off topic
Great Debates is also the forum for witnessing. Testimonials about miracles fall into that category.
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I don’t want to hand out warnings for ignoring mod instructions and I’m going to sleep now.
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Question @Polerius - are you only wanting experiences from people who currently still believe in deity after their experience, or also from people who had experiences that led them to believe in deity for a time, but later stopped believing?
Off Topic and incorrect suggestion
To the OP, maybe try this again in MPSIMS? And request some help from a mod putting in some reminder not to ridicule or debate people’s beliefs in MPSIMS?
Unfortunately, I have nothing to share on this front. I’ve never noticed anything miraculous happening around me.
Please do not do this. Witnessing does belong in GD and not MPSIMS.
Also if the reply is off-topic, especially about the board culture, please do not post it in this thread.
Understood. I’m hoping others share their experiences!
Both are interesting. In the latter case, would be great to know what “overrode” the importance of the earlier experience and led them to stop believing
Thanks to all who shared their experiences so far.
Typing on phone is hard. If people here want to look down on me or mock me, I’ve given them much better reasons than my posts in this thread
I hesitate to discuss such things, mainly because I find that rarely people can actually hear it. I do feel the ‘system’ God has set up works this way. God does things all the time, but most stuff goes hidden, in other words God does act, but people in general are not allowed to see it and just go about their business. I do believe this is because each person’s journey to God has to be personal and based on relationship with God, not proof or evidence by design.
But I will post one such thing.
I was in Haiti on a church mission to help build some things for an orphanage and also a school. There were 7 of us, and we stayed in secured quarters under armed guards who escorted us. Though I wanted to walk among the people. I prayed and felt I received an answer that I can, so I did. I wandered through the city and also the villages on my own.
At one particular point a lot of children came up to me and indicated (different languages) that they wanted me to lay hands on them and pray for them . I did, just praying what I felt I should, and each of them took turns receiving. After a short time some children brought a blind man to me, indicating to me to cure his blindness and to have him see. So I laid hands on him and prayed that God restore his sight, I would love to say that it happened but if it did I did not see that happen and some kids looked disappointed, but more came to have me pray for them.
After a while the kids all left and so did that man and I was alone again.
A short time later adults from the village came around me, and started talking in a harsh tone to me, and surrounded me. They also attempted to grab my arm, but they could not. The best way I could describe it is they had no thumbs. I looked around and even though they were blocking me at all sides and had no apparent way of getting out, there was a ‘tunnel’ of sorts through them. I walked through that tunnel and when I was about 25 feet away looked back at where I was. It appeared to me that they still thought I was there, as they were still around where I was and still doing the same stuff as if I were standing there and for some reason they could not see that I was gone. I walked back to the place we were working.
One of many things I have pondered about the life of Jesus is how He was able to slip away from hostel crowds. I believe it worked something like the above. At least my experience with God shows that this is a reasonable answer, though I have no proof or evidence, but it is only in the relationship of me and God and God OK’ing me that I would be safe to do this.
I also ponder about the blind man. Did I really cure him and was not permitted to see it. That could be exactly how God would work, it is a privilege to see the working of God, but God does many things that we are not to see, and to believe by faith. And just because God allows us to see some things does not mean we get to see everything.
My faith is the result of my lifetime of experiences. There is no one thing.
I grew up in the Methodist church, with a congregation that was very open. One of my Baptist friends asked “what would your church do if a drunkard came to your service” and was completely shocked when I said we’d welcome him just like everyone else. We were very pro-temperance in a person-friendly way. My church also practiced infant baptism, and I think the only local church to do so. The Mennonites and Baptists certainly did not.
Our church also had Sunday school before the service for all ages: pre-school, elementary, teens, young adults (typically adults without children), adults (typically adults with children), and elderly (typically adults with no children left at home). Often the study would be focused on a particular book of the Bible, with a study guide explaining things in an age-appropriate way. There was little focus on doctrine or dogma, and more on understanding the people in the Bible within their lives’ situations, the parallels to modern life, and how God helps all of us be better people. We have a tradition of discussion of what the Bible means.
This is where my strong sense of morals and values come from, and that there can be a guiding purpose to one’s life. I am flawed and do not always live to mine ideals, but I can attempt to do better. And sometimes my ideals cause me to do things I wouldn’t be comfortable doing otherwise and I am a better person for it.
Along my path to a doctorate in physics, I discovered the inherent beauty of our mathematical descriptions of the universe. There’s no a-priori reason that nature follows logic and other mathematical rules, and yet it does. Because of the values I have, this resonates deeply with me.
And because of my life’s experience, I believe in God. Yes, that means if the incidents of my life were different, my faith would be different. And that’s okay. I am who I am because of who I was. How else could it be?
I’m gonna pretty much echo this. I’ve had a few experiences of praying for guidance and obtaining a sense of certainty about what the right path was. These felt subjectively very different from the ordinary experience of making up my mind about something, but not in a way I can communicate to anyone else. But no visions or voices or miracles to report.
For the both of you (and any others): Can you envision having the same amount of belief in another religion and/or god if you had been brought up differently?
Doesn’t seem relevant; for the most part, the religion I was brought up in had no more impact on my eventual model than other religions I read about or heard about later, and none of them were a fundamental blueprint or anything.
I was brought up atheist. Certainly under other circumstances I might have joined some other religion. I don’t believe that my religion is objectively any more truthful than anyone else’s.
Finally home.
I can see myself being another religion, but ending up with mostly the same attitudes and values.
Oh, I almost forgot- Speaking for myself religious experiences have a lot in common with sex. There’s a heightening of the senes, a rush of sensations, a climax and afterward you feel more complete. I know I’m not the only who feels this way. My cite is the lyrics to Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen.
I also find, again speaking only for myself, that hearing the voice of G-d is a great deal like when you suddenly and intuitively just know the answer to a riddle or brainteaser. Except that in this case, the answer seems to come from without.
Believing in God and being well-schooled in physics and mathematics is intriguing and worthy of further exploration.
I was a strict atheist when I was younger primarily because I could not find a way for God to emerge and exist in the physical universe of classical mechanics. Now I’m a luke-warm agnostic.
The more I (a lay person) learned of quantum mechanics, the more I could envision a pathway for God to possibly exist. Not God in the classic Judeo-Christian sense; more like an underlying conscious intelligence that permeates the fabric of the quantum world.
Without evidence, I can’t sway myself to be an unwavering theist (even with a relatively remote, non-intrusive god), but I now do believe a type of God could emerge and exist without contradicting physical law.
Do tell more of your own belief. Do you believe God emerged and resides in the quantum universe? Have you developed a working theory for a pathway for this to occur? Is yours a hands-on God?
The devil is in the details…but that opens up another can of worms.
I don’t think I’d describe myself as unwavering. I admit that I could be wrong on this whole G-d thing. Also, I don’t feel that I ‘swayed myself’. I feel I was swayed by outside forces. I never sat down and decided to believe in G-d.