How do I deal with anecdotes like this?

[Story]

I've recently accepted atheism and I'm a bit concerned in regards to people's beliefs on magic, witchcraft and demons.

I was exorcised in my theistic life and was led to believe that there were demons within me. I understand now that I made up the voices in my head telling me to say things because the adults around me all believed that I was possessed. I can't explain all of the things that occurred, but I am at ease in assuming that it was mostly delusional.

What I have problems with however is other people's stories of possession. These "other people" were adults and, unlike me, they made a variety of amazing claims during their exorcism (I needn't elaborate) one person I know vomited a huge sponge like object. I didn't see this myself, but it was confirmed by a bunch of different friends.

Another adult person I know underwent a completely painless exorcism and had her entire character change afterward. (Although I can see this being explainable)

I've heard from a variety of different friends that 2 people they knew came crying, emotionally distraught, claiming that they were raped by an invisible entity. I didn't know those 2 people, but about 5 people I know knew them and they all told me this same story from talking to them personally. 2 of them thought it was hilarious.

I can't really put my finger on whether these are lies, delusions or if there is some sort of scientific explanation that these bizarre scenarios could have.

 

[borrofburi]

I can't really put my finger on whether these are lies, delusions

Probably some combination of them. People are notoriously fallible, in both understanding their experiences *and* remembering them. If you'd like, I could give you a rather long list of the ways in which people are fallible. I always forget to save one of hte links to something explaining morning paralysis or whatever it's called...

The simple reason I am skeptical of these claims is: they *always* fail a rigorous test. If someone were really possessed and capable of these sorts of things, you would think it could be caught on video (and not shitty quality video where people can hide things). And they could win a million dollars from the JREF too...

 

[Story]

The simple reason I am skeptical of these claims is: they *always* fail a rigorous test. If someone were really possessed and capable of these sorts of things, you would think it could be caught on video (and not shitty quality video where people can hide things). And they could win a million dollars from the JREF too...

Yes, which is why I'm leaning heavily to the lies, delusions, other explanations or a likely combination of all three. Unfortunately my mind won't stop pestering me about it until I have a few more answers. For example... why would 2 people believe they were raped by something and why would someone vomit up a sponge?

I need these to answer for someone else's inquiries. Something better than simply that the 2 were on drugs or that everyone involved was lying, although the latter idea may actually be more possible than you'd expect.

Morning paralysis is something I read up before that I really need to show to prove to someone actually, because they keep talking about it and I lost my source.

*googles*

 

[ImprobableJoe]

Yes, which is why I'm leaning heavily to the lies, delusions, other explanations or a likely combination of all three. Unfortunately my mind won't stop pestering me about it until I have a few more answers. For example... why would 2 people believe they were raped by something and why would someone vomit up a sponge?

I need these to answer for someone else's inquiries. Something better than simply that the 2 were on drugs or that everyone involved was lying, although the latter idea may actually be more possible than you'd expect.

Morning paralysis is something I read up before that I really need to show to prove to someone actually, because they keep talking about it and I lost my source.

*googles*

You should also look up "implanted memories", because that fills in the gaps that causes your mind to "pester" you.

 

[JustBusiness17]

why would 2 people believe they were raped by something

Attention :|

why would someone vomit up a sponge?

Why wouldn't you throw up a sponge? It's not exactly fruits and berries...

 

[borrofburi]

Hmm, found my list of reasons not to be credulous, though not all of these will help you (but I found all of them to be very interesting):

• The Forer Effect: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDfTLSb01xs
• On how bad memory is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfhIuaD183I
• Pitfalls of Thinking: Confirmation Bias (1/2): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u34BhEgO_es
• Pitfalls of Thinking: Confirmation Bias (2/2): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvj7p7Clq0c
• On the many security vulnerabilities and biases we have in our brains (including quirk of our memory, as well as quirk of what we consider a "hit" for paranormal concepts): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPqerbz8KDc
• More reasons why trusting your own mind (especially as infallible) is not necessarily the best of ideas: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98OTsYfTt-c
• On the topic of critical thinking (fairly related, you seem to avoid flaws and biases in your own thinking): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OLPL5p0fMg One thing I would note in this video is that, so far as I could see, he never pointed out that any position that by definition can not be shown to be unfounded (i.e. untestable) is a flawed one; it's important to remember.
• On why faith is worthless: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wV_REEdvxo
• Why common sense is worthless (fairly related to the topic at hand, in the sense that it shows a bit why personal experience is untrustworthy): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60uJ7sOx_1A
• Why science is not at all faith based (also only tangentially related): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlaCq3dKvvI
• On the topic of open mindedness (again, only tangentially related): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI
• On spiritualism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l95-OgVnrXk
• Lecture start (whole thing is well worth watching): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZr4mLwGxw4

EDIT: and I do recall there being one or two good videos explaining sleep paralysis and its hallucinogenic effects... but I don't recall who made them, so I don't know how to find them, if anyone else remembers, let me know.

EDIT2: I said "hypnosis" and meant "hallucinogenic". Fixed now.

 

[Laurens]

I have a friend with schizophrenia, once you see the kinds of delusions it is possible to form in one's own mind, things like this have a pretty easy explanation. Not necessarily that they are schizophrenic, I mean that these experiences can be explained as simple delusions.

When you meet someone who thinks that hidden messages come through the TV, and that they can influence things by putting socks in the kettle or whatever, you will find that the human mind is perfectly capable of creating very real delusions.

 

[JustBusiness17]

I have a friend with schizophrenia, once you see the kinds of delusions it is possible to form in one's own mind, things like this have a pretty easy explanation. Not necessarily that they are schizophrenic, I mean that these experiences can be explained as simple delusions.

When you meet someone who thinks that hidden messages come through the TV, and that they can influence things by putting socks in the kettle or whatever, you will find that the human mind is perfectly capable of creating very real delusions.

I know what you're saying. Last year there was a guy wandering around outside a coffee shop talking to himself and getting angry for no apparent reason. I thought he was on a bluetooth headset but someone told me he had been talking to himself for over an hour. I decided to see if he was ok so I casually asked him if everything was alright. He told me that he was controlling the traffic and that everytime a car went by, it was connected to his thoughts. He told me that he was schizophrenic but went off his meds because they weren't working. I had seen this guy around before... Trust me, they were working.

On a side note, he was also Christian and thought his powers came from god. He was the second schizophrenic christian that I met that summer. The other one was a creationist that lived up the street from me and was convinced that he had found diamonds on the beach. When he pulled them out of his pocket to show me, they were just large pieces of sand worn glass from beer bottles. One of the nicest guys I've ever met - he just wasn't all there...

 

[Demojen]

THE POWER!!

 

[borrofburi]

I have a friend with schizophrenia, once you see the kinds of delusions it is possible to form in one's own mind, things like this have a pretty easy explanation. Not necessarily that they are schizophrenic, I mean that these experiences can be explained as simple delusions.

I don't know I'd call the average hallucination a delusion, necessarily... I mean it seems really harsh, and when these things are not terribly uncommon it seems unnecessarily harsh. I guess the most important bit is that people can have delusions without being delusional, the difference is in the amount; when I think "delusional" I think of people like schizophrenics, who have very severe problems that very seriously affect their lives. But when I think of the average christian who has experienced weird thing Y (albeit usually not as convinced of things as weird as are in the OP), I don't know that delusional is necessarily fair.

 

[JustBusiness17]

I have a friend with schizophrenia, once you see the kinds of delusions it is possible to form in one's own mind, things like this have a pretty easy explanation. Not necessarily that they are schizophrenic, I mean that these experiences can be explained as simple delusions.

I don't know I'd call the average hallucination a delusion, necessarily... I mean it seems really harsh, and when these things are not terribly uncommon it seems unnecessarily harsh. I guess the most important bit is that people can have delusions without being delusional, the difference is in the amount; when I think "delusional" I think of people like schizophrenics, who have very severe problems that very seriously affect their lives. But when I think of the average christian who has experienced weird thing Y (albeit usually not as convinced of things as weird as are in the OP), I don't know that delusional is necessarily fair.

I don't understand why people get so caught up in the connotations that they apply to words. I understand where you're coming from, but opinions about words don't change their meanings.

de,·lu,·sion   /dɪˈluÊ’É™n/ Show Spelled[dih-loo-zhuhn] Show IPA
-noun
1. an act or instance of deluding.
2. the state of being deluded.
3. a false belief or opinion: delusions of grandeur.
4. Psychiatry . a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact: a paranoid delusion.

