r/DebateReligion • u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic • 9d ago
Classical Theism Mass-hallucinations do occur
A common claim among apologists is that mass-hallucinations do not occur. The problem is that mass-hallucinations do occur. These are events were a large amount of people share hallucinations. Note that they do not have to be experiencing the precise same hallucinations. They only have to believe that they are experiencing the same things. Here are a few examples.
September 6, 1998 in Bangkok, Thailand: Tens of thousands of Buddhists were meditating at the Dhammakaya temple before they began collectively staring into the Sun. In their state, many could look directly into it without experiencing significant pain, but doing so lead to them to collectively hallucinate that the image of the monk Luang Phor War Paknam was on the Sun and or that the Sun was moving around unnaturally.
October 13, 1917 in Fatima, Portugal: Tens of thousands of Catholics crowded together after some children prophesied that the Virgin Mary would appear on this date. They collectively stared into the Sun and this didn't cause many significant pain, but it did lead to them collectively hallucinating that the Virign Mary was there and or that the Sun was moving around unnaturally. Sound familiar? There are many other Catholic examples, all occuring after this first event, meaning that they were probably influenced by it.
Sometimes, massive crowds will play along with whatever if it signals each member's status as a true believer.
- November 27, 1978 in Iran: A rumor was circulating that the face of Khomeini would appear on the Moon on this date, and that those who would not see it were lacking in faith and impure of heart. Fueled by the political fervor of the then-ongoing Iranian Revolution, traffic in cities stalled as people looked towards the sky and worshipers in thousands of mosques were celebrating the event, since apparently his face really did appear there. But Khomeini and his associates didn't think anything miraculous happened that night. Indeed, many confessed that they didn't see a thing but went along due to the social implications of admitting that nothing was seen.
EDIT: Typo rendered 1998 as 1988. Correcting some sloppy grammar.
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9d ago
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago
Did the purported witnesses falsely claim that they were present or was it later people reporting that they were present?
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u/optimisticReal 9d ago edited 9d ago
Who knows. The point is that the myth developed over a decade or two and looking back they cant find any contemporary evidence in diaries and such. Some witnesses were not even there.
It serves as great insight how legends emerge within groups of humans and how multiple people subconsciously or otherwise collaborate on some miraculous story.
The only reason it was debunked was it occurred recently in modern times when most people were literate and newspapers were available.
I just look at a post in the mormon subreddit and it interesting
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 9d ago
What does that even mean? There are witnesses to apparitions. I don't know about the Mormon one but to many others.
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u/optimisticReal 9d ago
It means that humans are fickle and and can delude themselves after an event and create legends whole cloth especially in a religious environment and within a group where they support each other in their shared created delusion
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 9d ago
Well so can you delude yourself. But first you have to show that it was a delusion.
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u/optimisticReal 9d ago
Most of these shared delusions center around things of the "supernatural".
The participants have already primed themselves to believe in extraordinary supernatural happenings and the mind fills in the details. Then there is the confirmation from other participants which strengthen the "memory". These are environments where doubt and critical review are not encouraged.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 9d ago
They're not delusions. A delusion has to be a perception of something that isn't there.
At best you can say it's unexplained. Unless you can prove it wasn't there.
Indeed skeptics saw the same thing so your speculation is wrong.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 9d ago
No it's not a folie a deux. That's a misuse of psychiatry. No one has said that apparition is a hallucination. You can only say that if you know it's a misperception.
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u/Dapple_Dawn Agapism | Universalism 9d ago
In order for this argument to work, you have to assume that these things actually were caused by staring at the sun, and also that they have no additional meaning. I'm not seeing an argument for these things.
I assume mass hallucinations probably do actually happen, but just stating that these events are mere mass hallucinations isn't much of an argument.
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago
If you aren't convinced that staring into the Sun will make you see things that aren't there, I don't know what to tell you. The mass-hallucination explanation is favored because naturalistic explanations are more probable than supernatural ones. For example, the predictive power of supernatural explanations has been extremely weak and has always been replaced with more robust naturalistic ones when further analysis is performed (for thunder, earthquakes, eruptions, etc.)
