HelenM

Would you be willing to share the details of your SREs?

If you do, I expect a number of atheists will suggest interpretations of them/explanations for them that don't require the existence of deities.

Helen

Roland98

What is this, the "let's de-convert Calzaer" thread?

markfiend

I will point you to Jim Huber, an atheist who has had SREs.

HelenM

Not really - I guess I'm curious to see how atheists would respond to his (?) statement: "I can't be an atheist because of my SREs".

Thanks for the link, markfiend. It seems rather bizarre to me that the author of it evidently believes God told him not to believe in God. Doesn't that very piece of information prove that it was not God talking to him? So he's an atheist because God told him to be, in effect

Helen

Ronin

Come on, Helen...even a liberal christian should be able to justify such a blatant contradiction given the nature of christianity itself.

emotional

I've never had an SRE but I did have a paranormal ability when I was a little kid. Given an arbitrary date, I could immediately say what day it fell on, and I was always right. I have since lost that ability, but parents and friends testify to it.

Ronin

This one time I played 'heads and tails' and guessed right ten times...straight in a row.

I can also expel flatulence whenever my 2 year old son pulls my index finger.

...talk about paranormal...whoof.

HelenM

Most people don't have to wait until their finger is pulled.

HelenM

But it's the authors justification I'm interested in and he claims to be an atheist. Atheists cannot believe contradictory things, can they?

muon

That's not very paranormal. A simple calculator can do it. If you know the formula, you can do it in your head.

It might be more correct to say you had this interesting ability, but didn't know how you were doing it. We do all sorts of unconscious things every day that are horribly complicated. Try teaching a robot to cross a busy street, and you'll see how hard it is, but we do it almost without thinking.

What you describe is perfectly within the capacity of almost everyone reading this thread, if they learn to do it. Maybe your brain stumbled on the trick by accident.