 

[Laurens]

Perhaps I am being harsh, but if you go around saying that you have been raped by evil spirits, what other terms can one use? I think you could be justified in calling such a person insane.

 

[Story]

Well saying they're insane or lying is a temptation, but I'm led to believe there was something a little more substantial. I simply can't posit the assumption of lies or insanity to every weird thing that comes up, but I equally can not accept that any of these happenings were due to some intervening supernatural force either (For reasons I needn't elaborate on).

Many thanks to burrofburi for all those links those helped my curiosities alot!

 

[JustBusiness17]

Well saying they're insane or lying is a temptation, but I'm led to believe there was something a little more substantial. I simply can't posit the assumption of lies or insanity to every weird thing that comes up, but I equally can not accept that any of these happenings were due to some intervening supernatural force either (For reasons I needn't elaborate on).

Many thanks to burrofburi for all those links those helped my curiosities alot!

It sounds like you're coming to grips with the perfectly acceptable position of "I don't know". Skepticism isn't about having answers, its about achieving correct answers in the face of extraordinary claims. Sometimes a correct answer is unachievable, in which case defaulting to naturalistic speculation is the best possible stance on the subject.

 

[Lallapalalable]

hmm. Got here a little late. But I think borrufbori put it best with his list.

I think most people will act the whole situation out for either attention or to fulfill their mental outlook of why they are behaving a certain way, a way that opposes how they "should" act. Or, they are just crazy and truly believe it, but that never means an individual is right, now does it?

 

[Commander Eagle]

What I have problems with however is other people's stories of possession. These "other people" were adults and, unlike me, they made a variety of amazing claims during their exorcism (I needn't elaborate) one person I know vomited a huge sponge like object. I didn't see this myself, but it was confirmed by a bunch of different friends.

Another adult person I know underwent a completely painless exorcism and had her entire character change afterward. (Although I can see this being explainable)

I've heard from a variety of different friends that 2 people they knew came crying, emotionally distraught, claiming that they were raped by an invisible entity. I didn't know those 2 people, but about 5 people I know knew them and they all told me this same story from talking to them personally. 2 of them thought it was hilarious.

I can't really put my finger on whether these are lies, delusions or if there is some sort of scientific explanation that these bizarre scenarios could have.

The odds are definitely in favor of lies or delusions, but you won't be able to convince your friends of this. However, there really isn't any need to "deal" with them beyond smiling and nodding, then ignoring them. They're stories, like tales of the Hook-Handed Killer who haunts Lover's Lane, with absolutely no scientific backing. What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, and unless your friends can present actual proof that stuff like this is going on, there is absolutely no reason to believe that it is.

 

[Commander Eagle]

Well saying they're insane or lying is a temptation, but I'm led to believe there was something a little more substantial.

Why?

I simply can't posit the assumption of lies or insanity to every weird thing that comes up

Why not?

Okay, maybe that isn't very helpful, but really, why can you not ascribe lies, insanity, or delusion to these accounts? Obviously, you feel bad, because these are your friends, after all. But the fact that they are deluded (more likely than outright lies or full-blown insanity) is not a smear against them. It happens to everyone. It's part of being human.

Since I moonlight as a moderator on a forum for discussing the paranormal (called, fittingly enough, DiscussTheParanormal, I have some experience in stuff like this. If you want to know more about what might be causing your friends to think stuff like this is happening, feel free to ask. I'll answer as best I can.

 

[JustBusiness17]

Well saying they're insane or lying is a temptation, but I'm led to believe there was something a little more substantial.

Why?

IMO, it's a fair position to take - provided "more substantial" doesn't imply the supernatural... A frail psyche by itself isn't enough to experience delusions... For example, someone complaining about being raped by supernatural entities may be expressing suppressed abuse/trauma. The so-called "sponge" could be an elaborate prank. I think it's perfectly healthy to consider all possible causes - (again) provided it doesn't cross over into the supernatural :geek:

Note: I hate being so frank about the idea of suppressed abuse/trauma.

 

[Story]

Well saying they're insane or lying is a temptation, but I'm led to believe there was something a little more substantial.

Why?

I simply can't posit the assumption of lies or insanity to every weird thing that comes up

Why not?