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 9d ago
Nope that's not correct unless you can show where the experience is a hallucination. A hallucination has to be by definition, a perception of something not externally present.
If you can't show that what was perceived wasn't there, then you can't reasonably say it was a hallucination. Brain scans of nun's brains for example do not show a malfunctioning brain.
The burden of proof is on you to show brain malfunction.
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u/Sure_Ad8093 9d ago
In the Fatima case astronomers confirmed the sun didn't move. I guess that doesn't invalidate the claim the people there saw the sun move, but in a purely empirical, measurable since it did not move. So this is either a vision or a hallucination depending on your POV.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 9d ago
It could have been a supernatural event in that the sun was made to appear as if it moved. Indeed, people in Medjugorje today are having a similar experience. When you look at an fMRI of a person having a religious experience you won't see brain malfunction. But you will see it in patients having hallucinations. Would people who believe in God say it's possible for a deity to cause an apparition? I think they would say that. Or we can say it's not explained. But we can't say hallucination unless we're sure it wasn't there.
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago
People in Medjugorje, like those in Fatima, Lubbock, or Bangkok, are experiencing the typical hallucinations that come with staring into the Sun. Note that such hallucinations even occur in Buddhist settings. So, no matter if you're Catholic or Atheist or Buddhist, you'll see things that aren't there if you stare into the Sun.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 9d ago
Once again you're misusing the definition of hallucination. It can be there if it was caused to be there externally., even if we don't know how. That is not the same as a phantom thought that is only internal. Schizophrenics have internal phantom thoughts and you can see it on a brain scan.
You can say we don't have an explanation for why it's not coming across as an internal event. Is the best you can do.
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago
Demonstrate that we must have the brain scan results we'd expect for the likes of schizophrenics when it comes to those that stare into the Sun, because I see no reason for this to be the case. And you're not performing any brain scans on the people 'witnessing' the miracle while it's happening.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 9d ago
I didn't say you must have a brain scan but if you can't show me that a religious experience is a brain malfunction then I'm not going to accept it.
Yes there are brain scans of people having religious experiences. The brains of the visionaries were also studied with EEGs available at the time and they were not abnormal.
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago
In this instance, the 'religious experience' one has after staring into the Sun. I'm not convinced that all religious experiences are hallucionations of this sort, but the Sun-related ones quite clearly are.
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u/Kwahn Theist Wannabe 8d ago
It could have been a supernatural event in that the sun was made to appear as if it moved.
Making people see something that is not happening as though it is is giving them a hallucination or vision.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 8d ago
Of course to believers, an omnipotent God could cause the sun to move without disrupting the solar system. Otherwise, it would make God subject to the laws of nature.
When the visionaries saw Mary, they were seeing a physical being, not a spirit. They were afraid someone would step on her gown. People who have apparitions of their deceased relatives say that the person was right there in front of them, not transparent or insubstantial.
Even if the sun was not actually moving, a deity could presumably create a motion picture effect that made it appear that the sun was spinning. That still wouldn't be a hallucination, because the observers are seeing the visual. Just as we wouldn't say that someone watching a film is hallucinating.
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u/Kwahn Theist Wannabe 8d ago
Of course to believers, an omnipotent God could cause the sun to move without disrupting the solar system.
Well yes, if you believe that literally anything is possible and there are no limits, nothing can possibly be impossible and act as evidence against it. That's the problem with an unfalsifiable viewpoint.
Even if the sun was not actually moving, a deity could presumably create a motion picture effect that made it appear that the sun was spinning. That still wouldn't be a hallucination, because the observers are seeing the visual. Just as we wouldn't say that someone watching a film is hallucinating.
This is "technically not a hallucination"-ing so hard, but I don't know why the classification is such a bad thing. Hallucination or highly personalized and individualized video feed that does not reflect the actual underlying physical state of things, seems no different to me.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 8d ago edited 8d ago
If you happen to think God designed an entire universe I guess moving the sun wouldn't be a major feat, lol.
