Brushes with the divine?

Great Debates
21

[quote=“Kable, post:18, topic:660585”]

You said you “dislike woo, mistrust miracles, and am skeptical of spirituality in all its forms” but now you make it seem like you were convinced by the mundane that really would not convince a skeptic. Which is it? [/UNQUOTE]

All right, let’s get it over with. One day, about 25 years ago, while alone, I heard the angels sing. It was strictly out of the blue, not related to anything going on my life, or in regards to any disease/accident, etc. Full-out epiphany. Now, before you ask: I can’t prove it wasn’t a hallucination. I am lifelong teetotaler, have never taken recreational drugs, and have never had a similar experience before or after. How do I know it was angels? I don’t, actually, that’s simply the cultural template I’m most familiar with. If I was from India I probably would accept it as being something related to Hinduism. What did they sing? I couldn’t tell you the words, but it spoke to the innermost part of my being. Did God ask anything of me through the song? No, but at that moment I knew for certain there was a God. Now you can proceed with your snarking.

My, you are quick on the attack. There was a thread on the Dope a few weeks back that dealt with Hell, and a fairly strong case was made that the references to Hell actually imply (if not impel) the belief that the “lost” do not suffer eternally, but are utterly destroyed. I agree with that, but do not pretend to think that I understand what actually happens after death.

In addition to studying the Bible and Christianity, I’ve also studied comparative religion. I’m not at all certain that Christians are the only ones to have eternal life, and I don’t pretend to know.

You’ve mentioned in the past how hypocritical you find my faith and the doctrines of the Presbyterians. I’m curious what you mean by that.

22

Ya know, there’s plenty of us who are genuinely interested in reading about your experiences, even us bad ol’ atheists.

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That’s one reason I posted the above. Thank you for this.

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Specifically, the efficacy of prayer seems, to me, to be the most nonsensical belief.

For thousands of years, our ancestors went through wives and young children like monkeys go through bananas. Child birth often meant death for the mother, and infant mortality was through the roof.

This is in spite of incessant prayer by a culture that was a hell of a lot more religious than most of us are now (in the western world at least).

Suddenly science comes into play and in a few hundred years infant mortality and deaths during child birth have been incredibly reduced.

So either god wasn’t listening for the vast majority of human history, and only decided to start listening rather recently, when we started to become LESS religious. Or you, know, there is no god answering prayers.

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The most memorable experience of this type I’ve had was years ago. A ten year relationship was ending. We were spending our last night together. Lying there I was filled with anxiety, regret, and incredible sense of loss. Mymind wouldn’t stop racing and I just wanted to go to sleep and stop thinking.

I guess I went to sleep and had a dream or some kind of vision. In it she and I seemed to rise out of the bed. We were happy with each other content and began to dance. I seemed to be observing us as if I were a 3rd party. The visual wasn’t really the part that stood out. In the dream I or we seemed to understand that our dance was the result of all the little choices we had made over the years, the good and bad , the love or the insecurity and selfishness, but it was all human and okay.no need for blame or regret. Love would continue, even as we parted ways. I saw that consciously or otherwise we had , choice by choice, action by action, written all the music we were dancing to now, but it was all somehow , part of our human process and perfectly okay. The mistakes and the other, were part of our journey and love survived. I felt a sense of peace and euphoric love I’m not sure I had ever experienced.
When I woke up I felt the same way. Profound serenity , peace and understanding. No regret, just radient love for her. We said goodbye and a friend came to pick me up to take me to the bus station. This friend knew some off what had been going on and was surprised to see me so extremely happy and at peace. He said " " What’s going on with you Dan, you are practically glowing" What still remains a mystery to me about the experience is the insight, the deep understanding that came with the experience. Where does that come from?

AS an agnostic I don’t nessecarily attribute that experience to God, but that along with others makes me tend to believe in something more. There’s a lot left to undertand about how our consciousness works and IMO, it may be that there is some connected consciousness that we can tap into.

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kable, I haven’t described the experience to which I refer to my husband of 28 years so (for the reasons already stated) I won’t do so here. If that leads you to conclude that I made it up, so be it–but why would I do that?

To answer your questions, while I’m not really sure what you mean by “skeptic,” I had definitely stopped believing in God by my late teens. I was brought up in a not-very-devout RC family but lived much of the time with my grandfather. He was a brilliant man (a labor organizer and gifted amateur naturalist) who was staunchly atheist and who believed that religion had done much harm in the world. He was too smart and too honest to claim that all religious people are stupid or evil, but believed that faith in God was misguided and counterproductive. I came to agree with him.

