Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

On the Distinction between True and False Visions
enter into it. If you dreamed it, if it felt good, if it elicited wonder,
why then it really happened. There's not a sceptical bone in
Sparrow's body. When Jesus tells a troubled woman in an
'intolerable' marriage to throw the bum out, Sparrow admits that
this poses problems for 'advocates of a scripturally consistent
position'. In that case, '[u]ltimately, perhaps, one could say that
virtually all presumed guidance is generated from within'. What if
someone reported a dream in which Jesus counselled, say, abortion
- or vengeance? And if indeed somewhere, somehow we
must eventually draw the line and conclude that some dreams are
invented by the dreamer, why not all?
Why would people invent abduction stories? Why, for that
matter, would people appear on TV audience participation programmes
devoted to sexual humiliation of the 'guests' - the
current rage in America's video wasteland? Discovering that
you're an alien abductee is at least a break from the routine of
everyday life. You gain the attention of peers, therapists, maybe
even the media. There is a sense of discovery, exhilaration, awe.
What will you remember next? You begin to believe that you may
be the harbinger or even the instrument of momentous events now
rolling towards us. And you don't want to disappoint your
therapist. You crave his or her approval. I think there can very
well be psychic rewards in becoming an abductee.
For comparison, consider product tampering cases, which convey
very little of the sense of wonder that surrounds UFOs and
alien abductions: someone claims to find a hypodermic syringe in
a popular soft drink can. Understandably, this is upsetting. It's
reported in newspapers and especially on television news. Soon
there's a spate, a virtual epidemic of similar reports from all over
the country. But it's very hard to see how a hypodermic syringe
could get into a can at the factory, and in none of the cases are
witnesses present when an intact can is opened and a syringe
discovered inside.
Slowly the evidence accumulates that this is a 'copycat' crime.
People have only been pretending to find syringes in soft drink
cans. Why would anyone do it? What possible motives could they
have? Some psychiatrists say that the primary motives are greed
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