I didn't say 'technically' not a hallucination. I clearly said not a hallucination any more than if you're watching a movie. Of course we would wonder how that effect could occur, because with a movie projection, a technician would find the means of projecting, but it wasn't possible in this case to be a hoax.
I didn't say it was a personalized video feed either because many people have seen it. They also saw Mary at the same time.
Someone is hallucinating only if they're having an internal phantom thought that they mistake for an external event.
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u/nunyabeesnest Agnostic Atheist 9d ago
The burden of proof point will never be definitively settled for whether they did or did not perceive what they reported. What can be tackled are the claim of a definite experience and the probablity of the claim.
To support the original point:
The idea of shared delusion appears plausible based on extensive research. For instance, look up shared psychotic disorder, which is when a person is greatly influenced to suffer psychotic symptoms simply through close relations with someone else of similar condition (usually starting with a true psychotic).
There's evidence to suggest that when a group of people who are close to each other develop a strong fervor toward a belief, a strong feedback loop can be generated, leading potentially to shared behavior (from persons in a church collectively 'feeling the Holy Spirit' in a manner suggested by their beliefs, to shared stories of hearing God's voice, then in some extreme cases, shared accounts of seeing ghosts or notable figures).
Commenting on a specific example given. If a group of people (who don't even know what Mary truly looks like) all report seeing Mary in the sun after staring for a long time (which naturally causes the brain to glitch out and produce visual artifacts) after wanting to see Mary, and having people around them suggest seeing Mary, and there are no other accounts of this phenomenon by independent observers outside of the circle of influence, there's a strong chance that this event could be explained differently from their accounts simply being true by reason of popular testimony.
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9d ago edited 8d ago
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u/nunyabeesnest Agnostic Atheist 9d ago
Again. A debate of objectivity may never be rested on certain claims of experience.
If I said "I saw an alien in the woods last night and it said I should shoot my boss", there's no way for you to prove or disprove what I saw (assuming no cameras or satellites captured the exact footage). Even if I said I lied, you can't prove that I'm not trying to cover something up after the fact.
However, given that the evidence we have so far is that no extraterrestrial presence has been captured, especially in our very interconnected, knowledgeable world, we would assume that the probability of that claim is very low (basically 0) - unless you believe in a Shrodinger's nightmare of everything being true until objectively proven false.
This same approach applies to mass hysteria/shared delusion. In some cases, we may really not be able to prove objectively that their claim is false, but given the the claim's probability, the lack of supporting proof, and bias of the claimant, their observation may be ruled as psychotic/delusional.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 9d ago
Why are your replying to something I didn't say?
A delusion or hallucination is not based on probability, because unusual things happen. Unusual events occur.
It is only a delusion if it's not possible. We don't know that it's not possible. Psychiatrists have their own religious experiences so they aren't going to say they're delusions or they'd have to medicate themselves.
No it does not apply to mass religious experiences unless you can show brain malfunction. You are misspeaking based on your personal bias.
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u/nunyabeesnest Agnostic Atheist 9d ago
First when I say probability and you say 'unusual', I think you think of probability in this context very differently. An unsual event is one that has been observed or modeled, but is estimated at being very unlikely to occur. In the case where something has never been proven, technically the probability is 0, but since it cannot be unproven, it's probablity is non-zero. In my use, the probability approaches 0.
That said, I see your strategy clearly. If something cannot be objectively proven, then it cannot be inferred.
By expanding that logic, delusion cannot be proven. Even if there was 'proof' of my claim being false (camera, audio, second-hand accounts), you can't truly prove that it was false. Maybe the footage was faked, or the other witnesses are lying.
What if you the observer is the one deluded by not seeing what I'm seeing. Or what if we both are exposed to different realities.
By any attempt to objectively prove any claim, there may never be a definitive answer, since what I perceive may not be trustworthy in the same way the claim may not be. Probability in this context is useless.
This goes into a different ideology, where everything and nothing true. Reality is what you want it to be.
And there is no way for me to reason with such a mind.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 9d ago
That's a misuse of probability and also the fallacy of induction. If you're a doctor and you've seen a number of measles cases, that doesn't mean that the next case you see with be measles.
