adminmerely to explain away the fear that the universe really is quite random.
Whether you attach the hand of God, fate, or luck to these things, it seems to be a quite universal phenomenon.
And yet history is abundant with unusual little tales involving strange coincidences-even outlandishly improbable coincidences-that serve to remind us that not everything can be logically imbued with meaning.
Some outlandish coincidences do lend themselves to conspiracy questions: How much of a coincidence is it that the only state to have a vote counting controversy in the 2000 election just happened to be the one in which the Governor was the brother of one of the candidates?
Other coincidences are even stranger and do not lend themselves to easy causal connections. Consider the odd little story of Robert Fallon. He was a British man who, in 1858, faced accusations of cheating over a friendly little game of poker.
Poker is such a wonderful symbol for the desire to attach cause to an effect.
He was in San Francisco at the time, enjoying the wild open Wild West when the alleged cheating that netted him a tidy little sum of US$600 took place and the result was that Robert Fallon was gunned down.
At the time there was a superstition among some gamblers about taking money that was thought to be gained by cheating and so the money was handed over to the first person passing by the salon they could find.
He was brought in to take Fallon’s chair at the poker table and, against the expectations of the other gamblers, increased the dead man’s winnings to over US$2000.
Eventually the police arrived to investigate the shooting death of Fallon and demanded that the original US$600 be surrendered so it could be returned to his next of kin.
At that point, the stranger at the table realised what had happened and produced convincing evidence that he was Robert Fallon’s son even though he had not seen his father in seven years.
Think that is an amazing coincidence? Try this on for size.
Sometime during the 1930s a Detroit man happened to be walking down a street when suddenly a baby that had fallen out of a window above him fell directly on top of him.
A year later the same man was walking down that same street when the very same baby fell from the very same window and landed on top of him again.
Coincidences involving accidents that appear to have some kind of logical connection are legion.
For instance, in 1975 a man was riding down a street in Bermuda on a moped, as those Bermudans are apt to do.
He was killed when a taxi suddenly ran into him. The year before that man’s brother was killed when he was riding the same moped down the street and he was hit by the same taxi driver who was carrying the same customer. Now that’s just plain creepy.
Brothers seem to have a knack for coincidental events. In 1979 two identical twin boys who’d been adopted by two different families were reunited for the first time in their 40 years of life.
Both boys had been named James, both had a background as law enforcement officers, both men married women named Linda with whom they had a son they named James-one with the middle name Alan and the other with the middle name Allan, both had divorced their respective Lindas to marry women named Betty, and both had dogs they named Toy.
But what may the most amazing thing is that both men vacationed on the same stretch of beach St. Petersburg, Fl., often at the same time, but without ever running into each other.
Yep, coincidences are amazing and entertaining things. And who knows, maybe there is some causal connection to them all that we just aren’t smart enough to figure out yet.
Perhaps the truly startling thing about these and other bizarre coincidences is not that they happened, but that they are part of a much larger design that is intended to make us question such things as chaos and design in the universe.
Perhaps these disturbing events are a path toward a more spiritual understanding. — Huffington Post.
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