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Why aren't all atheists materialists?

Woomaster said:
@ Sledge & linusrichard:
Could you tell us what your experiences with telepathy/Ouija board were? I know that this isn't very on-topic, but I find such stories very interesting!
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Since you asked,

I was staying the night at my cousin's house. We were probably 12ish, give or take. She had somehow gotten a Ouija Board program for her computer. The screen was the board and the mouse was the planchette. Now I know right away that seems suspicious, like couldn't the software be programmed to move the mouse pointer on the screen and spell out a creepy message? I think it could, yes. But I think it wasn't.

Anyway, we were having a very typical Ouija Board experience. I don't know if you've ever messed with a Ouija Board. It stays still a while, then it moves a little, it goes to a few letters, whatever. The thing that is noteworthy about this one, though, is that, being a computer program, it had a little output area. So whenever it would hover over a letter long enough, it would type that letter out for you. The problem was, a lot of time the mouse/planchette would move over other letters on its way from one letter to another. So garbage letters would be thrown in. Also, it had to move to a certain area to put in a space, and it usually would not move over that area when a space was called for, but sometimes would move over when when no space was called for.

But still, we seemed to be getting a message. Something about someone needing help. Someone was saying something along the lines of "help me." Except it turned out as more like "H XELPMM E" or whatever. So I'm a skeptical guy, but I like a creepy good time. And generally, after a Ouija Board session, I just put it down to either one person was cheating, or more likely, on an unconscious level, someone was... well, for lack of a better word, cheating. But I like to play along with it at the time, to maximize the creepy good time. So we're asking the spirit who it is, what kind of help it needs, what we should do to help, etc. And we're getting all these vague answers, like you do on a Ouija Board, only with a lot of these garbage letters thrown in.

Then the mouse/planchette stops. No nudge, no wiggle. Maybe 10 seconds, felt like a long time. Then it starts again, moving swiftly. It moves and spells out: "TICK TOCK TICK TOCK TIME IS RUNNING OUT" just like that with every space in the right place and no extra spaces and no extra letters and no missing letters. Then it says something like "TOO LATE". Then it goes to "Good bye."

The only other detail I didn't mention is that, the way my cousin and I were touching the mouse, it was sort of diagonal sideways to each of us. Which in my opinion makes it next to impossible that she was consciously cheating. It also makes it seem very unlikely that we were subconsciously "cheating." And I don't think the program was cheating: it seemed to be matching the movement of the cursor faithfully with the movement of the mouse, and outputting the letters the cursor moved over. And of course the program has no way of controlling the movement of the mouse. But I "know" there's no such thing as ghosts and spirits. And I can't think of any fifth explanation.

I don't expect this account to convince anyone. If I read it, I would assume it was the computer program, and I don't expect any person here to do differently. I'm only trying to describe my experience, and explain why I can't write it off with some "rational explanation."
 
Christian said:
If it's just a preference, why then not not believe in gods? (here the double negative is intended :))
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I was just reading over this thread and I noticed that many of your posts don't really make sense. I just picked this one as an example - you responded to a post that didn't say, or even imply, that the various beliefs were "just a preference" then you redefine what he said to support your position. Your position might seem stronger if you could defend it against the actual arguments people post, instead of coming back with "if you don't believe in god then you can't believe in telepathy" or something equally illogical.
 
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