Another grandfather was a Jew who became a Lutheran minister, so there were certainly other religions besides RC for me to “return” to; in any case, I have deliberately chosen a different denomination because it is more inclusive and tolerant.

I am not a fundamentalist or a bible literalist. The only witnessing I do is to try to love my neighbor as myself. This has made me happier and helped me to help others. If that is cow-like, childish or dim-witted, it’s also been of great utility to me and no harm to anyone else.

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I had a very religious friend who claimed to have seen a literal angel appear in the middle of the road and physically push a car aside to cause a surely-fatal head on crash to end up being an injury-free fender bender. He literally saw an angel physically turn the car aside the moment before impact.

He was very sexually confused and unhappy at the time. It was still several years before he finally embraced his homosexuality, realized he could not reconcile his own feelings with the church’s teachings, and left the church to become a much happier and well adjusted non-religious person.

This guy literally fucking saw an angel, but decided this whole religion thing isn’t for him because it didn’t jive with his feelings.

Point is, people see what they want to see. I’m pretty sure not one of us actually witnesses the world how it “really” is. Our personal perspective and individual biases are so much stronger than our conscious ability to suppress them.

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I’m agnostic, though I was raised in a Southern Baptist household and was taught to believe in all kinds of paranormal things, such as the reality of demonic possession, rock music as an open doorway to let the Devil into my soul, etc, etc.

Anyway, when I was a senior in high school, my grandfather died suddenly and unexpectedly. My grandmother was naturally stricken and inconsolable. I was present when her pastor came and began to pray with her. She began to speak in tongues–all I can say is, a chill went through me, and I felt like there was some sort of presence in the room. The sound coming from her mouth was gibberish yet decidedly not gibberish. I don’t know how to explain it.

My grandmother collapsed on her bed and the pastor leaned over her. The bed shook–I’d like to say it was from the shaking of my grandmother’s body. It might have been, but I swear the bed frame just seemed to gallop in place a few times.

Well, that was more than 20 years ago. I’m still not sure what I saw. I know that at the time, though I was a committed teen atheist in my heart, I desperately wanted my grandmother’s pain to be taken away, and hoped it was actually the presence of God in the room comforting her. I’m willing to believe some of that influenced my perceptions of the events, which lasted all of 10 minutes, tops. But it WAS freaky. Unfortunately, my grandmother was hardly touched by an angel as a result of her experience. She never got over her grief, developed Parkinsons and quickly went downhill, dying a few years later.

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Belief in angels does not necessarily require belief in religion or God. That’s all I’ve got to say about that.

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That confirms my theory that prayer is a zero-sum game. It’s why they have so many tornadoes in the south. God is so busy answering all the invocations before every football game and other school event that he needs to throw a little badness in there to balance it off.

Ever notice how mild the weather is up here in the godless Northwest?

31

I’m an atheist who has had what I would describe as a mystic experience, in the literal meaning of the word.

Mine came right out of the blue, no real stresses or anything perceiptated it, and it did not lead me to believe in any god or gods - but it certainly changed my outlook on life.

I don’t often discuss it, for the simple reason that doing so rarely ends well for me - though I’m convinced it isn’t all that uncommon - just that most folks who have one learn, like me, not to discuss it much. It makes you sound like a lunatic or a flake.

A description: well, it is characteristic of these things, I have learned, that they are not easy to describe. Moreover, it happend a long time ago. The main points are I think the following:

  1. It feels real. Not like a mood, or a dream, or anything like that.

  2. The overwhelming feeling is that of being directly in a presence, compared to which, you the individual are infinitely tiny - less than a speck or an ant.

  3. This feeling is overwhelming and it is positive, not negative. Reading it as written, it sounds like it should be horrifying - but it is not.

  4. The feeling is you are a part of this presence. If you live or die isn’t all that important, like a finger doesn’t care much if it pares its fingernails.

What I remember is that I was walking somewhere on my father’s cabin property when I felt this overwhelming feeling of presence; it hit like a blow. I can remember being on my knees and then on my back, with tears streaming down my face - I was that moved; at that moment, everything was perfect. I did not myself hear any voice or see any light or anything of that sort.

My interpretation is that such events will be seen by people to whom they happen through the lens of their own culture and inclinations, or otherwise in ways that make sense to them. To my mind, it perfectly explains prophets hearing the voice of God (whichever god they are familiar with). It’s a powerful enough sensation to plow like a railway train through any sort of skepticism - if it happended to you, there is no denying it (just as there is no real sharing of it with anyone else). Its meaning is of course up for debate.