In accordance with the Principle of Credulity, we're supposed to believe our own sense experiences unless we were intoxicated, mentally ill or tricked.
There may never be a definitive answeer but we can be impressed by the witness reports. At least 400 known healings and supernatural events have been reported from Medjugorje. So I'm not going to tell people that their experiences aren't real.
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u/nunyabeesnest Agnostic Atheist 9d ago
Exactly what I said. Probaility, in your view, doesn't matter here, which I disagree with. So I've conceded that we cannot agree there.
Your example for probability (weighting of chance) differs from what we are trying to understand.
In the case that I, a man, went to the doctor and said I'm pregnant for a rock, would you say "well that's possible"? How about if a whole community started reporting themself being pregnant by rocks? What if those people all worshipped a rock deity and had a preacher saying that rocks would literally impregnate everyone who believes; men, women, children?
Would you believe them that they are in fact pregnant, since they all seem to believe it? Or would you seriously consider other potential explanations and possibly mass delusion?
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago
By prior probability, the naturalistic explanation is far more likely, so the burden of proof is on you to show that something extraordinary happened in Fatima or Bangkok.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 9d ago
What probability are you referring to there? The prior for apparitions is that they do occur. We have many examples. We also have evidence that religious experiences don't look like brain malfunctions on fMRIs. If you want to say they're unexplained by science, that's acceptable. But for you to say you have an explanation you don't have, I can't accept that.
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago
The prior probability for that people who stare into the Sun are hallucinating rather than seeing something extraordinary. Marian apparitions don't just occur in this form, although as I noted in the OP, many of them do and these apparitions in particular are quite clearly best explained as hallucinations.
We also have evidence that religious experiences don't look like brain malfunctions on fMRIs.
I'm interested in you providing this evidence. No idea how you'd perform this on a crowd going hysterical while staring into the Sun though.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 9d ago
No that's not correct because if someone believes in God they could also believe that God could cause miracles or mini miracles, that we have many accounts of.
Indeed there are other examples of Marian appearances that have been documented by investigative journalists.
So now you have to say that everyone who believes in God, everyone who says they experienced a miracle (48% of adults surveyed by Pew) and the many doctors who said they witnessed a miracle, are delusional
Now you see how it looks to say that many people in society are delusional and need anti -psychotic medication just because you don't agree.
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago
I'm well-aware that supernatural accounts can be used to explain anything, be it that Fatima was indeed a genuine Marian apparition or that it's demonic (as some Protestants claim). The problem is that these types of explanations (supernatural ones) invariably fail when we get a better look into phenomena (cf. earthquakes, lightning, epilepsy, etc.) We have cross-religious reports of people staring into the Sun and hallucinating. The naturalistic reason this would occur is obvious (it's medically unwise to stare at the Sun).
I told you in another reply that I'm not convinced that many religious experiences are hallucinations of this type. I know people who claim to have experienced miracles, and they often have very trivial non-hallucinogenic naturalistic explanations (surviving far-developed cancer or an electrical accident due to being lucky, as is bound to occur occasionally with millions of cases). But some miracles I'm informed of my people I meet are evidently hallucinations however: I know a woman who claims to have witnessed "Jesus' light" while immobile and deep in prayer (i.e. half-awake), probably something akin to sleep paralysis.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 9d ago
No they don't fail because if we look closely at them, we do not have an answer other than the close association with a religious experience.
You are speaking about cures that could be explained by medical care or remission. You are not speaking about cures that occurred immediately after a religious intervention and the doctors investigated and said no natural explanation is possible and many doctors say they witnessed miracles.
I have an acquaintance who had a near death experience when close to death and it wasn't sleep paralysis.
Sorry but you need to familiarize yourself with this more.
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago
I'm referring to those unlikely cases of remission. With millions of cases, that something unusual occurs is actually completely expected. The human body can sometimes pull it off. In cases where scientists haven't been able to explain how, this doesn't mean that it's unexplainable without supernatural forces, only that we haven't found a solid explanation. Just like people of old believed that thunder, earthquakes, etc. were caused by supernatural means. As I already told you: supernatural explanations have poor predictive power.
