Hello. I am just deconstructing from Christianity and learning more about psychology and how our mind works has really had me questioning the existance of a deity or of God. However my deconstruction has not been easy and one of my biggest areas of difficulty has been miracles especially the untested and witness claimed ones. I understand perfectly that not all eyewitness accounts point towards truth and between being honestly mistaken to embellishment and even to fraud I often have little trust of the same. But there is a particular claim that especially feels sticky to me and I would like your help in evaluating the same.

https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/amp/article/2000125937/kenyan-nun-who-photographed-god-is-headed-for-sainthood

https://sisterannaali.org/page.php?id=MDAwNEZCa053WjNBM3A

These are the links to the story. For the most part I am more comfortable with the claims of crying blood and the images and I know the evidence needed to affirm the same though I would like to hear your views on the same. For me I believe the part where I am bit hung up is on the issue of the cameras being damaged. I know that a claim and a witness story is not enough and there is a need to establish more like what damage was caused and what is the actual cause of damage etc.

But I often feel like my arguments are weak and not emotionally compelling. It definitely hasn't been helpful that the only medium I have consulted this far has been AI.

I guess what I am asking for specifically is what are your views and opinions on the same especially with the evidence claimed to be provided and am I being overly skeptical by choosing to be uncertain over the same information or for not accepting testimony face value .

hey, long time lurker. wanted to share a raw reflection and ask how you guys handle the aftermath of dismantling your own cognitive distortions.

for years i was neck-deep in the conspirituality space, esoteric stuff, synchronicities, new age bullshit. looking back objectively, it wasnt that i genuinely found bulletproof evidence for any of it. it was pure motivated reasoning and emotional self-defense. i was grieving lost family, terrified of non-existence, and overwhelmed by the boring, heavy demands of ordinary adult life. magical thinking was just a very seductive bunker to avoid facing an indifferent universe and my own lack of agency.

eventually the contradictions broke the dam. i spent months picking apart my own cognitive biases, fallacies, and rationalizations (ironically bouncing logic back and forth with an llm helped me see where my reasoning was completely circular). ended up landing hard in philosophical materialism and absurdism. no cosmic scripts, no higher vibrations, no grand narrative.

heres my struggle now: the intellectual deprogramming was the easy part. the hard part is the void that comes after.

when you strip away the magical theater, reality is just... reality. stubborn, completely indifferent, quiet. for those of you who have been rational skeptics for a long time or broke out of high-control irrational belief systems: how do you build a grounded, active life without slipping into cynical paralysis? how do you satisfy the human need for depth, connection, and drive while staying strictly tethered to empirical reality and knowing nothing owes you a damn thing?

appreciate any straight answers.

There is a real event underpinning the story, and an authentic chart showing a dramatic decline in automated internet traffic. But the leap from a viral chart to the disappearance of Russian propaganda bots is a large one. Much of the apparent corroboration comes from anecdotes about how social media feels, rather than measurements of what actually changed. And this speaks to a broader problem...

Broken down into 8 bite size segments by a leading disinformation researcher

1. What happened, and why does everyone think the Russian bots disappeared?
2. Wait, what exactly is a "bot"?
3. So what does the Cloudflare chart actually show?
4. But couldn't the strikes also have disrupted Russian propaganda operations?
5. Why did so many people believe the claims?
6. Couldn’t disinformation researchers just check whether accounts stopped posting?
7. What does this all tell us about the state of the information environment?
8. Why is it so hard to answer these questions now?

So, ironically, a story about the disappearance of Russian propaganda bots became a viral misleading story on its own. 

At dinner last weekend my uncle said full moons make the ER crazy. I asked how he'd know and he said "every nurse says so." Thing is, I've repeated that exact line before without thinking about it.

When I looked it up later, the studies I found mostly show no real effect on ER visits or admissions. It looks like classic confirmation bias. A wild night under a full moon becomes a story people tell for years. A quiet full moon shift just gets forgotten, and nobody remembers a busy night that happened under a half moon.

What bugs me is that "every nurse says so" feels like evidence because it's lots of people, but it's lots of people sharing the same memory filter.

Oddly, my cousin had some "orbivanius" numerology thing open on her phone at the table, and it happened to say something about seeing patterns that aren't there. Vague enough to fit anyone, but it made me laugh.

Anyone have a good source on why this belief sticks so hard in hospitals?