Surveying the landscape => A paranormal, religious future?

AMC Witching Hour Documentary

AMC AND AMC+ TO DEBUT ALL OF THEM WITCHES, A DOCUMENTARY EXPLORING THE HISTORY OF WITCHES, AS A COMPANION SPECIAL TO ANNE RICE’S MAYFAIR WITCHES

NEW YORK – DECEMBER 20, 2022 – AMC and AMC+ announced today the debut of All of Them Witches, a documentary exploring the history of witches, as a companion special to the anticipated series Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches. The doc premieres on Wednesday, December 21, the Winter Solstice, on AMC+ and on Monday, January 2 at 10:00 p.m. ET on AMC.  All of Them Witches is a one-hour documentary that will explore an alternate and authentic history told from the perspective of today’s most well-known, practicing witches, as well as scholars of history and anthropology.

The film examines the provocative history of Witch Hunts, paganism and voodoo, and challenges the myths that have become the fabric of popular culture.  Select experts featured in All of Them Witches include Pam Grossman, author of Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power, witch and entrepreneur Bri Luna, witch and author Amanda Yates Garcia and content creator and actor Curly Velasquez.

All Of Them Witches was directed by Mona Panchal.  The film was produced by XTR, the producers of Academy Award-nominated feature documentary Ascension, Emmy-nominated They Call Me Magic (AppleTV+) and this year’s awards favorite, The Territory. 

A nonstop Kentucky prayer 'revival' is going viral on TikTok, and people are traveling thousands of miles to take part

Jake Traylor

The growing event started as a routine chapel service at Asbury University, a small Christian college in Wilmore, Kentucky, according to university employees. At the tail-end of the meeting, a couple dozen lingering students assembled informally in a gathering that’s been going now for seven days straight, 24 hours a day. 

“The first day we had a very ordinary service, I would call it unremarkable,” said university President Dr. Kevin Brown. Following a morning service on Feb. 8, a multicultural gospel choir sang on stage. Some students stuck around afterward, and by evening more and more had trickled into the sanctuary creating something special, said Brown.

“It has absolutely been social media that is the mechanism that people found out about this,” said Mark Whitworth, Asbury University’s vice president of communications. The setup is simple. No projector screens or high-tech integrations, just wooden sanctuary chairs filled with people, and an open altar call with an invitation to prayer that still hasn’t ended. That equation has been a powerful recipe on social media. On TikTok and Instagram, videos hashtagged “Asbury Revival” are racking up millions of views. At the time this article was published, the hashtag #asburyrevival had 24.4 million views on TikTok.  The phrase “spiritual revival” can carry different meanings; in Christianity, they generally refer to a resurgence in interest in the church from believers and nonbelievers. Many attendees of the Asbury gathering say they were drawn by a spiritual presence they felt was at the event. In the TikTok videos of the event, some people are seen crying to worship music, with hands extended high, while others group up and place hands on those seeking prayer. The response of many TikTokers has gone beyond the typical "like" or comment on the videos, which in some cases have stirred viewers to make the trek to Asbury for themselves.   Tuesday night capped the largest crowd yet: 3,000 worshipers piled into the college chapel and four overflowed facilities throughout the college town. At least two-thirds of the attendants are from out of state, according to Brown. Students and staff from 22 schools have visited so far, alongside groups from Hawaii to Massachusetts, university faculty said. Travelers from Singapore and Canada are expected to arrive soon, they added. Although social media has served as a lightning rod for the event, Asbury faculty said they were cautious not to market or brand what was happening. “The university made an intentional decision not to publicize this because we wanted to place an abundance of respect towards the experience of our students,” said Brown. With the exception of the regular three hours of weekly livestream from the chapel, the videos seen online have all come from participants.   Historically, Christian revivals, like The Great Awakening, are marked by conversions and wildfire growth — a reason why — for now, at least — many are cautiously referring to Asbury as an outpouring, a gathering, or a nonstop worship meeting.      Nick Hall, an attendee who purchased a one-way plane ticket from Minneapolis when he saw a viral video on Instagram, emphasized that the gathering was notably low-key for something that people are calling a “revival.”

“This is acoustic guitars, pianos and very noncharismatic speakers. This is as un-sensationalized as it could be,” he said. And according to Hall, leading the charge in the sanctuary and on social media is the Gen Z generation.  “They’re the ones that started it, they’re the ones that sustained it, and they’re the ones that have been on the platform the whole time,” he said...

A nonstop Kentucky prayer 'revival' is going viral on TikTok, and people are traveling thousands of miles to take part

Rising Spiritual Openness in America (Jan 2023)

In an October 2022 Barna survey of 2,000 U.S. adults, three out of four (74%) say they want to grow spiritually. Additionally, the same proportion (77%) say they believe in a higher power. Nearly half (44%) say they are more open to God today than before the pandemic.

Hell, yes: younger Britons more likely to believe in damnation, study finds

Harriet Sherwood

You may think the idea of hellfire belongs to an age when people’s lives were shaped by the threat of eternal damnation.

Wrong, it seems: generation Z and millennials in the UK are significantly more likely to believe in hell than baby boomers, according to a new study by the Policy Institute at King’s College London.

Younger people are also more likely to believe in life after death than older generations, despite being less religious generally.

