14 DAY TRIAL // A study presented by the British newspaper Daily Mail indicates that nowadays people are more prone to believe in little green men from the outer space and their hat-shaped flying saucers, or even in ghosts haunting old houses and woods than in God. This may come as a surprise, given that one would expect the Almighty to be strongly supported by a large majority.
Still, since not many details were given in the article about the company performing the study, the questions posed or the way the data were collected and interpreted, corroborated with the fact that the research was made in junction with the DVD launch of “The X-Files: I Want to Believe,” it all starts to get a ghostly aura of doubt. In case there are people who do not know what X-Files is all about, it is a TV series involving two FBI agents who investigate cases which seem to feature a paranormal touch.
The research indicates that while God got the votes of 54% of the 3,000 participants, UFOs, ghosts and other supernatural events and beings received 58%. Almost 25% of the study participants stated that they had experienced a paranormal event during their lives. Also, women were showed to be more inclined to believe in the supernatural or visit a medium than men. Previous studies focused on our need to believe and on the high degree to which this is rooted in our minds.
"While it is difficult to know for certain, the tendency to believe in the paranormal appears to be there from the beginning," explains Christopher Bader, a sociologist at Baylor University, cited by LiveScience. "What changes is the content of the paranormal. For example, very few people believe in faeries and elves these days. But as belief in faeries faded, other beliefs, such as belief in UFOs, emerged to take their place."
Other studies showed that religious and paranormal beliefs rarely coexist. "Paranormal beliefs are very strongly negatively related to religious belief," shares Bader's colleague, Rod Stark. This is perhaps because church strongly discourages believing in anything else that could deter people from trusting God.