Atheism

I don't believe in "supernatural phenomena" either. If they'd exist, we'd actually have prove of their existence. There's about 8 billion people on this planet and for some reason all the "recorded" phenomena date back to before everyone had an easy to record device in their pockets. They've all gone down to 0 for some odd reason, even though it is as easy as ever to actually provide literal proof - if they existed in the first place.

People who experience supernatural phenomena are experiencing either natural phenomena they are too stupid to understand, are fooled by man made things, or are hallucinating for whatever reason.

I'd recommend Manly P Halls book on "secret teachings". I think alot of "religion" is just philosophy + myth.

Personally I take them with a grain of salt, some supernatural phenomena are probably not yet understood by current science. Now I sound like an ancient aliens person meme.

Asking if the supernatural exists is not a scientific question whose answer can be derived empirically. Which to me means the question isn't even worth asking until a bunch of other questions can be asked / answered enough that this question becomes a scientific one, belief really has nothing to do with it (not sure I'm even capable of belief like that).

Concluding that all these stories are made up IS the simplest and most logical explanation. But, they almost certainly do not come from nothing. We as a species are kinda hardwired to understand things, and when we encounter something we don't, we have a tendency to either make shit up or seek things that satisfy that understanding (even if its not really understanding). The result is that we have all these fantastic stories and myths that are only distantly related to reality.

We are overzealous pattern recognition machines.

The proto-hominids who saw a tiger in the bush when there wasn't one had a higher chance of passing on their genes than the ones who didn't see a tiger when there was one.

And now their descendants see tigers in the stars.

If LLMs have taught us anything about pattern recognition machines it's that when they don't find a pattern to match they don't say they have no matches... they just pull a somewhat fitting match off their arse, or an outright random one. They hallucinate.

And that's even before we get to our actual minds. We've got pattern recognition machinery in our retinas. What reaches our brain is already highly processed (to make tigers easier to spot), and then it gets into the visual processing part of the brain, which uses sophisticated autocompletion using previously stored patterns to fill in the blanks and highlight anything remotely interesting... often including things that aren't there (see optical illusions, for instance). That's what we "see", and then we get to make up stuff based on that (and the same probably applies to our other senses, too).

Add to that that we're notoriously bad at recognising randomness (or lack thereof). A coin falls heads up four times in a row and we suspect shenanigans, as if it wasn't as likely or unlikely as any other pattern.

We see some craters that look like a smiley face (pattern recognition strikes again) on Mars and we think it's a fake picture (it's 2024, after all), or a Watchmen reference. And when we learn it's actually real our hair stands up. We get goosebumps. It can't be natural. Must be super natural. Aliens. Gods. Ancient civilizations. All while we ignore the thousands of craters that don't look like a smiley face.

But, hey, at least we're not getting eaten by hidden tigers, so win some lose some, I guess.

If it can be oberved and explained then it isn't supernatural. Therefore nothing can be supernatural.

A ton of real things would fit in with all the supernatural stereotypes if we didn't already accept them due to science.

Wait, is this a depiction of the flat earth dome cutting someone in half?