and ultimately gives meaning to our search for knowledge. If we come to see automated calculations of probability as sufficient for our professional and social purposes, we risk losing or at least weakening our desire and motivation to seek explanations, to venture down the circuitous paths that lead toward wisdom and wonder. Why bother, if a computer can spit out “the answer” in a millisecond or two? In his 1947 essay “Rationalism in Politics,” the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott provided a vivid description of the modern rationalist: “His mind has no atmosphere, no changes of season and temperature; his intellectual processes, so far as possible, are insulated from all external influence and go on in the void.” The rationalist has no concern for culture or history; he neither cultivates nor displays a personal perspective. His thinking is notable only for “the rapidity with which he reduces the tangle and variety of experience” into “a formula.”54 Oakeshott’s words also provide us with a perfect description of computer intelligence: eminently practical and productive and entirely lacking in curiosity,

Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, always curious about new phenomena, once placed himself in a sensory deprivation tank and tried to leave his physical body. He was successful. He would later write that he felt that he had left his body, drifted into space, and saw his motionless body when he looked back. However, Feynman later concluded that this was probably just his imagination, caused by sensory deprivation. Neurologists who have studied this phenomenon have a more prosaic explanation. Dr. Olaf Blanke and his colleagues in Switzerland may have located the precise place in the brain that generates out-of-body experiences. One of his patients was a forty-three-year-old woman who suffered from debilitating seizures that came from her right temporal lobe. A grid of about one hundred electrodes was placed over her brain in order to locate the region responsible for her seizures. When the electrodes stimulated the area between the parietal and temporal lobes, she immediately had the sensation of leaving her body. “I see myself lying in bed, from above, but I only see my legs and lower trunk!” she exclaimed. She felt she was floating six feet above her body. When the electrodes were turned off, however, the out-of-body sensation disappeared immediately. In fact, Dr. Blanke found that he could turn the out-of-body sensation on and off, like a light switch, by repeatedly stimulating this area of the brain. As we saw in Chapter 9, temporal lobe epileptic lesions can induce the feeling that there are evil spirits behind every misfortune, so the concept of spirits leaving the body is perhaps part of our neural makeup. (This may also explain the presence of supernatural beings. When Dr. Blanke analyzed a twenty-two-year-old woman who was suffering from intractable seizures, he found that, by stimulating the temporoparietal area of the brain, he could induce the sensation that there was a shadowy presence behind her. She could describe this person, who even grabbed her arms, in detail. His position would change with each appearance, but he would always appear behind her.)

I have come to think of the UFO problem in terms of three distinct levels. The first level is physical. We now know that the UFO behaves like a region of space, of small dimensions (about ten meters), within which a very large amount of energy is stored. This energy is manifested by pulsed light phenomena of intense colors and by other forms of electromagnetic radiation. The second level is biological. Reports of UFOs show all kinds of psychophysiological effects on the witnesses. Exposure to the phenomenon causes visions, hallucinations, space and time disorientation, physiological reactions (including temporary blindness, paralysis, sleep cycle changes), and long-term personality changes. The third level is social. Belief in the reality of UFOs is spreading rapidly at all levels of society throughout the world. Books on the subject continue to accumulate. Documentaries and major films are being made by men and women who grew up with flying-saucer stories. Expectations about life in the universe have been revolutionized. Many modern themes in our culture can be traced back to the "messages from space" coming from UFO contactees of the forties and fifties. The experience of a close encounter with a UFO is a shattering physical and mental ordeal. The trauma has effects that go far beyond what the witnesses recall consciously. New types of behavior are conditioned, and new types of beliefs are promoted. Aside from any scientific consideration, the social, political, and religious consequences of the experience are enormous if they are considered over the timespan of a generation. Faced with the new wave of experiences of UFO contact that are described in books like Communion and Intruders and in movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, our religions seem obsolete. Our idea of the church as a social entity working within rational structures is obviously challenged by the claim of a direct communication in modern times with visible beings who seem endowed with supernatural powers. This idea can shake our society to the very roots of its culture. Witnesses are no longer afraid to come forward with personal stories of abductions, of spiritual exchanges with aliens, even of sexual interaction with them. Such reports are folklore in the making. I have discovered that they form a striking parallel to the tales of meetings with elves and jinn of medieval times, with the denizens of "Magonia," the land beyond the clouds of ancient chronicles. But they are something else, too: a portent of important things to come.

