These are just some random things that I'm interested in. I'll just give a brief description of each of them here. I'm picking four terms beginning with the letter "P" for the first of what might be a series of posts.

Pareidolia:These clouds! Am sure you can make out some figure of these clouds, a man flying perhaps!

I was reading something on Wikipedia and came across Pareidolia. Wikipedia describes this as a psychological phenomenon involving a vague or random stimulus being perceived as significant. This immediately reminded me of human psychology of burrowing for deeper meaning where there is none. We all tend to do that don’t we? Pareidolia is an illusion of perceiving something that is vague, as clear and distinct. The most common examples would be seeing figures in clouds, man on the moon, etc, that happen everyday. Some of the more famous examples of Pareidolia would be Man on Mars, the Monkey Tree phenomenon in Singapore, etc.

http://www.skepdic.com/pareidol.html

http://www/schizoidman.com/top-20-things-that-look-like-other-things.html

You could also Wiki it any day!

Panentheism, Pantheism and Polytheism:

I am an atheist. I do not believe in what generally is perceived to be God. My notion of God, though I would not call it “God”, is different, might sound weird too. I’ll talk about this in another post. But for now, I found these concepts interesting.

Pan·the·ism –noun
1. The doctrine that God is the transcendent reality of which the material universe and human beings are only manifestations: it involves a denial of God's personality and expresses a tendency to identify God and nature.
2. Any religious belief or philosophical doctrine that identifies God with the universe.
- Source: Dictionary.com

Panentheism:
A panentheistic belief system is one which posits that the one God interpenetrates every part of nature, and timelessly extends beyond as well.
- Source: Wikipedia.org

Pol·y·the·ism - noun
The doctrine of or belief in more than one god or in many gods.
- Source: Dictionary.com

Panetheism associates God with the materialistic world, air, water, power, etc. everything that the universe is made of. The world is god! Panentheism suggests that God is much more than just the world itself. God has a personality, and the world is just a small part of this huge persona. Pareidolia is so often used as an aid to establish "God". Ghosts, apparitions, appearance of god in anything-you-want-to-see-it-in (huh!), are all pareidolia!