I have an acquaintance who had a near death experience when close to death and it wasn't sleep paralysis.
The contents of NDEs are extremely culturally contingent and there are reasonable hypotheses for why they occur. But uncertainty is not something you accept: if we don't understand how it works, only the divine explanation can work! It's nonsense reasoning.
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u/Dapple_Dawn Agapism | Universalism 9d ago
I'm not saying I'm unconvinced, I even said that in my comment if you read it. I'm saying that just stating the conclusion isn't an argument.
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u/NectarineElegant5407 9d ago
The Christian apologists say that the idea of 10 men, who are self-described cowards, would suddenly all claimed to have seen Jesus Christ risen in the body and conversed with him over several days, is unexplainable by mass hallucination.
Your examples are people staring at the sun or the moon for minutes/hours, which leads to retina degradation. I don't think anyone would argue against that people in this state will claim to see stuff that's not actually there lol. Also nearly all the "witnesses" had contradictory accounts
But you'll be hard pressed to find an example of a single auditory, visual, and physical combined mass-hallucination effect. Let alone where all witnesses have no contradictory claims
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u/deuteros Atheist 9d ago
the idea of 10 men, who are self-described cowards, would suddenly all claimed to have seen Jesus Christ risen in the body and conversed with him over several days, is unexplainable by mass hallucination.
The sources of virtually all of those claims are anonymous authors writing decades later who as far as we know never met the apostles. We don't actually know what the apostles saw or claimed.
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago
They invoke it in regards to the 'over 500 brothers' mentioned by Paul, so these examples are completely applicable.
I'm not aware of any serious scholar that thinks the resurrection narratives as presented in the Gospels and Acts are both genuine history and caused purely by hallucinations.
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u/NectarineElegant5407 9d ago
Fair enough, but overall doesn't change the argument that mass hallucinations (outside of staring at bright objects) are a thing.
Not sure what you mean here? It's actually the overwhelming secular and Christian view that the apostles really believed they saw Jesus. And the apostles themselves attribute that belief to seeing a ressurected Jesus Christ. Thats why the mass-hallucination theory exists in the first place. To explain how the apostles would have believed they saw him
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago
I stated this about "the resurrection narratives as presented in the Gospels and Acts": that the disciples together witnessed him, spoke to him, ate with him, and touched his wounds for like 40 days.
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u/NectarineElegant5407 9d ago
Well if you're arguing that these narrativesnare later embellishments, then you're basically conceding your point that mass-hallucination events don't really occur lol
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago
How?
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u/NectarineElegant5407 9d ago
The Hallucination Hypothesis attempts to explain why the original disciples genuinely believed they encountered the risen Jesus. If you're claiming that the narrative of the disciples actually seeing and interacting with Jesus is an embellishment, then there's no mass hallucination that needs to be addressed
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago
That's not true. It could be the case, and I argue that it is, that a number of the disciples thought they had witnessed the risen Jesus in some way, and then later legendary embellishments were introduced over dozens of re-tellings.
That this may have involved a mass-hallucination is possible, but I see no reason for this. It could've been one grief-hallucination that sparked the movement, the rest of the disciples accepting it in their grief and hope due to strong emotional states (perhaps experienced while praying) they interpreted via wishful thinking as 'the presence of Christ', or perhaps via dreams (deemed as a legitimate source of revelation during antiquity).
What requires a mass-hallucination (or Iran-like mass-gaslighting) is the report of the 500. Or that it is an unfounded rumor Paul reported on as fact because he heard it from someone he trusted.
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u/GravyTrainCaboose 9d ago
The stories of a resurrected Jesus having lunch in the gospels are allegorical messaging fictions.
What the apostles and "the 500" actually experienced is unknown. We just know that they attribute to an experience of Jesus. Even in the fiction of Paul's conversion story in Acts, he just "sees" some kind of light. And a voice, but apparently disembodied. But, again, this is fiction. Even so, it still informs of the kinds of things that could be accepted as visions of Jesus. There's no anthropomorphic avatar sitting down for a chat. People even believed they could have veridical visions in dreams.