Hume failed to understand that paranormal phenomena do not violate or contradict nature; the supernatural is an extension of the natural world and conforms to universal laws.

During the Reformation and the Enlightenment, nature came to be understood in a mechanistic sense as bereft of any capacity for divine grace or revelation. We’ll explore this suggestion further in the next chapter. In order to appreciate the significance of this, we have to recognize that nature is a cultural construct. When we speak of nature, we are using language to describe the world around us with all its species, life-forms and landscapes. But nature is a concept whose meaning changes with different perceptions and ways of looking at the world. This means that supernatural is also a concept which has different meanings, for it refers to phenomena or experiences which do not seem to fit within our particular expectations of what nature is or should be. The term supernatural therefore depends on a certain concept of what natural is. For many people who are less determinately materialist than Dawkins, there may be an indeterminate region which is neither strictly natural nor strictly supernatural. A red rose may be natural, but when I am given one by the person I love, I experience a range of emotions, memories and associations which endow that rose with symbolic significance and make it, in some sense, supernatural. It transcends its natural biological functions to communicate something in the realms of beauty, hope and love.

Kim Il-sung understood the power of religion. His maternal uncle was a Protestant minister back in the pre-Communist days when Pyongyang had such a vibrant Christian community that it was called the “Jerusalem of the East.” Once in power, Kim Il-sung closed the churches, banned the Bible, deported believers to the hinterlands, and appropriated Christian imagery and dogma for the purpose of self-promotion. Broadcasters would speak of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il breathlessly, in the manner of Pentecostal preachers. North Korean newspapers carried tales of supernatural phenomena. Stormy seas were said to be calmed when sailors clinging to a sinking ship sang songs in praise of Kim Il-sung. When Kim Jong-il went to the DMZ, a mysterious fog descended to protect him from lurking South Korean snipers. He caused trees to bloom and snow to melt. If Kim Il-sung was God, then Kim Jong-il was the son of God. Like Jesus Christ, Kim Jong-il’s birth was said to have been heralded by a radiant star in the sky and the appearance of a beautiful double rainbow. A swallow descended from heaven to sing of the birth of a “general who will rule the world.

St. John would say that the natural working of the faculties is not adequate to attain to union with God, and the beginner is drawn to spiritual exercises as much by the satisfaction as by any purely spiritual motives. For the psychologist, even while he is refraining from making any judgment about the religious object, is often painfully aware that if interior experiences are viewed as if they had nothing to do with the overall dynamics of the psyche, then their recipient runs the risk of damaging his psychic balance. If temptations must be seen only as the direct working of the devil and inspirations and revelations the direct working of the Holy Spirit, then the totality of the psyche and the flow of its energy will be misunderstood. The biggest danger to the beginner experiencing sensible fervor, or any other tangible phenomenon, is that they will equate their experience purely and simply with union with God. The very combination of genuine spiritual gifts and how these graces work through the psyche creates a sense of conviction that this, indeed, is the work of God, but this conviction is often extended to deny the human dimension as if any participation by the psyche is a denial of divine origin. The beginner, then, can become impervious to psychological and spiritual advice. The sense of consolation, the feeling of completion, the visions seen, or the voices heard, the tongue spoken, or the healings witnessed, are all identified with the exclusive direct action of God as if there were no psyche that received and conditioned these inspirations. This same attitude is then carried over into daily life and how God's action is viewed in this world. If God is so immediately present, miracles must be taking place daily. God must be intervening day-by-day, even in the minor mundane affairs of the recipients of His Spirit. This does not mean that genuine miracles do not take place, nor that genuine inspirations do not play a role in daily life, but rather, if we believe that they are conceptually distinguishable from the ordinary working of consciousness, we run the risk of identifying God's action with our own perceptions, feelings and emotions. The initial conversion state, precisely because of the degree of emotional energy it is charged with, is often clung to as if the intensity of this energy is a guarantee of its spiritual character. As beginners under the vital force of these tangible experiences we take up an attitude of inner expectancy. We look to a realm beyond the arena of the ego and assume that what transpires there is supernatural. We reach and grasp for interior messages. Thus arises a real danger of misinterpreting what we perceive. What Jung says about the inability to discern between God and the unconscious at the level of empirical experience is verified here. We run the risk of confusing the spiritual with the psychic, our own perceptions with God Himself. An even greater danger is that we will erect this kind of knowledge into a whole theology of the spiritual life, and thus judge our progress by the presence of these phenomena. “The same problem can arise in a completely different context, which could be called a pseudo-Jungian Christianity. In it the realities of the psyche which Jung described are identified with the Christian faith. Thus, at one stroke a vivid sense of experience, even mysticism, if you will, arises. The numinous experience of the unconscious becomes equivalent to the workings of the Holy Spirit. Dreams and the psychological events that take place during the process of individuation are taken for the stages of the life of prayer and the ascent of the soul to God by faith. But this mysticism is no more to be identified with St. John's than the previous one of visions and revelations.

you study phenomena beyond the bounds of regular science: investigate the strange and inexplicable, prove things most people would label occult or supernatural.

In all phenomena of the supernatural, it's either nature playing tricks on us, or our own mind playing tricks on us, or another mortal playing tricks on us.

We are always looking for supernatural beings in the universe, forgetting that we are part of these supernatural phenomena. We are the inner souls and not the corporeal beings.

Studies have proposed that children implicitly support belief in an afterlife, as it is impossible for the human brain to comprehend non-existence. There is tantalizing research on humans being “implicit” or “intuitive” theists—that is, primates programmed to interpret design in disorder, patterns in nothingness, order in ambiguity. We are set to attribute intention to natural objects. Humans are “promiscuous” teleologists, interpreting natural phenomena as being there for us. The world revolves around Homo sapiens, and any perceived design is surely the consequence of supernatural forces choosing to single out humanity.

The cause of lightning was once thought to be God's wrath, but turned out to be the unintelligent outcome of mindless natural forces. We once thought an intelligent being must have arranged and maintained the amazingly ordered motions of the solar system, but now we know it's all the inevitable outcome of mindless natural forces. Disease was once thought to be the mischief of supernatural demons, but now we know that tiny, unintelligent organisms are the cause, which reproduce and infect us according to mindless natural forces. In case after case, without exception, the trend has been to find that purely natural causes underlie any phenomena. Not once has the cause of anything turned out to really be God's wrath or intelligent meddling, or demonic mischief, or anything supernatural at all. The collective weight of these observations is enormous: supernaturalism has been tested at least a million times and has always lost; naturalism has been tested at least a million times and has always won. A horse that runs a million races and never loses is about to run yet another race with a horse that has lost every single one of the million races it has run. Which horse should we bet on? The answer is obvious.

Humanity passed from a world of tolerant pagan polytheism to the black and white duality of Christianity. Something was either on the side of God, salvation, and goodness or on the side of the devil, evil and perdition. The tolerance, logic, rationality, and knowledge of natural phenomena that were an integral part of the Classical world were manipulated by the Church in favor of the supernatural, the mysterious, and faith in providence.

Supernatural Supernatural has several meanings; the usual is “miraculous; ascribed to agencies or powers above or beyond nature; divine.” Because science is commonly regarded as a method of studying the natural world, a supernatural phenomenon is by this definition unexplainable by, and therefore totally incompatible with, science. Today, a few religious traditions continue to maintain that psi is supernatural and therefore not amenable to scientific study. But a few hundred years ago virtually all natural phenomena were thought to be manifestations of supernatural agencies and spirits. Through years of systematic investigation, many of these phenomena are now understood in quite ordinary terms. Thus, it is entirely reasonable to expect that so-called miracles are simply indicators of our present ignorance. Any such events may be more properly labeled first as paranormal, then as normal once we have developed an acceptable scientific explanation. As astronaut Edgar Mitchell put it: “There are no unnatural or supernatural phenomena, only very large gaps in our knowledge of what is natural, particularly regarding relatively rare occurrences.”2 Mystical Mystical refers to the direct perception of reality; knowledge derived directly rather than indirectly. In many respects, mysticism is surprisingly similar to science in that it is a systematic method of exploring the nature of the world. Science concentrates on outer, objective phenomena, and mysticism concentrates on inner, subjective phenomena. It is interesting that numerous scientists, scholars, and sages over the years have revealed deep, underlying similarities between the goals, practices, and findings of science and mysticism. Some of the most famous scientists wrote in terms that are practically indistinguishable from the writings of mystics.

