Some of the others participating in the project have written that they're imagining responses to their own prayers or that they've noticed an unusual coincidence or two...
This was in the cards from the beginning, because both of these things are normal human responses when approaching the supernatural. It is a credit to the honesty of the people who made these observations that they posted them despite knowing how they would be received.
The fact is that any time we go into a "haunted" house wondering if there might be ghosts, we stand a good chance of scaring ourselves. Given that we're putting ourselves in a mindset to consider what communication from a supreme being might be like, there's a good chance that someone will eventually conclude that they have, in fact, received a revelation from the divine.
Some believers will, of course, interpret such things as signs. To those believers, failure by a skeptic to accept them as signs will be taken as proof that we heathen are "resisting the will of Jesus" (or Jehovah or Allah or Shiva or Thor). I was concerned about just this kind of stacked deck before I asked to join the project. Ultimately, I decided that I can't make decisions based solely on how everyone will misinterpret my actions. Although there was some risk of embarrassing myself, the project made sense for me as an exercise in keeping an open mind.
It has, however, affected what I say when "praying." What follows is an approximation of what I said this morning.
"Hello out there. Me again. If you exist, and you can hear this, and you're the sort of supreme being who communicates with human beings, I want to be open to hearing from you. Even if you're a god, for that matter-- I'm still listening. I don't want to put any limitations on how you might communicate, because the universe isn't a book written in English, and I assume that my vocabulary would be somewhat limited, from your perspective.
"My only request is that it be something clear that I can't mistake for my own imagination. I can't in good conscience ignore what I know about how the mind plays tricks on itself, and I can't ignore my experiences with other claims of the supernatural. Just make it something clear enough that I can believe it with a clear conscience and without ignoring evidence to the contrary. Whether I can use it to convince anyone else is beside the point; some people wonder about my sanity as it is.
"If you exist, you can do what you want, of course, but an omniscient being would know that I just want the facts, regardless of what they meant for me personally. That's it for now. I'll be back tomorrow."
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