The Freedom to Think Horrible Thoughts

One of the greatest gifts skepticism has given me is the freedom to have terrible, awful, horrible thoughts. Things you're not supposed to think about. Anti-social, nasty things. Back when I was religious, I ran away from such thoughts. You're not supposed to think about things that are unpleasant or sinful. Push them away, refuse to think about them, pray to overcome them, run away, ignore, deny.

But since I became a skeptic and realized, gratefully, that there is no magic genie listening to my every thought, I have been free to entertain some of those ideas and to judge them on their individual merits.

It's so much more liberating to think about something controversial or frightening or culturally unacceptable and then let it go because the evidence suggests it's not true (or the opposite) than to push it away, unresolved, because the powers that be say it's forbidden to even think about. Bad ideas should be rejected because they're not true or unrealistic or measurably harmful, not because some book written thousands of years ago says that they're sinful.

It's the difference between shoving all of your garbage under the sofa in the hopes that it will magically disappear and actually taking out the trash and giving the house a good scrubbing. One ignores the problem; the other solves it.

The Creature at the Edge of the Woods

This morning as I was walking my dogs, something caught my eye at the edge of the stand of trees that backs up to my property. It was large, at least seven feet tall, dark brown, and shaped like some sort of giant, hulking man. I've lived on this property for 13 years now and have never observed anything larger than a fox.
 

My breath caught in my throat. "What IS that thing?" I thought to myself. I stood watching for a moment, and when the creature didn't move, I got curious and decided to investigate. I moved slowly toward the tree-line then picked up my pace.

I was about 50 feet from the trees when I realized what it was: the wet bark of a large oak outlined by branches. We've had a bit of snow in the last week, and sometime last night or early this morning, some of the branches on the locust tree in front of the oak had snapped off under the weight forming an interesting "frame" around the bark of the tree behind it, a frame that from a distance looks very much like a tall, hulking, bipedal animal. Exactly like one, in fact. It is still surprising to me just how alive and realistic this illusion was. I saw it at precisely the right time.

So what's my point? Well, what might have happened had I seen that and not had time to investigate? The oak bark was only dark because it was wet. Later in the day, it will dry and blend in with the trees around it. If I had rushed off to work and come back and noticed that the "creature" was gone, would I be writing a different blog post? Would I, two or three or ten years down the road, still be talking about the "unexplained" animal-like thing I had seen? Given my current skeptical outlook, probably not. But had this happened a few years back when I was still a firm believer in the supernatural and paranormal, who knows what I might have believed had I not investigated?

Our perception is faulty. We have evolved to perceive patterns (and threats) in our environment. After all, the ape that ran from an imaginary lion was much more likely to survive and pass on its genes than the ape that assumed the lion wasn't really there. Those instincts are still there. We trust our senses, even though the best research we have says that eyewitness testimony is not as reliable as once believed.

How many "paranormal" or "anomalous" experiences are the result of something just like this? A convincing illusion is still just an illusion, but when we are unwilling or unable to investigate the cause of such an illusion and when we give our senses more credit than they deserve, the illusion becomes real.  We become convinced that what we perceived was actually there. We tell the story, and it becomes part of our worldview. Then, the next time the snow falls and our eyes deceive us, we become that much more likely to believe that the creature at the edge of the woods is actually there.