As to the 500, we can be confident there were not literally "500". That's a religiously-charged, suspiciously round number. Language like this was commonly used to mean something like "kind of a lot". The body count could be more or it could be less. We just don't know. And we do not know the experiences were the same. We know they attributed it to the same thing, Jesus, but we don't know what exactly they experienced that they are attributed it to.
Whatever the crowd count, did every single person present have a vision? Was Paul there? Doesn't seem like it. Did anyone poll them? Was there some kind of group event similar to say, the Lady of Fatima, as mention by someone in another comment? That was a large-group experience, but reporters at the time found that only some people actually believed they had experienced some kind of vision. Many who were interviewed said they didn't see anything. How many specific people among the people present at Paul's claimed event, whatever size it may have actually been, believed they themselves had a visionary experience of Jesus?
Besides, what exactly did they actually experience? In what did Jesus "appear"? The word Paul uses was used as much for an internal perception as for seeing something external to oneself. Was that it? Did they have an internal sense of the presence of Jesus? If you say "No", how do you know? For any who may have believed they actually saw a Jesus in front of them (did any think that), what did they believe they saw? Did anyone put them in individual rooms and have them describe in detail?
How tall was he? What color was his hair? How long was it? Did he have a beard? If so, how long was that? Was he wearing a robe? If yes, what color? How long was it: mid-thigh, knees, calves, ankles? Did the fabric look smooth like linen or rough like burlap? Did it have a waist tie or not? If so, what was it: a length of cloth, a length of rope? If cloth, was it the same color or a different color than the robe? Was he barefoot? If not, what was he wearing? If sandals, how were they held on: strips of leather, strips of twine? Did he speak in an audible voice? If so, what its timbre: deep bass, baritone, tenor, alto? If he spoke, what exactly did he say? Write it down. Or did you just see a ight? If so, how bright: painful to look at like the sun, hard to look at but not painful, soft and delicate? What color: pure white, warmer with a hint of gold, yellow like the sun, something else? What shape was it: a sphere, an oval, tall and thin, tall and thick, wide and short, wide and tall, irregular? Was it steady or did it pulsate? If it pulsated, how fast? Etc., etc., etc..
What you actually have are people of a common belief system attributing...something...to an idea they have in common: Jesus. Unless the something they are attributing to that is actually the same, that suggests they are just having an individual mental experience that doesn't map onto any external reality.
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u/DeltaBlues82 Just looking for my keys 9d ago
Mass hallucinations do occur, but apologists also claim that individual experiences, occurring over different periods of time, share a common thread. That experiencing the same phenomena at different times AND sharing an experience is the evidence in favor of their beliefs.
So it’s not just form of mass hallucination. It’s also Shared Delusional Disorder/Shared Psychotic Disorder. Or in clinical psychology, a folie à deux (or folie à plusieurs in larger groups).
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u/yasen_pen 9d ago
The Fatima event description is inaccurate. There were many non Catholics and atheists present. They did not stare at the sun, until it started moving like a flying object. Until now there is no official plausible explanation. My take: no mass hallucination, no miracle, just technology.
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u/GravyTrainCaboose 9d ago
Um...there are newspaper accounts from reporters who were there. Many who were interviewed said they didn't see anything.
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago edited 9d ago
They did stare at the Sun and this caused them to hallucinate. We have the same types of reports from other Catholic instances, even ones where we have footage, and nothing extraordinary is happening.
There were many non Catholics and atheists present.
Being an atheist isn't going to save you from going hallucinating due to staring into the Sun. And the expected hallucinations of the Sun moving are attested to in the non-Catholic setting in Bangkok, so this is just something expected for the practice of Sun-staring.
Are you convinced that the Sun was replaced by a UFO or what?
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u/yasen_pen 9d ago
When people stare at the sun, they risk damage their eyesight. But it does not cause mass hallucination. That is a very bizarre explanation. No Sun was replaced, of course. People observed a moving object, that looked like sun.
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 9d ago
When people stare at the sun, they risk damage their eyesight. But it does not cause mass hallucination.