Many people, who study paranormal or supernatural phenomena, believe that children are sensitive to the spirit world.

We may classify these ideas as secular or religious, rational or supernatural, value one over the other, but they are essentially creations of humans, by humans, for humans. They are artificial constructions, not natural phenomena. They have no independent existence outside humans.

It is clear to me that the disappointed expectations of materialistic science in solving the mystery of consciousness have their roots in the basic assumptions of materialists regarding the origin of the universe and the origin of life on earth. Their position on consciousness is logically dependent upon the theory that life (biological phenomena) occurs spontaneously and is intrinsic to matter, without the necessity of any extraneous operative; and that theory is in turn dependent upon the assumption that the universe itself originated from a material source without the involvement of any supernatural cause. The materialist-physicalist theory of consciousness is founded on those precedent assumptions; and without those assumptions, the physicalist theory of consciousness crumbles. It is a theory based on a theory based on a theory, each one dependent, not upon the accumulation of evidence, but upon the lack of empirical evidence to the contrary.

When scientists are unable to explain a certain phenomenon, it does not prove that the phenomenon belongs in the paranormal domain. It means that we need more data and we need to carry out more analyses. If you ask a five-year old to define calculus, and the kid has no idea what you are talking about, it does not mean that calculus is something supernatural. It means that the kid’s brain needs to grow further in order to comprehend calculus. The same goes for various unexplained phenomena of the world.

In the search for meaning we must not forget that the gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind; they are the creatures of man, not vice versa. They are needed and invented to give meaning and purpose to the puzzle that is life on earth, to explain strange and irregular phenomena of nature, haphazard events and, above all, irrational human conduct. They exist to bear the burden of all things that cannot be comprehended except by supernatural intervention or design. This

Instead of describing psychic phenomena as ‘paranormal,’ I prefer the term supernatural, because it refers to metaphysical or transcendental phenomena beyond human understanding. The supernatural does not adhere to natural laws, nor to parochial notions about what should be considered 'normal.' It can therefore not be conveniently 'explained away’ by physics or empirical science.

The ineffable nuances and numinous intricacies of the supernatural do not adhere to natural laws, nor to materialist superstitions. It will thus forever remain beyond the scope of Newtonian science and the narrow mind.

Referring to something as 'supernatural' is not to call it unreal or untrue - on the contrary. The existence of the term itself is a linguistic and cultural acknowledgment that inexplicable things happen which we identify as being somehow beyond the natural or the ordinary, and that many of us hold beliefs which connect us to spheres that exist beyond what we might typically see, hear, taste, touch, or smell. It resonates with the idea that even though we have advanced technologically, there still are elements and concerns that rest outside our arena of control or conscious understanding.

The concept God, Supernatural Power, Spirit, Deity, or in whatever other term the essence of Theism may have found expression, has become more indefinite and obscure in the course of time and progress. In other words, the God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events. -Emma Goldman

Humans are “promiscuous” teleologists, interpreting natural phenomena as being there for us. The world revolves around Homo sapiens, and any perceived design is surely the consequence of supernatural forces choosing to single out humanity. Horror taps into this atavistic theism in that it may fill the reader with a form of awe that allows one to contemplate whether there’s something beyond this physical world, an order, an ineffable truth that sets us to gape at the majesty of chaos. The conceit of an ineffable cosmos caring about us is a seductive thought, and even permeates secular humanist ideologies in exemplifying the virtues of our accomplishments through art, science and such, as if we’ve achieved some pinnacle on the Great Chain of Being.

