The Desire to Believe and the Way it Shapes Perception.(Christians Don't Lie part 3)
In my article about Ghosts, I started with some personal experiences. Here I continue my thoughts on the topic, but will widen the perspective to include some related issues.
I had an interest in strange phenomena from my childhood. I think it started with UFOs. I grew up during the “space race” and like many young boys at the time I became fascinated with the space programme. Around the same time UFOs were getting a lot of publicity with many parts of England experiencing a “UFO flap”.
Somewhere along the way my interest broadened to include other unexplained things. It was an interest I kept well into adulthood and I read a great deal over the years about UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, ghosts, and anything else that defied rational explanation. I strongly believed there was something beyond our everyday world and I was so willing to believe that I never considered that any of the things I read might be less than truthful. Why would anyone make these things up? I was beyond trusting, I was totally gullible. I believed some of the wildest claims.
Even after becoming a Christian in my teens I managed to keep one foot in each camp – without seeing any contradiction between the two. Somehow I kept things separated in my mind. My main concession was to attribute experiences of ghosts, aliens and other aspects of “the unexplained” to demonic activity. That conclusion was even supported by some UFO writers who didn’t have a Christian bias. Jacques Vallee, John Keel and Whitley Streiber all made comparisons between UFO activity and folkloric accounts of demons – suggesting that UFOs were a modern day way of interpreting what previous generations had seen as spiritual entities: fairies demons, angels etc.
Those non-religious writers confirmed my own conclusions. But they were conclusions based on the assumption that the reports of experiences were trustworthy. Here I would like to stress an important point. Note the change in emphasis at the beginning of this paragraph, from “experiences” to “reports of experiences”.
My own understanding began to change slowly. Perhaps this started with my personal UFO encounter.
One morning I was driving to work. The road followed the shores of a lake so there was a clear view across the water with an open unobstructed sky. I saw something above me, coming across from the lake. I glanced up and saw it was a very strange, clearly mechanical object. It had a narrow, elongated hourglass-like shape. After my brief sight of the object I turned my attention back to the road and then looked up again for a second look. This time everything became clear. The object turned and revealed itself to be a common light plane. My initial view of it had been from an unusual angle and my mind hadn’t correctly processed what I saw.
This experience reminded me of a UFO report I’d read a few years earlier. I think it came from a book called
The Flying Saucerers by Arthur Shuttlewood. Shuttlewood was a prominent figure in the 1960s UFO “flap” that helped spark my childhood interest. In that book he wrote of an experience where a UFO approached him, changed into a plane when it was overhead, and then after passing turned back into a UFO. I think the similarity to my experience is easy to see – the big difference being the degree to which each observer (myself/Shuttlewood) was willing to continue believing an extraordinary conclusion even when faced with clear evidence for a very ordinary explanation.
I can only wonder what the results of my own experience may have been if I hadn’t taken that second look to see that the object was only a plane, if that first glimpse had remained as the only “fact” to build my conclusions upon.
Around the same time as my “UFO” experience, I was introduced to a new concept related to UFOs, one that I didn’t come to understand until many years later. I had written to a well known British UFO expert and had mentioned a series of iconic UFO sightings. In her reply she referred to those sightings as mostly “media hype”, it was a concept that I later realised could be extended to other reported experiences of anomalous phenomena. And I had to consider the extent of which our knowledge and understanding of those phenomena is totally dependant on the quality and veracity of the information we receive.
Another eye-opening encounter I had was with the writings of Jim Schnabel. His book
Round in Circles rescued me from any remaining gullibility. The book was about crop circles, but instead of merely investigating the circles himself, he also spent time with the major players in crop circle research – the ones who provide US with the reports about all of the various formations found (mainly) around southern England. He clearly showed how public understanding of the crop circles was formed by the information being fed to them by investigators who were often far from objective in their reporting. Schnabel gave the example of a crude circle he had personally created being announced as “genuine” – even though his own muddy footprints were clearly evident across the circle
Not surprisingly Schnabel was accused of being an agent of CIA disinformation by those who refused to be swayed from their belief.
Basically, people believe what they want to believe. They are not swayed by evidence. They do not even consider evidence. They will merely collect and refer to stories that seemingly support what they believe, no matter how dubious those accounts may be. And Christians aren’t immune to this. We are often too quick to swallow the same kind of stories, but instead of seeing spirits of the dead, or alien spacecraft we interpret these things as demonic manifestations. Effectively we give “credit” to demons when in most cases credit is definitely not due.
Before we think of attributing a reported experience to demonic manifestation, we should be certain that the experience was a reality and not a misperception, a misunderstanding or even a lie. Through being too credulous in accepting everything as valid, we can effectively undermine the evidence and acceptance of those experiences that ARE genuine.