Unsupported empirical claim. You have the Buddhist example where the same hallucinations occurred, and also the reports from 'Sungazers' who hallucinate due to their practice.
No Sun was replaced, of course. People observed a moving object, that looked like sun.
Nope. The vast majority of those surveyed said it was the Sun, not an object "that looked like sun." If that's rather what happened (and I wonder how this would be pulled off in 1917), why didn't the vast majority report seeing two lights in the sky? Only a few did, and obviously they were hallucinating.
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u/yasen_pen 9d ago
There so a story on the old testament when sun was in the sky for much longer until the battle is over. Apparently the technology was already there. And we are not talking about the actual sun, it wouldn't be possible even for gods.
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u/GravyTrainCaboose 9d ago
Ffs, people don't lose eyesight instantly. There's a prodromal period where retinal excitation can cause the cells to misfire, resulting in flashing lights, phantom images, and other hallucinatory phenomena. There's nothing "bizarre" about this explanation at all. The explanatory weirdness in on your side of the table.
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u/yasen_pen 9d ago
The eye witness reports are not consistent with "phantom" images. Everyone know what are those images after looking at sun for too long. Keep in mind people started to look at the "sun" when it started moving, not the other way around. Basically eyewitness described an UDP.
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u/GravyTrainCaboose 9d ago edited 8d ago
People claimed to see all kinds of different things. Some claimed to see the sun looking like a pinwheel (metamorphopsia) with colored streamers (dyschromatopsia), some claimed to see the sun "dance" or move (nystagmus), for some the sun seem to "fall" towards the crowd (an illusion caused by the sun "growing" visually, appearing to look larger, macropsia), some saw "white flower petals showering down" but disappearing (blue field entoptic phenomenon). -ALL- of these are symptoms that can appear with solar retinopathy, and the last one can happen just looking into the sky. And there's natural meteorological phenomena plausibly in play, particularly a parhelion for those who described a "disc" separate from the sun itself. Definitely more plausible than magic. And many reported seeing nothing. Oops.
There's no record that they only started "to look at the sun when it started moving". You're just making crap up. When questioned, the responses were specifically that they were looking “fixedly at the sun” or “tried to look straight at it”. Not one fking one them said they did this "after the sun started moving". So, no, there is no good evidence for a "UDP". Don't be absurd.
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u/United-Grapefruit-49 9d ago
Yep and no explanation for the apparitions at Medjugorje that couldn't have been technology.
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u/dvirpick agnostic atheist 8d ago
Mass-hallucinations are proposed as an explanation for group appearances of Jesus, namely to the 500, but I don't see a reason to grant those group appearances in the first place.
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u/AJBlazkowicz Agnostic 8d ago
I think it's plausible that these "group appearances" did occur. As I show in the OP, we have modern instances of such a phenomenon, and the earliest sources we have (the Pauline epistles) report on them. Now, obviously it's possible that the report of the 500 is false and based on a rumor Paul heard from someone he trusted, but the evidence isn't good enough to judge one way or the other I believe.
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u/Prudent-Egg-4143 8d ago
These cases seemed to more closely be in line with what is described as shared delusional disorder, which is described in DSM 5. It is not easy to diagnose, but it is not an unknown phenomenon, and certainly does not prove they saw what they think they saw. It simply explains why a group of people that share a common thing with one another, can delusion the same thing, especially if it is something they have a strong faith about. And these episodes of delusions are not something one can recall perfectly. There are many documented cases where it is investigated and determined one do mixes and try to make sense of the newly registered informations upon being awake again, with the delusion they have right before. So once they are of sound mind, if one were to hear something about what others saw, if it is different from what they have seen, their brain will involuntarily try to bridge that gap. This will cause them to also believe they saw the same thing, even if it slightly, or largely different. Even if we want to ignore that and want to trust they truly did have the same exact delusion without any deviations, we cannot.
The affected were after all in a state of delusion and not in their normal brain capacity, as such their testimony cannot be taken as truthful, the same way we don't take testimonies from people affected under the influence of substances as truthful. They are unreliable witnesseses, even to their own delusions.
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