My own opinion: that they are physical, neurological events having to do with the workings of the human brain - perhaps akin to a seizure. But they are nonetheless valuable guides to personal philosophy and experience - at least I have found it so (as a result of this experience I am much less afraid of death, and thinking back on it, I find as an antidote to both selfishness and depression).

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My own experience, mentioned above, matches up with your #1-4. And your reasons for not talking about it mirrored mine. I have no quarrels with your interpretation, just putting my two cents in.

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Really, I think the issue here with divine experiences, and why many people are reluctant to share them is that they are usually very subjective and often very personal. For me, the best analogy I can give is like that moment you realize that you love someone. I remember as a child and asking, as many children do, how you know you’re in love and, of course, I got the generic answer along the lines of “you just do”. It doesn’t matter who you ask, but it will always be different, and it’s probably something that when recounted doesn’t seem all that special from a previous experience with that person. It’ll be something like she said this, looked at me like that, or did something and somehow that one time was just… different.

Looking as objectively as I can at my divine experiences and applying skepticism, I can completely understand how they wouldn’t be very convincing to other people. Really, it’s not all that different from describing that moment when I realized I was in love with someone, and then whoever I describe it to isn’t also in love with her just from hearing that story.

I can give some personal accounts of my own experiences, but I’m not even really sure what that really does other than add to a list of countless other experiences that probably aren’t all that convincing.

This is awesome. I am a theist myself, but this is very much how I feel about it. I think it’s silly to argue that these sorts of experiences don’t occur, that people are lying about them, the question is in what causes them and what they mean. It’s possible I’m wrong about the existence of God and these experiences are just some sort of weird aspect of our biology or have some other non-super natural cause that we can’t yet explain and, based on culture, they will get interpretted the same way. But as a theist myself, it fits very strongly with my views, particularly since they will always have a direct correlation with a spiritual matter I’m working with at the time. And, again, God’s presence will be interpretted differently by different cultures.

Regardless, even believing in God, I don’t think the purpose of these experiences is for me to relay my story to someone else and make them believe. Rather, because they go along with whatever spiritual matters I’m working on, they will bring with them some sort of epiphany, usually a personal truth, and it is really only meaningfully relevant to me. I always come through it with a changed perspective, and yet, never once has it been of the type “I am God, yes I exist” it’s always just been that truth, and that it comes from God, or perhaps even if not, is really more incidental.

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Why is it that threads on atheism or Christianity get page after page, but a thread on actual, denomination-neutral experiences like this gets so little interest? I am beginning to think that people only care about religion or no religion when they can attack someone over it.

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I find myself grateful to kable for starting this thread. I’ve never talked with anyone else who’s had a similar experience, and am amazed how many there are here on one message board. I don’t usually share it because I’ve been told it was a hallucination, or that I was/am delusional, or that God doesn’t work that way, so reading other people’s witnesses is really supportive. There can’t really be any attacks on these statements on scriptural grounds, because that would be pretty much after-the-fact anyway. Conflict drives arguments and discussions, so I’m guessing that’s why the thread’s so short.

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If I saw an angel or heard a voice I think I would assume the most logical explanation and take it to be a hallucination. Of course it’s probably much easier to say than do, but I try to live by reason and have never found any reason in a belief in the divine. It would just seem illogical to jump to such an unsupported conclusion as the influence of a god, especially a specific interpretation of one.

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Professor Pepperwinkle, I can relate to your thinking.

I’ve shared my main experience before, and don’t want to do that again.

Before the experience, I was a Christian and I still am. But now I am more open to the religious beliefs of other faiths and to the uncertainty and non-belief of agnostics and atheists. My ideas about God have expanded, but I have the sense that they are still way too small.

I believe that there is one God that is interpreted in many ways or not interpreted at all. And things are “still as they should be.”

Cosmos, your peaceful demeanor has been obvious when I have spent time with you. I always feel that when I talk with you, you let me be me.

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Thank you, Zoe. I was raised in an agnostic household. I’m Presbyterian, Madame P. is a very open-minded Baptist, my daughter’s Wiccan. I’ve read enough philosophy, theology, history and comparative religion to not believe that any one POV for spirituality has any rational claim over another, so I’m pretty much in agreement with you.

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If it hadn’t happened to me, I’d be agreeing with you completely.

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Do you ever feel doubt that it was more than just inside your head?