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Occam’s Machete's avatar

Seems pretty simple to consistently dismiss extraordinary claims of all stripes on the basis of insufficient evidence, whether they be regarding UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts, incorporeal dragons in garages, or Nephites on snowmobiles.

Most of the people who are willing to entertain the existence of UFOs are also believers in the supernatural, purely because nonbelievers are still a minority slice of the U.S. population. (How many elected officials aren't religious, on paper, at least?)

Strange things and remarkable coincidences happen all the time and the mind is quite frequently an unreliable narrator of external reality. Motivated reasoning is everywhere, all the time, by default. An outside view of doubt is the only sane baseline response to extraordinary claims of any kind.

"All this in spite of the fact that there is a far greater quantity of evidence for all of those [supernatural] things."

Noting that "quantity" is not "quality," could we get some grainy videos of angels puling high-G maneuvers or something?

(Also, the existence of the supernatural/deity doesn't/wouldn't compel most people to accept any moral rules they wouldn't be open to anyway, and a huge number of ostensibly religious people either blatantly disregard the traditional moral dictates of their religion or reinterpret things until there is no conflict for them.)

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Zippy's avatar

Please check out this reference re the very eclectic body of work by Jeffrey Kripal who is easily the

worlds most interesting scholar of religious themes etc - especially in the USA.

http://jeffreyjkripal.com/body-of-work

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