Okay, maybe that isn't very helpful, but really, why can you not ascribe lies, insanity, or delusion to these accounts? Obviously, you feel bad, because these are your friends, after all. But the fact that they are deluded (more likely than outright lies or full-blown insanity) is not a smear against them. It happens to everyone. It's part of being human.

Well I suppose my reaction is at least partly due to some form of sentiment on the part of my personal affections, but the reason why I'm less inclined to believe that they are simply lies and/or delusions is because of my own experience with the paranormal. I have a few theories based on what I've seen and heard. So I was simply interested in any other reasons that may correlate with my own. Expressing disbelief in scientifically incredulous claims by saying the people who originated the stories were lying or insane is probably as close to the truth as you'll need to get, but I have a sort of philosophical mind and that's just too simple an explanation for it to sit with my understanding of how human beings work in general. Let me explain my scenario...

I was being exorcised, because the exorcist did a test (basically he just read something) to see if I was possessed and during that test I began shaking madly, not in an epileptic sort of way, but simple shaking. I'm not sure if I could stop it or not, but I didn't try too, by then I believed I was possessed and apparently this was the reaction that possessed people give to the test.

I can't completely explain why I began shaking like that, but it's useful to note that I was very afraid of the exorcist and the possibility of him finding demons within me. This fear increased when I noticed myself shaking and I shook more... I was 12 years old at the time and surrounded by adults watching my every move. I had never shook like that before, but the event was a little traumatising.

This is one thing I can't completely explain, because a lot of people shake during the test without being told that they will, although some people don't shake at all, nevertheless the interesting part is coming up .

So here I am shaking and having them ask me a variety of different questions and by the way when I say "ask me" I actually mean "ask the demon that's possessed me". So I'm waiting for he demons to speak, but apparently they're tongue tied... which is unfortunate for me because when the demons don't speak the exorcist beats the demon until it does and when I say "beat the demon" I actually mean "beat the me". Yes, so you'll see how a child under that kind of abuse would trick himself to believe that the voices that he knew he was making up in his head were the demons telling him to write things because they couldn't talk or whatever.

I literally made that up on the spot. I felt bad about it for years to come, but I tricked myself into believing that maybe that was how they communicated. This led to a lot of skepticism on my part about the experiences of others. But there was another thing I couldn't explain, after faking 3 demons leaving my body, I was free to go. While walking around i felt really really light. [exageration]Literally like a feather...[/exageration] I had never felt that empty feeling of weightlessness before. I couldn't explain it. During the exorcism I was half aware that I was making everything up, but for some reason I still felt really light, as if something had left me... That feeling, which I experimented with for a while to see if I actually was lighter (I wasn't), led me to believe that maybe I wasn't making up the voices and that it was the actual way that the demons communicated with me.

Then came the anecdotes... about a year later.

"There were things floating in the room", "The window shook as the demons passed through it", "Things broke randomly."

Random claims made about things that I knew happened differently. I knocked things over with my hand and broke them. the window shook because I was hitting it (long story), but I could see in this person's eyes that they actually believed the things they spoke of and talked to me about it like I was supposed to remember. I don't believe these were lies in the general sense, but more of a really bad recollection of events. They remembered the wrangled curtains and the broken items and the amazing event and automatically attributed them to the exorcism and thus the demons. What made things worse was that when they told these "lies" they had someone else with bad memory ponder about it for a while and then agree that it was indeed demons passing through the window and breaking things, although not as enthusiastically, but it was like an instantly implanted memory, which is possible. Fake memories of mundane scenarios can be implanted easily by mixing them with real memories and narrating them to the victim. I think believing that you were a part of an amazing event would be very appealing to anyone's emotions and cause them to be less likely to filter out inaccuracies especially appealing inaccuracies.

Of course I could never tell whether they were all just making shit up, but their body language and the fact that the things they chose to "lie" about were half true led me to believe that they believed their "lies".

Hearing most of that you'd instantly assume that it was lies or delusions, which is true, but really too simplistic for me to sit with.

And btw, do you think I disagreed with the people that made those amazing claims about my own exorcism? I really wanted everyone to know the truth, but I really wanted to avoid arguments with people 3 times my age more.

So I was the actual deluded liar type, but I assure you it was not done guiltlessly nor with any confidence whatsoever.

 

[borrofburi]

It sounds like, you, like me, object to the word "delusion"?