Beneath the official pantheon, including the likes of Enlil, the Assyrian sky god, and Ea, the god of wisdom, was a layer of demons, such as Lamashtu, who threatened pregnant women, and Namtaru, the plague-demon, who needed to be mollified. Natural phenomena such as floods and lightning, or epidemic diseases, were not scientifically understood despite Mesopotamian advances, and so people at all levels of society preferred supernatural explanations.

Secondly, there is no necessary logical connection between natural processes and a supernatural causative factor. The relationship between the two is contrived not through any logical step but by a leap of faith. While there may be logical steps leading back to Big Bang from currently observed phenomena, the last step from the initial singularity - or what existed before the Big Bang - to God is not logical. It is actually in defiance of all logic.

Ben Franklin was renowned in his time for snatching “lightning from the sky and the scepter from tyrants.”49 Until he invented the lightning rod, ringing church bells specially baptized with water from the Jordan River were used to ward off lightning.50 This practice, which required humans to grasp a connection to a hunk of metal atop the highest structure in a town, killed more than 120 bell-ringers from 1750 to 1784, but was still believed to be effective.51 Many Christians did not believe humans had a right to defend themselves from divine attacks. Abbe Nollett, a man of the church, deemed it “as impious to ward off Heavens’ lightnings as for a child to ward off the chastening rod of its father.”52 Franklin retorted that “the Thunder of Heaven is no more supernatural than the Rain, Hail, or Sunshine of Heaven, against the Inconvenience of which we guard by Roofs & Shades without Scruple.”53 When organized Christianity failed to stop the spread of the useful invention, it blamed other natural phenomena, such as the 1755 Boston earthquake, on Franklin’s rods.54 John Adams condemned the religious opposition to Franklin’s rods, writing that they “met with all that opposition from the superstition, affectation of Piety, and Jealousy of new Inventions, that Inoculation to prevent the Danger of the Small Pox, and all other useful Discoveries, have met with in all ages of the World.”55 Franklin’s unholy invention was a blessing to humanity from the mind of a man, and religion fought it at every step.

Human actions are based on imagination, belief, and faith, not on objective observation – as military and political experts know well. Even science, which claims its methods and theories are rationally developed, is shaped by emotion and fancy, or by fear. And to control human imagination is to shape mankind's collective destiny. Beyond the question of the physical nature of the UFOs, it is imperative that we study the deeper problem of their impact on our imagination and culture. How the UFO phenomena will affect, in the long run, our views about science, about religion, about the exploration of space, is impossible to measure. But the phenomenon does appear to have a real effect. And a peculiar feature of this mechanism is that it affects equally those who "believe" and those who oppose its reality in a physical sense. For the time being, the observation can be made that it is possible to make large sections of any population believe in the existence of supernatural races, in the possibility of flying machines, in the plurality of inhabited worlds, by exposing them to a few carefully engineered scenes the details of which are adapted to the culture and symbols of a particular time and place. Could the meetings with UFO entities be designed to control our beliefs? Consider their changing character. In the United States, they appear as science fiction monsters. In South America, they are sanguinary and quick to get into a fight. In France, they behave like rational, Cartesian, peace-loving tourists. The Irish Gentry, if we believe its spokesmen, was an aristocratic race organized somewhat like a religious-military order. The airship pilots were strongly individualistic characters with all the features of the American farmer.

Many apparently paranormal phenomena and amazing deeds attributed to supernatural powers can be partly explained - as Alexandra David-Neel herself pointed out - as the effects of mental training. Through concentration an extraordinary force can be developed which produces a form of energy.

Theory and mythology, natural and supernatural, science and magic are dichotomies shaped by later human reasoning. In fact, all of them are rooted in the search for the underlying forces behind the phenomena and the quest to enlist them on one's side.

Magic and miracles are the exclusive privilege of those who consistently believe. There is no such thing as ‘temporarily suspending your disbelief’ in order to access such metaphysical wonders. You either believe...or you don’t.

