So hello guys!
I wanted to talk about something, about my mom that is theist, she is an Agnostic Theist, though she is sure that some kind of paranormal things exist, which I want to talk about.
I myself, am a Gnostic Atheist and I doubt in anything paranormal, but my mom's stories make me rethink my beliefs. My mom doesn't like lying and according to her stories, I doubt that she would be lying but still, I don't think that this would be true...
There are three stories that I wanted to talk about.
The first one:
"I was working as usual, doing my stuff, I was about 20 kilometers away from home, when suddenly I heard a voice inside my head telling me to go home, this was neither a male nor female voice, it was something like gender neutral, it's hard to explain, but it told me to go home, I couldn't go home because I'd get fired. It was lunch time, I ignored the voice for the first time, then it called me again, I got a bit scared but I still didn't listen, it called me few more times, louder and more "aggressively" so I decided to talk to my boss who was my friend. I was on my way home, there were no buses home so I had to get someone to pick me up, I was home in an hour or so, when I got home, my old husband was doing some work on balcony and I saw your one-year-old then sister drinking bleach, so I grabbed her and went to a hospital which was close. If not that voice, your sister would've been dead."
Second one:
"I was working in a toolshed, then I head same kind of voice saying my name, few times, I was terrified because it seemed very real, but I was all alone at the time, there was literally noone else, so I went home because it was after work anyway. About a kilometer away from the place, I heard the same voice, it was coming from the ditch which was filled with mud, it said "Luba! Get me out of here!" I was confused because sticks swimming in the mud were talking to me, but a moment later i saw eyes in the mud, there was a person that fell there, I tried to get him out but couldn't, so I stood on the road and stopped the first car that came by, and told them what happened, they didn't believe me and though that I was crazy, I kept telling them that there was a guy in the mud but they didn't see him, when they came out to check the mud from closer, the guy that fell there said "Come on guys! Get me out!", then he got shocked, but they we got him out of the mud and he told us that he was going to the store to buy some beer and he slipped and feel into the ditch."
And the last one:
"I was on my way home, I got into the bus and there was a lady, she was old and she was wearing some kind of old clothing, she asked me to give her something to drink, I refused because i barely got anything to drink and it way for way home anyway if I got thirsty. I told her to buy it herself. Few minutes later she asked me again, I refused again. And she asked me third time: "So you're not going to give me anything to drink?", I said "no". When I got home, your sister told me that my old husband died in a fire while asleep."
So, I'm not saying that I believe it, I'm not sure, but my mom isn't that kind of person who lies, my mom is quite honest. Which makes me rethink this.
What are your opinions about my mom's stories?
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Hello Andrew:
Before questioning the entire fabric of reality by believing in so-called paranormal phenomena, I would suspect the fallibility of the human memory and senses. The human memory is easily fooled. Sometimes imagined events and dreams can leak into our memories of actual events.
Even if she says that she clearly remembers that?
Human memory is a tricky thing. Scientist have conducted human memory test/experiments that lead to rather frightening results that we should all be aware of:
1: Confidence in a memory has no bearing on accuracy of a memory. Test takers would rate how confident they are in their memories in a controlled experiment of spoken and seen audio/visual stimuli. The confidence ratings made little to no bearing on actual accuracy of recalled memory.
2. Our memories are very prone to being inaccurate or "contaminated." Our brains create imperfect memories from the start, and are very prone to suggestion, confusion etc. Our brains do not operate like computers that store information on a hard drive. The longer it has been since the memory the more corrupted the memory can get. We already know this intuitively, we can not look at a complex picture for a few seconds, and then recreate it perfectly just from memory. (I am aware there are a few people in the world capable of doing this, but most of us can not come even close.)
3. Time and time again DNA evidence exonerates people/defendants that in court that had, eyewitnesses that were absolutely "sure." The eye witness was not likely lying, simply their imperfect memories failed them. Their was a 60 minutes episode a few years ago that highlighted this issue really well.
All of this again highlights a powerful reason why we need testable, repeatable evidence of the paranormal, not "eye witness accounts."
Your mother probably is not lying to you, but she is likely getting the events and situations wrong, thinking its a voice in her head.
There also some logical inconsistencies with her stories, that I could get into if you like.
You can if you want, that'd be interesting.
