Lets take a little break from politics and have us a real atheist conversation.
Personally, I’m open to the idea of the existence of supernatural phenomena, and I believe mainstream religions are actually complicated incomplete stories full of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and half-truths.
Basically, I think that these stories are not as simple and straightforward as they seem to be to religious people. I feel like there is a lot more to them. Concluding that all these stories are just made up or came out of nowhere is kind of hard for me.
Higher power = some kind of god or creator. Supernatural phenomena = anything that transcends/defies the laws of nature.
SUPERnatural means “above” nature
TRANScend means to cross the threshold to a new plane
Those both imply higher powers in their name. You might not consider the higher power to be sentient or good or whatever, but you’re literally arguing for a higher power, just under a different name.
I felt that in the context of the post, OP used Supernatural to mean “weird shit”. Nit picking on the definition of the word is just being argumentative, and not participating in the spirit of the conversation.
…nit-picking is what science IS. There is no way to independently verify the claims if OP can’t define what they’re even testing for.
But a lot of the time, what they’re saying is “look at this photon, it transcends the law that everything has an electrical charge!” No, it doesn’t transcend anything: your understanding of natural law is defective. Most of the UFO silliness falls into that bucket: they draw stupid conclusions based on their fanciful interpretation of a few perceived data points, then think that half-assed reasoning is enough to invalidate some real science.