Thursday 8 May 2014

Disbelieving in 'the supernatural' (as a matter of principle) - psychological consequences of this disbelief

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It is the mainstream, high status and ruling elite position nowadays to disbelieve in 'the supernatural' as a matter of prior conviction - that it, to disbelieve in principle every single claim of supernatural reality, action or whatever it may be.

And in this respect the supernatural includes the reality of all and every God or gods; personal revelations and guidance; the activities of spirits and souls and ghosts; miracles and prophecies and other divine interventions, telepathy; prophetic dreaming; the reality of non-human and non-animal intelligences; magic; the 'animistic' aliveness and awareness of non-animal entities; the objective power of curses and blessings; the effects of auras and influences... I mean everything of that kind is disbelieved.

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My point here is that this disbelief - as a basic and immoveable assumption - is highly distinctive to the modern West: that is to modern times, and to cultures comprising a minority of the world, and within those cultures to a minority of people.

Therefore, anyone informed of the facts has to acknowledge that a comprehensive and a priori disbelief in supernatural phenomena - whether it is true or not certainly is unnatural, un-spontaneous, and culturally-specific to human beings.

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How, then, are we supposed to know that this comprehensive disbelief in supernatural phenomena is true; and that the majority of other cultures and societies are and were completely wrong ? 

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If comprehensive dis-belief in the supernatural is to be regarded as true; then almost everybody who has ever lived has been either:

1. been the victim of some kind of major fraud - a deliberate falsehood has been successfully practised upon them; or else

2. humans must be regarded as intrinsically prone to this particular delusion: which means that humans must naturally and spontaneously believe in 'supernatural' phenomena of one kind or another.

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Both 1. and 2. are commonly asserted by atheists - that past and most present humans believe in the supernatural only because they have been systematically hood-winked by other humans who are manipulating them (especially priests); and/or that humans have an inbuilt tendency falsely to jump to supernatural conclusions.

It is this second point which is interesting; because I think it is almost certainly true that humans naturally and spontaneously do indeed jump to conclusions and explanations of a supernatural kind - and over a wide range of topics.

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Yet the mainstream modern high status elite view is that all such explanations and conclusions are false: all such - every single one of them  - and this is known for sure and without any need for investigation or debate.

Now, the question is to what extent this specific disbelief of something natural and spontaneous and wide-ranging has distorted other natural and spontaneous beliefs and behaviours.

Because clearly there must be ramifications of 'supernatural' disbelief, there must be a 'price to pay' for suppressing or deleting such a major aspect of human nature.  

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I would venture to suggest that the price to be paid is very obvious to those who have retained the natural and spontaneous belief in 'supernatural' phenomena -  the consequence is a wilful and wide-ranging blindness and inability to respond to things that seem to most people (throughout the world and history) major tendencies, causes, phenomena, events, situations and interpretations.

In other words, the modern secular elites cannot get away with simply blotting-out the validity of 'the supernatural' from their world view and expect to leave everything else unchanged - this dis-belief has multiple psychological consequences.

One consequence being arrogance due to a belief in one's own personal superiority to almost everybody else who lives and have ever lived - a believed-in personal superiority which is so deep, and so complete, and so foundational that it is all-but invisible to those who hold it.

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