But yeah, when to think about it, human memory is not perfect. So I guess that's settled then.
I will do a quick summary on the 2nd one that stuck out to me without much reflection. (The third one someone else already addressed.)
I know this story is 2nd hand, 2nd hand, which in the retelling some details probably got lost in the multiple retellings. Which may account for some/all of these inaccuracies. But as the story reads to me...
If I read it correctly, the guy in the mud said "Luba! Get me out of here!" How did the guy know her name? (I am assuming her name is Luba.) Did the same voice talking to her also talk to him, and tell the guy in the mud her name? Was this guy not surprised, (perhaps later, that a voice told him her name?)
Did she not actually hear anything at all from the guy (other than in her head?) until later, the guy in the mud said to the two of them: "Come on guys! Get me out!"
The way the story tells it, the guy was so covered in mud that you could not even make out a person, just moving sticks, except for the eyes, that was recognized a few seconds later. He was so stuck that he could not get out even with the assistance of your mother. The story indicates that "the voice" and your mother in person recognized that the man was in very life threatening situation.
All this points to a situation of a man literally buried in mud to the point he was completely helplessly stuck in mud.
You cannot sink into mud past your shoulders no matter what you do. Mud is quite a bit denser than a person is. And even then, getting buried up to your shoulders involves a tremendous amount of doing the "wrong" thing: struggling, the more you struggle the more you liquify the mud, which allows you to sink further. If the person was on top of the mud pit, just covered in mud, they can get out unassisted once the person calms down and gather some energy to sort of swim on the surface towards firm land, the man was not in mortal danger unless their was another factor unmentioned in this story. If they are stuck in mud vertically, (or at steep angle,) even two people cannot get the person out without major equipment, far more likely they would of gotten stuck them selves and caused injury to the man/themselves attempting to pull someone out. They would have needed to call emergency services and a team of people with equipment would be needed to free them, such an event would of very likely been covered by the local news, so your mother would of had a news article of the event to point to.
If you were real curious, you could talk to someone at local emergency services that has had experience pulling people "trapped by mud" to freedom and compare the reality of that to the story your mother gave.
I could probably write several other pages of ways this story does not seem quite right, but I will stop here.
Take a look at this story.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121213-fake-pictures-make-real-memories
A researcher showed people fake pictures of visitors meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland. Later they were asked about their own visits to Disneyland. Most of them remembered meeting Bugs Bunny. But Bugs is a Warner Brothers character. You'll never meet him in Disneyland. Memory is easily manipulated, especially by images.
Why do you believe her?
Okay. Thanks for the stories. Not calling your mom a liar at all but many, many people make stuff up. They can't help themselves. I had a woman employee who told me she'd looked into the eyes of a stray cat and it jumped into her head giving her all manner of evil thoughts. Now she's petrified of cats. Many superstitious people create stuff to justify their psyches. You mom sounds like one. My own pop, a devout cathaholic, described a scene where he was speaking with angels once. He was delirious following surgery for removal of a burst appendix. He was totally out of it but after he came to his senses he genuinely thought he'd been in the company of angels waiting to take him should he die. He also said it was real. Okay, pop, another dose of morphine and you'd have been swapping tall tales with god himself. The problem is, he knew he was delirious, on drugs, and yet he dismissed all that to hold onto his company with angels as real.
A little bit of psychosis, pinch of imagination, germ of an event and voila; instant impossible story.
It's entirely possible that your mother may be misremembering events, or assigning meaning to them after the fact. The third story in particular seems like a gigantic stretch; assigning causality between being offered a drink and someone dying in a fire is only logical in the most abstract, symboligical of senses.
My personal opinion is that one of the reasons people believe in unprovable things like paranormal phenomena or the divine is because the world is a frightening, chaotic place and human beings have very little control over it. Placing their faith in such things helps people impose a sense of order and control over the chaos and helps reassure them that something is in charge, even if it's not them. It's a coping mechanism for dealing with the understandable fear of a world where they could lose everything dear to them at any moment for seemingly no reason at all.
That's not to say that some instances of the "paranormal" might not be real phenomena that we simply have no frame of reference for or understanding of at the moment; as the Bard said, "there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy," and you can't prove the nonexistence of anything. But most such stories seem like an effort to impose order on an existence that, while mundane, can be senseless and horrifying at times.