Atheism

I think there may be some scientific explanation for a variety of things that are attributed to the supernatural; and not necessarily just mundane things like knocks and creaks in your house, paradolia causing images of faces in image noise and shit like that. For example, with how places that have unusual geomagnetic activity tend to also have higher than average ghost sightings, I think some people may just be extra sensitive to magnetic fields which causes them to hallucinate.

So many myths and monsters are basically caused by misunderstandings, not seeing something clearly enough to identify it, or even exaggerating a story that's been passed down verbally over a long time. Not to mention things caused by mental illness in times before advanced medicine and psychology. Many alien abduction stories and succubus sightings are almost certainly the result of hallucinations induced by sleep paralysis.

Idk about "supernatural" but there definitely seems like there's a lot of undiscovered psychological phenomenon we haven't figured out. It's hard to research and quantify subjective experiences.

I try to keep my thinking in line with scientific materialism. That also means things I believe need to be falsifiable, which means, I don't entirely believe them. There there always needs to be a bit of a hole or escape hatch in any truth to prevent it from becoming dogma.

I don't "believe" what I'm about to say, but it's something that has come up for me many times under psychedelics, which is the concept of a 'consciousness first' manifestation of reality. It's the closest thing I have to a spiritual or supernatural belief, and it's not really a belief because I don't believe it, but I do entertain the idea from time to time. The basic argument is that we've got the order of operations backwards, that the universe doesn't manifest consciousness through emergent properties, but rather that consciousness manifests universe concepts and scenarios that end up being plausible. This concepts extends the concept of consciousness to all matter and energy as well, because it all ends up being one and the same. I think of it as an extension of some Taoist thinking around wei wu wei where, because one is aught to find what they are looking for, if we can step back and stop dictating what we think/demand reality to be, reality may actually be much more fluid if we aren't so dogmatic in our thinking about it.

Anyways, I don't really believe any of that. But I think it would make for good science fiction, although it's already been done extremely well by Le Guin in her novella The Lathe of Heaven.

I have experienced weird things and I think it is something that is an explainable natural phenomena that humans attribute to the supernatural in their ignorance.

Like the "ominous feeling" of a basement being stuff like radon or unshielded wiring, things that are explainable without the supernatural.

I don't have anything to add to this conversation as I'm in agreement that the "supernatural" is simply how humans have historically described natural phenomena that is not yet understood.

Now... what I do find interesting is the shared art. I've seen similar styles, but not this piece. I looked it up and thought I would share because I find it to be pretty rad.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammarion_engraving

The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist. Its first documented appearance is in the book L'atmosphère : météorologie populaire ("The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology"), published in 1888 by the French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion.

The illustration depicts a man, dressed as a pilgrim in a long robe and carrying a walking stick, who has reached a point where the flat Earth meets the firmament. The pilgrim kneels down and passes his head, shoulders, right arm, and the top of the walking stick through an opening in the firmament, which is depicted as covered on the inside by the stars, Sun, and Moon. Behind the sky, the pilgrim finds a marvelous realm of circling clouds, fires and suns. One of the elements of the cosmic machinery resembles traditional pictorial representations of the "wheel in the middle of a wheel" described in the visions of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel.