"You can't get married, I'm hallucinating!"

12 August 2009

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ZJ: I've received several messages from people who claim to have had some kind of personal experience with what they consider to be supernatural entities. Specifically, one person said he saw angels when he was almost hit by a bus. Another claimed to have seen angels, and apparently that means gay marriage is wrong.

Well, I think it would be helpful to explain how sensory perception works. When you see something, this is because light is being reflected from or emitted by the object in question. It is then received by the retina in the back of your eye, which turns this into nerve impulses that are transmitted into your brain, which processes this into a visual image. Similarly, when you hear something, this is due to pressure waves which are transmitted through the air and received by the various structures of the ear, and, again, translated into nerve impulses which are sent to the brain and processed into the experience of sound.

Now, presumably these people who witnessed angels were the only ones who perceived them. However, when you see or hear something that really is there, this is because it has a physical presence that reflects light or creates sound waves. If this were the case, the entity in question would be seen or heard by anyone else who was present. This perception would not be limited to one person.

And this would seem to indicate that although these people claim to have seen angels, this was not caused by the actual presence of angels. Rather, they think they saw something, but it wasn't really there. Their experience of angels was caused by something localized to the individual, not an external stimulus.

And there are many reasons why people can experience sights and sounds that aren't really there. We're all familiar with dreaming, where we find ourselves in all kinds of fantastic scenarios, which seem quite realistic at the time, but aren't actually real. It's possible that a person could have a dream that incorporates familiar elements of their surroundings, while also including something like angels. And if this person has religious tendencies, they may not realize this was only a dream after they wake up. They might mistake it for an actual experience—after all, dreams can seem very real. Perhaps they would interpret this as a religious vision of some sort. Or, they might believe an angel somehow inserted itself into their dream, so although it was just a dream, the angel was real.

People can also experience hallucinations while awake, for a variety of reasons. Certain drugs, such as LSD, psilocybin and mescaline, can induce all kinds of perceptions that wildly differ from reality. Angels are a somewhat common hallucination arising from drug use. Mental disorders such as schizophrenia and other psychoses can cause visual and auditory hallucinations, and this can often be treated with psychiatric drugs which eliminate the hallucinations. Again, angels are sometimes perceived by those suffering from these conditions. A high fever can also provoke strange visions, and sleep deprivation can cause increasingly severe hallucinations depending on how long you stay awake. All of this once again confirms that perceptions are sometimes isolated to the individual, rather than the result of external stimuli.

And even among the sane, sober and well-rested, hallucinations can still occur. When someone is grieving over the loss of a loved one, they may see or hear the deceased person. Vivid visual hallucinations can also result from near-fatal accidents and situations of life-threatening danger, such as, perhaps, almost being hit by a bus.

It's also possible that the experience of seeing angels is not the result of a hallucination. These people may have actually seen something at the time, and mistaken it for an angel. Or, their recollection of having seen an angel could be inaccurate. Our memory is not as reliable as it seems. For instance, most wrongful convictions are based on eyewitness identification of a suspect that turns out to be incorrect.

Furthermore, even when something is experienced by more than one person, or even a great number of people, this can still be the result of misperception or hallucination. For example, in 1917, up to 100,000 people came to a field in Portugal to witness what was called "the Miracle of the Sun". They reported that the sun appeared to be dark and spinning, shooting colors across the sky, and then zig-zagged and zoomed towards the earth.

Now, does that mean this really happened? No. If these events actually occurred as described, this would be seen by nearly everyone, not just those who happened to be staring at the sun on a field in Portugal. You would not be able to avoid noticing something like that, because it would destroy the planet. This indicates that although these witnesses may have seen something, what they believe they saw could not possibly have taken place. Their experience was not shared by the rest of the world.

And these alleged angel sightings are no different. There is far more evidence of the numerous phenomena that can result in hallucination, misperception, misinterpretation, and misidentification, than there is for the actual existence of angels that are somehow visible only to you. And for that reason, these personal religious experiences are not a valid basis for telling others that they aren't allowed to participate in the civil institution of marriage.

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