chooseDoubt clicked on the “random article” link on Wikipedia‘s left-hand sidebar… lo and behold, he got directed to an article for a garden located right next to where he used to live!
With approximately 5,300,000 Wikified articles, what are the odds of that?!
It has to be an *amazing* coincidence, right?
Wrong.
I would have been surprised if the article had been about someone that shared the same name as me, or even if it was about a subject I am especially interested in. I would have been surprised if it had been the date of my birthday, the date of either of my children’s birthdays, an article about what I had for lunch today, a company I’ve worked for, an actor or actress in a movie I’ve just watched, a dog that looked like mine, a car model I own, an article I’ve already read, a type of pet I have, a TV show I like, the list goes on and on. But none of this occurred to me within the first five seconds of looking at the article in a state of mild surprise.
We all remember the hits — in fact, we look for the hits — and ignore the misses.
The countless charlatans that offer medium services, tarot, astrology, psychic readings and all the other methods of defrauding the gullible make good use of this.
That’s how prayer works, too. If religious people pray, most will assume that anything in the general direction of the prayer is an affirmation that God heard them and answered their request.
You like that one girl? You pray to God that something will happen between you two. The next day, she makes eye contact with you for a couple seconds. You count your blessings when, in fact, nothing remarkable happened.
So try it yourself.
Click on the Wikipedia “random article” link here.
How many clicks does it take before you stumble onto something you have a connection to, no matter how obscure that connection may be?
What’s the connection?
We could have some fun with this 🙂
[tags]atheist, atheism, coincidence, prayer, religion, Christian[/tags]
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