Thread: What reasons do you have for believing in nonmaterial beings(spirits, gods, dieties etc.)?

You are fine as long as you are connected through the fontanelle (crown) to the non-material meta-realm. You can always trust angels.

Originally Posted by Xei

It is self-contradictory because you base your argument around matter being 'electric signals that your brain interprets'; however, this posits the objective existence of electric signals (which, assuming you're talking about neural activity, are in fact the movement of ions; matter), and also of your own brain, which entirely contradicts your conclusion that there are no material things. How can there be only non-material things if even you claim that to create these things you require a material brain?

I know I didn't explain it all so well, but you have to consider that all matter is ultimately divisible into smaller and smaller particles that in the end are just packs of energy that pop in and out of nothingness in random places, forming a cloud of probabilities that constitutes "matter". A physicist would explain this so much better, but what I mean is that it is now known that matter is just clouds of information that come in and out nothingness - if something comes in and out of existence, continuously, you cannot consider it to be really real, according to the old paradigms, that matter is a solid thing that is permanently there, just changing shape, but never created nor destroyed. According to our old perspectives, matter revealed to be just an illusion to the senses, it's simply bits of information that you perceive as solid. That's more or less what I mean. That includes the brain of course, it is also "illusory" in the sense that is permanently being destroyed and recreated in its most minute energy "particles".

I don't believe in anything supernatural. However, I used to, and I've come up with some reasons why it seems to me people believe in the supernatural:

1) Humans are pattern-seekers. When a coincidence occurs, we automatically try to find intent behind it, some non-random cause for the seeming coincidence.

2) Most people do not realize what their minds are capable of doing, how powerful they are. If someone like this has an OBE, for example, she will insist that she was literally outside of her body, because it felt so real to her, and she can't imagine that it was merely her brain inducing the feeling.

3) The idea of the supernatural existing is a very exciting, alluring idea. It is also very fulfilling and ego-boosting to think that you have special information about the world that most people lack. I think that wanting it to be true so badly causes critical thinking skills to be scarcely applied while believing for reasons (1) and (2).