Is there an afterlife? See how your answer compares to polled Americans (Dec 2022)

Of the U.S. adults who believe in heaven, 69% said that it is “definitely” or “probably” free of suffering, where you will be reunited with loved ones who died previously (65%), where you can meet God (62%), where we will have perfectly healthy bodies (60%), and where we can be reunited with pets (48%). Of those who believe in hell, 53% say that people “definitely” or “probably” will experience psychological suffering, will become aware of the suffering they created in the world (53%), will experience physical suffering (51%), cannot have a relationship with God (49%), and can meet Satan (44%).

Respondents who do not believe in heaven or hell but still believe in an afterlife were asked to describe the afterlife in their own words. Within this group, roughly one in five (21%) believe that one’s spirit or energy lives on, while a smaller share expressed belief in reincarnation (17%), an existence without suffering (11%), rejoining the universe (8%), and a place that will allow us to learn and grow (4%).

One respondent described the afterlife as “a resting place for our spirits and energy. I don’t think it’s like the traditional view of heaven, but I’m also not sure that death is the end.”

More and more people believe we live in a computer simulation – but why?

Elizabeth McCafferty

TikTok videos about unsettling ‘glitches in the matrix’ have over a billion views

Jessica, based in Long Island, New York, has been receiving 50 to 100 emails per week of people sharing their ‘glitch in the matrix’ stories. Videos posted to her TikTok @tessicavision have acquired 13.2 million likes, as she shares people’s encounters or theories behind our reality. “At the present moment, I have 5,842 unread emails in my inbox,” she tells Dazed. “We have built a beautiful, accepting community where our motto is ‘we believe you’.” She doesn’t necessarily believe we are living in a computer simulation, but rather that “we are all fragments of the universe... I believe that most glitches in the matrix can be explained by the fact that we are living in a multiverse, with many different universes and timelines and energetic layers and frequencies.” She believes that most people write their experiences off due to fear of ridicule, but TikTok helps unite people with like-minded others.

 “It’s not arguable, and it’s not falsifiable. The general consensus is: if you can’t prove or disprove something, is it even science?”

Majorities of Americans believe in ghosts, aliens, the devil: Survey

by Tara Suter - 01/10/24 3:30 PM ET

Majorities of Americans believe in aliens, ghosts and the devil, according to a recent RealClear Opinion Research poll.

Among those surveyed, 56.9 percent said they believe in aliens, 61.4 percent believe in ghosts, and 70.3 percent say they believe in the devil, which is lower than the 85.4 percent who say they believe in God.
Other findings in the poll include 80.3 percent of respondents saying that they believe “Jesus is God or the Son of God” and 84.7 percent saying they believe in Heaven.

Another 83 percent say the believe in miracles, though majorities reject the existence of witches and reincarnation. Some 52.3 percent say they don’t believe in reincarnation, and 54.2 percent say the same about witches.

More than 70 percent of Americans believe in hell.

“Self-reported belief in God is highest in the South, at 89%, followed by the Midwest (85%), Northeast (83%), and West (81%),” said RealClear’s Spencer Kimball.

The high belief in spiritual topics appears to be in line with a recent survey from the Pew Research Center in which 7 out of 10 adults said they were “spiritual in some way.”

In the new RealClear poll, respondents were also asked, “If there is a God, do you think of God as male or female or neither?” Precisely half said male, 14.1 percent said female, 27.5 percent responded “something else” and 8.4 percent said they do not believe in God.

The RealClear survey was conducted between Dec. 19 and 21, featuring responses from 1,000 U.S. residents and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

An out-of-body experience (OBE) is the experience of perceiving the world from a point of view outside of the physical body. It is generally explained by psychologists as the cognitive system switching from a sensory driven model to a backup model based on memory and imagination (Blackmore 1984, 1986). This can happen when it tries to reassert a stable perception of reality, made unstable by meditation, drug use, trauma, and other triggers. This process can be likened to the deployment of cache files to compensate for a weak Internet connection. This zombie webpage is the OBE environment, typically beginning from a near-facsimile of the immediate environment. It is textbook eerie, often void of characters, but with hints that there is someone, or something, behind the experience.

Strikingly, OBE environments are recently proving to reflect our cultural shift towards the virtual and fictional. Floating computer screens, encounters with fictional characters and cartoon worlds will be discussed in this presentation, as well as the myriad ways that experiencers react to them. Are they hallucinations? Does this mean all OBE content is hallucinatory? Are they thoughtforms or sentient shapeshifters?

This presentation will also explore the recent shifting trend that has taken social media by storm in the past few years, which embraces these elements.

This practice involves astral projection-like techniques to enter the worlds of our comfort characters, and is particularly popular with the younger generations.

Jan 2024: Religious ‘Nones’ in America: Who They Are and What They Believe

A closer look at how atheists, agnostics and those who describe their religion as ‘nothing in particular’ see God, religion, morality, science and more

Our survey data shows:

• Most “nones” believe in God or another higher power. But very few go to religious services regularly.
  
  
• Most say religion does some harm, but many also think it does some good. They are not uniformly anti-religious.
  
  
• Most “nones” reject the idea that science can explain everything. But they express more positive views of science than religiously affiliated Americans do.
  

60% of Canadians believe there's an afterlife, poll finds

Stefan Labbé

Three in five Canadians say they believe there is some sort of life after death, a new public opinion poll has found. 

The survey, carried out by the Angus Reid Institute and the non-partisan think tank Cardus, found only one in eight Canadians could “definitely” rule out an afterlife, though 40 per cent doubted its existence.