Early in the morning of October 8, 1991, Mrs. Florence A. Snegg of Uvula, Michigan, was having an extremely vivid dream in which her son, Russell, was involved in a terrible automobile accident. Suddenly she was awakened by the ringing of her telephone. On the line was a Missouri state trooper, calling long distance to remind Mrs. Snegg that she had never had children

an agnostic Buddhist would not be a believer with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena and in this sense would not be religious. I’ve recently started saying to myself “I’m not a religious person” and finding that to be strangely liberating. You don’t have to self-identify as a religious person in order to practice the dharma.

The second secret: The second secret may actually be the often prophesized “Illumination of the Soul”. Throughout the history of recorded apparitions, locutions, and other supernatural spiritual phenomena, there has been a consistent thread of prophecy that describes an interior “illumination” of the soul that will be experienced by every living human being at a designated time. It is also called the illumination of the conscience.

I rose in my bed and gazed round the room, the whole of which, though only lit by a dim twilight, was still sufficiently visible. I thought at first it was a trick of Jasper’s, who might have provided himself with a bellows or a long tube; but a careful investigation of the apartment convinced me that no one was present. Besides, I had locked the door, and it was not likely that any one had been concealed in the room before I entered it. It was exceedingly strange; but still the draught of cool wind blew on my face and chest, every now and then changing its direction,—sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other. I am not constitutionally nervous, and had been too long accustomed to reflect on philosophical subjects to become the prey of fear in the presence of mysterious phenomena. I had devoted much time to the investigation of what are popularly called supernatural matters, by those who have not reflected or examined sufficiently to discover that none of these apparent miracles are supernatural, but all, however singular, directly dependent on certain natural laws. I became speedily convinced, therefore, as I sat up in my bed peering into the dim recesses of my chamber, that this mysterious wind was the effect or forerunner of a supernatural visitation, and I mentally determined to investigate it, as it developed itself, with a philosophical calmness.

The best distinction I’ve heard between “supernatural” and “naturalistic” worldviews is that a supernatural worldview asserts the existence of ontologically basic mental substances, like spirits, while a naturalistic worldview reduces mental phenomena to nonmental parts. Focusing on this as the source of the problem buys into religious exceptionalism. Supernaturalist claims are worth distinguishing, because they always turn out to be wrong for fairly fundamental reasons. But it’s still just one kind of mistake.

There are no unnatural or supernatural phenomena, only very large gaps in our knowledge of what is natural.” 9

Page 247: We must not infer from [the decline of religion] that rationalistic or scientific education has made any great progress in the lower classes. A person may not only question the truth of religious doctrines—he may also be convinced that all religions are historical phenomena born of innate and profound needs of the human spirit, and that attitude may be arrived at through a realistic mental training based on comprehensive studies that has gradually accustomed the mind not to accept as true anything that is not scientifically proved. In such a case, on losing one system of illusions, the individual is left so well balanced that he will not be inclined to embrace another, and certainly not the first that comes along. But the mass of lower-class unbelievers that we have in nations of European civilization today—and also, it must be confessed, the great majority of unbelievers who are not exactly lower-class, do not arrive at rationalism over any such road. They disbelieve, and they scoff, simply because they have grown up in environments in which they have been taught to disbelieve and to scoff. Under those circumstances, the mind that rejects Christianity because it is based on the supernatural is quite ready to accept other beliefs, and beliefs that may well be cruder and more vulgar. The workingman in Paris, Barcelona, Milan, the farm laborer in Romagna, the shopkeeper in Berlin, are at bottom no more emancipated from the ipse dixit than they would be if they went to mass, to a Protestant service or to the synagogue. Instead of believing blindly in the priest they believe blindly in the revolutionary agitator.

Superstition, the product of ignorance of causes, of the proneness to seek the solution of phenomena out of and beyond nature, and of the consequent natural but unreasoning dread of the Unknown and Invisible (ignorantly termed the supernatural), is at once universal

Me, I know the by-ways of ghostland as I know my own pocket, and I solemnly assure you there is no such thing as the supernatural. There is undoubtedly the superphysical; there is also that class of natural phenomena which we do not understand; but the supernatural? Non, it is not so.

On the other hand, there are people who seek a certain reality in religion and in doing so reach different sorts of supernatural experiences – inner experiences that give one a feeling of reality, accompanied by perceived unnatural phenomena, which science cannot (or does not wish to) explain.