Ah, back to GD at last…
We had ten testimonies of various sorts offered up on this thread, by Tris, Ken, Lib, myself, Mike, Jon, Poly, phouka, Beth, and Phil, in approximately that order. I’d like to do a little bit of very basic analysis on those stories - more pigeonholing than anything else.
I’ll clue you in ahead of time that I don’t see much in the way of significant patterns to be teased out of the stories.
1) Initial conversion/epiphany
Mike and Jon accepted Christ at very youthful ages (11 and 8, IIRC) and don’t give any further details.
Tris, Poly, Beth, and Phil asked God to make his presence felt, in one way or another.
Ken and I were witnessed to, and believed.
Lib and Phouka had epiphanies triggered by events (Lib’s by translating “Before Abraham was, I am” from the Greek; phouka’s by a relationship and dialogue with a man she was close to).
2) Did the conversion/epiphany immediately or eventually lead to a more self-sustaining experience/involvement?
In phouka’s case, the answer is ‘no’, if I am understanding her correctly. For the others, the only question is whether the conversion experience resulted in a more ongoing experience immediately, or whether it took another experience of some sort to trigger that change. For Mike, Jon, and Poly, it took another experience (though not an epiphanic event of any sort, in Jon’s or Mike’s cases) to nudge them into a more ongoing relationship with God. For most (perhaps all; not all the stories are sufficiently detailed) of the others, including myself, the experience/relationship achieved some sort of critical mass more or less immediately.
3) How was God’s presence experienced in the various epiphanies?
We have testimony on this from five of the ten respondents: Tris, Lib, myself, Poly, and phouka.
Tris recalls a sensation of inner warmth, and the replacing of doubt by faith. Lib, a sensation of a ‘spiritual whirlwind’ followed by a joyful sense of dying and being reborn. Me, a sense of warmth, of the world being reoriented, of being able to see the world for the first time. Poly, on his initial experience, had a sense of certainty of God’s reality, and on his later one, a sense of being connected to Something awe-inspiring, yet warm and caring. Phouka reports a sense of being loved and cherished, of everything being connected with everything else, of joy and light.
4) Did those experiencing these things still believe in their reality?
Phil: no. Everyone else: yes.
Other things worth pursuing, IMO:
It would be worth asking how the lives of those involved changed around their experiences, to the best of their ability to be objective. And (for those reporting a Christian conversion) it would be worth hearing their observations (as Polycarp has already provided) of whether or how their comprehension of the Bible changed - not in terms of what they believed the Bible to be, but in terms of whether and how it seemed to make sense when they read it.
Like I said, if there’s any patterns here, I can’t see them. But as Feynman pointed out, if you’re going to do science, you have to report the experiments that tell you nothing, as well as those that tell you something, to keep from biasing how the outcomes are perceived.
